JESS

SUMMER 1979

Jess faced the blank wall, holding her paintbrush, looking for any marks she might have missed. It was a chilly seaside morning, gray and damp, but as the fog began to lift the light through the uncovered windows grew brighter and clearer, washing the white room free of seams and corners, the parameters of defined space.

In the brightness her eyes swam with black floaters, flocks of short, dark lines like headless kite strings rising skyward. The floaters made it hard to judge whether the wall was clean. She dabbed at a few, unsure, but they defied erasure.

On the other side of the studio, one of Beethoven’s sonatas turned on the record player. The piano’s notes climbed, reaching, vivid and glistening. She tried to focus on the music, its promise, but other sounds seeped in from outside: motorcycles rumbling down on Pacific Avenue; gulls screaming over Venice Beach; skateboarders grinding down the sidewalk on their way up to Dogtown, the abandoned amusement park that still clung to the crumbling pier.

A lone runnel of paint slid down the brush handle to her wrist. She wore a sleeveless white T-shirt and her white painter’s pants. In the past, her achromatic work clothes made her feel transparent, enabling her to remove herself from the image of her studio and focus on what the space might become. But now when she saw the room in her mind she could not rid herself from it: her dark frizz of hair, the blue bruises on her elbows from cleaning the floor earlier that morning. She was an intruder, a blemish in the clean white space.

The sonata ended, leaving a sudden silence. Jess crossed the studio and turned the record over. Zack had given this set of sonatas to their aunt Ruth for Christmas, that first year in L.A. Jess had inherited the records, or maybe just taken them, she supposed. They hadn’t been willed to her; she found them still stacked on the spindle in Ruth’s stereo cabinet the morning after her memorial service.

I listen to them when I need to retune.

Jess could still hear Ruth’s voice, a steady, wonderfully nasal tone that never shed the open vowels of her New England upbringing. She remembered her aunt standing by the record player in her bedroom, looking out the back window, the piano’s notes rising like the sun over the short row of citrus trees behind the bungalow. It was Christmas morning, six months after their parents’ accident. Jess watched Ruth close her eyes in the wash of new light, as if waiting for something to arrive.

Jess had never seen sunrises like those, vivid blue to purple to orange, the entire spectrum imprinted along the horizon. And then the other side of those hours, the bookend of the day, the deep rich sunset, bloodred in the west. In the evenings they watched from the front porch, Ruth with a can of Hamm’s in one hand, a Pall Mall burning between the fingers of the other. There was no music playing, but Jess still heard the echo of the sonatas, as if the sound had traveled to sink and fade along the sun’s arc.

What did you think of that one? Ruth’s voice lower now, silvery with smoke. Asking about the sunset, or maybe about the entire day just passed.

In her studio, Jess dipped the long-handled roller into the paint pan and pushed it along the floor. Starting in the far corner, she worked her way out and back. Slow strokes. The paint’s sour-sweet smell filled the room. The roller squished in the pan and then there was the sound of the push and spread, shush-shush, like a finger to the lips, a secret.

She remembered how they mocked her for this, the ritual, the preparation. All those young men, that club of testosterone-fueled painters and sculptors leaning in the doorway of her big old studio space on Navy Street, smoking and chuckling. Housework, they called it. Hey, Jess, will you clean my room next?

Another dark shape slid into the periphery of her vision, like a human shadow lurking. It stood for a long moment, blocking the edge of her sight before moving away.

Most mornings when she left her apartment Jess walked down the stairs, past the locked studio door on the second floor and out onto Pacific Avenue, hurrying through the ever-growing gauntlet of junkies, Jesus freaks, doomsday prophets with their cardboard signs and spit-flecked warnings. But this morning she woke thinking of Ruth, and she wanted to hear the sonatas, not up in her apartment but in an uncluttered space, so she entered the studio for the first time in months. Now here she was, cleaning and repainting. Force of habit, maybe. Once there had been nothing more exciting than the possibility of the white room. This had been the place where she could transform her dreams and ideas and fears into something new. But that was impossible now. She had no new ideas, and her dreams were best swept into the dark corners upon waking. As for her fears, they had all bled free. They walked everywhere with her now, dark shapes floating just out of sight.

