Dead Stars (21 page)

–You
piece of shit! You stole money from me!

–I didn't st—

–
My own mother actually stole money from me! O my god! O my god———I want you to DIE, you BITCH! I want you to DIE! You piece of shit bitch! You will NEVER see your grandchild EVER I would NEVER let you see her even if I had a MILLION DOLLARS! I would never let you see her because you are so SICK, you are so FUCKING SICK that you would probably take NUDE PICTURES of it & try to SELL them on the INTERNET! because you're CRAZY you're CRAZY you're a fucking SICK CRAZY SLUT & I fucking HATE YOU! You are the biggest WHORE, you always make a FOOL out of yourself Steve Martin was LAUGHING at you & James Franco wanted to fuck ME not YOU even tho he could tell you were a fucking OLD WHORE! [sustained screams, then] YOU FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT [a sustained scream, then] you should just DIE why don't you go somewhere and DIE you are the WORST & the SICKEST you have NO TALENT and everyone thinks you're CRAZY they KNOW you are no one even wants to be SEEN with you all you have is how SICK you are, you are the WORST MOTHER, O my god I would rather be ADOPTED like RIKKI than have YOU as a MOTHER! You will NEVER meet my baby, you will go to your grave without seeing my baby & when my baby is older I will tell him that his grandma was a SICK PIECE OF SHIT and how HAPPY he should be that you never held him—you will NEVER EVER EVER hold him, do you understand? Are you listening? You better! You better! Because you ARE A SICK FUCKING WHORE AND I HOPE YOU DIE! I HOPE YOU DIE! I HOPE YOU DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Afternoon is the time of Woman:
the Unknown

Io ritornai da la santissima onda

Rifatto sì come piante novelle

Rinovellate di novella fronda,

puro e disposto a salire a le
stelle
.

—P U R G A T O R I O, XXXIII. 142–5

CLEAN

[Michael]

Dancing With The Stars

He

was in LA, in preproduction on a film. Catherine was shooting a Fosse-themed
Glee
. Ryan told him that a guest stint by Catherine had been in play long before Michael sent his fan letter.

Karma.

. . .

He met the little cancer gal & her mom for tea at the Peninsula.

Then he did something that surprised him.

Michael told the driver to take him to the little cemetery in Westwood where his half-brother was buried. (He didn't question his instincts anymore.) Anyway, now was as good a time as any to pay his respects to the dead; he wasn't able to make the Reaper's recent gala, and had respectfully RSVP'd his regrets. He'd be attending soon enough.

The actor's asst called the park to make sure he wouldn't be disrupting a funeral by his presence. The coast was clear. A caretaker met him at the car & walked him to Eric's flat stone. The mood of that shitty day—Eric's funeral—washed over him. He knelt a moment, running a finger over the grass on the grave.

The actor meandered through the modestly-scaled tombs. It felt like a minefield. He stepped over, around & in-between the engraved invitations in a superstitious foxtrot (or minuet, holding Death's hand like a child without knowing it), which was more or less what he'd done with cancer—with sure foot and unwavering eye, he picked his way through the cellsplitting grunge & muck that tried to abduct and to claim him, to snatch him back whence he came like an incensed parent denied custody. The fuckers on the Internet who laid virtual money that his time was nigh had already lost their shirts. He felt like Keith Richards. He'd outlive all the jackals, & have kicks along the way.

Everyone knew that Marilyn was buried here but as he walked and surveyed, the profusion of showbiz dead surprised him. His dad's time was well-represented: Malden & Matthau, Leigh, Lancaster, Lemmon. The manicured morgue was as eclectic as a guest list off the old
Tonight Show—
Capote, Coburn, Cassavetes—Gene Kelly, Don Knotts, Merv. Dominick Dunne's murdered daughter was here and he wondered why Nick buried himself in Connecticut instead of with his child. Michael couldn't bear the thought of being separated from his children, even in death. He shook his head at the Zappa & Joplin markers . . .
unfuckingreal
.

He soft-shoed between Natalie Wood and Billy Wilder, suddenly standing over Farrah. That was a tough death. It was one thing to go on Letterman and tell the world the cat got your tongue, & entirely another to announce the cat crawled up your ass and died and was taking you with it. In those first frightening months, MD thought of her a lot. He watched her documentary—all in all, a damn brave girl. Hella courage. And to have them film you like that, hella courage all around. He remembered something a friend said when the family was vacationing in Fiji. They were floating in a coral reef when a small, black&white-banded snake swam between his legs and disappeared. His buddy told him it was poisonous but not to worry, it had no interest in human beings. Michael asked where the hospital was, if you happened to get bit. “You could drive to the clinic in town,” he answered, “but I wouldn't recommend it. It wouldn't be the best use of the hour you had left.”

