Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

Back in his room, Ramage took a hacksaw blade from his tool sack and sliced up his apple, fanning the pieces out on the nightstand. He cut the brick of cheese and paired up a dozen openfaced sandwiches. Next door, a baby cried, and then a man yelled, telling it to shut the fuck up. A woman shouted, “For christsake, it’s just a baby. It might be hungry or something.” Ramage turned on his TV and blotted out the noise. He felt evil around young children; he avoided them on buses, in waiting rooms, in city parks. The night of his release, he’d been seated in a restaurant next to a family with a baby, not six months old. The child was dressed snugly in blue footed pyjamas, gurgling and burping a white liquid all over itself. After a few minutes, Ramage moved his steak knife to the other side of his plate. Something wildly uncentered in his mind had told him he was going to stab the baby in the eye.

The memory made him shudder, and he stepped outside for fresh air. The tourists were gone, and everything in town — the souvenir vendors, the picture postcard shops, the ice-cream parlors and arcades — had been closed for the season. Bits of popcorn blew across the highway; paper cones that had once held wigs of blue and pink cotton candy lay dirty and trampled flat in the parking lot. Ramage drew a deep breath and smelled sage or basil — something cooking in the spice factory down the street. A single stranded palm tree and the motel’s blue vacancy sign stood at the edge of the lot. Toilet paper fluttered from the fender of his neighbor’s car, a few crushed tin cans were strung from the bumper, and a Burma-Shave heart, pierced by an arrow, dripped from the rear window.

“This is the back road to Hollywood,” Greenfield said, early the next morning.

A steady procession of people moved from the van to the warehouse: a woman with a face pierced with pins, a punk with a hackle of red hair, a man with the shaved blue skull of a prisoner. They hauled trunks, hoisted lights and cameras, carried canisters of film, slung coils of cable over their shoulders. Best boys, key grips, gaffers — titles Ramage knew from his old habit of sitting in theaters, after the end, watching the scroll of credits bubble up from the bottom of the screen like a movie’s last breath.

“Who am I kidding?” Greenfield said. “This doesn’t go anywhere near Hollywood.”

“You got lots of company,” Ramage said.

“Everybody wants a little stardust to fall on them.”

“Success could be all over your face next week,” Ramage said.

“Sure,” Greenfield said. He took a deep breath. “This town stinks.”

“There’s a spice factory a few blocks over,” Ramage explained.

A blond woman lifted a travel bag from the van. Greenfield nodded at her.

“My star,” he said.

To Ramage, she looked like a rough outline for someone’s idea of a woman, the main points greatly exaggerated.

Greenfield fumbled in his pocket and drew out a box of colored Shermans; he lit a pink one. He’d already put the box away when Ramage asked if he could bum a smoke. A cigarette might cut the gnawing in his stomach. Greenfield took a deep drag, and said, “Finish this one.”

Ramage smoked. “You still pay in cash?” he asked.

“Bien sûr.” Greenfield lovingly patted a black shoulder bag at his side.

“How about an advance?”

“I can’t do that,” Greenfield said. “I’ve had people run out on me.”

“Would it matter if I said I was broke?”

“Not much,” Greenfield said. “How broke are you?”

“We’ve known each other a long time,” Ramage said.

“I heard you were in the bin.”

Ramage nodded.

“What’s the least you need?” Greenfield said.

It was clear that asking for the full thousand would only bring derision. Ramage said, “Half.”

Greenfield reached in his bag and separated two crisp bills from a bound stack. “Here’s two hundred,” he said. He held the two bills toward Ramage, then drew them back. “This doesn’t mean I trust you.”

Greenfield was wearing his signature black shirt and black pants; his cowboy boots were made of green snakeskin, buffed and shiny except where fine lines of dust had settled between the scales. Ramage had worked with him off and on for twelve years, beginning shortly after he’d moved to New York. Before his hospitalization, Ramage had been rehabbing the homes of the rich, but he was still loosely connected to an underground of carpenters and waitresses and bookstore clerks who, in successive waves, struggled to make films. Greenfield had been a rising star ten years ago; porn was only supposed to occupy the space of an anecdote, a moment of amusement as he looked back, a dark tint in an otherwise bright career. Ditto for Ramage: he’d scripted the movie that established Greenfield’s promise a decade ago.

They walked into the building and rode the freight elevator upstairs. “First thing you do,” Greenfield said, “is board up all the windows. This is a nonunion job.”

“A union for porn?” Ramage said.

“Erotica,” Greenfield corrected him. “There’s a street tax we’re not paying.”

“What’s the plot of this one?” Ramage asked.

Greenfield lowered his glasses and looked at him over the rims as if he were stupid.

“Boy meets girl,” he said.

Ramage ran the carpentry crew. They’d boarded shut the windows and now, with fumes of fresh paint filling the warehouse, Ramage felt woozy; as a precaution, he set his hammer down and stepped off the ladder and waited for the room to resolve back into focus. With a pry bar he yanked the nails from a sheet of plywood over one of the windows; the board crashed to the floor and the air rushed in. He was slightly winded by the effort. He took off his shirt and squatted against the wall and drank from a quart of warm beer and lit his last cigarette. He crushed the empty pack, feeling weak and isolated and craven; already he was dreading the next wave of desire. There would be no one in the crew to borrow from. RB smoked snowballs that tasted medicinal and Rigo didn’t smoke at all.

Rigo was in the next room rolling red paint over the walls. He was a short, stocky man with a broad, flat plate of a face whose perfect roundness was carried out thematically in his dark eyes and in the purple fleshy pouches encircling them and then again in the two wide discs of his jutting ears. These redundant open circles gave Rigo’s face a spacious, uncrowded look that people routinely mistook for simplemindedness.

RB, the other carpenter, had watched Ramage step down from the ladder, and saw this as a cue to take another break.

“What-say, Spooky?” he said, sitting beside Ramage. He took a swig from the quart and swished the beer around in his mouth. “You see the ladies out there this morning?” He held his hands out in front of him to suggest breasts. He shook his head in disbelief. He looked at his empty hands and said, “I saw that blonde do a midget once. She’s famous.”

Ramage nodded neutrally.

“This little itty-bitty midget,” RB said. “But he had the pecker of a full-grown man. About as long as his arm. Hey Rigoberto, how about pecker? You know what a pecker is?”

Rigo paused and held his roller aloft and red paint dribbled like blood between his fingers and down his arm. He had been a lieutenant in the army in El Salvador and his bearing was military; one could still sense in him the faint trace of his training at the hands of US advisors. He never fully relaxed and he held to odd protocols — after a day’s work he cleaned and organized Ramage’s tools and insisted on carrying the canvas sack for him, moving the bag to and from the job like a bellhop. Leftist rebels had raided his house on the outskirts of San Salvador and shot his brother, who’d been spending the night, and sleeping in Rigo’s bed. The bullet had been meant for Rigo, who’d skipped the funeral and fled El Salvador with his family, deserting the army and leaving the civil war behind. Now a jackleg carpenter who spoke only a crude, cobbled English, he worked with indefatigable energy, compensating for RB’s tendency to goldbrick. He lacked a green card and preferred the clarity of labor, no matter how arduous, to the vagaries of talking in a language where even the simplest notion plunged him into loss and confusion. He was still learning the names of the tools he was using.