A WROUGHT-IRON ELEVATOR CAGE descends, byzantine, bottoms out at the end of a narrow foyer, and its manual-draw doors remain shut, the lift empty. Through locked glass double doors Jay peers in from outside the building, his hands laced through the security grille, buttery light bouncing off brass mailboxes queued along one tiled wall.
He didn’t dream this.
He turns away, his reflection vanishing into a silken darkness through which a crude neon red-lipped smiling mermaid perched on a cocktail glass glows crazily. Her tail flutters and, in a sequence of neon stutters, she drops inside the glass.
He didn’t dream her, either.
• • •
Inside the storefront strip club directly across the sleepy street, fixtures rattle with the rapid-fire percussion from calypso music and a tangerine-tailed real-life mermaid rises in the huge glass cylinder that serves as a watery center stage; hair black, skin white, she floats up, arches her back and does a lazy, curling flip, palest breasts roiling, the girl, sinking away again, down, and golden bubbles rise in a burst from both sides of her siren’s red-lipped smile.
Half a dozen male patrons, none of them sitting together, watch her swim.
On the far side of the huge, glowing tank, in the darkest part of the bar, Jay looks back at her blankly, nursing a ten-dollar vodka tonic. Swirling the ice. Lost. An uneasiness has been creeping up on him, a nebulous slow-dawning understanding that it’s possible the relative ease with which he escaped from custody, or protection, may have been predestined: they let him get away to see where he’d go. Ego prevents him from fully embracing this notion, but he can’t seem to dismiss it. It travels with him like a yoke.
The mermaid floats up close to the glass in front of him, dark hair in tendrils, pale skin, glitter mascara, one pink nipple pierced with a gold fishhook. A tiny zipper tag flags from the orange scales at her hip, betraying the rubber tailfin costume this thalassic stripper has zipped herself into.
The dream version of the club, softened, rippled and smeared, looms behind her: the bar, the doorway, the faceless patrons at the scuffed black laminate tables . . .
. . . and John Q. Public strolling through the entrance curtain, followed closely by the Agent Known As Barry Stone. Public scans the bar, the room. The patrons. The tank. Mermaid in slow gyration, gilded in bubbles. Barry circles the stage-front tables, casual, careful, staying in the shadows.
No Jay.
• • •
No, Jay is bursting through the door of the upstairs tank room, out of breath from his sprint up the stairs. He slams it shut, looks around for something to wedge it closed. Water rocks free in the big, circular access hole that comprises the middle of the wooden floor. Some spangly mermaid costumes hang upside down from a rack in the far corner like gutted fish.
The pockapockapocka of a tiny air compressor whose hose disappears down into the water. Club music thumps below. An orange smear curls deep in the tank. Jay’s desperate to discover a second way out. There’s a ladder in the corner that leads to a trap door up to the roof. Fire escape?
Water sloshes up over the edge, darkening the floor, and the orange mermaid breaks the surface, gasping, spitting out her transparent air hose, scaring the shit out of Jay, and then groping for the railing to beach herself.
“Help me out here, willya, I can’t”—she extends a slender white hand toward Jay—“this lovely fin suit’s like wearing a giant dildo, plus it leaks and fills up and probably weighs as much as I do by the time I’m done.” Jay braces himself and hauls her up into the room, and she flops, awkward, wet, tail spritzing heavily chlorinated moisture, frisky breasts going everywhichway. “I HATE IT. I just . . . hate it . . .” She finds the zipper and yanks and escapes, wearing nothing but a bikini bottom, and now she gets self-conscious: “TOWEL?”
Jay finds one, and the girl covers up, shaking the water out of her ears.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” she says. Then, squinting at him: “Jurgen?”
“No, Jay.”
“Sorry. I’m blind without my glasses and I can’t wear contacts in the, you know. Seriously: legally blind. I want to get the laser surgery, but I’m nervous about it. I hear it goes bad. Jurgie’s this guy I made a mistake and sucked off about a month ago.” She adds, “Musta been life-changing, cuz he keeps following me, and like I’m gonna go through that crazy shit again, uh-uh, I don’t even think he’s German.”
She finds her glasses on a shelf above the mermaid tail rack. Thick rims, retro-chic cat’s-eye. She turns and watches Jay as she peels off her bottom, under the towel, and hangs it, dripping, from a hook. “Never wear latex with a Brazilian,” she warns him. “You walk like a rodeo cowboy for a week.”
“I’m looking for . . .” Jay stops himself. He sounds like a cop. He takes a different tack. “There was another girl who worked here, at the bar. Last winter.”
The mermaid gives him a dead eye, teasing: “Oh, sure, okay, yeah, like now I know exactly who you’re talking about.”
“She worked at a flower shop during the day. This was just, nights, I guess, part time, but, well, something, this bad thing, happened to her and—”
“—Miriam.”
Miriam.
The girl is suddenly sad. “Aw, Jesus, what a fucking mess. You were a friend of hers?”
“Kinda,” Jay says, but, from memory, a single image: running across an empty expanse of blacktop with a mermaid in his arms.
“Super-tragic,” the stripper remembers, “I mean—and she was our best swimmer, too, she was like, I think, almost in the Olympics or something, in that synchronized thing.”
“No, she worked the bar. I—”
The mermaid shakes her head, wet hair dripping. “Miriam was a mermaid. Miriam Miller. I wasn’t here when it happened, but,” she’s looking down, distracted, into the water, “hey, is somebody looking for you?”
Jay follows her eye line down through the tank and the warp of the water to Public, hands pressed against the glass, looking back up at him blindly.
“Don’t worry, he can’t see you,” the girl says, shaking out her hair again and starting to twist it, the squeezings streaming back into the tank, “on account of, I think, the surface reflection, or something. Otherwise, all the fappers would be, you know, nose pressed to the glass and drooling—”
• • •
Jay explodes through the trap door to the rooftop like he’s been launched from the ladder, pivots, his ankle aching, kicks the metal square shut again with his good foot and hop-skips across the roof, bathed in back-bleed from the shimmering cocktail neon hanging over the club. At the parapet he leaps a narrow slot of darkness to the tar-and-gravel of the next building’s roof, landing gingerly, weight on one leg, and limps across to the next parapet, to leap again.
One after another, roof to roof, down the block. Vent pipes like punctuation marks, his sneakers slipping here and there on ancient patches. The channeled black scar of the L.A. River squeezes in from the sudden rise of Griffith Park, to the north, as the row of commercial buildings ends in a cross street and Jay can go no farther. He glances back. No one has followed him, and the one sleepy car that crawls past below is heading away from him, east into the Valley scatter.
Jay finds the fire escape and awkwardly scrambles down. Hits the sliding ladder and takes it rattling to its abrupt end—hangs there for a moment—drops to the sidewalk, where he sinks back into the shadows and sits back against the brick, ankle throbbing, catching his breath.
Another car blows past, headlights liquid in the night air, slows at the corner, taillight winking red, and disappears.
The night is electric with the deep hush-and-rumble of the Los Angeles he’d forgotten from his weeks on the island. Across the street, a dead metal security gate pulled across its entrance, is a flower shop.
Jay stares at it dully.
He remembers that his mother loved roses.