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I knew he wasn’t here for me. I had known from the beginning.
But my foolish heart hadn’t. It had wanted so badly to believe him. Now it was crushed up against my ribs by the growing terrible feeling inside me.
“I’m not interested,” I said. “Like I said, we’re not really dating.”
“But even as a friend —”
“We’re not even really friends,” I said. I needed to shut this door right now, so that I could go scream or cry or smash something.
“I just knew him for a while.”
She studied my face, looking for the true answer, but I had gotten ahold of myself now, and I just gazed dead-eyed out at her from behind my eyeliner.
“If you change your mind,” she said, and flicked out a card from the pocket of her linen smock.
I didn’t change my expression, but I took it. I needed something to burn.
“It would be cool,” Baby said. “The sort of thing you’d always remember. Just think about it.”
She retreated down the sidewalk. I retreated back into the House of Dismay and Ruin. As I shut the door behind me, the house took another piece of my soul and transformed it into a piece of semi-custom cabinetry. My brain was exploding.
Sofia stood at the door to the living room. “Was that really —”
“Yes.” I snatched my phone out. Punched in a number.
“What did she —”
I clawed my hand through the air and pointed at the phone.
I heard a little tap as someone picked up on the other end.
“I thought you said you were here for me,” I snarled.
“Hello,” Cole replied. “I was just putting pants on. Unless you’d prefer me to leave them off.”
“Act like you heard what I said.”
“But I didn’t.”
“You said you were here for me. You lied.”
There was a pause. The thing about a phone call is that you can’t tell what is happening in the pause. I couldn’t tell if it was a find-a-way-to-make-this-better pause or an I-am-genuinelyconfused pause.
“What?” he asked finally.
“You’re recording an album? You’re going to be on television.
Those things are not me.”
Another pause.
“Say something.”
“Something.”
“Oh, ha. Well, listen. The problem is that you made me feel as if you came here just for me, and actually you came here to be on TV. You didn’t come for me. You came here to be Cole St.
Clair.”
Exasperated, he replied, “That is backward.”
“Funny how you didn’t mention it before,” I snapped.
“Forget about dinner. Forget about it all.”
“It’s no —”
“Don’t talk. In fact,” I said, “drop dead.”
I hung up.
Chapter Six
· cole ·
When I was a wolf, I didn’t remember anything about being me. I was reduced to my very basic self, solved for x. I was nothing more or less extraordinary than an animal.
It was what every other drug I had ever used was trying to be.
All I could think about after Isabel called was how if I was a wolf, this feeling would go away, at least for a little bit.
Instead I stood on the wire-strung balcony of the Venice house and looked out at the nighttime glitter of the city. The moon was a huge, round Hollywood set piece at the end of Abbot Kinney. Palm trees were exotic silhouettes against its face — movie-perfect, L.A.-perfect. This place: Were movies Hollywood-perfect because this place was, or had they built this place to perfection because of the movies?
Standing on the balcony, a silhouette myself against the purple sky, my depression was just another glamorous thing.
What should I have told her?
I was aware of the tiny camera pointed at my back. It was attached to the roofline and was one of several positioned throughout the compound — compound was really not the right word for it. My studio apartment, bright and wide-eyed and skylighted, occupied the second floor of a concrete block house.
The first-floor apartment was slated for another band member.
A wide deck led to a third apartment in a flat stucco house on the other side of the block. In between was a tiny yard full of plants that looked unrealistic to my foreign eyes.
Six weeks suddenly spooled out. I didn’t understand how I’d ever thought that forty-two days was a short time.
I rocked my weight against the edge of the balcony. I wished for a beer; I wished for a needle to push into my skin.
No, those weren’t me anymore. I was straight, clean, brandnew.
Baby had hired me to fail, but I wasn’t going to fail.
Isabel hadn’t even given me a chance.
I thought about how quickly I could be a wolf. How completely it would empty my mind. Just for a few minutes.
And unlike any of my other chemical salves, it left no marks and demanded nothing more from me. It wasn’t an addiction.
But I didn’t move.
Crossing my arms on the balcony, I laid my head on them, my chest slowly filling with black. My face was buried into the place where track marks had been before the wolf in me had erased them.
What was the point of being here, if not for her? What was the point of anything if I couldn’t even work out this one thing.
It was just dinner. It was just —
Isabel —
In the alley behind my apartment, I heard a car pull up and stop. A car door opened and closed. A trunk opened and closed.
The gate to the courtyard rattled.
I flicked my gaze up to an indistinct figure with a lightcolored hat struggling at the gate. He/she/it spotted me. A female voice, probably, called, “A little help, man?”
I didn’t move. I watched her/him/it work at the lock for another minute until the lockbox was persuaded to give up its key.
This had all seemed like such a fun game earlier when I’d been standing in Baby’s house. But now? Drop dead.
It felt like I’d never stopped arguing with Isabel, way back in Minnesota.
It was impossible how fast everything had gone to shit in my heart.
Down below, the figure entered the courtyard. She had a bag. It didn’t seem to have wheels but she dragged it anyway.
Pushing past an intrusive fig tree, she stood directly beneath me, her lanky shadow diffuse and multiheaded from the streetlights and porch lights and moon. I could see now that what I’d thought was a hat were actually massive blond dreadlocks.
Tipping her head back, she said, “Thanks for that, man.”
When I still didn’t reply, she dragged the bag a few more feet. Then she dropped beside the house and lit up a cigarette or a joint.
Slowly, I dragged myself into performer mode. Cole St.
Clair mode. It was a thing to wear, a familiar shirt, but it took a moment to get on.
