The Cormorant (17 page)

“You like to lie,” Grosky says.

“That’s not true, actually. The truth is usually way more interesting.”

“But you lie a lot.”

“The truth is a hammer, but a lie is a screwdriver. A more elegant tool. Sometimes you just want to pick a lock, not break a window. Even though breaking a window is always more fun.”

Vills pulls out another cigarette, lights it, hands it to Miriam. Then lights her own and plants her elbow on the table, leaning on her hand. “So, you called the number.”

“I called the number.”

“And?”

“It was a club. In South Beach. Nightclub called Atake.”

Vills tenses up. There it is. “Atake.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what did you do then?”

“What do you think I did? I went to Miami.”

“And who did you meet at Atake?”

“C’mon, Catherine. I think you know.”

Now Vills really tightens up – chin off her hand, elbow off the table – and for a half a second her eyes are hot pins trying to stick Miriam to the wall. But then Grosky tilts his head down to get his own look, and Vills fake-laughs it away. “No, I don’t, and that’s why I’m asking.”

“
That
is where I met Tap-Tap.”

PART FOUR

305 TILL I DIE

TWENTY-SIX

DAUGHTER OF THE YEAR

She steals her mother’s car.

No way around it. While her mother’s asleep Miriam sneaks into the kitchen and over to a pelican-shaped peg-board by the front door where the keys hang, and she snatches the Malibu’s keys.

Rupert barks at her.
Roww roww roww yap yap yap
.

She takes a mop bucket from a nearby closet and sticks it over the dog. The mop bucket moves around like a Roomba. The dog’s barks echo within, then eventually the dog quits and just sits under his dome.

Miriam leaves.

She stops, though. On the front stoop. That surprises her. She wills her feet to go, urging them forward like she’s trying to make an old person drive faster. But her stubborn feet just stand where they are, and it’s like they’re nailed to the walkway with iron spikes of pure guilt.

Mother will be crushed. You’re running away again.

I’ll be back, she tells herself.

Bullshit.

I’ll at least drop off her car.

How sweet. What a nice daughter you are
.

Oh, don’t get sarcastic with me.

You’re the one arguing with yourself, princess.

She growls and goes back inside.

She takes five hundred bucks from her stash and drops it on the breakfast nook table. Then she leaves a note:

Renting your car for a few days.

Here’s some cash to cover it.

See you on the other side.

–
m.

Miriam hurries off before she feels any other emotion besides the burning itching pee-pee-dance desire to get as far away from this place as humanly fucking possible.

TWENTY-SEVEN

THE GOOD NEWS GOSPEL

Night. The sky a dark sea. Highways looping to other highways – arterial knots. Streetlights smear.

Miriam’s tired as she heads toward Miami Beach. She stops at a gas station along the way, fuels up with some kind of cheap-shit teeth-rotting cappuccino that sprays out of the machine like foamy diarrhea.

It keeps her awake. It does its job. But it leaves her feeling like she’s running along a serrated blade – like she’s sawing herself in half with every step taken, every mile driven, like she’s about to spill everything that’s inside of her onto the seat of her mother’s Malibu.

She passes by a fruit stand. Derelict. Half-collapsed on the side of the highway. She sees a crooked sandwich-board sign and she’s certain that it reads HELLO, MIRIAM in drippy red paint, but when she blinks, all it says is ORANGES AND BANANAS.

“You believe in God?”

She jolts, startled. Almost swerves into the passing lane. A primer-colored pick-up truck blasts its horn and zips past.

The dead thug kid sits in the passenger seat.

Stringy brains connect his shattered skull and matted hair to the back of the seat. He twirls a long black feather between his fingers like a rock star with a drumstick. When he shifts, his puffy winter jacket goes
vviiip vviiip
.

“Go away. I don’t want the conversation.”

“Maybe you
need
the conversation, though. Maybe it’s time to ask yourself about God. The universe. The Devil. All that.”

Wicked Polly… May the Devil take you without care
.

“I don’t worry about that stuff.”

“You oughta. Maybe that stuff is worrying about you.”

The highway circles down toward Miami. Over bridges. Ahead she sees what first seem like massive white buildings but then she realizes: they’re cruise ships. Epic white whales parking themselves at the dock, one after the next, like skyscrapers turned on their sides.

“I don’t give a shit about God,” she says, “and here is where you flip it and say that
maybe God gives a shit about me
but I really don’t think He does and I’m not really even sure He exists. So.” She shrugs. And goes to turn on the radio. A blast of samba music fills the car –
chaka boom chaka boom whistle whistle horns
–

But the thug kid turns it back off.

“Maybe you’re on the side of the angels,” he says. With the end of that feather he picks something red, raw, and meaty from between his teeth and flicks it against the window.
Spat.
“Maybe God gave us free will and you’re on His side. Or maybe you’re the rebel, yo. Maybe you’re the Devil on our shoulder. Messing up God’s great-ass plan.”

“This metaphysical talk is gonna make me meta-fist-i-cal you in the mouth.”

“Lemme put it a different way.” He sucks air between his teeth. “Are you life? On the side of the living? Or are you death? A rogue reaper saving those who were supposed to die and killing those who were meant to live?”

“Yawn.”

“I know this shit bothers you.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it bothers me.”

“So you’re admitting you’re me.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I’m admitting that I’m inside you. Or that you’re me. Or that we share brains – especially since you blew mine out,
boom
.”

