Broken Monsters (22 page)

Each of
the six houses is curated to a theme, announced on the real-estate sign outside. They move through the buildings, peering in all the rooms: Would House, Lust House, House of Amerikana, House of Money, Luminous/Limnal, _Blank_.

Some of the art is lame, Heidelberg Project–lite. Plush toys stuck up all over exterior walls in “Soft” and a bonfire pile of sneakers, like Tyree Guyton's high heels.

“Yawn,” Cas says. She likes the banal wall-size pop-art remixes in the Amerikana house where Marilyn Monroe has been given Kiss makeup and Osama bin Laden has been mashed up with Einstein with his tongue sticking out. “I'd wear this on a T-shirt. See, I'm an arts connoisseur.”

Layla lingers at the storm cloud of gray balloons that fills a room, set up with shifting lights that create a sense of expectancy, dawn or dusk constantly breaking in Luminous/Limnal. It's a lot more interesting than the boring porno stuff in the Lust House.

And she likes the interactive piece upstairs at _Blank_ (where presumably the floors have been reinforced), luggage tags hanging from the ceiling on red strings, where viewers have to complete the sentence prompt, “I've lost…” The range of answers is lovely. “My mind!” “My grandmother.” “My virginity.” “All the feeling in my right leg.” “My place in the world.” “My dog. Reward offered!” “My wi-fi password.” “My dignity.” “$200 at the casino.” “My sense of wonder.”

“Are you going to read every single one?” Cas complains.

“I haven't thought about what I'm going to write yet.”

“I've lost…my patience with art. I'll see you outside.”

Layla finally writes down “my one true love” and then thinks better of it. What if Dorian recognizes her handwriting? She plucks it from its ribbon mooring and crumples it up in her fist. Then recants. When would he ever have seen her handwriting? And so what if he has? She hopes he
does
see it. She flattens it out and reties it among the others twirling gently.

In the meantime, the house has filled up. The crowd has become a salmon migration of shoving bodies. She fights her way down the stairs only to be faced with an even worse melee. It's going to take her half an hour to get to the exit. Someone barges into her and someone else steps backwards onto her toe.

“Ow!” She pushes back, but the crowd is oblivious. Screw this. She goes the other way into the kitchen, which is full of mannequins, spray-painted silver. She tries the latch on the back door and, mercifully, it opens onto a wooden porch that leads down into a dark overgrown garden. The music has become denser. She can feel it in the back of her teeth. Bass must generate its own subsonics.

She makes her way gingerly down the steps into the darkness and the long grass, hoping for a gate or an access alley down the side of the house. The grass gives way under her boots with a soft cellulose scrunch of protest. Blackjacks prick through her tights, clutching at her legs. Everything needs to propagate. She's just the vector of transmission.

She tramps past a dilapidated chicken hutch with the wire peeled back, the chickens long gone (flown the coop, ha ha), to the rickety wooden fence enclosing the yard. It's because she's watching her feet and thinking about seed cycles and aviary jokes that she doesn't see the tall figure canting forward with its malformed head and too-thin arms next to the chicken hutch, until she's right on top of it.

Layla has never been big on screaming. As a kid, she used to lie dead still, trying to keep her breathing slow so as not to tip off the monster under the bed. She goes quiet now. Blood thuds in her ears. Her mouth tastes like iron.

“Hello?” she whispers, so soft it doesn't come out. A warm flush of embarrassed relief as she realizes it's a dumb statue. Cheap thrills, like the floorboards, only this is more like a bad Halloween decoration. Shock art. A little deer with nubbin horns and a white tuft of fur on its narrow chest, its legs and hooves sticking out like arms, upright in pants and dirty sneakers. The creepiest thing about it is that its eyes are gone, so the fur around the sockets caves inwards on dark pits.

“Not funny,” she sneers at the deer-boy. It's badly done, awkwardly balanced in a wheelbarrow, propped up with rocks and cables, but it's still tilting forward. The hips are too wide for the chest, so the waist is padded with clay, which makes her wonder why the artist didn't make it all out of clay in the first place, because this thing smells fucking awful, of shit and rot. No wonder the artist dumped it out here where no one would see it. Someone's drawn a chalk rectangle on the fence behind it, like a cheap frame.

Maybe it's the music, or heartbreak, or the cold, but she's filled with growing trepidation. Young deer are called kids, she thinks.

