Maeve fly, p.2
Maeve Fly, page 2
Now here I am, her double, her ghost, haunting the Strip unseen.
* * *
Entering through the front door, the foyer greets me, opens up into the large living room beyond. My bedroom sits on one side of the house, and the master, my grandmother’s room, on the other. Between them a series of open spaces: dining, kitchen, bar. Balconies wrapping around both the main level and downstairs, looking out over the Strip and up into the hills. Downstairs, there is a small movie theater and a guest suite that has never, as long as I have lived here, been utilized. And below that is the wine cellar. Only the wealthy have basements in Los Angeles. There is something unsuitable about them here, and to spend too much time underground in a city in which the ground routinely shifts is a sort of glamorous temptation of fate. We have no yard, no pool. Just the three stories attached permanently and precariously to the hillside. As fixed and fleeting as any of us will ever be.
I step into my grandmother’s room. Hilda, her nurse, has just left, and the air still reeks of her disinfectant. I have never liked Hilda, not since the day she arrived and shoved me aside, shooed me out of the room as though I would ever do anything except help, as though I would not give all of myself to this woman I love. But Hilda has kept my grandmother alive, and that is more than enough to make up for her impatient European efficiency and vulgar sense of entitlement to our home.
But now it is my grandmother and me. Only us. I stand just inside the door. I do not approach her, and I do not say anything. The room, like the rest of the home, is tastefully decorated by a designer in an Old-Hollywood bungalow aesthetic, though the house is far larger than any bungalow. The velvet curtains are pulled wide, and the late afternoon sunlight spills in over her body.
My grandmother doesn’t know I’m here. She is dying, has been dying, slowly and ungracefully, for months now. Cirrhosis of the liver that led to hepatic encephalopathy that led to hepatic coma. The failing body works in every way to remind us that we are nothing more than a series of fired impulses, a machine of biological compulsion that really has very little use after reproduction. A slight tremor makes its way through my grandmother as I watch her, and her lips quiver as though she is attempting speech. She is not conscious. It is too much to wish for.
I remember those same lips, with her signature red lipstick, meeting the rim of a glass, her Old-Fashioned swirling amber inside. The two of us tucked in a booth at Jones my first night in town all those years ago. Red-checked tablecloths, brick walls, low lighting from sconces and small lamps. She ordered us two plates of spaghetti. Neither of us touched them. I took a sip from my own glass, filled with the same liquid as hers, and set it down, my hand shaking just a little.
She sat back and tapped her long red fingernails on the table, studying me. She wore an ivory Chanel blouse, left undone to a scandalous degree, a black lace La Perla bra beneath. Bulgari diamond snake around her throat. She has never told me her age. I could ascertain it through a quick internet search, but if there is something she does not want me to know, I am content not to know it.
“So. My granddaughter.” She said the word slowly, tasting its syllables, its hard consonants exaggerated in her haughty mid-Atlantic precision. This was the first day we had ever met. She and my father never saw eye to eye. It had almost everything to do with the fact that she took very little interest in raising him and left him in the care of a nanny for most of his childhood. His father was undoubtedly a movie star, but his identity has remained a mystery to my father for the whole of his life. I know, now, of course. But I will not tell him.
“You’re beautiful,” my grandmother said to me.
“I look just like you,” I said.
The edge of her lip quirked up, and her nails fell still on the table. She considered me.
“What do you see, when you look around this room?”
Billie Holiday played over the speakers. Waiters visited tables unhurriedly. In the small pools of light in the dim space, faces leaned close in conversation, dipped down to take a bite of food or a sip of a drink. Someone laughed. The bartender shook and poured.
“I see…”
“Don’t try to please me,” she said. “Just look. Really see.”
