Crashed (9 page)

“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.

People laughed like God had just stepped on a banana peel.

The doorbell in the TV living room rang. Thistle and the man both looked at the door. The man’s panic was minimum-wage acting, but Thistle’s went all the way to her socks.

“See,” Louie said, completely absorbed, “she can’t control her powers yet.”

“Her powers?” I said, sitting next to him and leaning toward the screen. “That’s her father? The geeky guy?”

“Yeah. Like the third actor to play the part. Nobody could handle working with Thistle. Standing next to her, they all disappeared. They put in a year or two, stashed some money in the bank, and quit.”

On the screen, Thistle Downing crossed the room, dragging her feet like her shoes were made out of cement, and opened the door. A stuffy-looking older man barged in, accompanied by his wife, an imperious woman of stately carriage wearing one of those fur pieces made up of small animals biting each others’ tails. The older man handed Thistle his coat without even looking at her, and when it landed in her hands it turned into a little boy’s sailor suit with short pants. Thistle’s eyes filled half her face, and she whipped it behind her. In the meantime, her father had collapsed on the couch, bending forward awkwardly to put his hands, with the platters attached, at table level. The older man, apparently Thistle’s father’s boss, sat down and began taking handfuls of cheese. Mrs. Boss claimed the armchair and gave Thistle a disapproving look. Thistle summoned up a hopeful smile, and the woman turned away with her nose in the air, and then Thistle, in one uninterrupted ten-second arc, took the painful smile to an expression of pure horror as one of the animals around Mrs. Boss’ neck lifted its head, winked at her, and bared its teeth.

“Turn it off,” I said.

“This is the good part,” Louie said as the mink, or whatever it was turned its head to eye the neck it was draped around.

I took the remote out of his hand and turned the set off. “That’s her?”

“That’s her. Hottest thing in America from the time she was eight until she was maybe fifteen, when she quit the show. Grew up in my fucking living room. I never missed her.”

“What happened?”

Louie got up and went to the window, using one finger to part the curtain. “They’re still out there.” He turned back to me. “She grew up, I guess. And no show lasts forever. Some of the papers, they said she gave people a hard time the last couple of years, but you know? She was worth it. She’d been working since she was way little, carrying the whole thing, and she probably got fed up.” He looked with some longing at the dark screen. “She was something, though.”

Looking at my own reflection in the screen, I could still see the child, see her uptilted features and bright, intelligent eyes. “How old would she be now?”

Louie screwed up his face. “Twenty-two, twenty-three. She got seriously beautiful when she was fourteen, fifteen, toward the end. You know, you don’t think of beautiful girls as funny. But she was. She could do anything. Shit, she coulda played that Shakespeare guy.”

“Hamlet?”

“That’s the one.”

“A funny Hamlet is probably a good idea. But she didn’t.”

“I think there was drugs,” Louie said. “You know, back then people sorta left stars alone, not like it is now where you’re looking up their skirts and up their noses all the time. But I think she was getting loaded and screwing up. She got fired off some movie, I remember that.”

“Thistle Downing,” I said.

“Whydya turn off the TV?”

“I didn’t want to see any more. I didn’t want to see how good she was.”

“What you didn’t want to see,” Louie said, nailing it, “was that she was a little kid.”

“Louie. You said it yourself. She’s in her twenties by now.”

“For me and about two hundred million other clowns, she’ll
always
be a little kid. That’s what’s so wrong with this.” He pulled out one of the wooden chairs at the table and plopped himself down on it as though his own weight was too much for him. “The guys who go see this or buy it on DVD, they’ll be paying to see that little kid. There oughta be a law.”

“She’s twenty-three,” I said. “I don’t think there is.”

“Well, there oughta be. This is just fuckin’ wrong. And you know it.”

I went and sat across the table from him. “I do,” I said.

“And maybe I missed this,” Louie said,” but how, exactly, are you going to be involved?”

“Trey believes the movie is being sabotaged. I’m the smart guy who’s supposed to figure out how and by whom, and keep things on track.”

“In other words,” Louie said, “you’re supposed to make sure it happens.”

“I am.” Suddenly my daughter Rina’s face flashed in front of me, not much older than the child I’d just seen on the television screen, and I blinked it away.

Louie laced his fingers together on the table, avoiding the pile of loose wet tobacco, and stared at me. Finally, he said, “You gonna do it?”

“There’s Rabbits,” I said.

“Rabbits,” Louie said, nodding. “Rabbits is definitely something to keep in mind.”

“I don’t think I’m in much danger of forgetting about him.”

Louie nodded again and let his eyes drift down to the table.
He seemed to be working something through in his mind. Louie was a slow thinker, but a long one. And when he went into thinking mode, I always had to remind myself that, friend or not, Louie the Lost was a crook. It was not safe to bet the farm, or even the back forty, on which side of his mental coin would land up. Whichever side it landed on, he kept it to himself. “So,” he said at last. “What now?”

Now
was something I could deal with. “Let’s see if we can’t screw with my followers.”