Excerpt from Recent Spectral Sightings in the Western Nest of Fornication and Their Relation to the Approaching Armageddon: An Evangelical Primer:
Do we as THE FAITHFUL believe in coincidence, brothers and sisters? We do not. God does not deal in coincidence! He deals in MEANING and SWIFT and RIGHTEOUS ACTION!
So we ask you, brothers and sisters, you who seek a holy and righteous life, is it coincidence that such specters have appeared where they have? Is this coincidence, or is such a thing HEAVY and FRAUGHT with THE LORD’S MEANING?
That such specters have appeared THERE and nowhere else—the very vipers’ nest of amorality and liberalism, chiefly within HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, home of the GOD-HATING ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY, and south of that, where the once-vibrant border towns of MEXICO are now run by narco-traffickers who deal in HUMAN SLAVERY, who publicly DISMEMBER judges and policemen and fling their severed body parts from bridges!
Ask yourselves if it is coincidence that the specters of the dead—the lost ones, the unclaimed—have appeared in the very same place where so many have gleefully TURNED THEIR FACES AWAY FROM THE LORD GOD?
Ask yourselves, brothers and sisters, if we really have the TIME and LUXURY of believing in the foolishness of coincidence any longer.
• • •
The plan wasn’t complicated. Get grounded, hit the To the Point studio and see what we could see. Most importantly, move. Even if it felt like we were treading water. But first, before all of that, we needed a base, a grounding.
Everywhere we went, places were full—hostels, motels, everywhere. California was packed, LA sardine-tight. Everyone wanting to bear witness. We finally found a motel on Slauson Avenue. Serviceable was a generous term for it, especially for what we were paying: double beds that would look like a surrealist horror painting under a black light, a winding trail of cigarette burns in the carpet. A barred window with a view of the parking lot, traffic beyond that. The TV remote hung from the nightstand on a chain.
I heard the sad rattle of old pipes as Casper turned the shower on in the bathroom. I turned the TV on and there it was, the same episode of To The Point. Like time itself was grabbing my skull and shaking it. I couldn’t escape.
There was Lyla on the screen, somehow both meek and confrontational. I looked for Joan again, buried there somewhere inside her countenance, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t see her. The bodyguard sat next to her, big veins curling along the backs of his hands, into the cuffs of his suit. And there stood Jesse Pamona, looking at that moment very skeptical as she panned toward her audience.
Turning back to Lyla, she said, “So it’s like a split personality thing?”
My phone rang. Julia. I put my phone back in my pocket.
Lyla shook her head. “No. We’re . . .” She squinted, raised her head. I saw the tracery of a tattoo beneath the collar of her shirt. “We’re in here together. She’s in here.” She tapped her breastbone. The rattling of the pipes stopped in the bathroom.
Jesse tucked her chin down and purred into her microphone, “Tell me something that only Joan would know,” and I felt my heart clang like a stone down a well, like I was about to be found out.
“Hey, Marvin?” Casper called from the bathroom, his voice muffled through the door.
Lyla smiled. “Come on, Jesse. A girl never tells.” The audience whooped, laughing. Some men in the audience stood up and pumped their fists.
“Just a sec,” I said.
“Marvin,” Casper said. “Seriously. Can you come in here for a second?”
Still staring at the TV, I said, “Gotta admit, I’m really not that interested in seeing you shower, Casper.”
“Yeah. Funny. Just come in here.”
I dropped the remote on the bed, stepped into the bathroom. It wasn’t a large room. At all. A tiny window inset high up in the wall, milky glass gridded with wire. Blue floor tile, grout embedded with grime. A reasonably sized bathtub made for tight quarters. Steam clouded the room, made the mirror above the sink purl and run with condensation. Casper stood in the bathtub, a towel around his waist. He pointed at the sink.
Which was, of course, entirely unnecessary.
“You believe this?” he whispered. “And me with no camera, God dang it.”
