John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

Kit found his voice. “Zia,” he said, “you look like the poster girl for a convent.”

More new sides to the woman: “God, how’d you know? I’ve been shooting for Joan of Arc since I was twelve.”

He grinned up the better side of his face.

“So what are you a poster for, Kit? What happened ?”

A reasonable question. Kit’s voice failed him again; he got no further than telling her he’d gotten into Monsod.

“Oh you did? You did ?” Zia actually clapped her hands. “Oh I’m glad, Kit. That’s fantastic for you. And it’s great for the paper, I mean — really great. Congratulations.”

His grin was getting to his bruises.

“Honestly, Kit. You’ve done something incredible.”

The smell of bread was torture, a vapor his stomach couldn’t hold. Or was it the news he’d planned to give her that made him so queasy? What he’d had in mind as he’d headed out of the city had seemed so sturdy, so clear. Self-evident. Yet here in this touchy-feely kitchen, before this happy young stranger, Sea Level’s next issue already seemed like a bogus reason for doing anything. Had he come all this way just to hurt Zia? To show her his bashed-in face and then tell her she was laid off?

“Zia, can we talk?”

She shared a look with the smoking woman, a glance he couldn’t read. For the first time since Monsod, Kit wanted a good look at himself. The best he could find was the kitchen’s security mirror, the bulbous circle of glass up in one corner of the room. The reflection turned him upside down. Or the proportions were all wrong, the head too heavy, patched and barely holding together.

To:K

From:Corinna Nummold,

Administrative Assistant

RE:Projected budget, SL #2 & 3.

Kit, I’m sorry, but I don’t belong here. I don’t want any part of this.

I mean, I realize you’re planning a double issue, next issue. I realize you need figures for that. A projected budget.

But Kit — it’s you who don’t realize. You can’t even begin to try to realize. Double issue’s going to cost you, Kit. Cost you a lot more than a man can pay.

See, to get the rates for the issue, I went to the libraries. I mean, you got to go where the facts are, right? And Kit, I’m telling you. I heard something.

There’s a crying in the libraries, Kit. That’s what I heard. A crying and a sobbing, a noise nobody can make sense of. Right there in the libraries.

I never did lay eyes on what was doing the crying, understand. The thing was in those stacks somewhere, oh yeah. Some kind of secret weeper, some broken heart. But it could tell when I was coming.

Because all it wanted, see, was to get across the message. The moan, only. That’s all it wanted. A moan inside the stacks, the stats, the facts.

A moan . Like to start me crying myself.

You know back home, Kit, back in the Dom Rep? We got the voodoo people back there. Voodoo witches and such in the woods, they come over from Haiti. Talk in tongues, you know. Voices from your worst nightmare, voices of the dead. Change your own voice to hear de voices of de dead. Bad news.

Don wan no part of it, Kit. Cain give no figures. I knows when we don belong in de facts n de stacks.

*

“First time my father said he brought you to the club,” Zia told Kit, “I could have killed him. My city friends aren’t supposed to know about this place.”

Kit kept his hands in his pockets, a fist round his pills. City friends? They were on the second floor, in a room that smelled of vacuuming. The space had a bar, a Sears setup with two stools. Kit had a seat at the long committee table. His back straight, his posture careful. No telling what the swivel might do to him.

“Whenever I have to battle the traffic coming down,” Zia went on, “I need a drink. And that’s without any bruises to show for the trip.”

Kit tried to think of pick-me-ups. Rum and Coke had sugar and caffeine, beer starch and calories.

“Scotch, right?” She held up the familiar bottle, the little man in a hurry. “Walker Red?”

The first taste went straight to his wounds. Straight into cavities all over his head. Zia took the chair beside him, waiting. Even her hands were a surprise tonight, the knuckles raw and overworked. Kit found himself starting with compliments, repeating everyone’s praise for her piece.

“With you,” he said, “it’s not just the hip versus the unhip. With you it’s a whole culture.”

“Well.” Zia fingered up a Marlboro. “It’s one girl’s little secret sliver of the culture.”

“But that’s just it, Z. You know the secrets. You know what’s going on inside. ”

She let her first drag of smoke seep up over her face.

“Someone like myself,” Kit went on, “I’m a dinosaur. I can’t even get past the names. I see a name like Talking Heads and I just go — huh?”

“Well, words aren’t really the point, Kit. What matters is like, performance. Manipulating media.”

Kit touched his neck. His stalling had taken him back where he’d left off, mentally, back into the big ideas he’d been toying with — his invisible layout & pasteup. The last place he needed to go.

“So, Kit,” Zia said, through seeping smoke. “You have something to tell me?”

He tried to think of her as a stand-in for the people who’d be reading his next issue. A warm-up audience. “Zia, do you realize what’s been going on in Monsod?”

“I heard some things this afternoon.” One of the women down in the kitchen, it turned out, had a man inside. Another was the wife of a guard. “Between the two of them,” Zia said, “they had the phone tied up for hours.”

She’d heard how the disturbance had started, too, down in solitary. “A guy down there got killed, right?”

Kit propped an ice cube against his tongue. The light here was rotten, the wall fixtures imitation gas lamps.

“The one who started it, right Kit? He’s the one who got killed?”

“I know all about it, Z. I was down there with him.”

“What? You were with him?”

It was a light that made faces glow, and her eyes were so large. “The guard left us, Zia. He cuffed the guy and left.”

“Jesus. Is that like, when this happened?” She gestured at his face, his jacket. “Was that the guy who hit you?”

He drank again, around the propped ice. His hand in his pocket, he strangled his pills.

“Aw, Z. There’s so much corruption.” If he did this right, said it right, she’d understand. She’d see she had to stay out of the next issue. “So much corruption …

“Think about it, Z. Down in Monsod it’s life and death. Life and death — now that should be simple enough. Right? That should be simple, getting that across. Life and death. But everybody wants to set up a different story. Everybody wants whatever makes them look best. It should be plain and simple, life and death and the whole truth, but everybody’s stalling and cowardly. They’re cowardly, Zia. They’re trying to cover their asses.

“Even Junior,” Kit went on. “Junior down in a closet in E Level. Down deep inside his own head day after day. He had a whole story worked out.”

Zia touched his arm, something else to adjust for. “In a closet, Kit? Like, from the first issue?”

“Junior was the man , Zia. Junior Rebes, Carlos Junior Rebes. That name in the piece was a fake, didn’t you know?”

“Well I remember you saying something…”

“Come on, Z. That Manny business was a fiction. A a necessary evil, that’s what that was. But today I met the man himself. I saw the totally fucking unnecessary hellhole of a closet. The graffiti alone, in there, the graffiti alone is more honest than nine-tenths of the other crap people want to put across. Aw, you want to hear about corruption, Zia? Let me tell you something. They had him on drugs down there.”