Black Tide, page 18
“I think I should take a look at that,” I tell her. She shakes her head. “Come on. Dr. Mike is in the house. We still have a little disinfectant left.”
“It’s fine.”
“Beth, my hands burned for hours after touching that thing. You actually got stung by the vine. Please. You shouldn’t have to be in pain.” I reach again, and she pulls away. What is she hiding?
“I told you no,” she grunts, clamping her right hand across her bandaged wrist. Something isn’t right. I can tell by the way her eyes grow and her voice goes shrill.
“Just let me look. From a distance, see?” I hold up my hands, to show I’m not going to lunge at her with medical intent. Slowly, she peels her fingers away from the dirty bandages.
They ripple.
Not much, but it’s enough to elicit a gasp from me. It happens again, a small protrusion rising and falling like a pulse. There’s something underneath. Something alive.
“Mike,” she whispers, her eyes refusing to drop, to see for herself what she clearly already knows.
“Can you feel that?” It takes her a very long time to answer. Running every possible form of denial through her head, hoping for one that will somehow make this all go away, and coming up empty.
“Yes.”
I finger one corner of the dressing, then slowly start to peel it back. Her good hand clamps around my wrist, bracing for what we’re about to find.
It’s like turning over a piece of fruit to find it squirming with maggots. Beth’s forearm is the same bruised purple as the shrieker. The same color as the hellvines themselves. Up close, it looks like hundreds of dandelion seeds sprouting from her skin, each one blooming ugly purple and giving off the noxious odor that’s been haunting us all day. Beneath this layer is an almost black protrusion, like a tree root slowly breaking through a sidewalk.
The root thing squirms lethargically as soon as it’s exposed.
“Mike! Ohmygod!”
“Okay, hold on,” I say, just to say something, my eyes bugging out idiotically.
“Fuck you! Get it off me!”
Yes, that is probably a smart strategy. But how? I don’t want to just start ripping and tearing. There’s vital plumbing in there, and we used the last of our bandages on the dog.
My eyes find the cooler. And inside is the remaining vodka. I can’t help but smile at how much mileage we’re getting from the little pieces of Sarah she left behind. As if she’d known I’d need the help. That thing taunting me with her voice, trying to poison her memory, got it wrong. Sarah wouldn’t want to hurt me. Even after everything. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I didn’t deserve her. I didn’t fight to keep her, the way she fought for me. I want to change that with Beth. Even if it’s just for a day.
“You already did that,” Beth moans as I twist off the cap.
“Yes, well, Dr. Mike is going to do a more thorough job this time, now that he knows what he’s dealing with.” My T-shirt is in the footwell, now soaked with seawater. Perfect. I set it next to me in a soggy heap.
Jake stretches to sniff at Beth’s arm, and she shoos him away.
“Give me your lighter,” I demand.
“What?” She’s becoming hysterical, hyperventilating, unable to rip her eyes from the thing on her arm.
“Your lighter, Beth. Give it to me.” She’s in too much shock to understand what’s about to happen. That’s probably good. She motions limply toward the cup holder, where the lighter and crumpled pack of cigarettes are still tucked, like the contents of a tinder box. I only want the lighter, but we both might need a smoke after this.
I pour vodka directly onto the black root. It curls like a salted slug. It doesn’t seem to be wrapped around bone or stretched up her arm beneath the skin, so hopefully I can get it out without causing too much damage to Beth.
She groans through gritted teeth, clenching her fist.
The knife is on the seat next to the depleted medical supplies. I flick open the blade with a resounding snap, then coax a small blue flame from the lighter.
At this point, Beth understands what’s coming. “Mike,” she begins to protest.
“This might sting a bit,” I tell her. It gets the laugh I’m hoping for. Humor, nature’s great panacea. But the laugh quickly rises into a scream as I touch the flame to her skin.