I drew my eyes away from hers and scanned the room once more. I saw humans. Humans trying so hard to make meaning, to create a space for meaning. An experience. Something to be desired. I saw walking corpses draped in finery meant to look not so fine. Expensive but casual. I am not trying, they said, this is effortless. But the trying, the striving, it poisoned the air, it perfumed it. It was everywhere. It was intoxicating. Everywhere, all the time, people are pretending. But here, in Hollywood, it is so much more. So much more that it renders it authentic. I wanted to drink it down and gulp it up and fill myself with it. I looked back at her, and I knew that my cheeks were flushed.
There we sat, the two of us, and I stared into her eyes, so like my own, this woman the picture of what I will grow into, what I will become. And the wrenching loneliness I had felt for the whole of my life, the simple fact of my being utterly and completely different, began to float away. We were two wolves in a flock of sheep.
She smiled then, as though she had read my thoughts. A wide and knowing predator’s grin, and her eyebrow lifted. She brought her glass up above the plates of untouched food. “We are going to get along just fine,” she said.
The bar fades from my mind, and I am staring at an unmoving woman, sunken in ways I never could have imagined. Connected through translucent tubes and wires to machines that light up and seem to do nothing else beyond take up real estate in the room, marring an otherwise beautiful space. All of it, a dying dream. Her condition, usually brought on by alcoholism, I was told was likely in fact brought on in her case by a rare genetic disorder. Hereditary, they said. You should be cautious yourself, they said, to me. In my initial frantic research, I even turned (in perhaps my darkest moment) to the overly moneyed and inanely out of touch new age corners of the internet—largely broadcast from the west in Venice and the east in Joshua Tree—in which I was informed that liver disease is tied to an excess of anger.
My grandmother’s familiar, a decrepit old Lester the Cat, brushes past my ankle and into the room to jump up on her bed. He bends down to nuzzle his face against hers, trying to get a reaction. Of course he does not. I can’t be in here anymore. I close her door softly behind me and head out into the living room. The floor-to-ceiling glass looks out over the Strip on one side, the hills on the other. Props from her movies hang from the walls and sit in corners on shelves, preening and alive. A tiara, an old telephone, a vase of fake winter flowers. I pour myself a glass of water and strip my shirt off over my head, let it fall to the floor. Unlike my grandmother, I adorn myself with nothing. I wear simple clothing, keep my face and my neck bare other than the makeup I am required to wear at work. It suits me better. I sip from the glass, and my hand again shakes.
Here is what matters: my grandmother is dying, and Kate will soon find everything she wants and more, and I will not enter her brave new world of television stardom and Hollywood grandeur with her. But I have done the research. On average, it takes two years from the current stage of my grandmother’s illness to claim the life of someone her age if she does not wake, which the doctors have said I should not hold my breath for. And, on average, from my own personal observations, it takes a young Hollywood actress about five years of nonstop pursuit in this town before anything substantial takes off, if it ever does. Kate arrived here three years ago, so she also has about two years before anything happens. So, I have determined that I have two years with the two people who matter, before I become a one. It is not exact, or even reliable if I am being honest, but it is enough to keep myself sane. My grandmother doesn’t speak to me anymore, but she is here, and that is the core of it. She is everything.
I have the Strip, and I have the park, and I have Kate and my grandmother for two years. I know everything about this place, every crack, every facet, and I am its surveyor and keeper and master and appreciator. For the next two years, my life is perfect. And beyond that, I will live alone. The timer on my life as it exists now is ticking louder every day, culminating in that ultimate inevitability.
I don’t have to face it yet, and in the meantime, there is so much pleasure in routine.
IV
Inside my room, I turn on Billie Holiday. There are only two kinds of music in my world: Billie Holiday and Halloween songs. Nothing else stirs me in the right way, produces the tingle from the ear to the breast, down through the spine. I have long been curating and developing what I believe to be the definitive Halloween song canon, and it is beautiful.
I flip my small TV on, an antiquated proper television that takes up space and depth and only plays VHS tapes. I love my old TV. I know that it will not endure forever, that one day its outdated technology and many years of dutiful function will be claimed by time and decay as all things are. Everything good fades and disappears.
