Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

After breakfast, I walk over to $isi’s room and knock on her door; no one answers. I slip the key card in the slot and walk inside. The bed hasn’t been slept in. I notice $isi on the floor, on the other side of the bed, by the window. She’s on her back. She is very white with a punch of red for lips. Right away, I picture a gurney with her tiny form laid out on it being wheeled out of the hotel. The camera flashes, the microphones, Mark showing up sweaty and crazed (his invisible monkey pinching him frantically), blubbering.

I crouch down to see her. She’s breathing. There’s a wet spot underneath her. I bend down to smell it. Urine.

“I fell out of the bed,” she croaks and opens her eyes.

My relief is quickly followed by a twinge of disappointment. Dead rock stars can bring in a lot of revenue. I may not care that much about money, but I am not completely indifferent to it.

“I fall out of bed all the time. There’s something wrong with me.”

“Is it drugs?”

“It’s not fucking drugs. I’m done with that. I don’t even drink now,” she sighs. She closes her eyes.

I bend down to lift her. There’s a feeling to her – a feeling I remember from when I was a child visiting my dying grandmother. It was the way her hands were, like her bones were spilled matches, like whatever she was had died a long time ago. This is what $isi feels like, like she’s not quite there.

I gently lower her onto the bed. She’s not saying anything. I have a hard time believing that I fucked this little body; that I opened it, and it was wet and soft and full of redness and life.

Mark shows up with his assistant, a hipster with a T-shirt advertising Camp Abilities 1975 . They talk in loud whispers, asking me what happened, looking at the stain of pee, hovering above $isi to listen to her steady, strong breath. It is decided that they will take her to the emergency room. Some phone calls have to be made to arrange this as discreetly as possible.

I know that it will still get out to the press, so we call Piglet/Jennifer to update her on everything and make sure she’s got some answers ready when the news gets out. She wants to know what $isi has taken to get so ill, but none of us has any idea.

“It just looks like she’s really, really tired,” Mark says. “I don’t think it’s drugs,” he says, and I laugh.

$isi opens her eyes. “What’s so fucking funny?”

When Mark calls me with the news, he sounds shaky. The buzz of my anxiety shoots from the bottom of my throat, and I feel like throwing up in my mouth on hearing his quiet Howareyou?

“I’m excellent,” I say in an attempt to contaminate him with my positive attitude.

“Are you sitting down?”

“I’m sitting down.” I spring up from my couch. I walk over to the window. If the news is really bad, I’ll jump. I’m kidding.

“A tumour.”

A tumour . It seems impossible. It seems impossible that even a small sick-looking creature like $isi would be capable of housing anything so rotten. “Jesus.”

“I’m talking to Jennifer later on. We’ll need to figure out a strategy. It’s going to get out sooner rather than later. She’s going for treatments.”

“What kind of tumour? Is it bad?” I say, trying to remember what it was that my grandmother died of. Something humiliating, requiring a catheter and a bag, pelvis bones breaking and her insides just melting into a toxic mass before she passed on.

“It’s operable. It’s in her brain. It apparently runs in her family.”

“We should have genetic testing before we sign them up,” I say and then quickly add, “Mark, I’m just kidding. I’m just in shock,” before Mark has a chance to say something or, worse, hang up.

“I’m in shock, too. She’s a young girl.”

“Practically a child,” I say. Then I have a brilliant idea. I frequently have brilliant ideas in the morning. “We need to use this,” I say.

“Use what?”

“The cancer. It’s an opportunity. Cancer kills, I know, but obscurity is a mass killer. We’ll send her on a tour – something smaller, you know, more intimate setups – but we’ll attach the tumour to it all. This could be a Thing. It’s better than drugs.”

“You are insane.”

“No. I’m not. We own it. Flaunt it. They have those ribbons that they wear, right? I think they’re different colours for different body parts. So we’ll come up with a colour scheme for her. We make a logo or something. Her logo is whatever, brown, the ribbon is brown; it’s perfect. Talk to Pig – Jennifer about it.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“Before you do, can you imagine the press? She can do inspirational interviews right away. Maybe a blog where she talks about the treatment.”

“You want to exploit $isi’s tumour.”

“Of course. Or no, not exploit it. Give her the voice. You know, inspire people. Other women. Use her celebrity to bring the world’s attention to it – how bad can that be? How bad is it anyway?”

“Not sure. She has to have surgery. Then chemo. Maybe. It’s mostly preventive from what she tells me, but she’s going to be pretty out of service for most of it.”

“That’s fine. She doesn’t even have to pretend to play the guitar anymore, she can just do a little dance or something when they perform. Or talk about the cancer in the intervals. Go sit down somewhere on the stage so that she’s visible, so that they can see her and think about it and, you know, feel feelings. They’ll buy albums out of guilt if nothing else.”

“Christ,” Mark says, but his tone of voice has changed. I’m very sensitive to small things like that, tone of voice, eyes. People can tell you their life story by the way they speak, the way they look at you. How they sit, too. Nervous laughter, rapid blinking, fiddling with jewellery.

This is extremely useful when picking up women. Knees away when you sit side by side: she’s mad at you. Vulgar jokes: she’s desperate, wants you to relax around her.

Anyway, right now, with Mark, his voice, what I notice is that some spark comes back to it. He would hate to admit it, but Mark and I are similar; he is just pretending not to be for his own sake, for his peace of mind. How hard it must be living with all these restraints, pretending to be nice.

After our phone call, I pour myself some sparkling water and drop a perfect, clean mint leaf into the glass. I sit in front of a window, letting my eyes lose focus, blurring out the apartments across the street, smudging the crawly little lives inside them.

I picture $isi’s future: her big-eyed face, her little cherry mouth that speaks in a wispy voice into a microphone to a sea of her look-alikes, black-and-white-haired girls, choking up at every honest word she says about her struggle, her need to go on, her spirit of survival. It’s lovely. She’s wearing white. White nail polish. Later we – she talks about the special kind of… energy at her shows. The energy. The support of her fans. What keeps her going. The purity. The love.

I call her number but it goes straight to voice mail. I tell her I know. I’m here to help. I mean it.

I order a bouquet of flowers. White roses and, I tell the girl on the phone, whatever other white flowers go with roses so it’s not just roses; it has to be unique; it’s for a unique person. The girl on the phone giggles because she’s an idiot.

AS MUCH AS I DON’T WANT TO ADMIT IT, WHAT’S GOING ON with $isi has got to me. What does it say about my judgment, signing up artists who are such liabilities? Addictions, unstable behaviour in general, hysterics? Cancer. I’d blame my inability to foresee, but foresight is nonsense. How could I have known? I couldn’t have.