The hundred-proof vodka ignites, and the purple fuzz vanishes in a flash of smoke and stink. Beth’s skin sizzles and splits. She howls like I’m sawing off her arm, and soon Jake joins her, the two of them singing of all the agony in the universe. I let the baby vine burn until it’s charred crisp and Beth’s shrieks hit a register only Jake can detect, then I stab it with the knife. It comes out cleanly, skewered to the blade like something fresh off the grill. I shove open the door, letting in a flood of water, and fling it into the waves. I pull the door shut and slap the wet shirt over Beth’s arm, smothering the flames.
The screaming stops abruptly, and her body goes limp.
22
MIKE
“Give me hope,” I say. The smell of burnt flesh and hell-vine has faded, but a new silence has filled the space between us. Outside, the waves mist the windshield, turning the sunset into an abstract. I took the shades out to give us a view. The car shudders like a plane in turbulence. “That’s the note I’d have given the screenwriter if this had all landed on my desk. Well, one of my notes. But the biggest, I think.”
“Hope?” Beth asks without much interest, still staring at her scorched arm. Nothing else is growing. Yet. I made her a fresh bandage out of tape and some lining cut from the patrol bag. I don’t know why the hellvine spread so much faster in the shrieker. Different biology, or the combination of disinfectant and seawater. Or maybe it was because Beth was able to remove the actual remaining piece of vine. Starts mature faster than seeds, after all. But there’s no telling if this is the end of it, or if it’s going to keep returning. Which brings me back around to my point.
“Yeah. Cut off the head and the horde dies, or our gravity eventually drags them down, or all the pesticides and hormones and chemicals we pump into our world ends up poisoning them. That would be some sweet irony. But just give me something to make the audience believe there’s even a chance of a win. Wins are good. Wins get sequels.”
Beth scoffs. “Who would want a second dose of this shittery?”
“Hey, it’s a good problem to have.”
She looks from her arm to the windshield. To the violet and burnt-orange sky. Our last sunset. “Thank you,” she says.
“For setting you on fire?” She laughs. Not much, but I’m glad she can still do that. Feels like another small victory.
“For sticking with me through the end of the world.” She looks at me, no hint of a smile this time. “Nobody else would have.”
“C’mon.”
“I mean it, Mike.” She holds my eyes for a long time.
I’m the one who breaks the silence. Not because it makes me uncomfortable but because I think she needs to hear this. “Listen. Here’s the funny thing about movie producers: anybody can be one. I’m serious. It’s not like you get licensed. You don’t even have to know what you’re doing, there are plenty of those, let me tell you. Wandering the streets of L.A. like vampires, sustaining themselves on other people’s dreams.”
“I was wondering why there was so little in your refrigerator,” Beth quips.
“I’m not a hack,” I say, ignoring that. “I’m hardly the best either. But … I do pride myself on knowing something special when I see it.” Then, just to get back at her, I pat Jake on the head. “And I knew if he had you looking after him, you must be pretty okay too.”
“You’re the worst,” she laughs, then scoots next to me, snagging her camera from the corner of the hatch. After fiddling with some settings, she holds it at arm’s length, pulling me close, the rear passenger window to our backs. Our distorted, harrowed faces stare back from lens glass.
“Say ‘doomsday’!” she sings. The shutter clicks. Beth flips the camera around to review the shot.
There we are on the little screen, holding our sadly sweet pose, the warm sunlight filling the shadows on our faces. What a story behind that shot. If by some chance humanity endures, I hope somebody finds this camera. If they clean out the sand and salt, pull the memory card, get it into a computer, I hope this is the picture that survives. This is how I want to be remembered.
I take the camera from her and start cycling through the other photos. Beth stiffens, her hands flinching toward me, to stop me, to take the camera away, but then she changes her mind. There’s no more point in secrets. And what could she possibly be hiding on this, anyway?
The first picture is a standard social media profile portrait of herself in a bathroom mirror, scowling at the world. Tired eyes, messy hair, middle finger raised. This is probably the picture that will survive the apocalypse.
“Cute,” I comment, and she punches my arm.