She takes a photograph on her phone. The sculpture doesn't look so bad on-screen. The flash lights up the hollow sockets, taking away the terrible falling-away black of its eyes. It looks small and kinda stupid leaning forward like that. But she sends it to her mom anyway.

Just a stupid statue, but as she heads for the rickety gate in the fence, she has to clamp down on the impulse to turn around to see if it's moved. She shakes the gate, flakes of brown paint coming off in her hand. There are people right on the other side of the fence, and music and beer and good times, if she could just get through.

She could probably kick out some of the boards and squeeze through the gap. Vandalism. She can't help thinking in cop. But minor league, she reassures herself. Barely a misdemeanor. She glances back at the thing in the wheelbarrow. Its eyes bore into her. Her throat burns. She rattles the gate again and realizes her mistake. The hinges are on the inside. Pull, not push, idiot.

She yanks it toward her and skids out onto the wet grass, disturbing a couple making out on a picnic blanket in front of the fence. They glare at her.

Her phone erupts with the ringtone she's set for her mother, which she's been meaning to change for ages. “Mama Said Knock You Out.”

“Where are you?” Gabi demands. “Are you
at
the party?”

“No. Yes.”

“Layla, you lied to me!”

“No, we decided it would be cool—”

“You have to leave right now. Did you take the photograph? Where is the body?”

“In the back of the, um, Blank house.”

“The Bank house?”

“BLANK. It's one of the houses at the art party, they're all themed.”

“Got it. I want you to leave. Now, this second. Call a cab.”

“What about Cas?”

“Take her with you. I want you both out of there right now. Do you hear me, Layla?”

“Okay, Mom! You're freaking me out.”

“I'm sorry,” her mother says in the stay-calm professional voice she's heard her use on other people, but never her. “But it's very important that you do what I say.”

Fuck. Now she's going to be that guy. The one who brought down the cops on a party. “Cassandra,” she yells at the top of her lungs. She can barely hear herself. She elbows her way through the crowd. Half the street has turned into a free-for-all dance floor. A drunk girl bounces off her. “Get out of my fucking way,” Layla snarls.

She's startled by movement down the front of one of the buildings. Thick globs are running over the slats, binding them together, something happening under a microscope, made large. The light shifts and the cells thicken into layers of skin. Projection art. Someone puts their hand in the way of the laser beams, momentarily casting a giant five-fingered shadow across the entire house.

Cas is sitting on the steps of the house where they started, talking to some of the boys from school. Layla almost sobs with relief.

“Cas,” she calls out. There's something off about the way the guys are crowding around her. A tension in their shoulders. Her trepidation ramps up to full-blown foreboding. “Hey Cas,” she goes for lighthearted. “We should bail. The art's boring, anyway.”

Travis Russo is leaning over Cas with a lazy gotcha of a smile. “You
are
her, aren't you?”

“Bitch, please. I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“No point denying. We've all seen the video,
slut
.”

“Get out of my space, dickhead.” Cas puts her palm in the middle of his face and shoves him away. One of the other boys titters, and that pushes him over the edge.

“Hey,” he calls as she gets up to leave.

“What?” Cas whirls on him. “What
the fuck
do you want?”

He lunges forward and grabs her breasts with both hands. He gives them two short squeezes. “Honk-honk!” he says, like a punch line. “Boobs.”

His sidekicks crack up. But Cas's face goes vacant. She wrenches herself free from his groping hands and flees into the crowd.

“What is wrong with you?” Layla screams at Travis. He is looking shocked and slyly pleased at his own boldness.

“Honk-honk!” one of the other boys says, miming the double pump, folding over with laughter.

“Cas, wait!” Layla starts after her, but the keening of police sirens is cutting through the music, bringing people out of the houses, blocking her way.

“Cas!”

Jonno is
wasted when the cops show up. He
is
filming Jen Q's set, but he's also filming people dancing to her set, which is important, to show how much they love her. The drunk girls have found him and are bouncing beside him, their arms around him. It feels like the whole of Detroit is alive and pumping. “We built this city,” he shouts at the top of his lungs, jumping up and down, “We built this city on art and te-ch-no!” Then the music dies.

It's the first thing the cops do, pull the plug on the sound system, which means he gets his camerawoman back, Jen fighting through the panic to get back to him.

“We should get out of here,” she yells over the hurly-burly. Another word she would never let him say on camera.