A ghost woman.
Weeping in front of the sink, imploring the air.
She was like pale smoke trapped under glass. Her form shifted, took hold, shifted again. I saw the sharp collar of a dress, hair in a tight bun and then a hand, a sleeve cuff. Shifting, shifting. The honk and blat of traffic outside, the world resolutely moving on. I caught a glimpse of her seamed face in the mirror, a brooch at her throat. She was oblivious to us, her hands gesturing in front of her as if she were explaining, petitioning.
“Holy shit,” Casper said. “Holy shit. Where is my camera? Why do I not have a camera? What is wrong with me?”
I couldn’t look away. “Casper, be quiet.”
At the sound of my voice, the woman turned, her eyes widening.
I knew recognition when I saw it. It was obvious. Like she had discovered me. She turned to me, her hands now clasped together in front of her belly, knotted into each other. It was one of my stranger moments, yet mostly heartbreaking for the anguish so evident on her face.
And she spoke. The sound of her voice was like her form: a shifting, coruscating breath with words half-buried within. I could’ve sworn I felt it tousle my hair slightly. A breeze, a hushed river of words.
“What is that? Is she talking?”
“Chinese,” I said. “She’s telling me . . . about her son, I think. Her husband.”
“You know Chinese?”
“A little bit,” I said, still not looking away from her. “Learned it a long time ago.”
“I should be getting footage of this. Still photos even. Can I borrow your phone? Sweet Jesus I’m an idiot. Who doesn’t have a phone?”
“Casper. Just be quiet for a minute.”
She spoke of her husband and son. I doubt it even took that long, her story. The three of us in the cramped bathroom, the wan light through that high-set, milky window. It only took a few minutes maybe. But how long, I wondered, had she waited for the telling of it?
A simple story, probably common enough. Irrevocably entwined, I imagined, with Los Angeles itself, and most certainly with America. Her name was Suyin. Her husband and son, Kim and Xan, were hired as laborers for the Southern Pacific line from Goshen to LA. Good money, great money, for the times. Worth uprooting their lives for. And by the spring of 1830, they were able to send for her. Kim and Xan, the totality of her life, her summation, but only two of the hundreds of men hired to bore the nearly mile-long San Fernando Tunnel, the last significant obstacle for the rail line before it reached LA.
I translated for Casper, never taking my eyes off the woman. This litany of heartache as she stared at me, her form dimming and sharpening. This rawness in her voice drifting throughout the room. I’d lived lives as desperate as Suyin’s, yes. Been the one to bring anguish to someone like her, too. Now, here, I listened.
The mountain was heavy with water, she told me. Mud mired their shovels, weighted them. The work was slow-going and brutal. Backbreaking. They worked six days a week, but her husband had proven to be a diplomatic man, a man who frequently calmed disputes between the laborers and the white line bosses and, as such, the family was allowed the rare privilege of living outside the work camp.
They were allowed to move to a rooming house in Chinatown, the three of them. She would spend most of her time alone there until Saturday night, when Kim and Xan hitchhiked or got rides from the line bosses back to LA.
Xan, her boy, was twenty. He was young and strong and was quick to make friends. The money, compared to what he could earn in Chengdu, felt like untold riches. Kim worked alongside his son most of the time but coughed and walked stiffly and seemed to shrink each week she saw him. But he was honorable and recognized their fortune and didn’t complain, not even to Suyin.
On Sundays Xan would leave to go walk around Chinatown with his friends and she would put balm on Kim’s muscles, bathe him in their tin tub with water she boiled on their small stove. Later, the three of them would sit in the small room on their mats and talk and drink tea as if they were still home, as if nothing had changed, as if even the light here was not different from what they were used to.
Kim and Xan would wake early Monday morning, before dawn, to make it back to the job site before daylight. Kim would sigh, putting his clothes on, and speak of their torches hardly burning in the tunnel, as if there were no air to feed them. He spoke of the frequent shifts and groans of the earth, the dustings of soil that fell on their shoulders as lines of men stood silent, waiting to see if the mountain would bury them. She held her tongue during these times, which was a hard thing to do.