Pulling a dropper from her bag, she tilted her head back, prying her left eye wide, staring openmouthed at the ceiling. She squeezed a bead of clear fluid through the dropper’s tip, where it hung for a moment, stretching, until it fell and spread, stinging across the surface of her eye. She allowed herself to blink, tears flowing. She repeated with the right eye, then shut them both, willing the drops to do their work, chemical warfare, fighting the floaters, the dark shapes encroaching. Afraid, as she always was now, to open her eyes, terrified of what she was sure would come, the moment when she would be stricken—that was the word that looped in her head, the word always used in movies, in the clinical accounts she read obsessively, the word that described the moment when Jess would open her eyes to find so many shapes and floaters that they crowded out all other sight. She would be stricken, and eyes open or shut there would be no difference in the darkness.

From out of the dark, the girl appeared. She was always there, waiting. Isabella was her name, but the proper name conjured even more terror, so she remained, when possible, the girl.

The girl at the gallery in Santa Monica, the girl with the metal canister, the hose, the wand.

It was a hot night in late August, two years before. Jess stood in the gallery beside Anton Stendahl. She was attending his show as a favor. His hand was at the small of her back, heavy, overly familiar. He was full from the attention, smiling for the cameras.

Anton had been very generous to Jess early in her career. He had written the first positive piece about her work—the first piece of any kind about her work—and so even though she didn’t think much of his wall sculptures, the garish, fleshy orbs that looked to her like cartoon breasts, Jess agreed to attend the opening. The cameras were there for her, for the recent infamy, she and Anton both knew that, but the publicity would be helpful to him and so Jess believed she was doing the right thing, repaying a long-standing debt.

All she could feel was his hand on her back, pressed against the hard zipper of her dress. She wanted him to stop touching her, but she was afraid that if he did she would float away. In that moment the unwanted pressure was all that made her feel real. It had only been a month since what happened at Zero Zone and she was still shaken to the point of numbness. She couldn’t move free of the disaster. Every action felt detached, dissociated from her mind and body. She didn’t know what she was doing except standing beside Anton and wearing a hollow, idiotic smile.

And then the girl appeared. Jess saw her crossing outside the gallery’s front window, then coming in the door. She was a teenager, small and hunched and terribly thin. Her dark hair was cut jaggedly, violently, almost as if it had been torn in places, or bitten off. There was a brown smudge of dirt or ash streaked in a straight line across her left cheekbone. A girl with a dirty face.

The girl looked around, bewildered maybe by the noise and bodies, but she didn’t seem lost. She meant to be there. After a moment she moved through the clutch of guests and critics and photographers. She wore a yellow blouse with a beaded multicolor spiral across the front and flared blue jeans. Her clothes were worn, torn, too big. She had the look of someone who had lost weight rapidly—starved, haunted eyes in an overlarge head.

The crowd was like most crowds at an opening—performative, competitive, self-aware—but the girl was small and inelegant, so she moved unnoticed even as she rubbed shoulders and brushed arms. She walked easily through the ranks to stand in the open space between the edge of the crowd and Jess and Anton. With one hand she carried the metal canister by its handle. It was about the size of a large fire extinguisher. A rubber hose ran from its top to the long wand she held in her other hand.

Like Aunt Ruth almost, with her beer can and cigarette on the old front porch. Jess saw a quick flash of the two women, superimposed.

The girl took another deliberate step toward Jess and Anton. Their backs were against a wall. One of Anton’s pink-and-white boobs hung just above Jess’s shoulder. Jess watched the girl approach—she was possibly the only one who noticed her—and felt a dulled sense of alarm, as if something was wrong but somewhere far away.

The girl looked only at Jess, as if no one else in the gallery existed.

In a corner by the windows, a security guard stirred and glanced their way. He wasn’t much older than the girl, his gray uniform hanging from his boyish frame. He seemed hesitant, unsure whether the situation required his attention. Anton stood oblivious, smiling, talking to a critic at the front of the crowd. Someone called out a question about Zero Zone. Jess ignored it by widening her smile. A camera flashed again, leaving a bright afterimage, a white punch discoloring Jess’s field of vision. Anton’s hand on her back held her in place. If his hand hadn’t been there she could have broken away or shouted to draw attention to the girl, who stepped toward them quietly, her dark eyes fixed on Jess.

With her thumb, the girl flipped a small lever at the top of the canister. There was the slight hiss of air or gas.

The girl pointed the wand like an accusatory finger. Jess stared at the small black dot of the wand’s sharp tip, only a foot from her face. The girl held it steady with what seemed like great strength. When she spoke, her voice was low and clear, trembling with rage. A boiling pot, ready to overflow.

You took this from us, she said. I’m giving it back.

