Gold Fame Citrus (6 page)

“What is that?” Luz said once, after the child had tromped off for another micro-expedition. “The way she
feels
everything.”

Ray nodded. “Like she’s seeing with her hands.”

Night was full-on, though it was a night obliterated by bonfire now thoroughly raging, letting off a chemical pungency where someone had heaved in a sofa. Soon the girl—whom they had started to call Ig, affectionately—tired of her collecting and began to whine and mash her fists into her eyes. Luz made a pillow of Ray’s hoodie and coaxed the girl into lying down, then took up a corner of the duvet and burritoed it over Ig’s soft body. There, the child fell into a fluttering sleep. In the distance a long, manic drum riff crescendoed, sending up trills from the partiers. Ig had been with them for hours now.

“We should have asked where they were going,” Ray said.

Luz swaddled the duvet over the sleeping girl more snugly, wishing for something more substantial to wrap around her, wishing she could free her from the putrid diaper. She laid her hand on the bundle of Ig and rubbed softly.

“Maybe they’re not coming back.” She said it nonchalantly—almost a joke—but she knew it was true. She had known it since they left.

Ray didn’t laugh. He looked at the sleeping girl, unable or unwilling to hide his pity. “Who leaves their kid with
strangers
?”

“Maybe she’s not their kid.”

Ray was quiet, though Luz could tell he had plenty to say. He was doing the dutiful stoic bit that so provoked her. Around them, people scrambled to set up camp where they could get a good view of the bonfire. Luz felt herself pulled taut with the urgency that had been distending in her since the girl plowed into her life. She was close to bursting, and frantic to make Ray feel that bursting, too. She was desperate to make him desperate.

“How could someone do that?” she said.

“What?” said Ray.

“Hurt a little one.”

He frowned down at Ig, pushed Luz’s hair back behind her shoulder. He knew about the photographers, was maybe thinking of them now. “I don’t know.”

“Ray,” she said, startled to find herself near tears. “We’re going to have little ones and they’re going to be hurt.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“Neither would you. But someone will.”

“Babygirl, don’t get like this.”

“There’s too much hurt in the world to be avoided. More than enough for everyone.”

“You just do your best.”

She leaned into him and gripped the inner meat of his thigh. “Then let’s do it.”

He inhaled and stiffened. “Do what?”

“Our best.”

Ray looked at her, miniature bonfires winking in his eyes.

“It’s been hours,” said Luz. “Maybe they wanted us to have her.”

“You didn’t even think those were her people.”

“They abandoned her, Ray.”

“You sound like a crazy person,” he whispered.

“Don’t say that.”

“You do. You sound crazy.”

“I’m not,” she said. Was that true? She was beyond determining her own fitness and had been for some time. And yet, here she felt solid—righteous. She peered fiercely into Ray’s prophet eyes aflame. It had been such a long time since she believed in anything. “I cannot accept that there is nothing we can do. I won’t.”

An ebullient shriek went up from the crowd. The drums pounded on and the bonfire swelled with mattresses and furniture and driftwood. There was a flare in the distance, and an orb of yellow-white gaslight bloomed overhead. Then another flare, another fireball, another ripple of pandemonium traveling through the canal. Ray said nothing.

Someone detonated a round of mortars, a purely sonic cluster of explosions that left pale smoke blossoms in the starless night and woke Ig. She startled in her bundle, then sprang up, wailing. Luz tried to take hold of her but the girl scrambled away, afraid. She stood on the smooth and cracked concrete infrastructure, shuddering, her soiled diaper drooping between her bowed legs. More explosions came and Luz knew as she had known anything that the child was on the verge
of tearing off into the darkness, through the dry canals to the channel that was once the Los Angeles River, streaking all the way to the black and infinite and worthless sea.

Suddenly, in one purposeful and athletic motion, Ray was off the blanket. He strode to the girl and scooped her into his arms. She wailed still but he pressed her to him and held her. Luz went to them. She tucked the hoodie around Ig. Ray paced, jouncing the child lovingly and murmuring into her pale head. Eventually she calmed, slackened, and fell back to sleep.

Luz watched. At the cacophonic arsenal of the bonfire’s climax she pressed her hands over the child’s small ears. It was useless, she knew, but Ray gave her one of his endlessly warm, instantly soothing smiles and she kept them there.

