The Journey Prize Stories 22 (10 page)

“Forty-five minutes,” she says to them. She's developing frown lines already.

I perspire heavily under the blinding television lights, which I suspect suits them fine. They've brought no one to powder my nose or remind me not to wear stripes.

“You've always been drawn to the theme of exploitation, but critics are saying you've taken the subject too far,” says the reporter, licking his lips. “Do you think your
protagonist
committed a crime?”

“Yes.”

“In some countries he'd get life in prison.”

“Here, in so-called civilized countries, they rarely even do time. We express outrage, but we do nothing to change the laws.”

“So this book is meant to highlight our cultural hypocrisies? Express that we're all somehow complicit in child rape?”

I lie about needing to go to the bathroom, which will surely be perceived as a glaring indication of guilt.

Lana is hovering outside. “Where are you going?”

“It's horrible. I just want to go swimming!”

“I can arrange that.”

“I don't want you to
arrange
anything. Just let me go to the fucking bathroom!”

“Of course,” she says, stepping back. I'm disappointing her too.

“Why do we do this?” I mutter to my big, sunburned clown face in the mirror. How could twenty minutes outdoors wreak such havoc? The bags under my eyes glow a sickly bluish-white from wearing sunglasses, and there are grim white creases around my nasolabial folds. Why didn't she tell me how awful I look? I'd like to retreat to a dark crawl space to die, but she's pacing outside waiting for me.

“Okay?”

“I survived. I'm sorry for –”

“I understand. Just two more today and no more cameras, I promise.”

“I'll do them at the bar. You should take a break.” Somebody should be looking out for her, too.

“We'll head to your reading at six.”

“You must have better things to do.”

“Like fireworks?” She smiles with her whole face, and it's like a life preserver.

Here she comes, black sleeveless dress, black stilettos, hair spilling around her shoulders. Does she have a room here for quick changes? The nails are still orange. That's reassuring.

“There's been a bomb threat at the venue. We had to cancel the public reading.”

“Oh dear.” So it's come to this.

“Don't worry. It was probably something to do with that action movie about the Saudi-American war. It premieres tonight at the multiplex next door. But we've found a new venue for a private reading.”

She looks unimpressed when I order a double, and starts clock-watching when my bellboy fan Marius and his hugely pregnant and famished girlfriend join us. By the time the bill arrives, we're fifteen minutes behind schedule.

“I'm paying. I insist,” I say. Lana doesn't put up a fight.

Walking to the reading, we hit an intersection clogged with environmentalist protesters and riot police. I think there might still be hope for this town, but it turns out to be a movie shoot. Within two blocks there's another movie shoot; it's hard to tell where the real world begins.

The new venue is a cramped condominium party room.
Aside from a few very attractive young people who look like movie extras, there's a murder of book-chain execs, old-fart academics, and errant realtors. I stick with a safe passage about the mass dolphin suicides, and get the reading done before the slurring kicks in.

Afterwards, there's a little party for me in a condo on the 52nd floor – one of those cold, modern, blinding-white jobs, full of wilting food in takeout containers and boxes of wine. Lana stays in the background, ever-watchful, throwing me the occasional guarded glance. The talk is mostly bestseller lists, government grants, books about war, finance, science – real life, that's what everyone wants. Nobody trusts fiction anymore, and why should they?

I escape downstairs for a cigarette. Out on the street, I realize that I left the pack in my jacket and that I'm locked out of the condo. Locked out of my own party, surely my last.

Eventually, three young men exit the building. I'm grabbing for the door when one of them tells me who I am. A fan that had tickets to the cancelled reading. “Remember when Dumbbell Moynihan called in the bomb threat at his orthodontist's office?” he says. As if it's possible to forget any of your characters.

He lights up a large joint and proceeds to tell his friends the tale of Dumbbell at the prom, in his too-tight yellow tuxedo with his “big fat date.” He exaggerates, skips and skews a number of important things, but I'm too busy sucking in huge drags to fact-check. I even laugh along with them until he calls Dumbbell's math teacher “Mrs. Asslicker,” and I have to break in and say, “Mrs. Aisslicher.”

That just makes them roar harder, and it suddenly smacks of a sitcom laugh track. Is my life's work just puerile stoner
comedy, like so many sad clowns pouring out of a tiny car? And why drag poor Dumbbell and his childhood sweetheart into it? She wasn't fat, just big-boned! Oh, you ridiculous old cretin, exploiting everyone and everything that is good and sincere for the entertainment of complete strangers.

I can't even trust my fans. I might even hate them.

Back upstairs, I'm very stoned and very paranoid, so I get into the food, mostly just broccoli stems left for me – at
my
party! Then the last box of wine, and soon I'm babbling and snorting, flirting with the one other drunken person in the room: a cashier from the bookstore with a slight moustache and long, fake white fingernails.

Lana, meanwhile, sits statue-straight in the corner, sipping water, stifling yawns. Why doesn't she go home! I don't need a babysitter! Then there's a window-shaking blast and I flinch and duck, thinking,
the bombers have found me!
But it's just the fireworks starting, and I've spilled red wine all over the place, which has the impact of a bloody explosion and the scene goes into crisis mode.

On the way out, the irate hostess shoves the box of wine at me and slams the door in my face as I mutter apologies. Lana tries to take the wine away, but I'm not having any of it. I'll carry this albatross! The fresh air and the boom of fireworks sobers me up enough to realize how utterly fucked-up I am.

“I drank too much. I'm sorry.”

“No, please. That was
awful
. We had such a nice party planned at an Indian restaurant near the original venue.” She senses this could be my last.

“Why do you do this
PR
job?”

“I've been told I have the right personality for it.”

“Meaning?”

“I'm not really interested in celebrities, to tell you the truth. Which allows me to be professional and gives me a necessary hostility towards the media.”