The girl’s finger jerked on the wand’s trigger. A loud blast of air sprayed Jess’s face, filling her nose and mouth, burning her eyes. Jess inhaled, she couldn’t help but breathe in, stunned. It was like drowning, like falling under the waves once again, reaching for her mother’s hand and breathing water. Amid shouts and screams, she stumbled back against the wall. The girl was closer now, her face twisted as she swung the wand, slashing Jess across the face, a searing, white-hot pain. Jess fell to the floor and the girl stood above her, the canister over her head, ready to smash it down onto Jess’s face. But then the security guard was there, finally rushing in, tackling the girl to the ground.

Isabella Serrano was only sixteen at the time. A juvenile court judge remanded her to a youth detention facility up by Fresno, a three-year sentence.

The doctors stitched Jess’s face, the wound that ran from her right temple halfway down her cheek. They said she was lucky. Her eye wasn’t damaged, and the scar would be relatively slight.

They tested the contents of the canister and Jess’s lungs and blood and urine and everything came back clean. What Isabella sprayed contained average levels of radiation, normal amounts of particulate matter. There was no explanation for its warmth or taste or any symptoms perceived to be associated with the attack.

It was just air, Miss Shepard, the doctor at the hospital told her. This was repeated by her own doctor at his office after multiple visits and more tests. It was repeated by other doctors, specialists, optometrists and ophthalmologists. She went to see them all, convinced she was being misunderstood or ignored. They thought she was hysterical, psychosomatic. She went to see acupuncturists, herbalists, the spiritual oculist in his alleyway storefront off Market Street who moved the dry pads of his fingertips over her closed eyelids, humming or moaning or chanting, she couldn’t tell which. She was willing to hum or moan or chant with him if asked, if that would help, the slight pressure from his fingers creating red-rimmed amoebas sliding behind her eyelids.

It was not just air. There was something more. The breath of the land where she had built Zero Zone, or something even worse. Jess could imagine Isabella in that place, planning her attack, pumping her metal canister full of poison.

There, the oculist said, lowering his hands, his breath hot and close, his long hair smelling of sage and patchouli. What do you see?

Jess opened her eyes and saw the beaded curtains ringing the room, the oculist’s sunburned face, the deep creases in his skin. She saw his mild gray eyes, sanguine, confident in his own power. But that was just background. Here, still, at the front of her vision, black pinpricks appeared, one at a time, and then lengthened, slowly, as if an unseen hand was dragging them, dark scratches across the world’s bright face.

She jumped at the sound of Gabe’s voice, calling her name from down on the street. She buzzed him up to the studio, blinking, spreading the drops across the surface of her eyes. Then she turned, composing something approximating a smile.

Gabe topped the stairs and leaned in the studio doorway, one tall frame inside another. “I was jogging by and saw you up in the window,” he said.

“Quite a coincidence.”

“Okay—I was checking up on you. Sue me.”

He was still breathing hard, his face shining with sweat. Beads of moisture hung in his mustache. He wore red gym shorts and a gold Sly and the Family Stone T-shirt. A damp band ran along his midsection, right above Sly’s Afro.

“It’s nice to see you in here.” Gabe pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his cheeks and brow.

“I just came to clean up,” Jess said.

Still rattled, she crossed the studio to the kitchenette. She pulled a cigarette from her pack on the counter and then offered one to Gabe. He shook his head. She saw his eyes move to the scar, then away. Like everyone else, he tried not to look.

“Don’t tell me you quit,” she said.

“I quit everything. Smoking, coffee, red meat. We do wheat germ now. Oat bran. David brews a thermos of oolong tea and I sip it all day.”

“Nothing in the tea?”

“Just a spoonful of honey.”

“Mary Poppins.”

“I think that was sugar,” Gabe said. “Which I’ve also given up.”

Jess found her matches. “You mind if I continue on unenlightened?”

Gabe smiled. “It’s your studio.”

She lit her cigarette and shook the match and tossed it into the sink. When she looked back, Gabe was staring into the newly whitewashed space.

“You’re thinking about something in here.”

“Just housekeeping.”

He walked into the studio, as if moving past her response. Not buying it, or not willing to buy it.

“I lectured about Spectrum the other day,” he said. “I probably rambled for half an hour about the concept and construction, the trial and error, getting it wrong, then getting it right. Trying to describe what it felt like that first night, moving through the rooms. The feeling of, what? Bathing in each color. Breathing it in.”

He stopped close to the far wall, still in those remembered rooms for a moment before coming back out.

“These are eighteen-year-old kids,” he said. “They think they’ve seen everything. I’m showing slides and sketches, and then I look out at their faces and realize I may as well have kept my mouth shut. It made no sense to them. It wouldn’t make sense to anybody who wasn’t there. I should have known better.”