MD wondered how he'd behave in the face of losing numbers: that was the real
Hitch-22.
(Jesus, losing Christopher was a loss. What giantsized balls the man had.) He knew the producer in him—the warrior—would never want to concede, but the actor just might . . . He agonized over the question: When do you stop NetJetting to clinics in Switzerland, South Africa, Brazil for experimental treatment? When the only result is twitter rape, videos of your emaciated bodyhusk struggling in and out of vans, your haunted, anguished huffin and puffin visage HuffPosted to the world. Ryan O'Neal had stayed by her side, steadfast & true. MD laughed a little, thinking: he won't be by
my
side, least not if I can help it. There were so many things you'd lose control of once you crossed a certain threshold . . . Ryan had leukemia himself, for the last ten years, same type Ali had in
Love Story
. And now he's got prostate. It's Cancer's world, we just live in it. At least Ryan was still alive. Wasn't he?

He headed toward the car, pausing at another stone:

 

DOROTHY STRATTEN

FEBRUARY 28, 1960—AUGUST 14, 1980

IF PEOPLE BRING SO MUCH COURAGE TO THIS WORLD
THE WORLD HAS TO KILL THEM TO BREAK THEM, SO
OF COURSE IT KILLS THEM . . . IT KILLS THE VERY GOOD
AND THE VERY GENTLE AND THE VERY BRAVE IMPARTIALLY. IF YOU ARE NONE OF THESE YOU CAN BE SURE THAT IT
WILL KILL YOU TOO BUT THERE WILL BE NO SPECIAL HURRY

WE LOVE YOU
DR

 

Strange. He wondered if the mom had written it. Maybe. In a raging delirium of grief, no doubt.

Star 80
was probably Fosse's best film. His most
director-
like film, anyway.

She was only twenty.
Star 20 . . . . . . . . . . 

Some were made like his dad, royal tortoises mobb deep in guardian angels, while others breathed ICU nursery O
₂
-tank air for a few mayfly minutes before expiration.

One needn't be a philosopher to grasp the insignificance of temporal goings-on; one needn't even be pretentious (tho sometimes that helped). In the design of things, there was utterly no significance in whether you lived an hour, a year or a hundred years—the span of human life was cloud graffiti. Michael couldn't remember the context, but one of his doctors in Montreal used a wonderful word,
blessure
, which meant injury to tissue, a break in the skin. (The actor rearranged it in his head as “surely blessed.”) Last night as he fell asleep, he meditated. If every soul who'd ever lived and died on Earth—Yahoo! put it just over 100 billion—were to suddenly manifest & vaporize, the Unknown
*
would have no more awareness of the thunderous lamentations accompanying their collective outgoing breath than an insect would have knowledge of a microblog devoted to its industrious ways. The unfathomable cessation would incur no celestial
blessure
, the Ineffable not suffer the slightest bruising whatsoever. Something he read in his college days at UC Santa Barbara stayed with him all these years, something one
did
have to be a philosopher to have said, or a philosopher-poet, anyway. “Life is the rarest form of death.” Wasn't that wild? The old joke of life being a near-death experience. Was that George Carlin? Or Mr. Nietzsche?

MD came out the other side of his catastrophe with the firm belief that cancer was his teacher. Cancer had urged him to accept (or die trying) earthly life for the dream it was—
fleeting
, as they say, tho such a perception seemed impossible to achieve (if one could call it an achievement) for anyone but saints, idiots & visionaries. Yet since the diagnosis, he strove to live in that blissful, acquiescent state, that unreachable cliché of
presence in the moment
, yes, in
this
moment, not moments past or moments to come. This moment was all he had. In this moment, he was alive & cancer-free. In this moment, from a cemetery, he conjured his wife, beckoning. In this moment, he could see his children crying, laughing, sleeping. In this moment, he had more money than he could spend in a hundred lifetimes.

By the time a too-close bird ended his train of thought, the actor's tour was almost done. It wouldn't have been complete without Marilyn.