And then the day came:
The Saturday in which they did not come home.
She waited. Cleaned the room, brushed her hair. Drew distractedly in the small notebook Kim had bought her. She didn’t sleep that night, waiting for the sound of their voices in the hallway.
She got on the road to the camp before dawn Sunday morning. It was a ways outside of the city but not as long as it had been—they were almost done with the line, after all. But soon she saw that many of the cars on the road were going toward the camp very fast. An emergency, Suyin thought, and felt the skin of her scalp tighten.
When she made it to the camp she looked for Liwei, a friend of her husband’s who had traveled from Mukden to work on the line, and a man who had occasionally come and drank tea with them. The camp was in disarray, with many laborers quietly weeping or staring solemnly at the ground as knots of white men stood around yelling at each other and pointing at the mountain.
She found Liwei and looked at his face and knew everything before he said a word to her. She knew. How could she not? It fell, Liwei said. His mouth looked like a cave, a dark hole falling in on itself. It fell on them, Suyin. Many men were buried. I’m so sorry.
And she walked back down the road with the mountain behind her. She walked very slowly. All the way home until sunset sent spears in her eyes and she had to cover her face to shield herself from the glare. She went into the room she had shared with Kim and Xan and lay down on their mat. She had been mending a pair of Xan’s trousers and gathered them and clutched them to her chest.
For a moment the silence stretched out between us all until Casper said, “She killed herself, didn’t she?”
“Yes,” I said. My legs felt useless, blocks of wood. Inside me, sorrow held court, sorrow thrummed a chord of such sadness inside me. A sadness that I hadn’t felt in years. Centuries, maybe. Even my time at the hospital hadn’t done this to me.
“I’m sorry,” I said in my stilted, terrible Chinese. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
I stepped forward and touched her hand. She was made of smoke, Suyin, but I reached for her anyway, without thinking. Concerned only with the simple human kindness of it. That ache to somehow absolve another of pain.
Suyin cried out. Casper’s feet squeaked a bit as he backpedaled in the bathtub. I pulled my hand back, afraid I had hurt her, but she was smiling. Less a cry, I suppose, than an exhalation.
She didn’t dissipate in a cloud—there was nothing so definable as that. There was simply the usual absence of her. She was there and then she was gone.
But I had heard her. I had been able to listen to her. There was that.
I stood next to the sink and quickly wiped a tear from my eye. “I’ll let you get dressed,” I said to Casper, my voice husky. I shut the bathroom door behind me, primly took my glasses off, folded their stems, put them in my shirt pocket. Buried my face in my hands and wept.
• • •
An hour later I’d cleaned myself up the best I could. The desk clerk gave us the address of the closest car rental agency, and Casper and I took a cab there. This part of town: parking lots, office parks, strip malls, all of it so like Julia’s part of Eighty-second Avenue as to be interchangeable. Occasional clusters of street corner doom-sayers held signs declaring the End Times. One proclaimed in a nearly indecipherable scrawl DEAD MEANS DEAD FOR GOOD. I carried Suyin’s story inside me like an ache, like a blade I kept wrapping my hand around.
We paid the cabbie and I looked around the parking lot and said, “We have to move, Casper. We have to get going.”
“Okay,” Casper said, giving a little shrug. “That’s why we’re here.” He took his cap off, put it back on.
“I just don’t have a lot of time.”
He cast me a shrewd look, his eyes dark under the bill of his hat. “Anything you want to tell me, Marvin? Something in particular going on you want to bullshit about?”
I started walking toward the rental kiosk, the wind blowing my hair back, carrying the scent of hot tar, garbage. “No. Not right now, anyways. Let’s just get moving, okay?”
