Page 97

I sleep right through it.

If I dream anything, I can’t remember it. All I have is a sense of drifting in absolute darkness and feeling like a complete idiot. Hell I can take, but I hope that isn’t my eternity.

SUPPLIES. I NEED supplies, but I don’t have a dime. I go through every drawer in the living room, hoping the Sub Rosa left some petty cash. There’s nothing, but I do finally find the liquor cabinet. With the bourbon now on the living room table, I head into the guest bedroom and go through Howard’s pockets. I come up with two hundred in cash and an American Express black card. The cash I keep. The card I don’t trust.

If I start stinking, I’m not sure I’ll be able to tell, so I go into the bathroom and brush my teeth twice. There’s shaving cream and a razor in a cabinet but before I lather up I realize that I don’t need them. My beard has stopped growing. Also, my face looks funny. I think. It’s hard to tell at this point. I see rot everywhere. What complicates things is that eleven, now twelve years in Hell left me pretty pale. But have I lost what little color I had left? And are my lips turning blue?I start to put on the glamour but get nervous. How much energy will it take to maintain it? Do I have enough to spare right now? In the end, I decide against it. The outside world will just have to deal with my regular face.

I shadow-walk out of the UFO house onto Hollywood Boulevard. The sun is like an anvil and the heat is like a hammer pounding on my skull.

Stumbling into the first tourist shop I see, I grab a pair of cheap Ray-Ban knockoff sunglasses and slip them on. The world is suddenly a little less horrifying. I also pick up a couple of black I LUV LA shirts, with hearts and palm trees on the front. They’re so hideous that if I thought I was going to last long enough, I’d want to be buried in them.

I give the nice lady some twenties and she snips the plastic price tag off my shades. Under my coat, I can feel the towels I taped to my body starting to soak through. My next stop is a corner market where I pick up some Tabasco sauce, sriracha, plums in hot red pepper, and four boxes of cling wrap. There goes another twenty and something.

Back at the UFO mansion, I strip off the red shirt and rinse it in the sink. The left side is never going to be red again, but I hang it up to dry next to my other shirt. It’s riddled with holes and still a little stiff with blood. I leave it where it is and pull off the towels I wrapped around me.

Immediately, dark blood falls in big drops onto the floor. I pour more peroxide over my cuts and open one of the boxes of cling wrap. My side is bleeding the most, so I wrap my torso first. I go around eight times, from my waist to my armpits. My whole body feels stiff and awkward, but I’m not raining as much muck onto the floor.

Wrapping my shoulder is a little trickier, since I have to do it one-handed. After a few awkward attempts, I get the job done. I’m officially one big blood sausage, ready for frying.

Before I leave the bathroom, I wipe my blood off the floor with one of Abbot’s nice towels. It’s so vile with my toxic blood that I don’t even bother putting it in the hamper. I just stuff it into the kitchen trash.

While I’m in there, I take a couple of slices of chicken, coat one with sriracha and the other with Tabasco. I get a little tingle from the sriracha, but I can’t really taste it. Next I try the dried plums in red peppers. I might as well be eating Styrofoam. I spit out the plums and throw everything else in the trash with the towel. I swear, if I don’t taste food again soon I’m going to eat Howard just to show him what happens to a man too sad to chance a bad burger.

When I go out later, I’m wearing a glamour. Even if it takes some extra energy, I need to do some things without people staring at me.

The first thing I do is steal a brown Subaru. I don’t even know what model it is. It’s simply the most boring wheels I can find. Cops are generally color-blind when it comes to brown cars, and this Subaru is too boring for even a soccer mom. It looks like it was made for people into competitive tire filling.

On my way to Max Overdrive, I stop at a little grocery and buy an insulated chest. Fill it with beer, cold cuts, and ice cream. Anything that will keep me cool so I don’t rot in the heat.

If it was night, I might just watch the store from across the street, but it’s the middle of the afternoon. There’s no way I wouldn’t be noticed hanging around. Besides, sitting in a broiling-hot car all day isn’t stalking. It’s a stakeout.

STAKEOUTS ARE BORING. I’ve been on them before and they never get any better. I have a beer and some ice cream to cool down, then some sliced ham to keep my strength up. I forgot to buy bread or mustard, so I shove the naked slices in my mouth one by one. I think of every old joke about how divorced guys are supposed to live. All I need are some week-old pizza boxes around to complete the look.

Even with the cold food and beer in my belly, I still feel hot. I shrug off my coat and it’s better for about a minute, but half of me is still mummified in cling wrap. I turn on the car and run the air conditioner for a while. It helps, but after half an hour, the engine starts to overheat, so I have to turn the damn thing off. The air outside is dead, so opening the windows doesn’t help. Eventually, there’s nothing left to do but take one of the bags of ice from the cooler and hold it in my lap like I’m trying to nurse it.

This might be the most pathetic day of my life.

I wonder if this is one of those things they call a “teachable moment.” What it’s supposed to teach me, I have no idea. Maybe that I should have stolen an ice-cream truck? Anyway, there’s nothing at all humiliating about clutching ten pounds of ice like your firstborn while the damn bag leaks all over your crotch so it looks like you pissed yourself with joy. I crack open another beer to celebrate fatherhood and keep reminding myself that I’m doing this for Candy.

What the hell am I going to do about Howard? I can’t kill him and he knows it. I can’t trust him, but I can’t let him go either because then the faction will get him. Should I tell him he’s on the kill list? Would that make things better or worse? I don’t need him making dumb decisions and he’s plenty scared now. If he was even more frightened, he might go off the rails completely. I need to think about it.

I check my phone. Nothing from Ray yet.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

The street cools down a little after dark. I put my coat back on. I’m parked halfway down the block from Max Overdrive, so when a car ahead of me pulls away, I move up the Subaru. Now I’m only one house down from the store.

I’m smoking one of my last Shermans—I forgot to buy cigarettes too—when Candy sticks her head in the driver-side window and yells at me. I’m not used to Candy screaming right in my face and it’s even weirder when she’s wearing her Chihiro glamour.

“Who the fuck are you and why have you been watching us all day?” she shouts. Then, “And why do you have a bag of ice in your lap?”

She must have spotted me and gone out the back of the store and around the block to sneak up on me. Good for her. I deserve to be yelled at for not watching my rear.

Now I’m more glad than ever that I put on the glamour. I’ve been going over it all day, whether I should reveal myself since it might be the last time we ever see each other. But that’s junior high romance-novel stuff. She doesn’t need to see me die again. And if I do live, I don’t know if my body is ever going to be right again. I mean, even if I figure out what Ludovico’s Ellicit is and get cured, I might look like Freddy Krueger’s foreskin forever.

She’s getting angrier by the second. I have to tell her something.

I say, “Thomas Abbot sent me. He’s worried about you.”