“Are you kidding me?” he shouts back. “We have to film this!”

He guides her against the tide, pushing back against the big dumb animal the fleeing crowd has become.

He tries the police first, aiming for the feisty-pants Latina who seems to be calling the shots.

“What's the problem, officer?” He raises his voice to be heard. “Can you tell me what's going on?”

“You're going to have to stop filming, sir.”

“Doesn't Detroit have a very high unsolved murder rate?”

“Sir. Put that phone away or I will confiscate it.”

“Fascists! Pig-dogs!” the girl from LA screams.

Obligingly, she does it again for the camera. He starts getting sound bites from other outraged partygoers.

“Jonno,” Jen says quietly. “Why are they all around the back of that house?”

It's true. The pigs don't seem that interested in writing up tickets, even though this should be a free ride for a broke city. They're hustling people along, trying to get them to disperse as quickly and with as little fuss as possible. An ambulance pulls around the side of the building.

“Think someone fell through the floorboards?”

A young girl wrapped up in a blanket like a disaster victim is sitting on the porch steps outside. She looks wretched.

“I want to see what's on the other side of the fence. Film this,” Jonno instructs Jen. “Keep it low-key.” He plugs in the mic and beckons Jen to follow him. He counts her down, holding up his fingers. Three, two, one. “There's something weird in the D tonight,” he says, sotto voce. “Police bust up the party, but they're not interested in the art lovers. So what's got the cops crawling over the scene like ants on a watermelon? Is it A) A dead homeless person? B) An art-related accident? C) Something more sinister? I'm Jonno Haim, here at the heart of a crime scene.”

He hauls a deck chair over to the fence and climbs up on it, testing his weight. “Pass me the phone,” he hisses at Jen. There are flashes going off in the garden. The police photographer circles a scrawny figure with a weird elongated head. Cops are milling around uneasily, and there are two plainclothes: a bear of a black man and the dark-haired lady detective.

“All my days,” says the fat black guy, and Jonno can't blame him. The figure is freakish.

“What's wrong with his head?” He tries to zoom in on the figure, but he thumbs the wrong part of the screen and his own flash goes off.

“Hey! Who is that?”

He scrambles down from the chair so fast it tips out from under him. It's sheer luck that he's already moving in the same direction, so he steps off as it hits the grass, like goddamn Fred Astaire. It makes him feel invincible as ball-breaker brunette storms toward him.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?”

“Concerned citizen, officer. The public have a right to know. Can you tell us what's going on? Was that a body?”

“I warned you before. Hand over that phone.”

Jen makes a little sound of dismay.

“Is that an official request?” he bluffs. You can't give up without a little resistance. Also known as misdirection. Jen asked him to keep her phone while she was playing, and now he slides it out of his pocket.

“Have you been filming all night?”

“A little.”

“Then you may have evidence that is critical to this case. Please hand it over.”

“What is the case?”

“I'm not at liberty to discuss the details.”

“Well, then I might have to ask my lawyer.”

Her mouth tightens. “It's an investigation into the murder of a minor. I hope that's enough to guarantee your assistance?”

“Wow, of course. That's horrible. Was it someone at the party?”

“If you can leave your name and an alternate phone number with Officer Marcus over there, I'll make sure you get your property back in due course.” The cop notices the girl sitting on the steps watching them and snaps at her. “Layla! Go wait in the car.” It's all the distraction he needs to switch the phones.

The teenager gets up and slinks over to the white Crown Vic with the lights flashing. Verrrrrry interesting. The detective sees him noticing, and that pisses her off even more.

“Sir, no shit, if you do not surrender your cell phone immediately, I'm going to confiscate it and take you in for questioning.”

“Okay, okay,” he says and gives her Jen's Galaxy.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” she snarls and heads back into the garden.

“We should leave,” Jen says.

“Not yet. We're onto something real here.”

“You tricked that cop.”

“So what?”

He raps on the car window. The girl's expression is smeary through the darkened glass. He motions for her to roll it down.

“What do you want?” she says, full of teenage suspicion.

“You okay?” he says, with all the caring concern he can muster.

“No. Leave me alone.”

“Do you know what happened? Did someone get hurt? Did you see it?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“That's fine. I understand. If you change your mind, give me a call, okay?” He passes her one of the cards they've been handing out all night, with his website URL. “Here, I'll write down my phone number as well.”