Cosmo (11 page)

After a good swig of water and a stiff slap to the cheeks, he drove on, the terrain unfolding like a gaudy postcard. The sky was a vision of some pagan heaven, he felt, its worship causing a dissociative kind of vertigo: a feeling that deepened, now, to nausea-rekindling degrees, with the spotting of another body. He pulled the van over. And the feeling of sitting there, about to leap from his vehicle and collect another duplicate, somehow held the foreshadowing of routine. There was work to be done, dreadful work, but he had to act, had to attend to each mess of limbs with equal care and comportment, hefting the new body off the soil and rock, lugging it into the van and lying it down gingerly with its brothers. ‘Now there are three,' Matthew said, after it was safely in and with its duplicates. He sucked air, nearly hyperventilating, feeling like some lost terrestrial janitor skipping along the highway of his splintered psyche, tidying up its errant shards. Then breaking into emotion, feeling fatherly, motherly, in the same space of breath, staring down at his three sleeping children, whose faces he covered with one of Cosmo's thin white sheets (though he felt an energy stored and patient beneath the cotton, a lonesome desire from the clones, willing more and more siblings to sprout like pods from the earth – or had
he
fertilized it? Had his droplets of hot urine leeched into the soil to produce these cabbage-patch corpses?). The sun felt too hot, too real. What was real? Was the sand on his toes real? Were Academy Awards, or was regret, real? Were buzzards? Were the three sleeping Matthew McConaugheys in the rear of his van real things, flesh and blood, or were they something else? He thrust his arm through the bead curtain, feeling the hair and scalp of one of his copies. ‘Something is going to happen,' he said aloud, though now he was certain: that his prophecy was correct, and that
something
was going to break his heart.

Still in
PARK
, he stared at the shell-like uprising from the ground, unable to force the van farther down the road. He'd sit and wait. Wait until things made sense again, until he could think properly, use the recorder. It would all make sense. But what if the brothers kept coming? What if they kept sprouting from the ground, one after another, as if to punish him?
What if I'm in hell
, he thought.

‘I'll have to leave some behind,' he whispered. And with a sudden cough, he wept.

 

 

III

 

McConaughey wrenched Cosmo toward a trail marked by repeat tire tracks and a worn and beaten feeling. He abandoned the main road because a white puff of cloud had formed what looked like a curved arrowhead, seemingly gesturing to a spot on the horizon. (He was indeed following shapes in clouds; he figured he was past the point of measured responses.) The path ran to the east, around pathetic dunes and ridges. He urged Cosmo on delicately, with only the softest pressure on the gas. He wanted to be tender, as if too much commotion might rouse the three Matthews in the back.

Relief began to bubble and blossom as he followed the trail for another mile, tires dipping in and out of gouges, crunching over the broken earth. He whined in delight with each passing rock, whispering
oh thank you oh thank you
tas the path yielded only more mounds of sand and blunt nature, inch by nerve-wracking inch. After the second mile, he began to shout in happiness, punching Cosmo's roof, as if he'd just been spared some deathly sentence. He was free, maybe; there were no more Matthews along the trail.

‘I'm sorry,' he groaned, to his own surprise, reaching back to stroke the sprawling arm of one of the clones. There was still the blunt irrefutability of that mass of brotherly flesh. Where would he dump them? Who was going to help him in the middle of the desert? He felt crushed; he closed his eyes and loosened his grip on the steering wheel, letting the vehicle drift beneath him. For a senseless stretch of minutes, he drove blind, Cosmo veering off the path and into untrammelled dirt. When he opened his eyes, they stung with fresh tears, as a splinter of sunlight made the windshield gleam. He took his foot off the gas completely, let Cosmo rock to a halt. He turned off the engine, leaned his sweaty forehead against the sun-heated wheel and muttered a word, halfway between
can't
and
shit
, but posed as a question. The sky was large and stupid and didn't answer.

