Fundamental Things Never Really Change
Waiting in the rain at the checkpoint into the favelas Kern worries that the soldiers will frisk him and find the money in his pocket—more money than he’s ever seen in one place before—but they just wave him through.
Inside, he says, “Lares’ place isn’t far” to the ghost, though others may think he’s talking to himself, another of the favela’s mad ones.
Everyone hurries through the rain which gives him an excuse to hurry with them. His tension, which had diminished in the city, has returned; he clenches his fists in the pockets of his jacket.
The favela’s old men will shake their heads and fret about the drainage but he’s always loved the storms’ violence, the smell of wet concrete. The music of the water pouring from the ledges reminds him of the light well off his room, how in the monsoon it becomes a cistern, how he could hear its depth in the sound of rain hitting, a sound he’ll never hear again, though he could walk there in ten minutes. He tries to feel the force of that, but nothing comes, until he thinks of Kayla, though he’s sworn never to see her again, has made it his practice to keep her from his mind.
A woman comes out of an alleyway, backlit, heavily pregnant, her soaked cotton shorts and tank top displaying her body’s metamorphosis. His first thought is that she, too, likes the rain and its cleanliness, but then he sees her staring eyes, her wide rictus grin, how she walks by without seeing him at all.
He wonders how she managed to conceive, with her craziness all but palpable, and imagines a pack of boys running her down, their honor dissolved in the group’s euphoria. The image of her swollen breasts under the wet cloth stays with him, and he could do what the boys did, and no one would know, for she must be all alone, and he is afraid, then, for this impulse is someone else’s, and purely contemptible, and of course the ghost would know, and even if he is a predator—and he is, must be, and the world peopled only with victims—the noble, he reminds himself, do not prey on the weak. (In any case, she’d smell like cold, and despair, and as he pressed her down her black eyes would be windows onto nothing.)
He stops, can’t bring himself to get moving again. He gathers his will and takes a few steps but his will fades, leaving him standing there, staring straight ahead. He thinks of Kayla, how she looked when she was sleeping, how she’d promised she’d always care for him. “Everything all right?” asks the ghost as he turns and heads for Red Cloud Street, where Kayla will be dancing in the Club Lazarus’s heat and shadows.
* * *
From a distance it looks like firelight flickering on the low cloud, and then Kern turns the corner into the glare of video. Thousands of screens are embedded in the walls, the lowest over the bars’ awnings, the highest lost in the rain, their light reflected in the puddles, the windows, the wet hair of passersby, and as he stares up into the screens the world falls away, leaving him floating among abstract planes of shifting light, a dream saccading without intent, but then the images, which have been form purely, resolve into the shapes of the bodies of women. They’re beautiful, the women, though their hair and makeup are dated (as are, more subtly, their breasts and musculature), because all the video is from archives of old porn, and he wonders why anyone bothers to make more, since the fundamental things never really change.
A trio of marines jostle past, splashing water on his pants, bringing him back to the roar of the street’s arcades, the massage parlors’ jangling musics, the rain’s drumming. They’re out of uniform, but he knows them by their haircuts, their muscular bulk, and an aura that’s both lethal and puppyish. One of them calls back to him in a child’s Spanish, to apologize, or perhaps to mock him, but is laughing so hard he can barely speak, and Kern sees that they’re very drunk. Their training is said to be severe, but whatever they may be in battle, for now they’re just foolish, and loud, shouting over each other in the street, and their swagger reminds him to go quietly through the world. They’re the ones who die, mostly, in their country’s wars, they say, and he looks up again at all the ancient records of the beautiful, locked forever in their endless loops, and all these girls must be dead now, their ranked ghosts shining brightly overhead. He follows the marines into the crowd.
Press and heat of bodies, smells of sweat, fried meat, beer, perfume and always the rain, all familiar, and in aggregate they feel like life itself. “Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s a terrible idea,” the ghost says. “Too many people, cameras, drones. You might as well be holding up a sign. You’re going to get your ass killed and I’m going to have to watch. Don’t mind me, though—I’ll just keep giving good advice while you throw your life away.” He ignores her, falls in behind a girl with vinyl boots buttoned to mid-thigh, tattooed serpents twining around her wrists and makeup done in black diagonals; he doesn’t know what her look is trying to say, but he suspects that she’s an artist, like so many who live on the favela’s periphery, and he knows that she’s a stripper, though he couldn’t say how he knows it, it’s just something he learned to recognize when he was with Kayla, and then, as though to confirm his intuition, the girl in the vinyl boots goes through the neon-outlined doors of Club Lazarus, where Kayla probably still works.