The plaque on the drawer of the cinerarium bore only her name, and the year of birth & death. Thirty-six years-old at the age of
blessure . . .
A long time ago, a businessman bought the space right above her. He told his wife to make sure they buried him facedown, in the missionary position—just for the kamikaze cosmo-comic eterno-skeleto-fuck jokey thrill of it—an inspired wish that his widow evidently wryly carried out. Then bogeyman Madoff swindled her and she had to auction off the spectral fuckpad penthouse, she got five million for it (if memory served) & buried him elsewhere—exhumation
in flagrante postmortem delicto
. It was common pop-cult knowledge that's where Hef was going, years ago he bought the crib beneath Monroe, so he could properly stick his candle in the wind. Karma was a funny thing: Norma Jean was molested as a child, & she'd be molested in the afterlife. It was ironic too that Dorothy Stratten always wanted to hang at the Playboy Mansion; now, Marilyn and Hef would be partying, with Dorothy just outside the gate, for all eternity.

The Wheel of Karma kept on turning.

MD understood those people who thought burial was for squares, for whom
cremation
was the magic word—to be sprinkled here & there, over the ground or into the wind & water of a place one loved. He understood the feelings of those who were stingy/proprietary about recycling theirs or loved ones' organs, even those who thought there might be bad voodoo in signing the donor's form on the back of a driver's license. He
understood
how a person could feel in their untransplanted heart that mutilation—that posthumously violent, nonconsensual
blessure
—regardless of the alleviation of the suffering of the living, just wasn't the way to go.

He didn't care about any of that now. They could scoop his eyes & pluck his corneas, whittle his kidneys, grand theft his thorax, fry up his liver, & harvest his skin on a special edition of Piers Morgan. They could tear off cock&balls at the root and laminate them for teaching hospitals. They could feed him to the dogs & piss on him, because by then his soul would be in another dream.

He was over it.

CLEAN

[Gwen]

Ctrl + Z

Tea

with Michael Douglas was heaven.

Gwen was on Cloud 9, she'd had a crush on him forever. Telma wore her new Marc Jacobs dress and was so excited that getting a part on
Glee
was hardly discussed, even though she couldn't
believe
his wife was actually
guest-starring
. OMG! It was all so adorable, watching her daughter interact with the legendary star, & Gwen thought he couldn't have been more charming. Sylvester Stallone, Tilda Swinton & L.A. Reid were in different parts of the sunlit room having tea. It was beyond beyond.

When Telma got her diagnosis, a few people told Gwen that cancer was a gift. She wanted to strangle them, but now she understood.

. . .

A few days later, she got a call from an attorney who said he represented St. Ambrose. He wanted to talk; when Gwen pressed what for, he said it was a matter best discussed in person.

Century City was walkable from the house. The request for a rendezvous was strange and slightly mysterious. On the stroll over, she had fleeting, preposterous fantasies of why she'd been
summoned
. She had a feeling it was a good thing.

That feeling changed when Dr. Bessowichte entered the conference room. After a cold, rabbity greeting—no shake of her hand—his wan smile withdrew, skittering under a rock. “Dr. B” (St. Ambrose happened to be the patron saint of bees & beekeepers, and schoolchildren too) had been with them from the beginning, right there in the trenches. He was the
ex officio
tsar of Telma's Troopers, whose equanimity & genius for decision-making sustained them through all manner of bloody, crazy-making stratagems, artifices & bombardments of the cancer wars. In Gwen's eyes, he was the single person most responsible for having saved her daughter's life. He never retreated, not once. He was part of their family.

Something awful had happened . . . it came to her head that he was going to announce that he was sick, that he was going to die. But why wouldn't he call or just come to the house? Why wouldn't his wife Ruth have called? They could have asked her over to
their
house—they were all that close, it was that kind of bond.

Why would a
lawyer
call with that kind of news?

Nothing she came up with in a handful of seconds made any sense.

“What is it?” said Gwen. She was trembling now. “What's wrong?”

A sudden, monstrous shift within, as she thought the unthinkable.

“It's Telma . . . is it Telma? Did the cancer come back?”

But if it did, why are we here in Century City, why aren't we at the hospital, why aren't————————

An attorney began to speak (there were 3 in the room), but Gwen stopped the world by imploring Dr. B with a beggar's brutalized eyes.

“No—no! Nothing like that,” said the doc.

The eldest lawyer spoke up.

“Thank you for coming.”

What? He's thanking me? Why he is——————

“I won't sugarcoat it, Mrs. Ballendyne”——
Mrs. Ballendyne? Huh?——
“this isn't going to be one of your best hours. And it's certainly not—not one of the hospital's finest. Dr. Bessowichte will be the first to tell you that.”

Though it wasn't a cue for him to speak, the restless doctor squirmed & broke free of the muzzle.

“I wanted to come to the house, Gwen. I wanted to tell you at the house but they said no, that wasn't a good idea—the hospital forbade me. I didn't want to listen.” He sighed, and repeated, “I didn't want to listen.”

