The Best American Short Stories 2014 (37 page)

 

Exterior. Night. Rainbo Lounge. Damen Avenue.

 

One night Kat told me we needed to go out. The band had been touring the Midwest—Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, Champaign-Urbana, both Bloomingtons—and we hadn't seen much of each other. She told me she missed me. She told me she had been a bad friend. She told me the only way to drive out a nail is with another nail—that was another of her father's sayings. Her stated goal was to find me a better, post-Milo boyfriend, or at least a reasonably unembarrassing one-nighter, but sometime after all the 2
A.M
. bars closed and the dirty stay-outs migrated to the last of the 4
A.M.
bars, we ran into Giles. In the best of the pictures from that night, Kat had just made contact with his jaw and his head was twisted to one side like someone was trying to screw it off his neck. It had rained earlier in the evening, and behind us the neon lay on the puddles like splattered milk. To the left of Giles was his new girlfriend, the lead singer for a band called Augustus Gloop; she was wearing a silver lamé jacket that shone like woven crystal. Her face appears on film as a collage of spheres and circles: her eyes so wide that they seem lidless, her mouth rounded into a big O. If I remember it right, she was about to say “Oh, snap!” which probably made Kat want to punch her too. Authenticity, after all.

 

Exterior. Night. Lincoln Avenue just west of Halsted. A line of people; a man checking IDs with a small flashlight.

 

Ask anyone who knew Lounge Ax and they'll tell you the place was a shoebox. If you believed the fire-marshal sign posted near the door, then it couldn't hold more than 150 people, but most nights the bodies were wedged chest to back and there could have been 300 or 400 from the window facing the street to the front of the stage. Risers lined the walls, prime spots where you could see above the bobbing heads to the back of the postage-stamp stage, and where you were less likely to get groped.

I have a picture from that night, before the really bad stuff, or the really good stuff, depending on your point of view: She has just finished her set and is standing behind the stage. The crowd is in a frenzy, screaming for the inevitable encore. She is making them wait and she is frozen in place, her hands knitted on the crown of her head and her elbows flared like wings. It's the posture of a runner at the end of a marathon, a way to open up starved lungs for a drink of pure air. She looks dazed, she looks happy, she looks like she might just lift off into the night sky, if not for the low ceiling, the apartments above, and the simple facts of matter and gravity.

 

OUTTAKES: Var. boxes, var. spools.

 

KAT: What does this look like to you?

ME: Yuck. What is that?

KAT: I know, right?

ME: How long has it been like that?

KAT: I don't know. I just noticed it.

ME: You should get that looked at.

KAT: I am getting it looked at. By you.

 

KAT: (singing)
Woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across
—shit, are we really out of coffee?

 

KAT: Not now, OK? Please? Can't you just—seriously. Stop it with the camera, OK? Stop it. Cut it OUT! Why can't you just be my friend instead of a goddamn—

 

Interior. Evergreen Avenue loft. Kat, backlit by windows, scissors the sleeves off a T-shirt.

 

People will say, isn't that wild that you two
knew
each other in high school? What are the odds? As if Kat becoming famous and me receiving some degree of—what? highly focused niche acclaim?—were independent of each other, like lightning striking the same place twice, or sisters winning the lottery one week after the other. But the truth is simpler than any of that: Kat became Kat because of the times and the tastes and the ways that her personality made her catnip for a certain breed of music fan. If she was cast as the Red Queen of post-punk pop, I was her court painter. But if we were monarch and courtier, we were also model and artist. People who know me only for my photos of Kat talk about her like she was my life's work, when she was only my first subject. If I was lucky to have a subject who became famous, even notorious, then Kat was lucky too: lucky to have someone get it all down on film, to create a public memory of who she was every step of the way.

And there's this, which gets overlooked: The pictures aren't good only because Kat is in them, they're good because I took them. She was perfecting her art while I was perfecting mine.

 

Interior. West Randolph Street condo. Kat's face in profile against a black-and-white tile floor.

 

Someone at the party called me. Someone who knew that Kat had a roommate who might be able to put her back together and get her home, though I don't think getting her home was as much of a priority as getting her out of where she was—
where
in this case being the gut-rehabbed third floor of a former slaughterhouse west of the Loop, a place owned by a guy who called himself a club promoter, which meant he had access to enough drugs and big enough speakers to turn any room into a party. This was when Kat was losing a lot of friends. This was when Kat was making worse decisions than usual. This was when Kat had started going places without me.

I rang the buzzer and the alleged club promoter pointed to a door and he didn't say,
Hi
or
Thanks so much for coming
or
We're really worried about her
, he just said,
In there
. And in there was nothing I hadn't seen before, though maybe a little worse. She had one arm draped across the back of the bowl, and she was trying and failing to keep her hair out of her face. She had already puked a ton. I flushed the toilet, which Kat hadn't had the will or the ability to do, and she startled as the water roared in her ear. She looked at me through the sweaty fringe of her hair. I thought she was going to say my name, but she just said,
So sick
over and over again like it was her mantra. She retched and threw up, retched and spit out a little more. She looked up at me again through her bangs and her eyes were rolling in her head. She seemed like she was trying to focus. If I was a good friend or any kind of friend I would have held her hair and stroked her arm; I would have put a cool washcloth on her forehead and told her that it was going to be all right. I would have kept flushing with each heave, instead of letting the bowl fill up with a night's worth of casual poisoning. But instead I swung out my Leica—a bulletproof camera, the one they use in war photos—and started shooting. I got her leaning there using the toilet bowl like a pillow. I got her with the stuff pouring out of her like tar. I got her lying on the cool floor, the frazzled burr of her head against the smooth solid base of the bowl.

 

Contact sheet. Twenty-four-exposure study of an Econoline van during load-out. Location unknown/forgotten.