A sense of threat puts him on the balls of his feet but it’s just the club’s bouncer, bald, massively built and frowning down at him; strong, but the type who thinks all the muscle will make him invincible—his face and his legs will be his weak points—and after a tenth of a second Kern is morally certain that his confidence is shallow—hit him once or twice and he’ll crumble.
“Stop,” says the bouncer, holding out an open palm, trying to say it like a cop would. “If you’ve got money, let’s see it.” Kern smiles inwardly. “Otherwise, we’re full up.” There’s a tattoo on his palm, elaborate gothic lettering spelling Family.
Then the bouncer’s face clears, and, amazed, he says, “I know you! You’re a fighter, right? I’ve seen you fight a dozen times. You move like the mantis, brother—you’re hard core. I should have recognized a warrior of your stature.” It’s kind of a joke but he also means it and Kern doesn’t know what to say so he says, “What’s that on your hands?”
Gentle now, the bouncer shows his palm, saying, “This is my family,” and showing the other, equally tattooed palm, “and this is my pride. If I’m going to die I only have to close my hands and I can hold on to both of them.” The bouncer realizes something and there’s a moment of awkward silence which he tries to cover with a false heartiness, saying, “Oh, that’s right, Kayla’s your girl, isn’t she? Well, she’s working tonight, so why don’t you go on in.”
A grim place during the day, the Lazarus at night is smoke and shadow and a few hot beams of light, and the music pulses through him. It feels a little like a dream, but of course it’s meant to—Kayla had explained how it’s essentially a machine for getting men to pay for worthless things. Blue light plays over the girl on the stage and as his eyes adjust he sees that the darkened room has more gangsters than usual, and he wonders if the house figures they’ll spend whatever they have on booze and girls, and never mind the fighting, or if that’s just how things are going now. He stands against the wall, out of the way, sees the waitress take him in, waver, dismiss him. On stage, the dancer, blinded, stares out across the tables and smiles emptily—he remembers that Kayla said they can’t see a damned thing, how it’s a kind of privacy. In the hard light he can see every hair and mole on her body, which, in its detail, is somehow inhuman, less like flesh than a map, and then the song ends and Kayla totters onto the stage in just her heels.
She looks so thin. The motion of her hips is apparently ecstatic but he knows she’s bored and trying not to show it. He’s held those hips, seen that face transported, as someone has held all of them, he supposes, and in fact it’s nothing special—there were boys before him and there’ll have been boys since. In the blue glare she’s almost an abstraction, her flesh become spirit like the women on the screens, but then the spotlights narrow and find her tattoos of angels and serpents and houses burning down—she never would explain them, but had said they were a mirror of her life.
* * *
He waits in the alley by the staff door. “I’m guessing this is your girlfriend,” the ghost says. “Maybe someone you want to say goodbye to. I already told you how dumb this is so be sure she’s worth dying for.”
He says nothing, hunching his shoulders as the rain runs down his neck. The ghost says, “Not that it’s really my business, but I knew a lot of girls like that in LA. Hearts of gold, supposedly, and all saving up for college, but from what I saw they’re mostly just wrapped up in their pain. Little honor, less sense, no thought for the future. But I’m sure this one is different.”
“So how did you get locked up in a house?” he asks, trying to remember how long Kayla’s shifts are. He’s relieved that she hasn’t moved away—she used to say that the city was claustrophobic, that she’d come there to be free but it was suffocating her, that if she could ever get the money together she’d go north, maybe learn to breathe again. This had worried him, when they were together, until he’d realized that she quickly spent whatever she got, managing somehow to be even poorer than he was.
“It’s a long story,” she says, and then falls silent, so he says, “Okay, what were you doing in LA in the first place?”
“Starving, mostly. Trying to get a career worth advancing. Not a good time, though in retrospect I had a certain freedom. I stayed away from the drugs, but I hardly remember it at all.”
“Tell me,” he says, so she won’t ask him questions.
“I didn’t know a soul when I got there. I slept in my car the first month and washed up in the showers at the beach. I knew girls who had gone there before me but after a few emails they always vanished, even though I spent hours looking for them on the web. I met a lot of girls who’d gone there to be actresses but most were just pretty, with no skills at all, and they mostly ended up doing sex work, or worse—the violence was just getting bad, then, and people hadn’t gotten cautious. The ones who weren’t awful mostly had some kind of conservatory training, which I sure didn’t, but it didn’t matter, because I’d always had a talent for being someone else. When I had nowhere to go, which was most days, I’d go where people were, the bars and promenades and the lobbies of hotels, and sit there nursing a vodka, watching people, letting them bleed into me.
