Paint It Black (38 page)

And that girl had cleaned up the mess, bucket running bloody.

Here it was. Everything she hadn’t wanted to know. He sat in
this
room, and wrote his notes, and put the gun in his mouth. Alone, in this dismal cell, inscribing smaller and smaller circles around himself until there was nowhere for him to go but out. He was the one in the corner, not the girl. Now she was here. She could not keep it from happening, but she could keep him from being alone.

The journal was number
XX.
She’d never opened his journals before. Even now, it seemed like the last violation.
Forgive me, Michael.

The pages were dense with drawings, ink and charcoal, sticky with the hair spray he used instead of fixative. She was surprised, she thought there would be more writing, but these were just pages and pages of drawings, mostly self-portraits. Himself with three eyes. With one eye. Eyes on the same side of his head like a halibut. A truncated body with a second set of legs where the arms should be, limping past a shell and a human skull. Heads with faces tangled in the hair. Snatches of writing, chains of words in blotchy pen, running downhill, the backward-leaning
d
’s, the
e
’s like
3
’s,
Can’t get back into the parade. Even tried to make a virtue of it.
WHERE IS THE ROSE GARDEN GODDAMN IT WHERE IS IT?
A hand with six fingers, severed from a wrist, the blood running down onto a piano keyboard. A series—severed hands, severed heads, arms without hands, a man carrying his own head in his arms.

And there was her name,
JosieJOSIEJosieJOSIE.
Written in chains, in suns of
Josies.
Her face, over and over again, he could do it from memory.
Don’t leave me, please God don’t leave me.

I’m such a piece of shit. I disgust myself. How can she still be in love with me. She should leave. I would if I were her. Everything I touch turns to shit. Her love just makes it worse.

She shivered, she couldn’t stop, it was so cold in here.
Her love made it worse.
How could that be? She couldn’t understand, why was she so stupid, she read it over and over again but she still couldn’t take it in. She hit her forehead with her fists, trying to wake her brain up, trying to force this into her head, how such a thing could be.

I don’t know how. I don’t know the first fucking thing about life. I wish she wouldn’t look at me like that, for Christ’s sake. Like I had crushed her last dream. What does she think I am, Jesus?
I’M
NOTHING
. I HAVE
NOTHING
.
STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT
.
STOP LOVING ME LIKE THIS I CANT BEAR IT
.

Josiejosiejosie, you’re all I’ve ever had. Every scrap of joy. Don’t leave me, please God, please God.

She read that part over and over. He had loved her.

But it hadn’t helped.

He had loved her, but he hated himself more.

Such suffering, so much pain. And he thought it made him hateful, as if suffering were shameful, disgusting. As if pain were a crime. Why didn’t he tell her? She could have helped him if only he’d let her. She could have done something. But it wasn’t what he wanted. How hard he’d pushed her away. And then said,
Don’t leave me, please God. You’re all I have.
He’d loved her, he had. And he knew she loved him, he knew it! But it wasn’t enough. She couldn’t have imagined such a thing was possible. Love wasn’t enough.

Her mouth bent itself square in mute anguish, but she kept turning the pages, trying to see through the blur of tears, the marks they left spattering the pages.

Clocks. Pages of them. Grandfather clocks in black cases, dense charcoal marks. Wristwatch with a broken face. A clock nestled in the crotch of Michelangelo’s
David. What’s the good of all my so-called gifts? I should have been a pair of ragged claws
. . .
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
.

After clocks, the mazes. Naked men up against the blind ends of passages. A labyrinth that bled into the distance, as if it covered the world. A labyrinth in a graveyard, the space between tombstones. A self-portrait, a labyrinth superimposed over his features.

And carefully, lovingly rendered, a dead man, lying across the lap of a huge mother, in the pose of Michelangelo’s statue of Jesus and Mary, only the dead man had a bull’s head.
Minotaur.
She remembered the story. A queen who fell in love with a bull. They had a child, half bull, half human. And the queen was ashamed of it and kept it in a maze under the palace. It turned murderous, the king fed it youths from Greece.
Feed me,
he’d written.
I strip your living flesh from your bones.