“That was my first day doing this. The picture-a-day thing.”
“What gave you the idea to do that?” I ask. It takes her so long to answer I almost repeat the question, in case she didn’t hear.
“My dad bought this camera for me,” she says, as if confessing to murder after years on the lam. “He was going downhill pretty steadily by then. His memory, you know, his mind. I’d come around to say hi, beg for money, use the toilet, and he’d ask about boyfriends I hadn’t seen since high school, jobs I’d been fired from years ago. I wasn’t exactly eager to give him the latest updates. To tell him about all the cliffs I’d been throwing myself over. That I was living in my car—that’s right, my crappy Toyota? Casa Beth.
“So when I started the house-sitting thing, I took pictures of the places on my phone, and showed them to him. Pretended they were my places. My cats, my cute apartment, my nice plants. I knew he’d forget, and next time I could be somebody else. I know, it’s gross, but the truth … I didn’t want him worrying about me. Or thinking I was in trouble. And I didn’t want to disappoint him. So I lied. With pictures.
“That’s the part that stuck with him. The pictures. So one day when he was particularly lucid, he got out the credit card and went on the internet and bought me a proper camera. Mom was furious. I’m sure she told him that I’d been lying. But I kind of think he already knew. He could tell I was doing my best to get back on the road, and this was his way of encouraging me.”
“‘Get back on the road’?”
“You know. The straight and narrow.” She shrugs. “The picture-a-day bit was my own idea. Something I knew I could do, could stick with, that wasn’t self-destructive. Baby steps. Mom figured I’d just sell the camera for some new way to wreck myself. I’ve enjoyed proving her wrong. I just wish I’d started sooner.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because for my entire childhood, she never missed a chance to point out how much of a disaster I was. To put me down. To set me up for failure. I honestly don’t know why. I don’t think she was always that way. My dad obviously saw something good in her. But there was something about her life that she was deeply unhappy about, and she took it out on me. I don’t know, we never exactly talked it out. Eventually, it just became easier to live down to her pitifully low expectations. Messing up was the one thing even she couldn’t deny I did well. After a while—I know this will surprise you—I kind of got addicted to it.
“That took me to some low places. I knew if I kept it up, it was going to get me killed, or thrown in prison. But by then, I didn’t really know how to do anything else. How to be anybody else. I mean … how do you get clean from yourself? I’ve been trying, Mike. I really have. But every time I do, I just feel like a fraud. A pretender. I can hear her voice in the back of my head, counting down the seconds until I screw up again. And then I drift off the road. And crash.
“I’m no Annie Leibovitz,” she says, nodding at the camera. “But I’m working at it. And I haven’t missed a day. Which is more effort than I’ve given anything else in as long as I can remember. Just in time for the world to end.”
I scroll through her pictures. A lot of selfies, interspersed with still-lifes inside other people’s homes. Colorful front doors, tasteful decor, little messes of clutter and personality. Nothing that was going to win awards, but she was talented. That was obvious. And getting better with every shot. She had an eye for finding stories in things most people would glance at and forget a moment later.
I come across a picture of a shattered sand dollar in a tire track.
“That was my first day here,” she says, as if remembering a moment years ago, rather than a week. There are more pictures of her stay in Strawberry Dunes: beach grass against a soft sky, fried eggs in a skillet, elk in the mist, a bald eagle perched on a telephone pole. I can still see her improving as I scroll, her subjects carefully chosen, the intent of her framing, the use of backdrop and foreground to create depth and draw the eyes.
The best photograph yet is of a man standing in his kitchen window, staring outside into the gathering darkness. The hopelessness and despair in his posture are so real, so perfectly captured, that the weight of them take my breath away. How could a human being, on a planet occupied by billions of others, possibly look so isolated? So alone?
The man, of course, is me. Beth stiffens next to me, as though she’d forgotten to clear this picture off the memory card. Is that her big secret?