 

You should do a book, someone said. You should put them all together so people can see what she was like, before. And I could. I have thousands of pictures. Each one different. Each one telling the same story.

Kat on her first night as a blonde—her first night looking the way that most people remember her, the way she looks on the cover of the first album, with her bleached hair and black jeans spray-painted on her skeleton's legs.

Kat getting the thorn-wrapped heart tattooed at the nape of her neck, the one that she'd rub with her index finger when she was deep in thought or bored or distracted or nursing some grudge.

Kat in that ridiculous ski hat she used to wear—pompom on top and earflaps down each side. She is tottering toward me on an icy sidewalk with her arms spread wide and her lips puckered like she's about to plant a big wet kiss on my face, or on the lens.

Kat at Montrose Harbor in the bright sun with the sky so clear you could put your fist through it. It was late fall and the wind was tearing at her hair and beyond her you can see whitecaps and closer to her the lake is hurling itself against the rocks, and in the middle of all this motion and light Kat looks so. Goddamn. Tired.

This is my fear: that it would be like watching a whole carousel of slides from your neighbor's trip to the Grand Canyon. You'd ooh and aah for the first five pictures or so, but there would be another ninety on the way. Somewhere in the middle, you'd stop caring, and before you reached the end, you'd hate your neighbors, hate the Grand Canyon, hate the entire Eastman Kodak family of companies. None of this is going to make her more real for you. And none of it is going to bring her back.

 

Interior. ICU. Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Close-up of Kat's hand cupping three pills: pale blue, dull yellow, off-white.

 

No one agrees with me, but her last album was her best. Most people stopped paying attention during her years in LA. They got tired of watching her push it too far, they said the music was never as good as those first two albums, and they all wondered why she didn't just get it over with and die already. Instead she came back to Chicago and after lying low for a while, she put out an album with a small indie label run by guys too young to have been burned by her on her way up. I imagine that recording it, playing all the instruments herself, and knitting the tracks together must have been like those long airless days in her parents' basement. I say
imagine
because I wasn't there; I had abandoned Chicago shortly after Kat left town. I had planned on sticking around and being smug about how I was keeping it real, 312-style, but when I saw my chance to go east, I went. By the time I came back to see her, after months of promises and see-you-soon messages, she was sick and then she was gone. Anyone who had guessed overdose or razor to the wrist or self-immolation must have felt cheated. She got a stupid cancer, one that had nothing to do with any of her more toxic habits, and that was it. Right before her body betrayed her that one last time, she was tiny and bald and her skin was like cigarette paper. I wanted to scoop her up and carry her back to our old loft, to the couch where we had curled up all those years before, watching reruns of
Cheers
and
M*A*S*H
and
The Mary Tyler Moore
Show
and everything else WGN threw at us. Kat had fallen asleep on my shoulder that night. I listened to her breathe. I watched her dreaming eyes twitch. Her face was soft and full, despite the bruise that painted her left eye. Seeing her in that hospital bed, that's what I wanted: to carry her back home.

That's what would happen in the dream sequence where the best friends are reunited after the falling out, the bitter words, the long silence, the gradual thaw. But I did not spirit her away. When I found her in that bed, wiped out and with little left to give, I aimed the lens and started to shoot. Because not getting those pictures would have wrecked it—for me. And, I hope, for her.

Looking at all of the pictures now, I can pretend that she was the only one with the
what-the-fuck?
look, the
what-makes-you-so-special?
look, the
do-you-even-believe-your-own-bullshit?
look. But she's also the only one with the
thank-God-it's-you
look, the
just-trust-me-on-this-one
look, the
I'm-sorry-please-forgive-me
look, the
look-that-I-only-give-to-you
look. This is when I wish that there had been another me as devoted to me as I was to her. Someone to offer me proof that I looked at her like that, instead of just gawking with one big dumb glassy eye that only asked for more, and more, and more, and more.

FROM
Image

 

Do not love the world or the things in the world . . . For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.

—John 2:15–18

 

Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts. For the word of the
LORD
is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness.

—Psalm 33:3–4

 

M
Y NAME IS
John Fuller. I am nine and twenty years of age, born in the year of our Lord 1370, the son of a learned musician and the youngest of twelve children—though the Lord in his wisdom was pleased to take five brothers and two sisters back to the fold. After a grave accident, I no longer possess the use of my hands. Any inaccuracies in this document are not the fault of the scribe, who enjoys a high reputation, but of my own mind. My pain is not inconsiderable. However, I will continue frankly, in as orderly a fashion as I am able, so that these words may accompany my confession to the honorable vicar of Saint Stephen's.

My story begins as God knit me in the womb. There my knees pressed in to form the sockets of my eyes as they do in all men. However, my left knee—the cap of which has a sharp embossment—pressed upon the iris, pushing it to one side. While I am able to see clearly, it appears to others that the eye looks away from the place I have trained it. God be praised for this deformity, for it kept me close to him for the better part of my life.

My first memories are of two sounds—one ugly and one beautiful. As a child I lived in Oxfordshire in the northern Midlands. An old church stood in the center of the village, and in its center demesne what I thought must be everything the world could possibly contain: a bakehouse, granary, pigsty, dairy, an assortment of dovecotes, and a malting house. Once I recall walking on the outskirts of this enclosure with my father when there came an ugly noise, dry and papery, as menacing as a snake's warning. My father quickly lifted me to his shoulders and ran toward our cottage. Looking back, I saw a man whose skin bubbled up like a dark pudding—a leper, I later learned, required to wear a rattle to warn us of his coming. In one moment his eye caught mine from high upon my father's shoulders, and the look he gave me was so sinister that I have not forgot it. It seemed to say that only my father's body separated us, that in its absence the leper and I were one.