Time passed, white. He rose from the wheel and blinked, lids cracking. What kind of so-called
acting
experience could possibly have prepared him? He was a semi-decent actor, a surfer; he liked to throw footballs and smoke bowls and read the odd Michael Crichton novel. You couldn't prep for a role like this; method acting didn't even come close. One body was doable, maybe, but
three
? And
why
three? Why not two, or five, or fifteen? He thought hard. Numbers held power – of this he was, at least, pretty sure. He'd done some reading on numerology, the power of naming. Even had a book on the topic, lost now, with a purple hardcover, that gave him a basic rundown of things he'd already known about himself: that the combination of letters in
Matthew
translated to the number nine, which meant he was good at following his feelings and emotions; that he was inspiring to others and was well-suited to co-operative work; that he was mostly tolerant of difference, with a broad-minded perspective and compassionate heart (if a bit idealistic); and that he was naturally suited to creative endeavours, to imagination and art. If he allowed himself to falter, he'd be pegged as aloof and insensitive, selfish and indifferent to other people's problems.

From what he could remember, three was the pinnacle number, lorded over by the benevolent planet Jupiter, rich in symbolism of compassion, love and harmony. It was the Holy Trinity, the Golden Triangle and the highest good; it meant sacrifice and giving, Fame and Beauty and Happiness and Wealth, order and stability. LOVE itself, according to the number chart, equalled three. That there were
three
clones, according to numerology, could only mean good – if not absolutely terrifying – things. Matthew chewed on his cheek, thinking. Maybe there were three bodies because each was a third of his whole, just as 3 x 3 = 9. Maybe each was an equal portion of his psyche, or soul, or animus, or whatever. That they needed to be put back together. Or that he'd broken himself into pieces.

He turned up the volume on the
CD
player and rolled down the windows, letting the noise tear into the desert's arrogant silence. He rubbed his face violently. ‘The desert was made for pilgrims,' he muttered, or laughed: serious travellers stopping at holy shrines to make offerings, penance, prayers. Stages of a journey of transcendence. He was not a tourist in this waste, but a holy soul, a lover, stopping to reflect with each recovered token. Once again, he hit
REC
, his voice shaking.

‘This is all acting; I'm playing a role. I have three versions of myself in the back of the van. And maybe I'm picking up pieces of all the roles I've nailed … I mean, really
nailed
… because I've left too much heart, too much, like,
love
out there in the atmosphere. Too much of Matthew floating around the cosmos. Gotta pick up the pieces, recollect the parts of my
soul
. Feel like a million tiny pieces coming back together!'

This came as a surprise, the thought that his mood or depression was really a scattering, a feeling of being disassembled. Like he'd lost a sense of who he was and wanted to be, the Matthew of his imagination, the Matthew he was
proud
to be. He'd given it away to people, to agents and extras and advertisers. The media writers, the mooching groupies. He'd given a large chunk to Sandra, maybe the largest of all. There were far too many versions of himself floating disembodied in the ether, and now the blankness had responded, conjuring out of the expanse those dreadful visions of what he'd lost. He was a fool to think he was just using his head. The heart was always involved. Intimately. He nearly leapt from his seat.

‘Okay! I'm listening!' he bellowed into the air, following up with a jackal-like laugh. ‘I hear you! I'm a
vail
able!' The wind made no answer. He listened to its breathy incoherence, sticking his head out the window like a panting dog. An insect flew into his mouth and squirmed against his throat; he swallowed. He imagined the relief in releasing his fear, his sorrow, his clutching attachment to trifling icons, karma and voodoo and spiritualism. Falling back into his seat, he tore the Smoking Indian from his rear-view, snapping the dental floss and whipping the brown figurine out the window. He'd rip out and discard all his paltry wards and possessions, offer them up to the void.

After all the tokens had been thrown away and his body was squelching with sweat, the sky was less of a pure, earnest blue; it was deeper and richer to the east. The sun was lower, glowing orange, the thin surrounding clouds swelling with blood. In a few hours there would be one of those dazzling desert sunsets he loved: the atmosphere thrown into indigo and violet, great bars of colour not unlike a punishing, sky-stretching rainbow. The heat had already broken.