“I hadn’t realized anybody was living next door until I saw you that night,” she confesses gently, as if this betrayal of my privacy might send me into a rage. I guess if I were her mother, it would have. On me, it has exactly the opposite effect. “I know I told you the same thing yesterday. I lied, sorry. I didn’t want you thinking I was a creeper. ‘Hey, I’ve been secretly photographing you for the last few days, wanna pour me a drink?’”
“Photographing? There are more?”
I progress through the camera roll. There’s another shot of me, standing on the back deck and staring out at the waves.
A third, taken from the beach, looking in through my office window, which frames me standing at my desk. Beth’s shadow is visible on the sand, her arm raised in a friendly wave I didn’t even see. I was looking far past her.
This series of pictures could be shown in a gallery, if such things still existed. Masterly shots of a man wading through the ruins of his life, searching for something worth salvaging and coming up empty-handed, because he’d already let the thing he treasured most slip through his fingers.
“I’d make up stories about who you were,” she says. “What you were always looking at. Or looking for. I know that’s weird, I just … I’d never seen somebody who looked as lost as I feel. It was kind of comforting, knowing you were over there. Anytime things got heavy in my head, and I felt like I was going to lose it, I just looked for you.”
The second-to-last photo was taken yesterday. Me and my stupid champagne. Minutes before we met and changed each other’s lives. This evening’s selfie is the first shot on the roll with another human being sharing the frame with her.
“You know,” she says sourly, “it’s not cool that you got to look through my pictures, but I won’t get to see your new movie.”
“It if makes you feel any better, nobody will.”
She laughs. “Apocalypse humor is dark.”
“No, what I mean is, there isn’t a new movie. There never was.”
“But the champagne—” she starts, as if unable to accept that she isn’t the only liar in the car.
“The champagne is what Sarah and I used to do,” I tell her. “It was our ritual, I was being honest about that. Whenever I’d wrap on a project, we’d come up here so I could decompress for a few days. That first evening, we’d always pop a cork, pour two glasses, and she’d look at me and say, ‘So what’s next?’”
“Sounds nice,” Beth says.
A wave rocks us hard, splashing across the roof and streaming down the back window. Water laps against the seats.
“I thought so too.”
“Then what happened? Where did it go wrong?”
“It was always wrong, that’s the problem.”
She studies me with narrowed eyes.
“Because I was always too busy with me. With my goals, with the things I wanted for us, the things I thought were important. You know, with movies, you wrap, have a martini, and you go on to the next thing. Turns out, people don’t work that way. They’re ongoing. Always changing. I think, when Sarah asked me, ‘What’s next?’ she was hoping I’d say her. Hoping I’d give some indication that I was paying attention, that I knew she was her own person, that there was a whole life behind her eyes, that she had her own ambitions, her own fears, her own pain, and that I was ready to be there for her no matter what. But I’d wrapped on that project long ago and moved on, content that it would always be great. That nothing could possibly sneak in and cut all those wonderful frames to ribbons.”
I look out at the sunset.
“One year ago yesterday, she went out for a walk on the beach, and never came back.”
“Oh, Mike. I thought, when you told me she left…” Beth trails off.
I nod. I had let her think that, because, like her, I hadn’t wanted to face the truth all over again. Hadn’t wanted my throat to tighten as it does now, for my mouth to contort into these ugly shapes as I try to form the words.
“She loved wading into the ocean,” I force myself to say. Because I’ve needed to say this, to somebody other than myself, for a long time. “The feel of the water around her legs and the sand between her toes. She used to laugh at me, standing on the shore, wanting none of it. I don’t mind L.A. beaches so much, but here…” I trail off, the words of that sign flickering across the screen of my memory. DON’T SWIM ALONE. NO LIFEGUARD. BEWARE OF RIP CURRENTS. “I didn’t go with her that day, like I usually did. I had an ‘important’ phone call. I couldn’t be bothered. So she went by herself. That was the last time I saw her, from my office window, walking down that trail to the beach.”