He closed his eyes, inhaling deeply. “That smell, huh?”

“The cigarettes?”

“The paint. You miss it. That’s why you come in here. Don’t give me that bullshit about cleaning.”

“It’s not bullshit.”

“Wouldn’t it feel good to work again?” Gabe was animated now, unwilling to let it go. His enthusiasm pressed at Jess, boxing her in. “What are you thinking about in here?”

“I’m thinking about painting the fucking walls.”

She gathered her brushes in a sheet of newspaper. With her keys she popped open a can of turpentine, dumping the greasy liquid into a bucket. The chemical tang joined them in the room, fumes rising.

Gabe started to respond, then stopped himself. He pulled a breath in through his nose and Jess saw the outer flicker of some internal calming process, another new feature of her old friend. She studied him, feeling a little more in control now that she had been difficult enough to derail his concern. He had lost a significant amount of weight, slimming his previously pear-shaped torso. There was great definition now in the lean muscle of his arms and legs.

“How long have you been running?”

“Half an hour.”

He was petulant now, hurt. She softened her tone.

“I mean as a continuing practice.”

He bent and pulled a stubborn white sock back up to midcalf. “About a year ago David and I joined a group. The Whole Body Seminar.”

Jess winced. “You joined a group.”

“It’s not like that. Positive energy only. We meet every morning on the beach in Malibu. It’s done wonders.”

How many times had she seen Gabe in the last year? A handful only, when he stopped by like this to check on her. And in how many of those times had she really paid attention, been able to see past her own fog? He no longer smoked. He was a runner now. He had joined some kind of group. She knew next to nothing about his life since Zero Zone, his life with David, his teaching. This scared her, this sense of time passing without her, the world moving on while she painted and repainted her white room.

“I heard from Christine,” he said.

She had rebuffed him, so now Gabe was jumping to the other reason for the visit, dropping the name on the floor between them like a cat presenting a dead bird.

“She called you?”

“Came out to campus,” he said. “I haven’t seen her in years. Her son was with her.”

“Henry.”

“He looks just like Alex. Same crew cut, everything. A serious little man. Three or four, maybe.”

“Three.”

Jess’s cigarette had burned down to the nub. She dropped it into the sink and ran the water for a moment. She wanted another but opening the pack again would feel like an admission of something, weakness or guilt. Instead, she worked the brushes in the bucket and then transferred them to the sink, rinsing their heads clear then flicking the excess, quick sharp whips spattering water around the drain.

“She’s looking for photographs,” Gabe said, “of the area where you built Zero Zone. She said Alex took photos there a year or so before his death. She asked if I knew where they were.”

“What did you say?”

“I told her the truth. I’d never seen any photos. I thought she was mixed up—she seemed very mixed up. Like she was confusing your work with his.”

Your work. Gabe had always taken pride in their collaboration, his skill in helping build the physical structures Jess designed. Our work, he often called it. But not Zero Zone, apparently. That was hers alone.

“Are there photographs?” Gabe asked.

An abrupt pop sounded in the room. Jess felt her stomach jump, before realizing that it was the needle rising free of the record. She crossed into the studio and flipped Beethoven over on the turntable.

“There are things he wanted me to have,” she said.

“Pictures of the site?”

“Whatever he gave me is none of her business.”

“She was his wife, Jess. She probably has some kind of legal claim.”

The Fifth Sonata sounded harder this time, percussive, planking notes in the empty room. Jess kept her back to Gabe, facing the white walls, the bright windows, her eyes awash with dark, dancing shapes. Her anger was misplaced. It didn’t belong with Gabe. Maybe not even with Christine.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Listen,” Gabe said. “I know this probably sounds like the last thing you want to do, but one of my students is having a party tonight.”

“It does sound like the last thing I want to do.”

“We need to get you out of here, just for a few hours. I’ll have my tea and you can have a couple of drinks and we’ll sit and listen to the kids bullshit about who’s hot and who’s not, what’s in, what’s out. Remember those conversations?”

“I hated those conversations.”

“So you can hate them again tonight.”

“I don’t know, Gabe.”

“Come on. I can proselytize about health food. Wheatgrass. Spirulina. Say the words. Simply saying the words is the first step.”

Jess smiled, feeling herself on the edge of a grudging surrender. Maybe this would be good for her—she could spend some time with Gabe, get out of the apartment, out of her own head for an evening.

“You have to stop blaming yourself.” Gabe was behind her now. His size had always felt comforting, supportive, safe. “It’s time to move on.”

He set his hands on her shoulders and Jess tried not to flinch.