Got the rental car and found a copy shop where we printed directions to the studio. Modern phones could do this in seconds now, but my technological prowess began and ended at sending email invoices to distributors at work. I had a landline at the shop and a flip phone with a prepaid card in my pocket. Casper was still wearing the same goddamned shirt we’d picked him up in. We were working with what we had.
I white-knuckled my way through traffic. I was an idiot. Unprepared, and deserving of what I got. I could feel self-pity and desperation settle over me, hook into the back of my neck.
“I don’t know how people stand this,” I said at one point, my hands locked in rigid attention on the wheel.
“What?”
“The traffic,” I said. “The stupid fucking traffic. Is it always this bad?”
“I don’t know. It’s LA. This is just part of the deal, right? You okay, Marvin?”
“We’ve managed about fifty yards in the past twenty minutes. People do this every day. Years of their lives, probably.”
“Man,” Casper said, smiling, “this is the place to be, dude. Are you kidding me? There’s a reason why everyone wants to be here.” He drummed a little rhythm on the dashboard. The car smelled new, a coffin embalmed in that chemical smell. “You talked to that ghost, Marvin. That’s crazy. You know that’s crazy, right?”
“I guess. I’m trying not to think about it right now.” I tried to merge and had a moment of bright, feverish empathy for Vale and his anger.
We eventually found the cluster of studios and soundstages where To the Point was filmed, but got lost in the labyrinth of parking lots and connecting roads. Acres of pavement. The tourist section of studio hangars gave way to sad patches of scrub grass and blunted, leafless bushes that stood in ditches between the lots, winding back roads and chain link fences choked with brambles.
The place became quickly charmless. Casper blithely noted that it seemed like we were lost. It was odd to think that so many fantastic and made-up worlds were contained inside all of these buildings, when the outsides were so bland and uniform.
I finally parked in a half-full lot that faced an outbuilding the size of an airplane hangar. There was a line of utility vehicles bracketing the face of the building. No one was outside. I didn’t recognize anything. “How did we even get here?”
“Like I said, we’re lost.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“We could just walk in.” He shrugged. “Let’s just try walking in somewhere. Let’s just go in that building and talk to someone.”
“And then what?”
Casper shrugged. “And play dumb? Try to find, what show was it?”
“Just ask where the To the Point studio is. Say we’re late, act like we’re in a big hurry. Like we’re supposed to be there.”
I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. Pictured an hourglass, me at the bottom of it, buried under sand. My black lens with a funnel of dust falling on it, my mouth filling up. I was freezing up, like I had at Vale’s ex-wife’s place.
“We’d never find it,” I said. “We haven’t really thought this out, have we?”
Casper made a little exasperated noise, jabbed his hands palms-up at the window. “Come on, Marvin. The studio is right there. Fly by the seat of your pants, dude. You need to find this woman, let’s do it.”
I started up the car. We wound our way through more lots, pulling over to the shoulder once to let a pair of guys in one of those little golf carts putter by.
“You could ask them,” Casper said. “Ask those guys.”
We came to another lot, this one with a small guard booth and a retractable gate.
“Ram right through that thing,” Caspar said. “Jesus, just do something, Marvin.”
“Casper, please.”
The guard sighed when we pulled up. This part of the studio had an air of desolation about it. Like this guard, when she saw people, saw them for the wrong reasons.
She laid her arms on the sill of the booth, looked down at us. “You guys must be lost.”
“We’re actually looking for the To the Point studio.”
She pointed a finger back the way we came. “You’re about two miles off, guys. Lot 2, Studio F.”
“Studio F. Great, thank you.”
She smiled wanly. “You know you’re gonna need laminates to get in, right? Either that or head on over to the main entrance, and you can get tickets for guided tours at any of the gift shops.”
Casper leaned over and bowed down so the guard could see him. “Listen, I don’t mean to be a pain here, but you need to get Tom Pugliesi on your little radio there right now and tell him I’m here. Shit’s fucked.”