And here was Josie, trailing a ball of string. The black mouth of a cave in the background, the entry to the labyrinth. The string was the way out, it was how the hero killed the Minotaur and escaped. But Michael wouldn’t take the string, would he? He wasn’t the hero in the story he was telling himself. He was the monster. And the maze wasn’t just a prison, it was also a palace, his dark home.

She needed a cigarette, needed to breathe air that didn’t stink with death. She opened the door, leaned in the doorway, sucking in the night air. She gazed up at the stars, which had retreated still higher.
We don’t know, we don’t have problems like yours.
He’d loved her, and she’d loved him, and it wasn’t enough. She struggled to understand how that could be possible. Love, it seemed, wasn’t as big as she’d thought. There were bigger things. She felt her heart being crushed, it was going to pop like a grape. But she closed the door and sat back down at the table. The black book had not finished unfolding its black tale.

Across two pages, he’d drawn a picture of a man on a bed, feet closest to the viewer, wearing black pants and a white shirt. It was an iron bed like Michael’s at his mother’s, the bars of its headboard and footboard like a jail. He’d splattered black ink on the wall behind the bed—just shaken the pen. Underneath, he’d written,
Mayakovsky criticized Esenin. Who can judge another man’s suffering?

She gazed at the blobs of India black, brushing her tears with the back of her hand. She had to look at that. She had to look and let it come in. It was one thing to say,
Why couldn’t you hang on, why couldn’t you have gone somewhere, started again?
But she could never know what he suffered, there, under the palace. Even if he had told her everything, could she have known, understood, the depths of his despair? And what if she had? In the end, she couldn’t go there with him. She couldn’t follow him the rest of the way. She’d tried to remind him about life and a way out, handed him the end of the string, but he’d only backed deeper into the labyrinth.

Who can judge another man’s suffering?
Was this before or after the dog? There were no dates anywhere, it wasn’t Meredith’s chronicle of her historical life. What went on inside had no time. Did it matter whether it was before or after the dog? It wasn’t about what she did or said or hadn’t done or hadn’t said. She’d been cruel, but he knew why, that she loved him, that she wanted him. The dog day had been one more cruel thing, but not the darkness itself.

Large, Gothic German lettering:
Mauritz Friedrich Loewy,
1898
-
1956
.

Ming.

But she didn’t believe in destiny. She refused to believe. Even if the game was rigged and the house always won, you could still go on playing, even as you lost.

Who can judge?

She turned the page and there it was. The mad monk. Wrapped in his black cloak, gaunt, hungry, smoldering with fury. Underneath, Michael had written,
I accept you, demon.

She stared into the seething eyes of the wretched monk. How she hated that thing. She could taste the murky water of the baptismal font all over again.
His
demon?
His?
She’d always thought the monk was accusing
her,
punishing
her.
Her body felt pierced, like the chests of Indians who flew on windmills, hanging from hooks through their flesh. He was depicting his own madness, the thing that tormented
him,
accused
him. But of what, Michael? You didn’t do anything wrong.
It wasn’t the dog, it wasn’t even Saint-Tropez. But what? She stared at the large crazy eyes of the monk, his bony body in its crow black robes like the wings of a dirty bird.
What did you accuse him of?

WHERE
’
S THE GODDAMN ROSE GARDEN
?
WHERE IS IT
?????

It was a poem too.
Down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden.
That was all he wanted. Simple happiness. But the mad monk tortured him because he wanted it. The monk despised it, mocked it. He couldn’t let him believe it was possible. That was the thing stopping him. That mocking, evil thing that had his own face.

She covered her eyes with the heels of her hands. The anguish of missing him, all these days since the cops called, since seeing him in the morgue like a giant, wooden mannequin. With his poor battered face. That fucking crow-bodied thing had won. How gleeful it was now. All because he’d wanted to live, forget genius and destiny, and simply be happy. And it wouldn’t let him.

It had all come to this, like poisoned bread squashed to the size of a pill. Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear.

They have ladders that will reach further but no one will climb them.

I would have, Michael.

But maybe she wouldn’t have. Maybe she would have had to stop somewhere, unless she’d wanted to follow him into the night. She didn’t know what she believed. In any case, he didn’t want her to save him. He had retreated into his labyrinth, out of reach.

