Numb (19 page)

He looked me in the eye best he could. “Who is it?”

“Chump sent me up. I was a friend of Mal's.”

His waver stopped for a moment. “Not a reporter?”

“Not according to Chump.”

“Chump's got good instincts. Come on in.”

I followed him in and stood at the door a moment as my eyes adjusted. Bernie stagger-stepped heavy, awkward stomps, yet missed every lamp and bulb, broke nothing, as he moved across the loft's large room to a curtain and disappeared behind it. If some of the lights between me and the curtain had been extinguished, I might have enjoyed a shadow-puppet show, as there were at least a dozen burning bulbs on the other side. The heat of the room was unbearable. Extension cords ran the floor like a web, lamps plugged into one that connected to another that was already connected to three or more cords and lamps. The cords crossed one another, three or four thick, gathered in clumps, leading back to a single source cord, the primary root, a thumb-thick industrial-orange extension that curled on the floor for seven or eight feet and then shot straight up to the ceiling, to a hole chiseled into the thick plaster and on through wooden slats to a main junction box deep in the ceiling. Modern wiring spiraled out of the junction, siphoning off the juice meant for some other part of the building and delivering it to the free-hanging outlet that the thick orange cord plugged into. Bernie's network fed off stolen voltage that fell from the ceiling. The room was a swirl of electric current and light, and once I grew accustomed to the heat, something that had seemed impossible upon my entrance, I began to sense a jingling along the hairs of
my back, the electricity in the air, warping and weaving around me. The tingle ran straight up my spine and danced across the back of my skull.

Bernie came back around the curtain a little more awake, a little less bleary. He stood before me, hands in pockets, sniffing, licking his lips. I remembered then that Karen had called him a drug dealer and wondered if it had been exaggeration or accurate. I saw nothing in the room that looked illegal. In fact, other than the lamps all I saw was a curtain, part of a mattress on the floor behind it, and a box spilling pornographic magazines.

Bernie waited for me to explain my visit, and the fact that I didn't know what I wanted or expected from him stood between us. I pointed at the lamps nearest to us, hoping to find my way by starting with small talk.

“Could we turn off a few of these lights?”

“No.”

“Uh…”

“Because fuck my landlord, that's why.”

“I didn't—”

“Your friend was an okay guy, but we were roommates, not buds. He and I didn't really get along, okay? Fact is, he ruined my car. So if there's something you need other than his things, you can ask or not, I don't care, but do it now 'cause I'm too tired to fuck around.”

“His things?”

Bernie pointed at the box of porn. “Might be a few more things at the bottom of the closet, but I can't tell
anymore. He was only here a short time and that was months ago.”

“Right. Can I?” Already heading for the box, standing it up, riffling.

“Help yourself.” Bernie sat on his mattress and munched saltines from an open box. He watched me with the same interest one watches rain, to see what it touches and whether the wetness amounts to anything.

Beneath a thin layer of skin magazines I found a stack of books and article clippings. The books tended toward literature and self-help. Dickens and Powers.
The Stranger
and
Wishcraft
. Beneath these were clippings from newspapers and printouts from a computer I didn't see in the box. I looked toward Bernie, still watching from his bed, fresh crumbs salting the hair of his beard, and wondered if he might have sold some computer Mal had owned. The clips and articles all dealt with freakish stories, bizarre accidents, or ill-advised stunts. The oldest of them, from only a few days after my final Redbach show, placing Mal already in LA much earlier than I could have imagined, was of a woman who, through no fault of her own, wound up with her hand stuck inside a vending machine. At work late, she'd struggled with an insubordinate soda dispenser and lost. It had been a Friday, after hours, so she was forced to wait through the weekend and most of Monday morning until a coworker finally came to get a diet soda and found her, unconscious, on her knees, pressed against the side of the machine,
in a pool of her own fluids. Stories and printouts from the same period revolved around similar random accidents and poor plans. Circus-performer accidents were popular with him. As I flipped through the pages I saw the focus narrow over time to self-inflicted acts, public stunts that drew wild attention. Magicians who dared to put on uneventful performances in public—standing in ice, lying in water, suspending themselves above the ground for days. Climbers who scaled office buildings, sculptures, bridges, only to be arrested. Actors and musicians who insisted on public acts of personal distaste. Again the articles refocused and became about certain of these performers, and then re-refocused, toward one in particular. Me.

