Stone Arabia (24 page)

“Go to the door that says ‘honey for sale.’ There, at the back.”

“Great, thank you.” Denise walked the path to the white farmhouse. The door he pointed to was on a recently built extension. One side had Tyvek insulation sheets nailed to it. Are they allowed to use Dupont-produced Tyvek? But they weren’t random Luddites. They just wouldn’t use anything that would distract them from their worship of God. Keeping your house warm, up here, was not a luxury. It was a practicality. Denise enjoyed reading about them. They weren’t trying to live in the nineteenth century, the way people always think. They were just very cautious and deliberate about technological “innovation.” They protect their undistracted life. They are suspicious of progress, improvement, new things. They don’t blindly grab at whatever is new. They consider such things with deep skepticism. It wasn’t hard to see how much better that might work for someone.

Denise knocked softly on the door, which was unlocked and slightly ajar. She heard someone coming downstairs, and then the door opened and the woman Alice Blake stood before her. She looked like the woman Denise remembered from television, but older. Denise looked into her face—it definitely was the same woman.

“I’m Denise Kranis,” she said. “Are you Alice?”

She nodded. “Yes, good to meet you.” She gestured for Denise to step into the entryway. It felt very dark after the sunlit yard.

“You are looking for a sitter?” she said.

Denise felt strange and panicked for a moment. She stared at Alice. She shook her head.

“No, not really. That’s not true, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

Alice’s brow twitched and she frowned. She pulled back ever so slightly. She knew why Denise was there. Denise felt her mouth go dry; she hadn’t really thought things through.

“What I want to say, what I want to tell you, is I’m so sorry for your loss.” Denise could feel her throat constricting as she spoke. “I want to tell you, I want to help you. Find your daughter, I mean. I know they still haven’t found anything. If I can help you.” Denise felt tears clouding her eyes, and she wiped them. The woman stood there, not moving. There she was, a stranger, so strange, really.
I just wanted to help you. Because, because. How could she know I meant well? Does she think I’m something terrible, a pain tourist?

The woman could have told her to mind her own business. She could have become angry and told her to leave. But she didn’t. She also didn’t take Denise’s hands and hold them as she uttered a prayer in German. She didn’t do that. She didn’t start to cry, she didn’t say, “Thank you, sister.” She didn’t do any of those things.

She looked at Denise. Her eyes were very light blue and rimmed in red. Her skin was pale, and Denise could see she actually wasn’t very old at all. They stood there for a moment, silently looking at each other. Finally she spoke.

“It is all right. I already know my child is with the Lord.”

There was, of course, nothing to be done. She was right. Denise nodded, but didn’t move. Alice held the door open. Denise walked through and then turned back to the woman.

“It will be all right,” the woman said.

Denise walked to her car, climbed in, and backed out of the long dirt driveway.

She drove down to the city, to Ada, to all that was left.

Sometimes Denise imagined he was in Mexico, with a young wife to take care of him. Maybe he played guitar on a street corner, but that seemed unlikely. If he sold some of his things or if he secretly had stashed some money. It was possible. The police never found out anything.

Denise looked at the link Ada had sent her. Ada’s movie,
Garageland,
was long finished, but she had yet to find a distributor. So she posted the film in ten-minute increments on the new video website YouTube. Miraculously, or maybe not, the clips had quickly acquired thousands of hits.

The clips with old Fakes footage had the most hits. And the most comments. But the link Ada sent was for a clip of Denise. She was filmed going through Nik’s things, packing them in boxes.

ADA
(offscreen)

What are you going to do with all of his stuff?

DENISE

Move it to my garage.

ADA

What do you miss most about not having your brother around?

DENISE

It is just … knowing someone your whole life—no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other. It is all
know,
at times too much
know.
It is hard to accept, that knowing between us being gone.

She stretched her arm across a stack of boxes. Three rows of stacked boxes were visible behind her.

The disputes, as you age, over what is the true
know,
checking memories against each other, sometimes sweetly, sometimes for a talk, a sorting out, and other times angrily, because all it takes is a hint, a flash of a gun in a jacket, secret and lethal. It is hard to believe that is really gone.
(She pauses, regards the boxes beneath her arm.)
But there is this.

