John Shirley - Wetbones

The wall of the Mexican bar, beside its small gravel parking lot, was etched with the pathetic psychological watermark of Hispanic gang graffiti. Above it, something unfelt hung from the powerlines with the tennis shoes someone had tied together and tossed up there as a practical joke; something fell with a translucent blizzard of hydrocarbons from the smoggy sky.

Five years old, Constance came to him with her first Barbie. "I think Barbie's sick, Daddy." Constance had been morose, and unable to eat much, for weeks before.

He looked at the doll and there was nothing broken on it. He thought Constance wanted to play, so he said, "Uh oh. I'll be the doctor and you be the nurse and we'll -"

"No!" She was crying, now. "No, she's really hurt."

He stared at his daughter and somehow knew this was about her mom being dead. He had taken her into his arms and said, "How about you? Are you hurt?"

He'd coaxed her into talking about it and she'd begun to cry in earnest – and then to heal. There was no dramatic moment, no 'Barbie feels better Daddy!' But, as weeks passed and he stayed close to her and drew her out, he could see her begin to bloom, see her become interested in playing with other kids again, and he'd almost wept with relief. He had shown her – and himself – that he could be there for her. She's going to make it. We're going to make it. We'll be all right…

The police thought… a machine…

Now, in the hotel room on the downtown end of Hollywood Boulevard – well below the territory where Japanese tourists snapped photos of Marilyn Monroe's handprints in concrete and Bob Hope's star in the sidewalk – he said it aloud: "Grieving. What a fucking joke!" As if he deserved to grieve! Christ. Christ.

He was afraid to scream, or cry. He felt like a bug scrambling desperately to avoid the heel of some giant's shoe. Scrambling into a crevice in the floor, going to ground so as not to attract attention. So that the gargantuan, black, crushing weight of his criminal absence wouldn't flatten him to pulp… as she had been…

Surely she had screamed for him and he hadn't come. It didn't matter that he'd been unable to bear her, unable to come.

At least, now, he could be really, definitely punished.

But something in him rejoiced. It was a small thing he had starved and ignored and withered with contempt, for many years. A creature somewhere between plant and arachnid; a spider that started not as an egg but as a kind of seed; a crawling thing with roots. But now the liquor was irrigating it; now despair was revitalizing it. Its joy was unspeakable. A whole world of self destruction opened up for him, now. And it rejoiced.

It was the addict – and it had never really died.

The liquor, surely, was not going to be enough. Garner got up, staggered to the door. Went out to cop some dope.

Culver City, Los Angels

More and more, Prentice was afraid of going to bed. Lately his pattern had been to lie there for at least an hour, his mind teeming and morbid, trying to think about anything but Jeff and Mitch, Amy and Arthwright; and thinking almost entirely about Jeff, Mitch, Amy and Arthwright.

He was staying at Jeff's now, which was probably a mistake. Sleeping on the couch in the office. It's back folded down so it made a pretty decent single bed, except for that valley down its middle, but he had some privacy here, and he was tired, so he should be able to sleep.

Should, but couldn't. Instead, he'd putter about the office, toying with Jeff's Japanese monster collection, looking at the hoard of comics and pulps; he'd pull out a book, flip through it, read a bit, put it back, and be unable to remember any of what he'd read.

It was dark out, and Prentice had the shades drawn. He was sitting on the edge of the sheet-covered couch in the dim room in his underwear, restless and worried. Thinking about Saturday. He'd be going out there Saturday. He'd be able to clear it all up then… And Arthwright would give him the break he needed…

But did he want to belong to Arthwright? After what he'd realized about the mirror in the guest bedroom? And then there was the way Arthwright had manipulated Prentice into doing his dirty work for him. Prentice had successfully talked Jeff into holding off on the court orders. They'd found a private detective referred by a cop – who was already looking for a missing teenager, a guy named Blume. That was a good start.

But still. It had been manipulation. Arthwright puppeting Prentice who puppeted Jeff. And then Arthwright prompting Lissa to check up on Prentice…

So what? Prentice told himself Arthwright was no more a sick manipulator than most producers in the business. It came with the territory.

Prentice glanced at Jeff's word-processor; in the gloom its monitor was a ghostly, square head propped on the desk. Jeff had been out taking meetings all day and he'd let Prentice use the computer for writing, in the hopes of getting a start on the spec script that Jeff and Buddy were counselling him to write. Prentice had produced exactly two pages of uninspired melodrama. Which he hadn't bothered to save.

On a shelf above the desk, the radio chattered to itself like a cancer patient trying to stay cheerful. The DJ finally finished blathering vacantly and put on a song. It was Iggy Pop's song, "Butt Town."

All over Butt Town

Values are thrown down…

But in Butt Town I'm learnin' in Butt Town, I'm earnin' in Butt Town I'm turnin' into my worst nightmare…

Prentice stared at the radio as if a hand had reached out of it and slapped him in the face. He stabbed a finger at the button, switched it off before Iggy could say it again.

"Fuck you, Iggy," Prentice muttered. He'd like to have flung the radio against the wall. But it was Jeff's.

Instead, hoping to ease some tension, he stretched out on the folded-down sofa and jerked off. It didn't help much. "Turning into my worst nightmare," Prentice muttered, stretching out on the sheets.

He couldn't quite bring himself to turn off the desk lamp.

Rest, he thought, and then get up, try to write some more, turn the restlessness into something productive.

He laid an arm over his eyes and stared into the dull flashes the pressure made on his eyeballs. It might have been an hour later when he went to sleep.

The dream, anyway, seemed to sidle up to him before he was truly asleep. Or was he dreaming about lying on the sofabed?

Amy was sitting on the arm of the sofa, near Prentice's feet. She looked good. Healthy. She wore blue jeans and a t-shirt, barefoot – then she wore lingerie and pumps. Then she wore blue jeans and a t-shirt again – it changed from second to second. She said, "That bitch is going to eat you alive, you know that don't you?"

"What?" he asked sleepily.

"You heard me."

They were walking through a shopping mall, now. Some generic shopping mall. He glanced at Amy and saw with a shock that she was desiccated and mangled again, as she had been in the morgue. She smelled of embalming fluid. A walking corpse, nude and mummy-like, but not shambling, walking perkily along with a purse on one arm, impatiently passing a troop of Girl Scouts selling cookies. She shook her head at them, No, she didn't want any cookies. They didn't react to her appearance. Lots of people in the mall were dead.

He looked away from her and said, "I don't want to see you like this. And don't say, 'Like what?"

She said, "It's your dream. Make me something else. By taking me back to somewhere else…"

He put a hand over his eyes – and when he removed it he was in their Manhattan apartment, sitting with his arm around her, doing something she'd loved to do: watch a foreign film on videotape while drinking a bottle of red wine.

It was Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. Prentice and Amy were cuddled comfortably on a big floor pillow, leaning back against the foot of her bed, watching the film. He felt warm and secure; he knew she felt the same way. For a moment or two.