He would have to make a decision. Something had to be done with the brothers. He reviewed his options, drinking mineral water thirstily. There was the path of covert disposal. Burial. Cremation. That was easiest; he had enough gasoline. Or, the strangest yet most sensible: drive to town and civilization, hand them over to some hospital's forensic specialist, receive a ‘scientific' explanation. This – the worldly, scientific solution – would require the most courage. Perhaps it was best. Hand off the bodies, get a sliver of a rationalization, rather than ditch the clones and leave all his pain and confusion in the unresponsive wild.

As he scanned the horizon, a small variation of light caught his eye. To the south and east was a distant, ground-level glimmer. He focused and looked. It was something metallic – the fierce rays of the sun's passing lustre rebounding off a metal surface. The sudden thought of somebody,
anybody,
giving him a hand was too sweet and relieving to refuse. He was stupid to have left the road, to have followed a cloudy arrowhead. He should have rushed back to the I80 the minute he found the first body. He cranked the keys and gunned Cosmo toward the reflective surface.

The drive overland was rough, full of worry that the pile of Matthews would awaken. As he closed in, he spotted a rectangular cement structure painted a creamy yellow that made it partially blend into the landscape. The glint Matthew had followed was a bead of light reflecting off a wilted stretch of chain-link fence dangling from its connecting supports. In front of the building was a concrete, cubic block that sank into the earth. Another hotly reflective metal, which looked like a ventilation shaft, ran alongside the concrete. Cosmo bumped and jostled over the torturous ground. The main structure was two storeys, shot with perfectly square, glassless windows. It was dark inside. Someone had spray-painted a neon-green swath across the side, its original message lost to the wind's persistence. The ground swelled up to meet the base, or camp, or facility; an abandoned workstation, probably commissioned by the government. Matthew was about to hit the brakes, discouraged, and head for the highway, when he saw someone sitting on the steps of the building's vacant doorway.

The figure – a hiker, a tourist, whoever – was a calm drop of moisture in so much dryness, a salve to his cracked lips and the hot finger of heat poking the back of his skull. Matthew pressed the pedal and nosed through a gap in the diminished fence, four-wheel drive accelerating and sputtering uphill. Near the building's looming shadow, he reached behind him and freed a wrinkled Longhorns T-shirt from beneath a stone-like ankle. He stopped the van, donned the shirt and stepped onto the soil, wearing a friendly smile, a
you're not gonna believe this, but
expression. Maybe so-and-so would recognize him; celebrity could always help.

He looked and then lost his breath. It was the worst kind of recognition: as if he'd been walking with his head down, his eyes full of sleep, counting his steps on some warm and even pavement of Los Angeles, and before he could be collected and witty and put together, she was there before him, nearly bumping into him. And of course ruining him, making him blush wildly, making him curse the luck that brought him like a homer toward her through the million chancing alleys of a metropolitan city. Making him feel that something spiritual had intervened to make them meet.

He stood a few feet before the cubic slab of concrete. Sandra rose from the stairs, brushing her jeans of what the wind carried. She wore a T-shirt he hadn't seen before: an evergreen. She smiled at him across the fifty feet of soil, and the wind blew her hair into a straight line, pointing west. She looked skinnier than he remembered; he focused on her collarbone, the knobs of her wrists and hips, blinking as grit and dust cut across his bare, sunburnt face. Then she was walking toward him, the same slow stride.

He knew then that he'd stumbled into fantasy – that at some point in the remote distance of the day, waking reality had slipped into dream. Why else were there bodies, identical triplets? Though he was lucid, the direction of the dream was out of his control. He would have to be brave and trust to feeling –
like being on drugs
, he thought – you had to let the flowers bloom unmolested, allow the petals to fall as they wished. He closed his eyes until he heard her scraping footsteps before him.
Wake up
, he told himself, but the world didn't change. He opened his eyes and took in the full sight of her, standing two feet away.