The first references to me were online pieces about “freakish” acts that had taken place in a circus somewhere, or a bar, or on a street. The printed images were grainy, poor copies of video frames. It was a homemade version of the research that had trailed out of Michael's office, pages fluttering and worn, yellowed with age and poor care in Bernie's closet. Mal, it was obvious, had been on the same trail as Michael's investigators, even having references to some events that they hadn't found, such as the cook who, at the height of the dinner rush, neglected to notice that he had severed and served a finger in a Caesar salad, or the construction worker who had been riveted without much complaint to a high-rise in Dallas. The pages lacked any of the notes or insane
speculation of Michael's, but they centered on the same subject. I saw myself in each one. And when I found a DVD with no label near the bottom of the pile of papers I wondered if I was in this too, in exactly the same way. Was I on the disk by not being visible, by being not the one on screen but hunted for nonetheless?

I held the disk up and waved it at Bernie. The light from dozens of bulbs cast circular reflections on the walls around us, as if we were trapped inside a diamond. Bernie blinked out of his meditation on me and raised an eyebrow, something of an effort given the totality of hair across his face.

“Do you have a way to play a DVD?”

“Uh-huh.”

A slow minute later he finally stood, knocking half-crackers from his beard as he did so, then fumbled through a closet, its door hidden behind a hanging blanket. When he returned with an old laptop we exchanged a silent accusation and denial that it had once been Mal's, and I turned it on and loaded the disk. It played without prompting, having dreamt of the moment for so long at the box's bottom.

There was a burst of humming and some scratchy feedback. I played with the volume and the bass and treble. The hum never stopped. Occasionally a pop or crackle rose up. Nothing else. I stopped the playback and started it again. It played the same crackle and hiss as before.

The camera technique was nonexistent, wavy and shaky and panning fast enough to make you think of a tennis match. Aside from the setting—the bottles on the cart, the medical apparatus, the stethoscopes and white masks, it looked like any hospital—the film had all the unmistakable signs of a home movie, either a reel-film camera or a very early video with no sound, or one in which the sound had been lost or damaged somehow.

It began with a long shot of a man's back. When he turned toward the camera, he was all mustache. He said something to the camera and then stepped aside and behind him rested a baby on a table. Instinctively I wondered if the baby was me.

The baby sat awkwardly and drooled on itself and made fists that it shook in the air and then stuffed, whole, into its mouth. It wore a little blue jumper with a teddy bear on the front. Clouds were painted on the wall behind the baby.

The camera spun, blurring the room, to a doorway. In it stood a man with the unmistakable air of a doctor. White coat, hand in pocket, stethoscope, heavy sideburns and thick, wavy hair. The mustached man approached the doctor and said something that could have been “How do you do?” or “How are you?” The doctor rubbed the side of his face, blocking his mouth, but whatever he said made the mustached man laugh.

The doctor and the mustached man both moved toward the camera, their smiles nervous, and the mus
tached man reached out to it. There was a white flash as the image cut to a woman standing next to the baby on the table. The doctor stood next to her. Apparently the mustached man now held the camera. The woman, with long, straight brown hair, fidgeted nervously with her blouse as the doctor examined the baby. The baby kicked and put the stethoscope in its mouth, looked at the ceiling, the woman, the doctor, sometimes at nothing. The doctor weighed the baby, measured the baby, held the baby as a nurse came into the picture and took the child.

Another cut and the image was closer and the doctor held a syringe with a needle and the nurse held the baby. In the background, over the doctor's shoulder, stood the woman, holding her face in her hands. The doctor explained something to her, either ready to give a shot or take blood. The woman looked nervous.