“It was just a trick of being open, like leaving a blank space inside me for their essences to fill. And once I had them I could impersonate them, in fact I almost had to, like what I’d seen had to work itself out. I tried to fool people, being someone I wasn’t, even when I didn’t look the part at all, and it almost always worked, because people would find a reason to let it work. They said it was spooky, like watching a shape-shifter. It wasn’t a good time. The only thing that made me happy was being someone else.”
“Did you get anywhere?”
“No. At least not at first. It was maddening. Part of it’s the place. At night you can see the lights in the big houses in the hills, and the life you want is right there, but might as well be in another country, and the people who have what you want are staring down from all the billboards. You keep trying, chasing down auditions in dismal industrial parks on the fringes of the city, and promises are made but every opening is illusory and their words have no substance. I got an agent, for a while, but he couldn’t do anything for me, or for anyone, in fact he was barely an agent at all, was trying to break in as hard as I was. His stock in trade was the impression of reality. There are real agents, but they don’t take calls or email from outsiders, and I’d never met one, or even met anyone who had, and it started to seem like they were just part of the mythology. It was like two cities, one within the other, and no bridge between them, but then I started to get little parts—third-tier Danish phone games and unfunded pilots for direct-to-web series—and I realized that in fact the cities are concentric, and innumerable, and as you advance inward from the periphery you get no closer to the core, and as hard as you try you always end up back in the bars, pretending to look at your phone while the essences accumulate.”
“Do you have my essence?”
“Maybe,” she says, almost laughing.
“So who am I?”
“Well now. I hardly like to say. But you move, as our large friend would say, like a mantis, or as I would say like a dancer, though that’s not a comparison you’d like. You’re part scholar, in your way, and part wild animal. I get the sense that you spend a lot of time alone.”
“If you know me so well, then what am I going to do?”
“What you need to, I’m guessing, though with every second we wait here there’s a better chance I’ll have a close-up view of your blood pooling on the pavement, so maybe you could find a way to hurry up.”
* * *
When Kayla comes out of the door she’s wearing a man’s coat cinched tight. She’s still in her makeup, so thick she looks like an actor in those Japanese plays.
He’s afraid she’ll be unkind but when she sees him she embraces him, an embrace he holds a beat too long, but as she pulls away she gives him a kiss on the cheek. “You look great. Are you waiting for me? You’re waiting for me, aren’t you. It’s sweet of you but you can’t do this, okay?” she says in her little girl’s voice, and he breathes in her sweat, the stale cigarette smoke; her pupils are pinpricks in the alley’s little light.
“I don’t mind,” he says, wet with rain, suppressing his shivering. “How about I walk you home.”
“You should have called.” He didn’t because she never picks up, but doesn’t say so.
“They were asking about you,” she says, suddenly full of wonder; her teeth are straight and white, a reminder that she was rich once, or at least her family was. “Like gangsters, but with real money. They were asking if I knew where you were, said they’d pay anyone who could tell them, and now here you are. Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“I’m in bad trouble,” he says, talking too fast. “I’ve got to go away and I might not be coming back. I’m going to get a passport and I might not ever get to see you again, and I think I killed someone but I had to.” He stops when he sees her realize something and in a hopeless, inward voice she says, “But I guess they’d probably have caught you anyway.”
“What?”
“But you’re strong, aren’t you,” she says. “I’ve seen you knock out guys twice your size. You can take care of yourself.”
He takes her limp hand, but she snatches it away, saying, “I can’t do this,” and then she’s striding away, which amazes him, because he’d thought that he’d somehow find the right thing to say, and it’s hard not to follow her, but he’s determined to keep his dignity, such as it is, a goal to cling to as his despair rises, and he’s wondering if there’ll be fighting on the rooftops tonight when she stops and turns back to him—humiliatingly, his heart rises—and calls, “Get out of here! You’re not safe. Don’t trust anyone—not anyone, okay? Would you please just run?” and then she’s gone into the crowd.
“This Lares who makes the passports,” the ghost says.
“Yeah,” says Kern, glad that at least she’d cared a little.
“Where does he live?”
“Deep. The old levels.”
“Easy to find?”
“Almost impossible, if you don’t know the way.”
“Ever take your little friend there?”
“Once, to show her his game.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to run her down and choke her ass out?”
“What?”
“Kidding! Now let’s go see Lares. You’d better run.”