1.: Paint Me As a Dead Soul
(Los Angeles, January 17, 2018)
Here’s the scene: Ellison Nicodemo, dope sick and all but naked, comes awake to dusty terra-cotta sunlight filtered through tattered chenille curtains and to the staccato notes of a music box and to the smell of someone else’s brand of cigarettes. The light and the heat are a wrecking ball in her head, and for some number of seconds she cannot recall where she is or how she got there. She can only in the dimmest, most rudimentary sense recall her own name. But then the pieces fall mercilessly into place, even through the shock of this rude awakening, even through the junkie haze, and even through the murderous Los Angeles morning sunlight seeping in despite the drapes. She squints at the old Sears digital clock radio silently ticking away the minutes from its place on the low table beside her mattress on the floor, and blocky red numerals inform her it’s 10:13 a.m.
“It’s a goddamn oven in here,” says the Signalman, and he mops at his face with a handkerchief. “You know that, right? I couldn’t get the heat to shut off. Your thermostat’s busted. And your TV. That’s busted, too.” He closes the lid of the music box, sets it down, and lights a fresh Camel. Through tearing, stinging eyes, Ellison Nicodemo perceives him as a ragged demon in a cheap black suit and shiny cheap shoes, his face slick with sweat, dark sweat stains at his armpits. He’s pulled one of the kitchen chairs over to the corner that passes for her bedroom and he looms above her, tall as tall can be, gaunt as a scarecrow.
“How long have you been sitting there?” she asks him, then sniffles and wipes at her nose.
“A while,” he replies. “Long enough I’m working up a heat stroke. I tried to open a window and let some fucking air in, but they’re all nailed shut. Did you do that? Did you nail your damn windows shut?”
“What are you doing here?” she asks, instead of answering his questions. She turns her head away from the barbarous sun, coughs and clears her dry, sore throat, breathes in the rancid mélange of scents filling the rented room above a Koreatown combination locksmith and shoe-repair shop—spilled beer, sticky spoiled takeout clinging to Styrofoam boxes, heaps of dirty laundry, candlewax scabs, vomit stains, a transvestite prostitute’s cheap perfume, the musky ghost of sex, and her own sour sweat. Down on South Ardmore, the morning traffic rumbles and bleats at itself like an impatient flock of gasoline-powered sheep creeping slowly towards the hollow promise of greener pastures. Then Ellison realizes that she’s alone on the mattress.
“You didn’t hurt him, did you?” she asks.
“You mean your tranny hooker?” the Signalman asks. “No, I didn’t hurt him. I paid him and then I sent him on his merry way. I don’t rough up boy whores. Jesus. Just what kind of man do you think I am?”
That’s a trick question, if ever there were one, she thinks, and she rubs at her protesting eyes and sits up, her bony shoulders and spine pressed against stucco painted the delicate pale blue of a robin’s egg.
“Your television’s busted,” he tells her again.
“It’s not my television,” she says. “It came with the place. It was broken when I got here. But if you’re making a list, the refrigerator doesn’t work, either. Can you at least light me a fucking cigarette?”
“Yeah, sure,” says the Signalman. “Here, you take this one.” He leans over and sets his Camel’s damp filter between her chapped lips, then lights another for himself. Ellison Nicodemo takes a long, soothing drag, praying to the deaf, indifferent god of all atheists that this is just a nightmare and in a moment she’ll wake up and it won’t even be dawn yet. The pretty Mexican boy will still be sleeping there next to her, breathing softly, only almost snoring, still with her because she promised to pay for the whole night. She’ll lie there on the mattress listening to him sleep, listening to the city, and watch the light from the neon signs turning the windows all the colors of the rainbow.
Surrender Dorothy, indeed.
“Well, does the shower work?” asks the Signalman.
“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing in my apartment. And if you broke that lock, you’re paying for it.” She turns her head back towards the offending sun, takes the cigarette from her mouth, and squints up at him again. He looks a lot older than she remembers, older and more weary, more broken down by time and alcoholism and by gravity. There’s more grey in his thinning hair, more lines etched deeply into his face. He looks haggard. He looks almost done for. It’s only been five years since the last time she set eyes on him, but the Signalman seems to have aged at least a decade and a half in the interim.
“You don’t look so good,” she says.
“You been anywhere near a mirror lately?” he asks, smoking and sweating and staring straight ahead at the dead TV, like maybe by sheer force of will he can Lazarus the thing back to life. “You know, you said you were going to Europe. When you left the organization, that’s what you said, how you were going away to Europe to sort shit out and get your head screwed on straight. Prague, wasn’t that what you told me? Didn’t you say you were going to Prague?”
Ellison shrugs and takes another drag on the Signalman’s cigarette. “Yeah, and I almost made it to the airport,” she tells him, “but you know how it goes. The best laid plans and all that happy shit. Should’a, could’a, would’a, but didn’t. If wishes were horses, beggars would be rodeo clowns.”
“Well, I didn’t know,” he says, and she gives him the side-eye and laughs.
“Yeah, right. You’re telling me Albany hasn’t had someone watching me all this time, keeping track, just in case?”
“Just in case what?” he wants to know.
“Just in case anything,” she says. “You’re telling me there’s been no surveillance, no bugs, no tails, no drones, no unmarked black fucking vans lurking about?”
“That’s not what I said,” replies the Signalman. “But I’ve kinda had my hands full ever since you left, and I didn’t know. That’s what I said, that I didn’t know. You claimed you wanted out, so I figured you didn’t need me looking over your shoulder anymore. Way I figured, she’s a big girl wearing big girl shoes and she can take care of herself. But clearly, I was mistaken on that count.”
Ash falls from the tip of her cigarette onto her bare belly, and she brushes it away, but it leaves behind a charcoal smear on her skin. “It is what it is,” she tells him. “Don’t you dare go turning all white knight on me.” She sits up a little straighter and reaches for one of the amber prescription bottles littering the table by the mattress. There’s a small pharmacopoeia lined up there—opiates, opioids, benzos, a few hits of high-test MDMA from a well-connected dealer over in Little Bangladesh, a few tabs of ketamine from another dealer in Silver Lake, half a vial of fairly decent cocaine, and so forth and so on. She pops a childproof cap and shakes two white Vicodin out into her palm, just something to take the edge off until she’s awake enough to fix. Until the Signalman finally spits out whatever’s on his chest, gets it out of his system and goes away and she can proceed with the perfected monotony of her day. Her mouth is almost too dry to swallow the pills, but she manages. Just.