The bonfire caved in on itself and the drummers followed. Soon, another ineffectual raindance would disperse up and out of the canal. Luz folded their blanket, packed the growler, berries, and water bottles in the backpack and donned it. Ray watched, Ig still in his arms, her glowing head draped over his shoulder. They stood looking at each other. Ray’s eyes were reddish and bleary now and seeing them made Luz’s hurt, too. She wanted to go home. She had the sense that they were standing on the edge of something and she wanted to step off, together. But Ray did not move.

Then, his eyes widened.

Luz turned, looking for what Ray saw instead of her. Below, across the dark dry canal, a serpentine figure moved easily through the churning crowd. He came toward them, the Nut.

Luz did not breathe.

The berm was dense with people. It was possible the Nut had not seen them. They could flee. She wanted to say all this and more but before she could manage a word Ray leaned into her. He released two firm syllables, the finest she had ever heard: “Go. Now.”

She followed Ray swiftly, wordlessly, away from the Nut, through the throngs, up and over the berm. On the lip of the canal, Luz looked back, the bonfire a dying star behind them, the Nut coming at them, maybe.

“Here,” said Ray, leading her through a gouged redwood gate dangling from its post by one hinge. They weaved through the sacked backyards of the abandoned craftsmen, past their shredded Burmese hammocks, drained koi ponds, groves of decorative bamboo gone to husks. Upended kilns, mosaics of pottery shards, slashed screens, slivers of smashed Turkish lamps lynched from what had once been a lemon tree, hummingbird feeders still half-filled with pink nectar, wire skeletons of dissolved paper lanterns, a splintering croquet mallet, terra-cotta pavers, disintegrating block walls, gutted cushions, a burnt-out miniature pagoda, a canoe filled with excrement and ancient newspaper. All the while Luz watched the baby’s glowing haloed head where it bounced on Ray’s shoulder, nodding
yes
. It led her to the starlet’s car, to Ray, and together he and she fled to their canyon, with their Ig.

Luz woke at daylight on the living room floor with her head split in two. Her aching brain like some dim-witted oracle slogged through the night before: the affectionate half sleep, she and Ray with arms gently tangled, rolling back together when they parted, each always reaching out for the other. Ray twitching. Luz holding him, uncoiling his clenched fists. Ray at some hourless hour, pressing gently into her from behind. Her encouraging him drowsily, tilting her pelvis back so he could get at her. Him urging himself inside and riding her silently, her face pressed to the rug. Him coming quickly, rolling her over and stroking her clit for a bit, then her taking over. Ray with one big hand around her throat, his index finger curled up and into her mouth, puckered with moisture and rind-tasting. Her diddling madly, coming, and falling back to sleep.

The raindance only a zany, phantasmagoric dream, except Ray rolled on top of her now, kissed her deeply with mash on his breath,
and above them, on the starlet’s space-age couch, the child began to cry.

They stared at each other, at what they’d done.

The child went on crying, a tight sound leaking from her. Luz dressed quickly in one of the starlet’s robes, and as she did, Ig climbed down from the couch butt-first. Luz had untied the child’s sagging dirty diaper and lay her on the couch the night before, she remembered now. They looked at each other for a while, the three of them. Luz said, “We should wash her.”

Ray said, “We should feed her.” He pulled his pants on and went to the kitchen. Ig stood nude in the sunlight flooding through the wall of glass. She regarded Luz a moment, opened her mouth slightly in concentration, and loosed a stream of gold-brown urine on the starlet’s birchply floor.

Luz said, Shit, oh shit.

Ray ran in, holding a box of graham crackers. “What—oh. She needs a diaper.”

“I know that.” Luz ran upstairs and came back with a maxi pad and a psychedelic Hermès scarf. Ray was mopping up the pee with a monogrammed beach towel and Ig was crawling along the stone ledge in front of the fireplace, wagging her bare bottom.

“Come here,” Luz said, but Ig screeched, wanting to finish her journey along the ledge and back. Luz waited, then took Ig squirming and flailing and laid her on the ottoman. “Can you hold her?” she asked, and Ray did. “Hey, hey,” he said, trying to distract the baby with weird faces and gestures, none of which Luz had ever seen before. Finally and with considerable trouble, Luz cinched the scarf through Ig’s spindly bow legs. “Just for now,” she said to Ray, whom she could feel watching her.