I clomped down the stairs. In the dark, the faint glow at the end of her joint illuminated the smoke around her. Her face was very long and very thin and a lot like Ichabod Crane, if Ichabod had blond dreadlocks, which he might have. The eighteenth century was a bad time for hair.
“Hi, why are you here?” I asked.
“I’m your drummer,” she replied.
There were no fireworks or parades or signs raining from the heavens to announce her, the first of the musicians assembled around the musical feet of Cole St. Clair, ex-frontman of NARKOTIKA.
This girl was not my band. My band was one-third Buddhist and one-third dead.
I said, “That isn’t a fancy way of saying you’re a hooker, is it?
Because I’m really not in the mood.”
She blew smoke out at me. In a slow, nasal voice that seemed like it had to be cultivated, she said, “Don’t harsh my buzz, man.”
She closed her eyes. She looked utterly at peace with the entire world. Marijuana had never had that effect on me. I got super funny, and then I got sad. The entire process had only ever been a good time for onlookers.
“I wouldn’t dream of it. I thought you were coming tomorrow.
If you aren’t familiar, that’s the day after today.”
Girl Ichabod opened her eyes. Her dreadlocks were massive.
They needed a zip code. I had seen some great dreads in my time, but these looked like they had been made with the ruins of abandoned third-world villages. “Buzz. Harshing.”
“Sorry. I’m Cole.”
“Leyla.” She offered me her joint.
“I’m straight,” I said, although once upon a time I had considered pot the most minor of an array of sins available to me. It was the first time I had said I’m straight out loud, and the words had a glorious nobility to them.
“Might want to take the edge off,” she told me. “Before the rest of them get here.”
“The rest of them?”
As if on cue, lights flooded the backyard. I threw a hand up to shield my eyes. Four people walked through the gate, easy as you please, all dark and ghoulish at the yard’s edge. Two of them carried cameras. The other two carried instrument cases.
The former was pointed at the latter, but when they caught a whiff of Leyla and me, the lenses instantly swung to us.
I felt like I’d been thrown onstage without a set list. This is the show, I told myself. It starts now.
“Like I said,” Leyla said, indifferent.
“Cole, hey,” said the camera guy. I could see half of his face, and it reminded me strikingly of Baby. The same heavy lids, the same brown fringe of hair, the same feeling that he’d stepped out of a vintage ’70s photograph. “I thought you’d be sleeping.
Sorry for the surprise. Everyone got in early and we thought we’d shoot a couple minutes of them walking in.” He stuck out his hand at me, camera still in his other hand. He was wearing about four hundred hemp bracelets. I instantly made at least three judgment calls about him based upon the bracelets alone.
“I’m Tee. Just the letter.”
“Which letter?”
“T. My name. Just T.”
I made another judgment call, and then I shook his hand.
“You have Baby’s face.”
“Ha, I know. I’m her twin brother.”
“Kinky.”
“Yeah, I know, right? I’m going to be one of the camera crew.” I could tell right off that he was one of those pliable guys who just liked being around celebrities of all sorts. Not a fan of anyone specific, just a fanboy of anyone who’d ever been anyone in general. Still, I immediately liked him better than Baby. He was more straightforward. “Joan’s the other one you’ll see all the time. That’s her.” He pointed. “So if you see us around, you won’t freak out.”
Part of my attention was on him, but the better part of my mind was working over how his parents had collectively named their children Baby T.
“Anyway, we’ll just, like, get a quick shot of them walking into the house, and then we’ll get out of your way,” T said.
“We’ll try to be as, you know, unobtrusive as possible.”
“Do what you gotta do,” I said.
T and Joan backed up, pointing cameras hither and thither, looking for the best possible lighting. Joan nearly stepped on Leyla, who reclined in the grass. I caught a glimpse of the scene through Joan’s viewfinder and it looked like one of those lion documentaries after dark. All that was missing was the fender of a Land Rover and the half-eaten corpse of a wildebeest.
I focused on the two musicians at the same time that Joan’s camera did.
“Why are there two of them?” I asked.
T, eager and amiable, immediately stopped what he was doing and turned to me. “Two of what? Cameras? Differ —”
“No, them.”
“It’s your band, man,” T said. He wore the same wide smile as Baby. “Guitarist and bassist.”
“Which one is the guitarist?”
T looked at the two guys with their two similar instrument cases. He didn’t have half a clue. One of the musicians lifted his hand.
I said, “You can go.”
T’s sleepy eyes got unsleepier. “Hey, wait a second.”
“The door’s over there,” I told the guitarist, who was staring at me with an expression I’d forgotten — disbelief mingled with indignation. “Nice to meet you, da svidaniya, etc., etc.” I turned to the bassist, who swallowed. “And y —”
“Hey, wait,” T interrupted. He was still smiling, but his eyes looked a little alarmed. “Baby handpicked these guys. I don’t think she’ll be so happy if you just send one packing before we eve —”
“I didn’t ask for a guitarist,” I said. “Why would I need a guitarist? This isn’t the Beatles.” I pointed. “Bassist. Drummer.
Me. Done.”
T clearly wanted to keep the peace. “Why don’t you just keep him to see how it goes? Then you’re happy, Baby’s happy, Chip’s happy.”
I presumed Chip was the guitarist I was going to have to forcibly eject from my life. The most annoying thing about all of this was that I was certain Baby hadn’t forgotten that I didn’t want a guitarist. Someone who remembered a notepad didn’t misremember an extra band member.
“If he wants to sit around, whatever,” I replied. “But that thing’s not coming out of the case. I don’t write for guitar. He can keep the plants company.”
T held my gaze, waiting for it to waver. But it wasn’t going to. If nothing else in the world went right, I was going to at least keep this: I was recording the album my way.
Finally, T said, “Chip, why don’t you wait in the car?”