The ant powder was making her dizzy, the stink of fear and his despair under the sweet poison. She lay down on the bed, on his side. But as soon as she did, she knew he would have taken the other side, her side, a last shred of comfort, like the dog curled up by the patio wall. She moved onto the right side. She sat in the bed, arranged the pillows behind her. He’d poured himself a last shot of mescal.
I’m sorry. I just want to stop now.
And put the gun in his mouth, sour, cold, smoky. She put her own two fingers in her mouth.
I’m so sorry.
And pulled the trigger.

36

Rock

D
awn tinted the darkness like watered ink. She sat outside number 4, wrapped in the spread she’d pulled off the bed, her chair tipped back against the rough stucco, smoking. The smell of the tobacco didn’t begin to offset the smell of Michael’s death. The landscape stared back at her, obstinate in its silence, spiny and hostile as the Joshua tree stretching its twisted limbs to the slate-colored sky. Dry and empty, where everything not mineral armored itself with leather and spines. The dog had gone.

She thought of Michael on the porch on Lemoyne, holding a cantaloupe like a skull on his fingertips. Mock-heroic, tilting his profile like Laurence Olivier. “
To be or not to be
. . .” She hadn’t even known that speech was about suicide. “It’s the only question, really,” he’d said. “Zero or one. Accept or reject.” The expressive gesture of his long fingers.

And she’d laughed.
Laughed.
“The only question?”

She hadn’t even begun to understand the length and breadth of her idiocy, so enormous, its gravity field alone would crush anything for light-years around.

And so the zero had sprouted in their garden. Small and secret, it would bloom as this gaping cold absence where he’d torn himself away from the fabric of the world. Zero a red hole in his head. The number that lodged in his brain. He once told her that the Arabs invented zero, because they were a desert people, at home with absence. Now she knew why he’d come here to answer the question, this desert, this graveyard. This was his landscape, bitter cold, populated only by rocks and strange leafless trees, no softness or mercy, no touch of green. Her eyes cracked with the emptiness, the dry scoured ache in the pit of her heart. Why hadn’t she argued, when he said
that was the only question?

She waited for morning against the rough wall, humming softly to herself,
Tricks ain’t walkin’, tricks ain’t walkin’ no more
. . . Now she knew why he liked those old blues. Nothing had ever happened to man or woman that wasn’t in the blues. If your life came apart, Lucille had been there before you, Louis, Bessie. You could learn how to keep on, you could count on them. A better guide to the labyrinth than anything she could offer, her pathetic ball of string. The blues had mapped the place inside and out.

The horizon began to lighten. White chalk marks appeared overhead in the colorless sky. Jet fighters from the marine base. Piloted by boys like Jeff McCann and Steve Coty, the football gods of Bakersfield High, nothing filling the domes of their skulls but thoughts of applause and their dicks and the crudest outlines of reality. Boys who wouldn’t have appeared in public with Josie Tyrell, but if they gave her a ride, shared a joint or a forty ouncer, she could nurse the illusion she could be seen by a boy like Jeff McCann. And maybe, if she got him off right, he might talk to her, smile at her in the hall, call her up for a date on an off night, dance once with her at the prom. So eminently exploitable.
I hope you find someone
. . .

Michael had given her a dream better than any that Bakersfield could imagine.
He made you feel . . . worth.
That was his greatest gift, to see something more and believe it into being. But what happened when you were someone’s idea, when the person thinking you up checked out? What happened to a dream without a dreamer?
I hope you find someone who can meet your needs
. . . Where did he think she would find that phantom? She had needs she hadn’t even known about till she met him.

Someday, you’ll be washing dishes in a trailer in Lancaster
. . . Was that what she wanted? Even now, she could go with Meredith. But the labyrinth covered the world. The thing that had crippled the crippled boy, that had deafened the deaf-mute. The dark church of the mad monk. Michael wasn’t in Europe, drivers and pony-skin coats, the Hotel Diplomat. That was the cross he had been nailed to.

The sun crawled up over the horizon as if risen from a bad night, dreading its passage over the landscape. It vomited on the wall of the motel and splashed the door where the
4
should be with unnecessary gold. Her nose was as cold as a coyote’s dug in under a tumbleweed. She gathered the quilt around her and gazed out at the motel yard and its pool—empty—the lone Joshua tree. Beyond that, no line of painted white rocks or ocotillo fence marked off the boundary between the motel and the desert, one bled right into the other.