Ray released Ig and she ran, stumbled, and nearly put her head
through a glass end table. She lay where she fell and howled tremendously. Luz rushed to her and gathered her up into her lap. Ray handed over the box of graham crackers and Luz broke one into quarters and tried to soothe Ig with a piece.

“Can she eat those?” Ray asked.

Luz shrugged. “She has teeth.”

Ig went on wailing, her flat face tomatoed and shiny with tears. Luz waved the cracker but the baby went on screaming bloody murder, as Luz’s mother would have said. And indeed it seemed if Ig did not stop soon she would kill herself, or them. The sound was sharp-edged as a siren and sliced into the softest, still-sleeping or still-drunk parts of Luz’s brain. Ray was doing a freaked-out little dance, hopping fretfully from one foot to the other. Luz wished he would stop. She waved the graham crackers helplessly. Then Ig stopped crying, took a cracker in each hand, and stuffed one into her small, saliva-webbed maw.

She ate another and another. Each time a cracker disappeared into her mouth she would wail for another to replace it, so she was always managing three, two in her fists and one disintegrating in her mouth. Luz waved Ray to the kitchen for more and he came back with an unopened box. He set it on the couch beside Luz. “Something to drink,” she said.

Ray came back with a ration cola and Luz looked up at him. “All we have,” he said. They’d drunk yesterday’s water yesterday. Luz helped the baby with the cola and watched as the syrup mixed with the crackers to make a mealy puck in Ig’s open mouth.

Then Ig wanted to go outside and so they took her into the backyard. On the deck Ray kicked away the spiny somethings as Ig transferred both crackers to one hand and took Luz’s index finger into her other chubby nautilus fist. Ig led them to the chaise, its canvas cushions already baking, and said, “What is?”

Ray said, “Chair.”

He said, “Pool.”

He said, “Fountain.”

“Frogs.”

“Trellis.”

“Hot tub.”

“Fur coat.”

“Half-pipe.”

“Rocks.”

“Rocks.”

“Rocks.”

“Rocks.”

They were in the rock garden—though there was not now much to distinguish the rock garden from the garden garden, except the rock garden had been arranged according to some flimsy interpretation of the word
Zen
—when Ig started tugging at the scarf. Luz untied a knot to adjust it and a little mustard turd rolled out. She picked up the baby and rushed over to the corner of the yard, to the shitting hole, and held her over it. Ig dropped her crackers and began to cry. Luz said, “I know,” and Ig squirmed and flailed in the air as saffrony pellets of poop dropped from her, some of the poops landing on Luz’s bare feet. Luz tried to shake them off but one had established itself between her biggest and second biggest toes.

“Jeez. What did she eat?” said Ray.

Luz wiped Ig’s rump with the maxi pad, wiped her own toes with it, then let the pad and the Hermès flap down into the shitting hole. “How would I know?”

Ray looked down the hole as if regretting the ignoble burial of the beshitted scarf. “Should we keep those?”

“She has a million of them.”

—

Ray dragged the couches and the mod low-slung armchairs from the library and the foyer and the drawing room and with them built a baby corral in the living room. He cleared out all the ouchies, as he called them, and put duct tape over the outlets though they had no juice. He hoisted the glass end tables onto his shoulders, carried them out front and chucked them down into the ravine. For toys Luz unplugged an antique rotary phone from the library and placed it in the baby corral. She gathered up the starlet’s collection of glazy babushka dolls, Guatemalan worry people and cottonwood kachinas from a guest room and, though Ray asked if letting a child play with a kachina wasn’t to invite a wicked hex, she put those in the corral, too, along with a taxidermied desert tortoise, the thickly lacquered and glass-eyeballed head of which Ig promptly began to gnaw.

From then on out it was The Ig Show, an onslaught of enslaving cutenesses. Ig seemed to need a dress, so Luz outfitted her in one of the starlet’s French silk camisoles cinched up on the side with a scrunchie. Ig was a cracker junkie, so Ray emptied the pantry to find her favorite. Ig took everything into her mouth, so Luz cinched dry ration rice into a pocket of gauze and made what Ig instantly called a
nini
, for her to suck. Ig was savage for walks, so Ray made her shoes out of packing tape and corkboard prized from the walls of the library and Luz let herself be pulled endlessly round the starlet’s backyard, shading the baby with a cherry-blossomed paper parasol, big bloom of gauze sprouting from Ig’s face.