I pop in a porno, man on man, light bondage, an old favorite. On my desktop, I open YouTube and pull up a video of a gray wolf hunting a rabbit. Like the porn, I’ve watched it before, and I know how it ends. It doesn’t make the buildup any less exquisite. There are no spoilers in life. If you are observant and pragmatic, the endings of all things are easily predictable. In the most basic terms, human life is always punctuated with death. It does not cheapen the buildup to know it. There are many winding paths to an inevitable end, and there is so much beauty and pain in the watching.
I slide my jeans off and lie down on my bed just as Rick inserts the smallest of his plugs into Conrad and the wolf steps behind a thin gray-barked tree, his olfactory senses on alert but his eyes not yet having found his prize. Billie croons over the speakers. I open my phone with my free hand. I check the time. It’s perfect. She is always most active on social in the afternoons, once her kids are home and needing her attention.
She is Susan Parker, and if I am able to smoothly execute this, her life is about to end.
I open my app, one of many fake accounts. Trixie Krueger. Thirty two years old, Orange County, Pro-American and Proud! You can get away with any name these days. All these children are Paxton and Austynn and Braydyn and Braydee. These will be the names of children’s parents and grandparents. These names will be written in history books.
For months, Trixie Krueger has been conversing with Susan Parker, a fanatic NRA member and mother of five. Gaining her trust, becoming her confidant and friend. Susan Parker’s children bear an uncanny resemblance to fleshy malformed dough, and not one of their names disappoints. There is Kayleigh, Karleigh, Chasen, Brantleigh, and my favorite, Boone. I have memorized them, have reveled in their now even bleaker futures. Susan and her husband drive matching H2 Hummers, but hers is pink. They have money, family oil. Susan’s husband’s entire wardrobe consists of casual camouflage, and he drinks Kum & Go’s HuMUGous one-hundred-ounce sodas on the daily. I have not been able to ascertain the flavor, but I’d like to think it’s Mountain Dew. Susan, on the other hand, does not drink caffeine or alcohol, has never smoked or imbibed any drugs, and keeps her body dutifully pure for her husband and Jesus. Perhaps it is her shunning of vice more than anything else that really brought me to understand that she was the most beautiful, the most perfect of targets. I don’t mind so much that she is racist. Morally disappointing people exist everywhere. It is really just the holiness that kills me. Nothing in this world is so deliciously satisfying as watching a pious person go down.
So many months of work, and I think today might be the day. I am nearly dripping with the anticipation of it.
I open our chat.
The chat begins the way it does every time. Small talk about her children and the long sunny weekends we’ve returned from. I compliment her most recent Insta post, an image of Susan and two mom friends posed in beige and leather riding boots with the caption GOT MY PSL WITH MY GIRLS, OFFICIALLY CHRISTIAN GIRL FALL! I inquire about the latest PTA dramas. I mention an armed robbery somewhere that could be anywhere, but I know where she lives, her street number and the color of her mailbox. It’s enough to get her going. It really takes so little.
SUSAN: It’s just that with all these people moving into the neighborhood I fear for my kids safety. It’s really disturbing all the things you hear and the police are worried too! My neighbors brother and also my sister-in-laws husband are both on the force God bless them and they both say we’ve really gotta watch out.
TRIXIE: It just isn’t right. I know we’ve said it before, but they don’t pay taxes. They expect all these handouts and then they make it unsafe for our children to live in their own God-given-rights homes!
SUSAN: Amen. Remember that robbery I told you about? Six houses down from me and someone stole his American flag too! And he’s a docent at our church!!!
TRIXIE: Honestly I know it’s not Christian of me to say it but I just sometimes wish we could round them all up and burn em.
I send the message, my heart pounding, and wait. She types. Rick and Conrad on the TV move on to the medium-sized plug. The wolf’s eye catches movement. Billie croons. All of me, why not take all of me? I slip my hand beneath my underwear.
SUSAN: Frankly it’s what they deserve. Every day I fear for my babies. Every night I go to sleep and I lie awake thinking what if someone comes for them when Joel and I are not around. Nobody knows what that feels like. It’s not right and it’s not the world I thought they would inherit from us. The one they were meant to inherit. It just makes me sick.