ADA

What remains.

DENISE

And what I remember, of course.

Five thousand hits and counting. People speculated in the comments over who Nik Worth really was. They had theories.
Denise scoured the comments, looking for a clue of some kind. Maybe he was watching from somewhere, it wasn’t impossible. Would he love it, the attention, or be annoyed by the inaccuracies about him?

Denise signed up for a user name (DeniseK385) and posted a comment. She corrected some of the factual errors other posters had made about dates, venue names, and other trivia.

Maybe he was in the Netherlands, or Spain.

Maybe he was still in LA, with a new name and a new life. It was even possible that he would contact her at some point. But there was no point in looking for someone who didn’t want to be found. She knew he wouldn’t be looking back. He wanted to be rid of all of it. Maybe he wanted the freedom to be whatever he wanted to be now, and that required jettisoning all his past work, all his past. He wanted what it was like when he began, before all of it had piled up into a long life.

One day, without trying, Denise ended up near Vista Del Mar and Casa Real, the house they grew up in. She decided to park the car and walk up the street. It looked much nicer than when they had lived there. Each house had been fixed up and painted. The white plaster mission bungalow they used to rent now had a high hedge all the way around it. Denise decided to knock on the door, the way people sometimes do when they see a house they used to live in. She knew it would be a peculiar experience. Memory-palace stuff. Memory palaces were what mnemonic artists used to remember complicated things. Before photos and movies and tape recorders. They would imagine the layout of a building—a palace—either real or invented, and then place things to remember in each room. Then, as they walked
through this imaginary house, they would remember what things or ideas they placed on the table or in the cupboard. The hippocampus organized data by some complicated interaction of ideas and spatial associations. The more familiar the building, the better the method worked.

Denise rang the bell. She told the woman who answered she used to live there—grew up there—and would she be so kind as to let her walk through? The memory-palace trick could work the other way, too. Outside of your mind, in the real world. Walk through the place where you used to live, and the details—the ceiling molding, the light from a window, the feel of floorboards as you moved across the threshold of a room—could make you remember everything you did and said and felt in that place, so many years earlier.

Lisa and I are doing our makeup in front of the full-length mirrors attached to my sliding closet doors. We are listening to T. Rex and dancing a little as we do ourselves up. We are laughing, but we are also sort of bored.

I look up and see that Nik is at the door watching us. He has his new Polaroid SX-70. He takes a picture of us in the mirror. I put a hand on my waist and extend the other arm in an exaggerated wave. I wink. I blow a kiss. Lisa puts her arms around my waist and peeks her head through my arm. He takes more pictures. We hear the click and groan as each picture is taken and expelled, and it makes us feel like superstars. He collects each photo as it comes out of the camera and places it on my bed. Nik stops when the film runs out. He pulls out the spent cartridge and chucks it in the wastebasket. He pulls a new pack out of his pocket and clicks it in. He pulls another flash bar out and snaps it on top. I have no idea where he gets the money for all the film and flash bars he uses. But he must use tons: a wall of his room is covered from ceiling to floor with Polaroids. At least half are self-portraits. By the time he has switched film, the posing moment is over, and instead of taking more, we all hover over the photos on the bed, watching as
they develop. Something about the flash and the Polaroid film makes a made-up face work particularly well. We are eyes and lips and blush-edged cheekbones. We hardly have noses. We look gorgeous.

“Your album cover,” Nik says, pointing to one extra-posey shot. We don’t have a band, but we nod in agreement.
That must be the cover
. Now we would have to start a band.

As we stare at the pictures, Nik picks up my eyeliner pencil and approaches the mirror. He stares into his eyes’ reflection and grips the pencil.

“Want me to show you?” I say.

“Yeah, but let me do it,” he says. I take the pencil and look into the mirror. He watches as I put a finger to my lower lid and pull down. Then I take the hand holding the pencil and apply the tip to the thin strip of skin between eyeball and lash line. I make a dark, smooth line of color. It isn’t smudgy at all. It is one of the few things I have mastered in this world—I have the eyeliner business down flat. Nik watches, and then takes the pencil from me and leans close to the mirror. His wide-set eyes are a soft, clear gray, and they look made for augmentation. He shakily applies the liner on one eye and then the other. He blinks at his image.

