LITMIR.BIZ

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we finish the tamales, Candy grabs the plates, takes them into the kitchen, and ditches them in the sink. She comes back into the bedroom and crawls onto my lap.

      I start to kiss her, but she pulls back.

      “What’s wrong?”

      “What happened to your eye?” she says.

      I reflexively touch the bruise.

      “It’s nothing. Like I said, I bumped my head leaving Abbot’s boat tonight.”

      “Sandman Slim walks into doors?”

      “Hey, a guy snuck up behind me tonight and sneaked a selfie before I knew it.”

      “That I can believe,” she says, and rolls off me onto her back. “I know there’s something wrong with you, but I can’t help if you won’t let me.”

      “I’m okay,” I say.

      “No, you’re not. This isn’t the first time you’ve come home bruised. You’re usually better at hiding them, but I know your body pretty well, so I notice them even when I don’t say anything.”

      I put a hand down on the bed and she reaches out and wraps her warm hand around one of my fingers. I don’t want to look at her, so I look at my hand. Old scars gleam white like I stuck my hand into a metal grinder looking for my car keys.

      “I’m still getting used to this new life is all. I’m a little off balance.”

      She rolls onto her stomach and looks at me.

      “Know how we just talked about me being a detective? If you’re doing something to hurt yourself, I’ll find out.”

      “Let it go this time, okay? I’m just a little off balance, but I’m getting better.”

      “Okay,” she says uncertainly. “But I reserve the right to bring it up again if I suspect you of asshole behavior.”

      “Agreed.”

      She sits up and kisses me.

      “You told me I could tell you anything. You can do the same with me.”

      “I’ll remember that. Thanks.”

      She puts her arms around me and I just hold her like that for a while. I feel something light slide down my chest. She’s crying or I’m sweating. Probably both. I feel like I’m fourteen, caught in a lie within a lie with no way to get out.

      “Do you want to get a dog sometime?” Candy says.

      “Not really.”

      “Thank God. Neither do I.”

      See? The truth didn’t hurt. Now I need to get out of this particular knot of lies by not going back into the fight pit.

      “Get whatever kind of lamp you want for the living room. Flying robots. Naked witches.”

      “You know I was going to anyway.”

      “Yeah, but I just wanted to say it.”

      “Thanks. You know if I find out someone’s hurt you, I’m going to eat their fucking heart, right?”

      “I know.”

      “I know you know, but I just wanted to say it.”

      “Thanks. Can I ask you one more favor?”

      “What?”

      “Can you turn that goddamn surf record over and play the other side. You’ve played this one about fifty times.”

      “This is my homework. Alessa is going to teach me surf guitar.”

      “I bet there are songs on the other side you can learn.”

      “Your wish is my command,” she says, and pads out of the bedroom to the stereo.

      When she’s gone, I take a long, deep breath. This thing we have. I don’t want to fuck it up. I don’t want to lie anymore and I don’t want a dog. I just want Candy or Chihiro or whoever she has to be next to stay alive. We’re in this together and I’ll kick the ass of anyone who gets in the way. Even if it’s me.

      “Did I tell you an angel gave me a birthday present tonight?”

      She comes back into the room and flops onto the bed.

      “No. Tell me every little thing about it.”

      So I do. And we’re okay.

      For a while.

      CANDY IS GONE when I wake up in the morning. There’s a note on the kitchen counter when I go in to make coffee.

       Jamming with Alessa at her rehearsal space after work.

       Home late. Be naked.

      There are some hearts and she’s taped a press-on tattoo of a sleeping cat at the bottom of the note. I lick a spot on my forearm and press down on the tattoo. A minute later I pull it off. No cat. Just a few frayed lines scattered across my scars. Once again, my stupid body rejects the simplest amusements. So, I make coffee. That’s one bit of pleasure that still works.

      I don’t bother going downstairs and bothering Kasabian. He’s even drearier than me in the morning. Before he gets up and turns on the news or does something else to annoy me, I turn on the rest of a movie I started with Candy the other night: Amer. It’s a deconstruction of Italian giallo flicks. The directors tear it down to its essential elements—beats, images, violence, colors, sexual tension—but they do it almost wordlessly, like a silent movie. Just the thing for that time of day when words are still hard to come by.

      I sip coffee and smoke, letting the movie run through to its end and one last little shock, then pick up my phone and thumb in Vidocq’s number. He picks up after a few rings.

      “James, how nice to hear from you at this early hour. Is everything all right?” His voice is deep, the accent relentlessly French.

      “Nothing’s wrong. Sometimes I’m actually up during daylight hours. I just thought if you were going to be around, I’d swing by and show you something that fell into my lap from Heaven.”

      “Really? You must come immediately. Do not stop for coffee. I’ve made some better than your vile swill.”

      He says it all like the friendliest headwaiter in L.A. See, I always notice the accent because it’s such an accomplishment. Eugène Vidocq has lived in the U.S. for around a hundred and fifty years. Any normal person would lose an accent after all that time. But Vidocq holds on to his like some grandma with the family photos. Nothing in the album means anything to anyone except her, which makes her hang on all the harder.

      “I need to get dressed. I’ll be over in half an hour.”

      “I doubt that on a weekend,” he says. “Let us say an hour.”

      “Don’t rub it in.”

      I used to walk across town through a shadow and come out by Vidocq’s front door in ten seconds. It feels like something that happened in another lifetime, but it’s really been less than three months.

      I plow through the Hollywood traffic south and get to Vidocq’s place in just under an hour. L.A. people are obsessed with addresses, distance, and times between places. I used to worry about the first two, but now I’m just like every other asshole in this town. A clock watcher, knowing the hour I wasted getting here I’ll never see again. Everyone in L.A. is like this. It’s one of the town’s big secrets. Want to know why people drink and smoke so much weed? They want to wipe out the time slipping away from them. Want to know why people do coke and get on the pipe? They’re trying to outrun the clock. Like Superman at the end of the movie where he flies around the world fast enough to roll back time. That’s all anyone in L.A. wants. To get back the time they lost just fucking being in L.A. I can’t outrun time. I don’t even know if angels or Mr. Muninn can. Gods and regular

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