Timothy Hallinan - Crashed

“I guess,” Louie said. “Gonna be a lot duller, though.”

“And she’s doing what she can to avoid getting capped. She’s living behind metal gates, surrounded by a bunch of try-me guys wearing Valentino Kevlar. Her car’s been bulletproofed. But she can’t control what’s going on around the movie, and she’s made it the big symbol of the transformation. That’s what she calls it, the transformation. Also, she’s smart, and I like smart. After she gave me the whole Hallmark version of the transformation, complete with the string section, about living on the right side of the law and sleeping well at night, and all the wives and husbands who won’t have to wait up every night to see whether Thuggo comes home on a slab, she told me the real reason. You want to hear it?”

“What am I gonna do?” Louie said. “Stick my fingers in my ears? Go outside?”

“She said, and this is pretty much a quote: The government’s not going to be worrying about terrorists forever. And when it’s not, all the new laws saying nobody has the right to privacy or untapped phone lines or unread e-mail, all that stuff is going to get turned on us . And she plans to be as clean as a whistle by the time that happens. A hundred percent legal, tax-paying, highly diversified multi-millionaire.”

Louie said, “Yikes.”

“That’s pretty much what I thought. So she’s cold and she’s smart and she’s willing to try to do something that’s going to be dangerous as hell for her. So, yeah, I kind of like her.”

“I don’t know how smart she is,” Louie said, “if she thinks she’s gonna pay for all this with a skin flick.”

“Not one, three. And what she’s selling is the idea that these are going to be the biggest one-hand movies ever made, and they’re going to earn millions and millions of dollars, and those dollars are going into a retirement fund and a health care plan, if you can believe that, for all these thick-necks who are suddenly teaching Sunday school. She calls it a trilogy, like it has a Dewey Decimal Number or something. It’s supposed to produce a big fat legal flow of porno dollars, and it all gets salted away to secure the future of her guys. And girls.”

“This is seriously cracked,” Louie the Lost said. “This ain’t 1970. These days, everybody’s seen everything. What kind of peepshow can earn that kind of money?”

“She’s got a star,” I said. “Name doesn’t mean anything to me, but it seems to put everyone else in the drool zone.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Thistle Downing.”

Louie the Lost bit his cigar in half.

Life is definitely not fair. First I had to watch Hacker throw food at his mouth, miss with about half of it, and chew openmouthed on the stuff that found its way in. Then I had to watch Louie cough and spit and pull long dark shreds of wet tobacco off his tongue. When he was finished, he had brown lips and there was a pile of something in front of him that looked like used carnitas. I decided to skip dinner.

“Thistle Downing ?” he finally said. “You’re shitting me.”

“Okay,” I said. “Means something to you, too. But not me. There’s something familiar about the name, but I can’t place it.”

He shook his head pityingly, as though I were the only guy in Turin who’d never heard of the Shroud. “You ever steal a TV?”

“No. Too big, no resale value.”

“You live in these fucking motels,” he said. “Take a look around. Tell me what the second-biggest piece of furniture is.”

“I use it to put my spare change on.”

“Well, if you turned the damn thing on, you’d know who Thistle Downing is.” Louie looked at the remnants of his cigar and dropped it, with a surprising concentration of disgust, into the salad bowl. “But … but …” His head was shaking back and forth and he was practically spluttering. “They can’t put Thistle into that kind of movie. They can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s-it’s sick . Diseased, perverted, just wrong.” Louie is a short, stout guy who has a fat, cheerful little face that’s mostly forehead, and a dark Mediterranean complexion, and he generally looks like a happy olive. But he was actually flushed with indignation, and his lower lip was quivering. “They can’t .”

“Louie,” I said. “You’re acting like she’s your kid sister.”

“She is,” Louie said. “She’s everybody’s -wait, wait.” He looked at his watch and then looked at the TV. “Does that thing work?”

“I have no idea.”

“You ain’t never turned it on?”

“To tell you the truth,” I said, “it never occurs to me.”

“You’re missing a lot.”

“It keeps me up nights.”

“Something wrong with you. Does this place get The TV Channel ?” He got up, grabbed the remote and pointed it at the television.

“I don’t know. I suppose it gets a bunch of them.”

“No, no. The TV Channel . It shows, it shows …” He was punching buttons on the remote, flipping past earnest newsreaders with neon makeup on their faces; the newest retro-hip-inverse-ironic cartoon series; a bright orange Bob Barker, undoubtedly the oldest life form on the planet; and some just-possibly-not-entirely-naturally-well-endowed young women on a beach, empowering the hell out of themselves by wearing red bikinis. Then Louie stopped, frozen into immobility, the remote pointed like a magic wand at a completely unironic living room from the 1990s: couch, tables, bay window, stairs to the second story in the background, a room like a million I burglarized back then, when the words “twentieth century” sounded current. Everything on the screen, from the furniture to the lighting, looked cheap and slapped together in that way that-even to a non-TV watcher like me-says “sitcom.” And nothing about that impression was contradicted by the room’s sole inhabitant: a slender middle-age man who was standing next to the coffee table with a dinner platter glued to each hand. He was trying a bit over-desperately to get them off, and the electronically enhanced audience was finding it mechanically hilarious.

“This is the one about the cheese,” Louie said, sitting on the end of the bed. “Watch.”

“The one about the-”

“Cheese,” Louie snapped. “Forget it, it doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters.”

The director cut to a door stage right that opened about six inches, and a girl of eleven or twelve peered apprehensively into the room. Light brown hair above uptilted eyes with lots of intelligence in them. The word that came to mind was elfin . She registered the man with the platters on his hands, and her shoulders came up to her ears and she squeezed her eyes closed, and with those two simple movements she somehow conjured up someone whose deepest wish was to shiver herself into molecules and disappear forever from the face of the earth.

The laughter this time didn’t sound enhanced.

“She’s good,” I said.

“She’s great,” Louie said. “ That’s Thistle Downing.”

On the screen, the man with the platters stuck to his hands caught sight of the girl behind the door and waved her angrily into the room, the platters making glittering arcs through the air. She came in, but walking as though she was heading into a ninety-mile an hour wind. It seemed to take every muscle in her body to travel four steps. I could almost see her hair blowing behind her.

“How does she do that?” I asked.

“She did that or better every week,” Louie said, without taking his eyes from the screen, “for eight years.”

The man was shouting accusations and waving his arms. The words seemed to have actual weight as they struck the kid called Thistle, and automatically, in self-defense, she brought her hands up, palms out. Some primitive special effect created a current of blue ectoplasm or something from her hands to the platters, and suddenly they were piled high with cubes of cheese.