The bubbling of birds filled the air. A line of quail burst from a shrub and dashed across the parking lot, their tiny hats bobbing. Like Jeanne’s hat in the dream. The same question mark.

She stubbed out her cigarette against the motel wall and stood, wrapped the quilt around her like a stiff evening gown, and walked out past the pool onto the desert.

She found a faint trail in the dust, an old dune-buggy or jeep track, stretched toward the warming horizon, and she followed it. It didn’t much matter where the path went, she wasn’t the least bit curious, she just needed a direction. She followed it up and over a rise, then another, stopping every so often to gaze back at her shadow, Giacometti tall and thin, streaming back against the pale rocks and blond bleached grasses.
I am the long world’s gentleman
. . . And every rock trailed its own blue pillar of shadow, each so clear it was almost alive. Blue and tan hills rolled in low lines on either side of the valley, their slopes sharp and distinct, each from the next, like a paint-by-numbers landscape.

She wandered from rise to rise in the bitter cold, the cheap motel bedspread snagging on cholla. Their fur of spines caught the early light in auras, like halos on saints. She’d never been much of a nature person. She liked the city, people close all around, crowds, the feel of something happening. Music, nightlife, being on the list, the girl everyone wanted to know—the possibility of more than dishes and diapers and the grocery store. But these days, she didn’t much care to see people living their lives. It seemed pointless, like the swimming of a hit dog in the street. She could understand what people saw in the desert. What wasn’t there, like Phil Baby always said. No people swarming over each other, everyone with a motive, everyone with a dream or a nightmare, so much wanting and longing, clutching, desiring, passion and hatred and terrible need. Even their kindness swarmed, like devils in the hair of Michael’s self-portraits. Out here, death was suitable, there was room for it, the grip of life’s relentless urges slackened, replaced by this icy simplicity.

She kept walking, turning, aimless, dragging the quilt, even the jeep track had disappeared. Whatever you were, whoever you were, nothing distracted you from it here. The desert left you absolutely to yourself, it was zero embodied. It should have frightened her out of her wits to be lost in such emptiness, alone, like that dream with the coyote, but it was morning, and she wasn’t afraid.

She turned to see if she could make out the Paradise, but it had vanished. The world had been reduced to its barest outlines, abstract—cactus and Joshua trees and rocks, the vast sky, the far blue mountains. Spaces for forgetting. She tried to remember her life before Michael, but it seemed like somebody else’s. How busy she’d been, living at the Fuckhouse, days full of color and plans, nights feeling glamorous and part of it all. She never appreciated how much she’d had then. Maybe she shouldn’t have let him wake her, learn something better, let him change her. For this is where his road led. This dead end.

Now it was just her. She didn’t know where there was left to go. It didn’t seem to matter, Europe or LA or nowhere at all. Death was bigger than anything. Bigger than love. Big as the universe. Death now or death later, that was the real question. So much like the Atomic Café, only everything on the menu was the same, there was only the question of how long you wanted to wait, how many quarters you had left for the jukebox. The pain of living another day, and another after that. How long did you want to lie on that rock with life’s dirty bird chewing on your liver?

She oriented herself to a big square chunk of rock at the top of a rise that showed its pale gold side to the sun, keeping its blue face toward her, and made her way up to it. At least it didn’t smell like swamp out here, not meat or moss or the sea. No surprise scents to wring you and twist you and make you cry out.

When she reached the crest, she paused, drawing the pure clean nothingness into her sad, tangled soul. She sat on the rock and noticed the square-shaped stones perched there. She sat staring at them, like listening to music in a far-off room.

It was a duck. Such an odd sensation. Someone had been here before her. Way out here in the randomness of fucking nowhere. Someone had been here, and had bent over and picked up those rocks and placed them here. At the corner of a boulder at the edge of a rise. To mark the way for another human being, who might or might not ever happen by.

Or for himself.

Would a man getting ready to erase himself leave one last marker, a prayer?