My heart pounds again, my breath coming in faster. I reach for a vibrator so I can use both hands to type.
TRIXIE: Look I know we haven’t met in person but I feel like I know you. And it’s just so nice to know there are good God-fearing women in this country, that you’re keeping His spirit alive. I’ve been wanting to ask you something for some time but I needed to know what kind of woman you were first. I needed to know I could trust you.
Send.
She types. I wait. My heart is pounding. Conrad is moaning. I am so profoundly wet.
SUSAN: You can trust me.
I type.
TRIXIE: Well, I’m not sayin this is true … But hypothetically if I were to tell you that I am a member of an organization … the type of organization that has been around for some time and is still around even though they have to keep it quiet … if that organization existed and if I were a member maybe I could tell you that we’ve got a chapter in your town. Maybe I could tell you that they COULD do something about that little problem of yours. We do it all the time—take care of our own. We know how important it is to stick together to stand up for the country we were promised. So … if this hypothetical were real could you see yourself being interested?
I send it. I am sweating. Blood pumping to my clit. My skull. I send another.
TRIXIE: If you’re not we can pretend I never said anything. It is after all a hypothetical.
TRIXIE:;)
She types. She pauses. She types again. The wolf spots the rabbit. Rick is rock-hard. Susan Parker types. I wait. The vibrator buzzes between my legs.
Finally, it comes through.
SUSAN: I’m interested.
I exhale. I screenshot the conversation. All of it. One hundred and eighty-six messages from Trixie Krueger, one hundred and seventy-two from Susan Parker, age thirty-seven, Louisville, Kentucky. 251 Sherman Drive. I screenshot her LinkedIn, full of her volunteer Church work and Haiti missions. I screenshot her Instagram, her Facebook, and her PTA membership photo on the website. Conrad on the TV says, “Yes, Daddy!”
I open Reddit, and I post it all.
I run my server through a Ukrainian IP address, so Trixie Krueger, fictional as she is, will not be found. I’ve done it before, and I know how to cover my tracks. But Susan Parker, on the other hand …
The Reddit upvotes and comments begin to arrive. She will be annihilated. Her life is irrevocably ruined, and she is about to lose everyone and everything she loves. I did it. I did this to her.
The wolf’s jaws close. Rick shoves himself into Conrad. Billie sings.
I move the vibrator aside.
I come, violently, beneath my hand.
V
An hour or so later, I lean in close to the bougainvillea outside the tomb of Tower Records, still basking in the afterglow of the most delicious downfall of another, the demise of a woman who thinks herself chosen, who believes herself to be untouchable.
Bougainvillea are the ultimate microcosmic display of this city. Exquisite, exotic, erotic. The shock of their purples and pinks a transgression against the dusty green of the palms, the smoky slate sky. Like the city itself, the bougainvillea does not belong here. It is too vibrant, too alive, never meant for this desert at the end of the world. And yet, here it is. And beneath the dazzling colors and intoxicating scent, there are thorns longer than fangs and sharper than kitchen knives, waiting to cut us all open. I like to gather them all up in my fists, punctured and pleasured and raw.
The Sunset Strip was originally a stretch of dirt road built to connect Hollywood with Beverly Hills. A no-man’s-land, a desert expanse of nothing. An absence to be traversed only when absolutely necessary. After some time, a few bars popped up, outposts for the traveler, and a gas station here and there. Then came the visionaries, the ones who saw the space for what it was and what it could be. Francis Montgomery. Arnold Weitzman and William Douglas Lee, the architects of the Chateau.
Over the years, the Strip has lived a life of extremes. High highs and low lows, heydays followed by periods of nothingness, of forgetting. The last great high, of course, was in the days of rock and roll. The riots in ’66. Mötley Crüe, Jim Morrison, Tom Petty, Blondie, Jane’s Addiction. The Roxy and Whisky a Go Go. The Viper Room.
