Death Valley

Chapter 4-3

He swivelled on the stool and faced her.

“I am not going to hurt you,” Vivienne said.

“A girl like you always hurts a guy like me,” Andy said. But he sat there. The dead had cathected onto the photographic paper, their energy had pooled there. She wanted an antemortem photograph of this Andy.

“Would you like to have a picnic in my room?” she asked. Say anything to get the picture.

“You planning on smuggling in the personal vino?”

“It’s already contraband in my suitcase.” Not true, but hey.

“Sounds promising,” he said.

“So, shall we go?”

Andy held his left palm up and made the silent gesture of writing the cheque with his right hand, catching Daysee’s eye as he did it. She had the bill ready. Then he silently poured invisible coffee. Daysee brought more hot mud. What was going on? Vivienne thought. First he calls for the bill, then he calls for more coffee. “Is there a problem?” she asked. Now he was pouring three sugar packs and two petrochemical glops into his brew.

“Ma’am, I do not think I would truly be any good for you, right now. I’m on the wrong end of a hangover this morning. And the truth is I’m off to Baghdad tomorrow, so let’s say good night and call it a day.” His eyes flashed at what he just said. He grinned. But Vivienne could see that his body was rocking slightly with a new weather system coming through. An agitation causing him to shy back.

“Partying hard?” she asked. Trying to revive the moment.

“Ma’am, I –”

“Vivienne.”

“Vivienne. Okay. Vivienne, you see, well. I had a bit of a situation over the weekend. Not a good one, by any stretch. My buddy Sean and I were on the road from LA to Twentynine Palms. That wind came at us, blew us off the road. It blew down a palm and crushed our Commander.”

“You had a commanding officer with you in the accident?”

“A Studebaker Commander Starlight, 1951. Lemon yellow. A real beauty. The plan was for Sean to take it to the shop. That never happened. That beauty looked like a crashed yellow spaceship sitting under all those stars.”

He liked cars, he liked stars, he liked clothes that fit, he liked sweet white coffee, he was at ease in public, he was composed, his eyes were deadly marine blue. “It is so dark, you know, out in the desert.”

“We’re in the desert now,” he said. He had been to the still place. His face showed old geology, old worn harm.

“There’s red corpse debris out there all over the sky, you know,” she said, and when he smiled at her, she felt her right arm wanting that dear camera in it, badly. “Those stars, they are already gone from us, they are just energy cadavers.”

Andy’s eyes turned midnight black. “Ma’am, I think I’ll just ride it out until morning, thanks all the same.” He brought his hand down Vivienne’s pink leather-clad arm to her wrist, where his fingers began playing on her wrist bone. Their shoulders were touching. She moved her wrist so her palm opened. His hand did the same. They each drew their fingers back, curling, staying an inch away. He wasn’t leaving. Her camera was waiting in the room.

“It could be a quiet spot, upstairs. Quiet conversation,” she said.

“Possibly.”

She spoke in a low voice, “So, listen, Andy, if you’re not doing anything for the next hour or so…”

Andy’s eyes had gone off with the ghosts. His body was still there beside her at the counter, but his eyes had travelled to the solo place. Vivienne knew about those micro-blackouts that came after too many shock waves. Temporarily, even without your conscious knowledge, you speak from the grave while being alive.

Andy reached into the back pocket of his Levi’s again. He pulled out something crumpled, so old the creases were white. He unfolded it. It was a picture from a magazine, originally in colour. “This is my baby,” he said.

Vivienne looked at her watch. 1:35 p.m. Less than three hours to sundown.

Andy pressed the cracked paper with his hand like it was money. “This is my Ford Mustang I have back home in San Diego. It’s the prettiest blue you ever saw, some people call it sky blue, some call it robin’s egg. You look at that Mustang when it’s parked, you can feel the wind blowing through a pretty girl’s hair.” The talk of being photographed had put him in his own photograph already. “I’d like to redo the interior in a cream channeling. I’m thinking I’ll get around to getting it detailed when I get back from over there. I bet you’d like to tool on out to Death Valley in a pale blue Mustang convertible.”

“I would,” Vivienne said.

“That red hair of yours would get crazy going at speed, real Medusa.”

“It grows like weeds.”