“If you keep talking I’m going to steer this car toward a light pole and shear it in half and leave you in a mechanical heap by the side of the road.”

He leans over toward her. She smells his breath. It smells of roadkill ripening in a wet ditch. He taps the end of the feather on the dashboard,
click click click
. “I’m just warning you, Miriam Black. Forces have been aligning against you for a while. You’ve been fucking with this Jenga tower for too long, and it ain’t long before it all comes clickety-clackety falling down.”

She scowls. “What forces? What the hell are you–”

A lemon-yellow Maserati cuts her off in traffic, honking its horn as its speeds away. She turns back to the passenger seat.

The Trespasser is gone.

TWENTY-EIGHT

DEATH ON THE DANCE FLOOR

This is Atake.

The bass is like a Tyrannosaur stomping through the chambers of her heart: the
doom doom doom
making her blood jump with every hit, up through her feet, vibrating through her bones, her teeth like a teacup rattling against its saucer – ceramic buzzing against ceramic.

It’s hot. Wet. The throng of bodies moving in tandem forms a single beast made of flesh and sweat and lust. Girls in bikinis. In lingerie. Dudes in stylishly torn vented tank-tops or no shirts at all. Women on raised platforms, pretend-fucking black glossy mannequins – Miriam thinks, this is probably their
job
, getting paid a hundred a night to come in here and sex up fake men so the real men below get stiff, get hungry, spend money on real drinks for real women with fake tits, and the cycle continues.

Fingers of light dance above their heads – this way, then that, then both ways. Steam rises from dancing skin, trapped in the beams.

Miriam moves along the edges. Less of a wallflower and more of a barracuda stalking the shadows of the reef.

She hates this place. She hates the music. She hates the people dancing
to
the music. Some buff dude in a hot pink Cuban fedora with his guayabera shirt open down to the tops of his pubes comes up and starts knocking his khaki-clad cock against her like a woodpecker looking for grubs in a tree – grinding on her so hard she’s surprised she doesn’t see sparks. Miriam throws a hard elbow backward–

Four years from now he’s in a nightclub bathroom, everything black and white and silver and the mirror is cracked but he doesn’t care because he’s drunk and high and buzzing like an electrical current. Outside the music matches the vibration in his veins, the thumping in his chest – this guy just wants to keep the party going so he kneels by the sink and pops open a bindle of cakey white powder and shakes out a generous but zig-zaggy rail of coke. He shoves the tip of a drinking straw up his nose and he dives into the powder; the high hits him like a shuddering wave of high-voltage awareness, but then it keeps going, keeps amping and ramping and suddenly it’s like everything in his body is closed in a vice. His eyes roll, nose bleeds, mouth foams, overdosed and overdone–

–and the guy in the pink fedora
oofs
and doubles over. He says something, yells it even, but the words are gobbled up by the hammering bass.

No time to get into a fight with some
cabrón
. She’s trying to find answers, not fistfights, and she’s not sure she’d win against that muscle-brain anyway, so she takes a sharp left into the throbbing throng of flesh.

She does it without thinking.

It’s a mistake.

Bodies. Skin. All around her.

The first vision hits her–

She’s with her three friends and they’re older now by a few years and they’re crossing at the corner by this old art deco-style café with the horizontal lines like the melting sun and the rounded lemon-yellow corners and they’re laughing and they have hella shopping bags and those little pillow-puffs between their toes like they just got pedicures. Then the girl’s flip-flop gets caught on the curb -- it rips and she tumbles forward, her nose mashing flat against the street just as a pink Fifties Cadillac vrooms up, tire on her head, popping it like a hairy pimple–

Miriam staggers–

Twenty-three years from now, guy standing in an empty house with polished floors, the ceiling fan on above his head. Only piece of furniture in the room is a chair, and the guy’s got a big rope in his crook of his arm. He goes over, turns the fan off, already starts to feel the sweat crawling down the tip of his crooked goblin-dick of a nose and with the toes of his bare foot he pushes the chair beneath the fan (the legs of the chair make a comically loud groan on the polished wood) and he unfurls the noose-end of the rope and that goes around his neck. The rest of the rope he winds around the base of the fan. Then he pins a note to his T-shirt that says I LOVE YOU, JENNY and beneath it FUCK YOU, JENNY and before he can even knock the chair out the damn thing breaks beneath him CRACK and suddenly it’s
grrrk kkkk thhhhsssss
beet-red eyes bulge tongue out head bulging purple like a well-fed tick black nowhere the notes fall from his chest and slip down through a heating register and he paws at the air trying to get them back but he’s seeing stars seeing nothing–

Miriam cries out but her voice is lost. Backpedal, turn. More skin –
doom doom doom
–

–
he won’t remember anything because of the anesthesia but the doctor nicks an artery, blood sprays, they can’t clamp it, a red mist ends it all–

Sweat drips in her eyes. She pulls her arms in,
no more, please, no more
, but she’s in the thick of it, a prison of skin, emerald lights and a sudden mist of water from pipes above,
pssshhh
. Someone shoves her–

–
a piece of bagel caught in the throat–

Someone grabs her hand–

–
the sharp stick of a hornet’s sting – a big fucker, too – big as a thumb, big enough to carry ordnance to bomb a Smurf village. Then comes the swelling, the head-woozy, the thick-feeling, the throat-closing. Anaphylactic shock shakes the guy like a baby, and the seizure–