Gwen felt like she was watching a play.

“What is it, Donald, what's happened?”

He didn't seem to hear her.

“They tied my hands, Gwen—”

“What are you saying?”

“It has been a nightmare. Not just for me, but the other doctors on the team. On Telma's team . . .”

“GODDAMMIT, DONALD, you tell me what you're talking about & YOU TELL ME NOW.”

Two of the lawyers spoke up.

She turned to them with ferocity.

“No! Don't talk! HE talks! Only HE talks.”

“There was an error,” said Dr. B. “A series of errors. 1 in 10,000,000. And I can walk you through it, when it's time. We have already constructed a
very specific timeline
of events.”

He paused.

The air was brittle, frozen.

Everything got bigger and smaller (for Gwen), all at once.

“Gwen . . . Telma doesn't have cancer. She never did.”

(
Almost inaudibly
)

(
As if jarred from a private thought
)

“What?”

“There was a mistake—a
series
of freak mistakes &
switch-ups
, on the clinical & the—on all levels.”

“You're telling me that my baby never had cancer?”

“That's right,” said the eldest lawyer, gingerly stepping in. “It is a
terrible, tragic event
based on both
human and machine error
. The hospital is heavily insured for this sort of—”

“This sort of thing?”
railed the doctor at the men, as if suddenly, in the play, taking the rôle of the injured mother. “This sort of thing?
This sort of thing?
I don't think you
understand!
”

He pivoted toward Gwen in mid-monologue, as if to show her how eager he was to give voice to injustice, thus lending
her
a voice, until her own did come. As if seeking support for any effort he would make to redeem himself. As if asking forgiveness.

“
‘This sort of thing' just doesn't happen
, it doesn't happen! In 45
years
, I've never seen it—never!
Never.
”

Indeed, with this last word, this remark, the ruined doctor spoke as if it
hadn't
, that what they were discussing was a thing so far outside his and any other practitioner's realm of possibility and experience that it would, with calmer heads, inevitably be acknowledged even by the most aggrieved parties as the supernaturally statistical anomaly that it was; and that Dr. Bessowichte (& Team Telma) could not, in the end, have had any way of avoiding its preordained inevitability . . . for a few tortuous moments, the defenseless, prideful physician, himself mutilated, freefloated in a sphere beyond denial, speaking from his ethical, frightened
no longer as a preacher but as a child who wishes to
think back together
something precious they had dropped and broken.

“O God. O my God!”

Someone pushed a box of Kleenex at her.

Dr. B stiffened, bracing for blows, & the dangerous pelting hail of oncoming tears.

“Gwen, I'm so sorry—”

“Then what
did
she have?” She wasn't fully comprehending. “If she didn't have it, what
did
she have?”

“Something that
looked
like cancer,” said the doctor. He leaned bravely in, for the first time. “It's not simple—”

“Not
simple
 . . . . . . . . . . . . . .”

“Gwen, I don't know how to express in words how sorry——————”

“You're
SORRY
. You're SORRY!—
O my God my God my God
. What am I supposed to do? How can I———
what am i o what am i supposed to do to do o what o what what am i————
”

(
Her lamentations directed to the ether
)

“First, you get a lawyer,” said the eldest partner. “There are a half-dozen the firm can recommend, all the best at what they do—medical malpractice. Until you're represented, we ask that you keep what we've shared today in confidence. Disclosure at this juncture would potentially do both you and the hospital great harm.”

Dr. B, patron saint of bees & schoolchildren, of candlemakers, chandlers, & domestic animals, buried, as they say, his head in his hands.

“Great harm?” she said.

She stood, unwell.

The doctor rose along with her out of sheer clinical reflex, seeing/sensing even in his periphery that she was unsteady, she looked ill, she was a wounded human being, it did not matter that he had been her assailant, he was still a healer, by definition & by oath. In medical school they taught that
given an existing problem, it may be better to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm————————
She went flush, she had no rage, no stratagems, no emotions. They tried getting her to sit back————————
primum nil nocere . . . . . . . doctrine & principal of nonmaleficence reminding the physician he must consider the possible harm an intervention might do
————————down, they tried giving her water, they tried to comfort. She struggled to keep the vomit from rising. They gave her a box of Kleenex that sat in her limp arms, her eyes like smidged windowpanes————————
may thy rod & thy staff comfort you, rod of Asclepius, ancient symbol of medicine & healing, Hippocrates himself a worshipper of Asclepius———————————
——————————————and all she could do was