“You’re a prettier girl than I am,” I say, and we all laugh, but it’s not really a joke. He is. I don’t usually look closely at him, but somehow the eyeliner enables a new appraisal. I also notice Lisa is staring at Nik. He’s wearing a T-shirt. He’s tall and really skinny. It’s a tight T-shirt, baby blue with a scoop neck. I realize it is actually one of my T-shirts, and I wonder when my brother decided he needed to get his girl on. But he isn’t gay, he
is just super vain, and he is currently staring at himself in the mirror, his arms folded.

“Let me take your picture,” I say, as if he would ever not let someone take his picture. I pick up his camera and he turns to face me. He starts an apparently well-rehearsed series of poses. He cocks his head, he juts out his jaw slightly and purses his lips. He yawns and looks theatrically bored. He starts to laugh and looks down, hands in pockets. He looks at the camera again, and I notice there is a tiny edge to his expression, an undertone that suggests he is about to do something, or is suppressing something, only you can’t quite read it, it might be a smile or a sneer or he might crack up. And he looks as though he is in on the joke somehow, of the phony poses, of his vanity, of a photograph. I can’t quite figure out how this works, but I understand that this is what we mean when we say someone looks cool. My brother looks cool. He is wearing my girly T-shirt and eyeliner, and he totally pulls it off.

He stops abruptly and reaches for his camera.

“I can’t take this music,” he says, and he leaves the room. Lisa and I examine the photos I just took. They move from gray-brown to big blobs of color and then grow sharper.

“Nik is a fox,” Lisa says. I shrug. He is so familiar, so deeply of my family life, that it is nearly impossible for me to believe he is sexually attractive to anyone. I fan out the photos. His looks are an abstract asset to me, something I hope reflects my own attractiveness, which I am also blind to. I hold the little padded border of the photos. He could be in a magazine, sure he could. But so could anyone. Nik and I are both theatrical, we both figured out how far that veneer of theater could take you.

We spent many nights alone as little kids. The lack of supervision meant we would have whole evenings of uninterrupted fantasy. We would pretend we were on a ship lost at sea, or were royalty in exile, living in an abandoned country castle (one of Nik’s favorites). We were in a musical, and we would burst into song. We were in a bomb shelter, and the whole world had been obliterated. We would lay down the rules of the premise, and we would do what we had to do, make dinner or do chores or whatever, within these made-up parameters. Mama didn’t know any of it; by the time she got home from work, she was just glad we were safe and fed and in bed. As we got older, we retained our love of artifice of any kind. Nik’s first stab at a band was called the Make-Believers.

I revel in affectation and teach it to Lisa. Even if I weren’t already an expert, it wouldn’t take a girl long to figure it out. All you have to do is put on your clothes and makeup and go for a walk on lower Sunset, where all the clubs are, or even just waltz into Hamburger Hamlet: we would get looks, we would get attention. It’s fun because we are made up—not just in makeup, but we are made-up, imaginary people. We are liberated because not only do we know we can pull it off (whatever it is) but we know everyone else is a fake, too. Maybe Lisa doesn’t yet know this, but I have always known it.

We decide to get Nik to drive us over to Sunset. We live not far away, but we don’t want to trudge the back blocks in our high heels. Besides, Nik is a good accessory. He always knows what club has good music and is always being invited to parties. If I look iffy and maybe a bit too young, Nik tips the scales in my favor; he ups the charade considerably. You might ask what
the goal of all of this is, but believe me, it is pretty innocent. We don’t have sex, not yet, and we rarely drink much or do any drugs (Nik, alas, is a different story). We just want to be out and around the sex and drugs, the hip adults; we want to hear good music, and we want—most of all—to be looked at and desired. We want to feel that desire the way you feel the hot sun burning down on your head. We want it to cover us and make us glow. That is enough for me, anyway.