The guard nodded, frowning. “Oh, late for an important meeting, huh?”
“Exactly. You’re exactly right.”
She rested her chin in her hand. “I’ve heard every name, guys. Every name, every scam you can think up, I’ve heard.”
Casper looked at me, shook his head. “Tom Pugliesi. She thinks Tom’s fake.” He stared up at her again. “I don’t show up, hon? Heads will roll. First yours, honestly.”
“Well, I’ll get on my radio, friend, but it’ll be to call security. You can try your luck at Studio F but they’re going to tell you the same thing.”
Casper sighed, ran a hand down his face. Took off his hat, put it back on. “Ma’am, do you have an employee number or something like that? Pug’s gonna shit a brick in approximately three minutes, and he’s an ugly dude when he’s unhappy. Did you ever catch the Treacherous Means pilot we did last season? About the deaf-mute bounty hunter?”
“Nope.”
“That’s because the star we got—young kid, boatload of talent, knew jujitsu, all that—was fifteen minutes late to a meeting with the Pug and a bunch of board suits. Fifteen minutes! Pug killed the whole fucking show, ma’am, a pilot and nine episodes. I know I don’t want to get on his bad side, how about you?”
She looked at Casper with dead, eternally patient eyes as she keyed the mike on her radio. “Dispatch, this is two-five. I’ve got two douchebags at Gate T-1 here. Repeat, two d-bags at Gate T-1. I’ll get you their plate number in just a second, over.” She took her thumb off the mike.
I sighed. “Thanks for your time.”
“Be sure and buy a ticket for the tour. They let you guys ride on those little carts. It’s cute.”
“Douchebags?” Casper said as I drove away. He sounded hurt. “Two douchebags? That’s cold.”
• • •
I started to head to yet another lot, another nondescript patch of pavement that would undoubtedly lead to the same exact answer that we’d already gotten. It all just came tumbling down on me. The weight of it. I’d run out of time.
“I am fucked,” I said, and gunned the engine, veering through the empty lot and pulling snarling cookies, the stink of rubber trailing behind us. Casper grabbed the handle above the door.
“Marvin?”
I jumped out of the car and slapped the hood. I bellowed, spun around in the empty lot and bellowed again. Flung my arms out, felt my voice crack. There was nothing around us besides a few panel trucks and nondescript vans and another closed-up soundstage the size of an airplane hangar—even the guard’s booth was a good half mile away.
I was out of ideas.
I was dead. Any time now. It was a matter of hours.
It had seemed possible, for a moment there. Finally, some kind of answer. Joan suddenly cutting through the endless dark. But no.
Casper got out and laid his arms on the top of the car, resting his chin on his forearms. “Dude. The position of freaking-the-fuck-out-guy has already been filled. Vale’s got it, and he’s been great at it. What is your deal?”
I shrugged, and kept shrugging. I looked ridiculous, I was sure. “I’m out of time,” I said. “I’m just out of time.”
Casper ran a hand over his new haircut. “Why?”
I let out a big sigh. There was nobody here. I had tried to find the To the Point soundstage and happened upon the most remote, desolate area within the entire studio. In all of Hollywood, probably. It was ridiculous. The whole thing was ridiculous. The Man Who Couldn’t Find a Building.
“I have to tell you something,” I said.
“Okay. Good.”
“It’s kind of a lot to take in.”
“That’s what she said.”
I just shook my head.
Casper held his hands up. “Trying to lighten the mood. Sorry, Marvin.”
“Get in,” I said, and we got back in the car. I turned around and headed back down the road we’d come in. To Lot 2, Studio F, I couldn’t even say. Didn’t know. I was just going to drive and see where we wound up.
No more time. No more plans left. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt—and this was saying something, considering—as lost as I did right then.
“Okay, so.”
“Hit me,” said Casper.
“I was born in Moineau, France,” I said.
“Cool. Sounds fancy.”
“In 1381.”