“Mighty fine weeds, ma’am.” He began to stroke her pink leather jacket, her animal hide. That move was okay now, because she could just smooth it along to the elevator, the room, the lens, the shot. Get the man by a window, before sunset.

“The Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon,” she said.

Andy was framing her in that pretty blue Mustang on an open grey road under blue sky. The model was picturing how he could be the artist. This made him the perfect model. The dark kingdom of light was awaiting, the land of light that came after the end of Eden and snakes, the wild light that ran up into mountains through the wind horns of the endemic bighorn sheep and blew down the hard notes of awe into the beds of salt, deep into their ancient cracks. Nothing was settled, nothing stayed in place where the wind ruled the land.

Andy held the salt-white channels of the clipping up to his face. “I’d be sitting with sand right up my a*s c***k over there in the desert, I’d pull out a picture I used to have of my wife in this very Mustang. I’d stare at that picture the whole night, trying to remember what she looked like.”

“And you get home to where she is,” Vivienne said, “and there she is, right in front of you and you still can’t remember what she looks like. The photograph knows, but you don’t.”

Andy squinted his eyes like How do you know what’s in my head?

“It won’t take long, honey, I promise. We can be in and out of my room in twenty minutes. Fifteen. How ’bout fifteen?”

“You ever see that movie Wings of Desire? Berlin before the wall fell?” Andy asked.

“Black and white; the angels in the archives,” said Vivienne. He had taken her to a car crash, a car love and now he was talking Wim Wenders.

“The very one,” he said. “One night my wife, Caroline, and I head out to see Wings of Desire, but we never made it. A drunk comes out of nowhere and broadsides us. Caroline dies on the way to the hospital. I was blessed I have to say. I walked away with two broken legs.” He smiled at the tender idiocy he had just uttered. “Right here,” tapping the creased photo of the blue Mustang, “is the car we were in. I got it rebuilt afterwards. One night, honestly, I can’t tell you what channel I was watching on TV. I was back stateside. There’s Peter Falk on the screen, at some hot dog stand talking to a guy with wings. It’s black and white. How the hell did I know it was the movie Caroline and I had set out to see and never saw? So it’s looking a lot like Berlin. The angel’s taking a tour of his former life, walking past the Berlin Wall and all. I felt sick with happiness watching it, and I did not know why. This angel goes into a club. Oh yeah, I been there, some sort of German punk band on stage.” He drank down the whole cup of sugary white coffee. “But he’s invisible. He’s back home, but no one can see him. He’s listening in on a woman talking Chinese, which he can’t understand a word of. He’s cracking up with joy at nothing. He’s just glad to be back. He’s dead and he’s glad to be alive. Jesus, ma’am, I’m in bad need of a drink.”

Vivienne extended her hand to his forearm. His skin was warm, the hair blond. She stroked his skin lightly. “Let me take your picture.”

Andy looked at her, his blue eyes going dark. “You know what, Vivienne, why the hell not? I might not have a face next week. I went to a wedding last year where the groom, a buddy of mine, had half a face. I don’t know why I have a face, ma’am. Sure. Take my picture. If it’s twenty minutes, what’s twenty minutes?” He took her hands. “Baby Pink, you sure are some –”

“Hello, gorgeous, que tal?” A tall man with silver hair sat down to Vivienne’s right, where there was an empty chair. He pulled at her swivel chair’s bottom and swung her to face him. “Having fun, Vivi?” It was Val Gold, who lived with her and Johnny. He kissed her right hand. “How’s it going, my darling Vivi? Stepping out on me again, are you?” Val held the seat of her counter stool so her back was to Andy, then let it swing around. “Don’t let me interrupt. Go on, rob the cradle, I’ll just watch.”

Vivienne gave Val a dead-eyed look. “Piss off, you spook buzzard. Piss off, Val, I am working. Can you men ever let a woman get her work done?” Andy looked down into his coffee cup and sucked up the moment. He motioned to Daysee the waitress, and made that writing-out-the-bill pantomime.

“Ain’t she cute,” Val said. “Oh, I remember now, you used to take pictures, didn’t you, Vivi? She used to be a big deal once upon a time, son.” Vivienne watched Andy push away from the coffee counter.

Andy gave her a nod and departed. Vivienne swivelled the seat and watched him walk across the room. Her brain was banging around in its skull jelly. The one who got away. Her eyelashes flickered a thousand white T-shirts in one second.