The doctor had the needle, and the baby was in the nurse's arms, and she talked to the baby and the baby looked at the nurse and was excited and kicked as the doctor stepped forward, still looking at the woman, and the needle stuck straight through the baby's fat leg.

The doctor let go, and the syringe hung from the baby, pierced straight through, the shiny point visible through one side, the syringe on the other. The woman screamed and the doctor quickly grabbed the baby's arm and the camera fell down. After another cut the image was of the baby, held by the nurse, and it was unclear
who was behind the camera, but the doctor pulled the syringe from the leg, plump and pink, and the baby had a fist in its mouth and didn't react with pain or even interest, and looked at the camera and drooled as the fist left its mouth.

The film jumped then to another room and another doctor. This time the camera seemed to be on a stand—the shot was very level and the image sharper. The baby sat on an examining table and two men in white coats stood nearby. The baby was naked and fat and happy. It held a teething ring in one hand and shook it happily.

The camera moved to the left, toward a tray filled with pins and syringes. One of the men poured alcohol over the utensils, put on rubber gloves, and began to pull pins from the tray. The other man took hold of the baby's arm and held it steady.

I turned off the DVD.

I watched my hands as they floated over the computer keyboard. The scars glowed in its blue light, even some that had faded, some I'd forgotten. An image, stuck on the doctor's hands holding the baby's arm still, floated in my eyes after I shut down the video player. I became aware of breathing behind me and looked over my shoulder into Bernie's twisted mane.

He blew a silent whistle. “It would suck to be that baby.”

“Yeah.”

“Wonder what Mal was doing with that.”

I thought I knew. Mal had protected me once again. He could have sold that video, or sent it to Michael or me or any of the news agencies, when I made my rounds on the talk shows. Instead, he'd sat on it, hidden it away in a box under useless research and pornography. He'd left it behind when he returned to New York. It was past; it hadn't mattered, to him at least. And when I realized that, it began to matter less to me. It might be me, it might not. Mal had died with it in his head. The images wouldn't leave me either, I knew, but he'd kept them where they belonged. What was I to do with them? Nothing could be done. Whomever that was, me or someone else, grown or gone on to other currents, it didn't matter. I looked past Bernie and saw the knots and loops of electrical cords, the repeated patterns, unintentional, but one cord followed close, so close as to almost get it right, the path of one below it, though missing, just by a hair, the same route. This was me and Mal. He'd held on to the video, left it behind, knowing that all it might do was lead me to a place that had no resolution, that with it in my hands I could do nothing about it but watch and watch again. He'd died without sharing it, a form of protection.

Which was absurd. I knew it. Mal had reasons for doing what he'd done, but to see him as protecting me at every step was both unfair to him and ridiculous. Mal's research was as much about his need to see the birth of fame as it was about looking for me. He'd followed that
path of self-creation to a fiery end. This film showed me no proof, nor did I have proof Mal had wanted to protect me. That didn't matter. I could behave as if I did. I could behave however I liked. If I needed to find solace and protection in the video, if I needed to find permission to stop hauling up questions about my past, like luggage I neither owned nor cared for, then I would give those to myself. I could be as free of these questions as I wanted, and behave as if I either knew myself or didn't. Either way, I thought, I would find out.

Bernie had retreated to his bed and crackers. I stood and looked around the room. It suddenly felt rather cozy, and through the windows I could see the brightening sky. Dawn approached. Buildings outside glowed blue, subtly showing some inner light at the edges and even glimmering in their darkened windows, as if sleepers there released energy to the building and the building released it to the morning, somehow leaking what was normally held inside.

I said, “Would you have a car I could borrow?”

Bernie shook his head. “Told you. Mal ruined it. Haven't replaced it yet.”

“Where did he do that?”

“Northbound I-5, I think. Near the Indiana exit.”

I stood at the center of the room, looking from the cords to the computer to Bernie, realizing I wanted none of Mal's things, disk included, and held a hand up to Bernie. “Thanks for your help.”