The desert stood still as she gazed at those rocks, sitting on a boulder in the long-shadowed dawn. It could have been him. Or it could have just been a hiker, taken by impulse, leaning over and picking it up, setting it on end, capping it with another.
Kilroy was here.

But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn’t have to be a genius. You didn’t even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, “A human being passed here.” And changed zero to one.

There it was.

Right there, on this waiting, breath-held desert. In a couple of ordinary rocks. It was here all the time. Shining in the first morning light. He’d lost faith in it, but there it still was. It hadn’t died in room 12. It hadn’t been eaten by zero, it hadn’t been lost in the labyrinth. It wasn’t back in the house in Los Feliz, it wasn’t at the Hotel Diplomat. It was in this—what he had given her, Josie Tyrell, from South Union Avenue. Art model, student actress, and whatever else she was to become. This was his gift, marking his own passing.

She put another rock on the duck, and turned back to look at her own blue shadow stretching across the sand. In the distance, the dog zigzagged from cholla to cholla, stopping to piss on a tumbleweed. A roadrunner dashed across the gully. The curtain so thin after all.

J
osie sat on the bed in number 4, smoking a ciggie. The sunlight shone bright and cold through the open door. She knew it was time to leave. There was nothing else to do but pack up and head home. And yet, how could she leave this place where he’d made his end? She sat up against the rickety headboard and picked cholla spines out of the bedspread, flicking them into the ashtray. Maybe she should take up knitting. Something quiet and productive. She didn’t want to go back home, back to the empty house, as if Michael had fallen through a hole in the ice and just disappeared. But she couldn’t drag his raw death through her days like this, like a giant bleeding moose head. Michael had made his choice. He wasn’t dragging anything now. This wasn’t her death. It was his. That was the sad and honest truth. Though it would stay with her, it would be more like a black onyx heart on a silver chain, worn privately, under her clothes, close to her body, all her life. The guilt, the beauty, everything. It wasn’t over, it had only begun.

From where she sat, leaning against the plywood headboard, she could see the manager’s office through her open door. The girl was already up, working in the laundry room. That busy little form, bending in the darkened room at the elbow of the motel. How alone she was. This terrible place. Terrible yet mundane. Hell was perfectly simple. Just a few walls in the middle of nowhere. Just another part of the labyrinth.

Josie abandoned the bedspread, ground out her cigarette, and pulled her boots on. Feeling strangely thin and pure in the clear winter sunlight, she walked down to the laundry room. That dryer smell. How he loved that. The memory so clear it stunned her. She ducked into the warm darkness, dropped the key to number 12 on the neat stack of towels the girl had just finished folding. “I’m sorry you got mixed up in this. I wanted to thank you.”

The girl snatched the key, dropped it into her sweater pocket, not looking at Josie. “He gets up soon. I must put back.” She started for the door.

Josie put her hand on the girl’s arm. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m leaving in a bit. Why don’t you come back to LA with me?”

The German girl stared at Josie. “To LA?”

“Why not?”

Storms followed one another across the girl’s face “I . . . I know no one. What would I do there?”

As if only movie stars lived in LA, as if nobody sewed sleeves onto dresses or fried chicken or cleaned rooms in cheesy motels in a town of eight million. “Sleep on my couch. We’ll find you something.”

Josie didn’t think the German girl could get any whiter, but she’d been mistaken. “
Bitte.
Please. I cannot.” She shrugged off Josie’s hand and ran into the manager’s office, shut the door.

Josie laid her face on the warm towels, pressed her nose there, waiting for the girl to return. When she didn’t, Josie went back to her room. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, tried to do something about her matted hair, spit on some toilet paper and wiped at the raccooned mascara under her eyes. No wonder the girl didn’t want to go with her. She looked like she’d slept on Hollywood Boulevard.

She assembled her guitar and her schoolbag, smoothed down the bed and hung the towels in the bathroom. She washed off her sunglasses in the bathroom sink. She opened the curtains to the morning light, pocketing the roach clip. She knew she couldn’t control what happened with the German girl, any more than she could control Michael or Meredith or anyone else. All she could do was try moving a stone. She could feel the girl now, hiding from her, beyond the door of yellow panes, probably wishing to Christ this wild-haired girl had not offered her a way to leave, making her feel her own gutlessness and fear that much more.