Yes, the protectiveness. It's not for us, per se, it's against them.

“Of course I always read up before a job. I couldn't put your book down.” She throws me a between-us look, but it strikes me as a much darker, more intimate collusion that sends a chill up my spine. We've reached the hotel lobby and the front-desk people are eyeing us.

“What did you think?”

“I think I'll walk you to the elevator and say goodnight.”

I don't care if I wake her. “I heard that they closed the beaches here.”

“Who told you that?”

“Why take it personally?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Two summers ago.”

“It's late.” She's not even trying to hide her irritation.

“I woke you.”

“Yes.”

“So you
can
tell the truth.”

Silence at her end. She should say, “Fuck off old man.” She could say anything to me.

“You despise me.”

“I don't.”

“What if it had happened to you?”

“Look, this isn't appropriate.”

“Please. Oh god, just never mind. I'm sorry. Good night.”

My hands are trembling so much that I can barely hang up the phone. Everything good is lost and I shall surely die alone, unloved and undeserving. The phone rings.

“It did happen to me. I was twelve. Years younger than Sibby.”

It's a shock to hear the name out loud.

“My parents had just divorced. He was my mother's boyfriend.”

“Did you tell your mother?”

“I've never told anyone.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. It was a long time ago. My life is more than that. It has to be.”

“Did you hate him?”

She says nothing for a long time. I feel as if my entire being exists only as energy that will be snuffed out as soon as the connection is broken.

“Sometimes, later, I wished I had hated him, but I liked his attention. I wanted to see where it would go. It was my curiosity I kind of hated later. He didn't force me to do anything.”

“How do you know that? They say that …” I can't say it. It's too awful.

“They
groom
you. Yes, he probably did and I'm certainly not excusing him. But I groomed him too. I could sense it in him.”

“Sense what?”

“That he was vulnerable.”

I don't want to hear anything else, but she's right about curiosity. Once it starts, it can't easily be stopped.

“His attention was sort of repellant, but I liked it. I felt powerful for the first time in my life. Later, my views changed. But you can't rewrite the way you feel. Not even with fiction.”

“But that's why it's such a terrible
crime
. You could still do something about it!”

“It would be easier if it was black and white. But that doesn't change anything for either of us, does it? I'm not going to say any more.”

The line goes dead.

I want to cry, and not being able to makes me feel oddly emasculated, impotent. I go outside to pace the beach. In the dark, the mountains dance with lights and seem restored, at least until sunrise. The moon is a bright yellow crescent hanging over the yacht-littered water. It looks like a movie prop.

A man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned “The One & Only” approaches and asks, “Spare five bucks for the house lottery?”

“Do you swim in the bay?”

“Never learned how, buddy.”

“I'll give you $20 if you wade around in it for a while.”

“Go fuck yourself, you old perv,” he yells and stalks off.

I go to the water's edge, trying to will myself into the water. But even my desire to enter it has become utterly embarrassing. I just can't swim with me there watching, judging, taking notes, ruining everything.

Even sleep abandons me, and who could blame it? I wait in the lobby for the clothing store to open. Lana was right about the meagre selection of swim trunks. I choose long Hawaiian shorts in garish colours. They bulge under my pants but give me a semblance of courage to face the last day.

Here she comes, in a white suit and such precarious matching shoes that I tense up watching her approach. Her face is mask-like with heavy makeup, which makes her look older, more weathered somehow. Or maybe it's the new knowledge weighing down my impression. She's already accompanied by the day's first reporter, so there's no small talk about sleep, no consolatory attempts to fend off the latest onslaught of media hate, no room for my lame apologies. For the final inquisition, she even leaves me in the hot seat for an extra twenty minutes, my mesh-ensconced scrotum sweating profusely and the plastic-knobbed price tag knifing into my side.

“You're done,” she says afterwards, meaning who knows what.

“I'm going to swim in that bay. I want to go to Spanish Banks.” Where my life began, with such joy and promise.

“Fine.” She doesn't believe me. “We'll stop en route to the airport. I'll handle the checkout while you get your stuff.”

Ten minutes later, I barely have a chance to close the passenger door before she starts driving. She drives too fast and I feel a paternalistic desire to scold her.

“Why did you take this gig? I'm not a celebrity.”

“You're listed on Celebrity.com.”

What kind of a world put me there? But my disgust is overwhelmed by smug, unstoppable vanity.

“Nobody swimming. As usual.”

She doesn't respond, just starts marching towards the shoreline.

“Look at all the brown froth.”

“Well?” She crosses her arms and glares at me with unfettered hostility. Oh, Lana, it wasn't supposed to be like this.

“I don't think I can.” It comes out barely a whisper.

“This is ridiculous,” she says. She drops her bag, unbuttons her suit jacket and tosses it to the sand. She kicks off each shoe, then unzips her skirt and lets it drop down around her feet. Her underpants are white.

“Stop,” I say, but only part of me wants her to stop. Next she removes her white camisole and flings it sideways, but it's so light that it gets caught in the breeze and takes forever to land, too close to the dirty tide. Her bra is white too.

She turns and strides into the water, puts her arms above her head and dives under. I feel so proud of her and my body contracts like a runner at the starting gate, ready to bolt in as well. But I hesitate. My feelings turn to envy, which fills me with shame and roots me down, leaving only the aching, useless longing to go backwards in time and make everything right. I close my eyes and there, waiting for me, are the brilliant greens and blues of such a long, long time ago.

T
he tone sounds and Katrin turns to the class.

“That fire?” she asks, squishing her brow in bewilderment.

“No, Miss. Fire's a beeping one.”

“Oh.”

“I think that's the intruder tone,” says Cody –
Co-deeee
, as he pronounces it – from the back row. She raises an eyebrow. Listens.