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TWO DAYS AFTER
the shoot, with Mal's help, I tried convincing myself that Emilia would never call. Mal and I met in the Hotel Thomas bar. He unashamedly sat at the chrome-and-glass bar in a T-shirt that said assholes in a big red circle with a slash through it. I was still a registered guest, so the bartender only asked what we'd like instead of kicking us out.

I said, “Why would she call? She knows I have a girlfriend.”

Mal munched on pretzel sticks. He nodded quickly, his topknot bouncing forward and back. “You got nothing to worry about, man. Unless you want to worry. Do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you say you've got a great thing with Hiko, but you gave that girl your number. Could be you want the worry.”

“I don't know why I gave it to her.”

He ordered another round and nodded again. “Yeah, and that's the bitch. You got to worry about whether or not you wanted to worry.”

The bartender brought us two fresh beers and I waited for him to get safely to the bar's other end before continuing. Despite the darkness and desertion of the bar, I couldn't help having a feeling of being watched.

“Should I tell Hiko?”

I expected him to say not to. Instead he shrugged and said, “You should have stood your ground the moment she began to treat you like Darla. You don't have much of a say in what goes on in the house, do you?”

I didn't know what he meant.

Mal drank half his beer, burped loudly, and smiled at me. His wheels spun a moment. “You've got to figure out what you want.”

We were both going to pretend that he hadn't mentioned Darla. “I don't know what I want.”

“Man, even not knowing something is a kind of knowing. I mean, all the most important stuff you do no one knows about but you. All your decisions and the little debates you have with yourself. That's where your life takes place. The real stuff happens while you're waiting for the subway, choosing what you're gonna do for the rest of
your life. Sometimes these moments are shared with one or two others, but mostly it's just you and you. So you go home and you debate this over with yourself, and when you don't come to a conclusion, then you know.”

“Know what?”

“That you're fucked. You're not even sure of who you are, let alone what you want.” He gulped from his beer and avoided looking at me as he continued. “Before you and I had our falling-out in Redbach's bar, I used to have debates like that every night.”

I stirred the foam of my beer with my index finger and wondered what the hell Mal was talking about. I realized that I was seeking advice from a bridge jumper when he said, “Besides, she probably won't even call.”

“No, I bet she won't.” My stomach loosened up a bit and I rewarded it with a large sip of my beer.

Mal waited for me to put the glass down. “Or maybe she will.” He pretended to ignore my squirm as he ordered another.

The next day my internal debate continued. I kept myself near Hiko in the speculative belief that her presence would help me come to a conclusion. I even asked her to go to Michael's office with me. He wanted to go over an offer from a production company about my story. When I asked him, “What story?” he just laughed. I told Hiko that we could go out to dinner after my meeting. She agreed and I called a car service to come pick us up.

In the car she took my hand and asked if I thought
it a good idea to sell my story to a production company when I didn't even know my whole story. “You don't even really know where you came from.”

“I know. I will eventually.” I watched cars promise collisions if we so much as dared to override our lane. “I hope.”

She squeezed my hand and leaned against me. I smelled her citrus-scented shampoo. “I just worry that if nothing turns up, or if you don't like what is found, you'll be crushed.”

I stroked her hand. I had never shared any of the research Michael forwarded. Until I saw something that bore some resemblance to me I saw no reason to, and the idea of describing these nonhistories to her made me dizzy. I'd rather just wait until something solid turned up and then share that. I said, “Michael's hired a private investigator. He'll find something.”

We hit the bridge and before Hiko could say any more I started to describe the view, how I could see the Statue of Liberty and that the Staten Island Ferry chugged by. I didn't tell her when we passed the gap in the fence where Mal had leaped from the bridge, followed soon by the spot where I had run into a girder and split my head. I thought I recognized that spot just as a B train erupted into view, chasing along beside the flow of cars.

At Michael's office I led Hiko to a sofa in the waiting room. She sat facing a coffee table covered in magazines. I kissed her on the cheek and told her I'd be right back. She refused to let go of my hand.

“Don't you think it's a little silly, signing your life away? You're going to be at their beck and call.”

“Right now I don't have any control or money. If I sign this, I get money. One out of two.”

“You don't need it that bad.”

“Who paid for the cab ride over here?”

She let go of my hand.

Hiko stayed in the waiting area while I went with Michael to discuss the contract. Michael started the meeting by showing me proofs of the photos with Emilia. With Hiko no longer at my side I fell back into a meditation on what Emilia offered. The photos were beautiful: a spectacular shine glinted off the nailheads in the bat and my black eyes, and the hastily done stitches nearly bled in each frame.

Michael smiled across the table at me. “You did good. They loved you. They can't wait for the issue to come out.”

I kept looking at the way Emilia's skin melted from the leather outfit and lion's mane. Michael watched my eyes and said, “She had a good time too.”

From that point I became too distracted to follow Michael's description of what the movie production company wanted from me. They promised a steady income and some sort of percentage for the rights to my story, whatever it might be, whatever that might mean. Emilia's arched back kept interrupting my focus. All I really got out of our meeting were a couple of repeated words such as
standard clause
and
indemnity
. Michael stood near
his large window with a copy of the contract and, when he flipped to a new page, I did the same, pretending to follow along. Behind him, across the square rose a building under construction. A giant crane stabbed up into the air, and from it tons of metal hung quietly, suspended by cables, waiting to be turned into something.

After seven pages of the contract I said, “Let's just get to the heart of it. If I sign, I get some money, right?”

Michael raised his eyebrows at me and said yes.

“And the production company gets the rights to my life story, whatever it may be.”

Again Michael said yes.

“And you think this is a fair deal?”

He said he did.

“Where do I sign?”

When I found my way back to Hiko in the waiting room, I discovered her reading a
Vogue
magazine with Emilia on the cover. She kept her head lowered as if concentrating, cocked to one side. She had her sunglasses on.

Everything in our cupboards was labeled with stickers with bumps, even shelf edges. We spent Sundays shopping and Mondays we labeled everything so she could read them. Cans were bumped with
tomato soup
,
chicken noodle
,
broth
. But here she sat, reading a magazine. What if she wasn't really blind at all? Would it make her something else?

What would that make her?

I walked toward her and as I got closer I saw that she had the magazine open with a Braille book inside it. I said, “What are you doing?”

She just barely jumped, but I could see the fear behind the placid face. She looked away from the book. Her fingers played along the center of a page, soaked up the information. “I didn't want to be disturbed, so I pretended I can see. No one asks about Braille when they can't see it.”

“Okay. But there's no one else here.”

She blushed. “With this thick carpet in here it's hard for me to know when someone is nearby or not.”

I put the magazine back on the table for her and took her arm as she stood. When we got to the door, she said, “What's strange is, the book I was reading seemed to be missing some pages.”

The next day I left early and stayed out all day. Not knowing what else to do, I went into Manhattan and found a cinemaplex with over ten theaters. I bought a ticket for the next show to start and spent the day wandering from theater to theater. I dragged a giant tub of popcorn and large soda around. I saw parts of the four movies on my floor, none of them very good, and I hardly understood much of any of them. At times I forgot which theater I was in and waited for characters from a different movie to wander into a scene. At moments Michael's research even leaked in and I wondered if that might be the actor who disappeared, or if the story was based on
one of the fakirs or accident victims. I started to feel as if all the movies were as connected to me as the research had been, as if somehow I would walk onto the screen and I would both sit in an uncomfortable seat with my feet stuck to a gummy floor and watch myself stack bags against a coming flood, prepare to battle robots from the future, fall in love with the older female teacher across the hall, vanquish demons using ancient powers locked in the heart of a chiseled rock. None of these stories was mine. They might as well have been.

When all the salt and sugar finally had their way with me I left to get real food. I ate half a sandwich in a coffee shop and then browsed through stores near the movie theater. I wandered aisles of CDs, DVDs, and books. Displays at the ends of aisles promised me the greatest entertainment of my life until I reached other displays promising even more.

Michael had given me a thousand-dollar loan from his office petty cash. I started to fill my arms with DVDs and CDs. I avoided books since Hiko already had so many. Hiko's, Braille or not, were enough, and I might read some of them one day. I didn't know how to read Braille but figured that if I ever wanted to badly enough, Hiko could teach me.

With such a wide assortment to choose from I lost track of where I was in the store. The sections all looked the same, bled into one another, overlapped. Occasionally I'd see a name that would pop out at me and I'd
recognize it, having heard it from the Brailled-over television in Hiko's living room, or seen it along the side of a city bus, on a billboard, squeezed into place around the headlines of
People
,
Us
, and other less reputable publications. Album covers like artifacts, hieroglyphs depicting the hunt for power and prestige and pagan rights; a young girl dressed like an oversexed woman, a group of young men on a cover sticky with bright pink classic stickers from an album completed before one or more members overdosed, were committed, or died. I scooped them up. I tried to buy a sense of familiarity. I had nothing at Hiko's of my own. I bought mine.

By the end of the week I was sweating constantly, worried Emilia would or would not call. She'd said she would be in LA for a week and would call when she returned. That week passed. I spent the last two days taking showers and finding reasons not to go out so that I would be there if the phone rang. I stalked around the apartment, carrying the cordless phone while berating myself for not charging it and trying to keep Hiko from thinking I was hiding something as I hid and took the phone with me. I listened to DVDs on my Braille-vision television. I now had a credit card, thanks to Michael, and had wasted no time going to the nearest electronics store and getting everything that my papered-over set needed to be a complete entertainment system. The surround sound drove Hiko out of the room.

“How can you listen to it that loud?”

“It's the only way to get the full experience.” I lay on the sofa staring at the ceiling as conversations and sound effects swirled around us. Hiko withdrew into her studio, leaving me with a kiss on my sweaty upper lip.

I began to suffer from headaches that wouldn't end. My stomach tightened but I refused to eat. I was too nervous.

After not eating for a day and a half, hunger finally overrode my concerns about Emilia's call. I'd avoided any contact with Hiko for nearly twenty hours straight and I'd gained some calm. I was famished and, with the phone tucked under my arm, headed into the kitchen to scavenge. I worked on half a chicken that I found in the back of the fridge. Hiko found me kneeling before the fridge with grease and herbs smeared across both cheeks, refrigerator door standing open, bones sprinkled like runes. I grunted as I tore the meat off a thigh. Half-eaten chicken lay on the floor at my knees, along with the foil it had been wrapped in.

Hiko bumped into me as she felt her way to the kitchen sink. “What are you doing down there?” She washed her hands and dried them with a paper towel.

“Eating chicken.”

“Isn't that old?”

“Yeah, but it's good.”

“Enjoy.” She said something about being out of hand soap in the bathroom and shuffled past me.

I had noticed our life together had run low on a lot of
little pieces. Hand soap in the bathroom. Ingredients in the kitchen. Places to put my things. I built a fort out of my large CD and DVD collection. I left stacks of disks in and around the living room. The arms of the sofa were covered with DVDs I'd bought with the advance Michael had gotten me from the production company.

I dumped the chicken carcass into the garbage and headed to the bathroom to brush chicken from my teeth and to dry my hair, still wet from my last shower. With all the showers and sweat over the last two days, it had hardly been dry. Hiko was right, there was no hand soap, and in an act of rebellion I wiped my chicken-coated hands and mouth on the hand towel. I held the phone tightly in my left hand as I angled the hair dryer around my head with my right.