Hell's Half Acre

twenty-seven.

MOLLY’S ROOM, NIGHT.

I lie on her puffy white bed, smoking a cigarette. I wear filthy blue jeans and nothing else. I am exhausted and pissed off about the rabbit, but I could be worse. I have a fresh glass of scotch balanced on my chest, my third of the evening. I am staring dumbly at the little television across the room. The sound is low but I can just make out the numbing dialogue of a sitcom involving a gang of attractive white people and their innocuous homosexual black pal. I flip around until I land on CNN, hoping to find something about Sam.

On the bed beside me is Miller’s script. The Velvet.

Yeah.

I don’t know what I think of that title. Too oblique, too nihilistic, or too esoteric or something but it’s not my problem. The Velvet is Miller’s baby. Molly has left the room, to get into character. She wants to run a scene with me and of course she already has her lines down. I have agreed to cooperate, but I’m going to read my lines from the script in a voice composed of discarded feathers and broken glass.

Molly enters, wearing white underpants and a little white tank top. Her hair is wet. She’s carrying an open bottle of red wine and an orange. She tosses the orange on the bed beside me. Takes a drink of wine and wipes her mouth on her wrist. She offers the bottle to me and I shake my head. I put the glass of scotch aside and sit up, the script in hand.

What’s the orange for, I say.

I have a vitamin deficiency, she says. I’m getting rickets.

That would be scurvy.

What?

You’re getting scurvy. And deaf, too.

Oh, shut up.

Have you seen a doctor?

I toss the script aside because I remember how it goes. This scene is based on an actual conversation between Jude and me, so long ago that I feel sick with loss. I take a shallow breath, realizing that Jude must have at some point collaborated with Miller on this thing. Molly ignores me, bends to pick up a shirt from the floor. She smells it, apparently decides it’s relatively clean and begins to rub her hair dry with it. I watch her for a while.

Isn’t that my shirt? I say.

Yeah, she says. I already used my shirt to dry my poor body.

Oh.

Why don’t you buy some towels? Your houseguests might appreciate it.

I take the shirt from her. I rub her head gently with it.

What houseguests? I don’t have houseguests.

You have me.

Well. I don’t know where they sell towels.

They? she says. Who would they be?

You know. The household luxuries people.

Molly laughs. Phineas…towels are not luxuries.

They are if you don’t have them.

You have sheets, she says. You have nice, clean sheets.

Yeah, well. My girlfriend bought the sheets. Before, all I had was a dusty mattress and a sleeping bag. She said I would never get laid unless I had real sheets.

Molly’s hair is dry. I toss the shirt aside and lean over, reaching for my scotch. Molly bites me on the shoulder. Then we wrestle for a minute and I let her pin me to the bed, or so it goes in the script. Molly is wiry and strong, though. She doesn’t need a lot of mercy from me.

Your girlfriend was right, she says. Wasn’t she?

There is a long silence, which Molly interprets as me being lost. I am lost, but not in the way she thinks. Molly sighs and takes a drink of wine and her lips come away dark as berries.

I don’t know, I say. This was a nice sleeping bag, a mummy bag.

She rolls her eyes. Why don’t you ask this girlfriend to buy you some dishes, too. Wine glasses, for instance.

I have coffee cups, I say.

Two coffee cups. One of them is dirty. The other one has a plant growing in it.

At this point, the script calls for Molly to nonchalantly remove her tank top. I am weirdly nervous about this. Because while Molly and I have been slowly, painfully seducing each other for days now, and it seems reasonable to assume that any day she might in fact remove her top, there is a sense of detachment and hostility between us that seems to arise directly from the script. Anyway, after slight pause, Molly shrugs and pulls the tank top over her head and she is exposed to me.

The script now suggests that I fondle one of her breasts as if I’m preoccupied, distracted. I am supposed to randomly tweak and pinch her nipple between thumb and finger as if fiddling with the tuning dial on a car radio. This seems rude but I give it a whirl. Her nipples are hard. She tolerates my affection for a minute, then slaps my hand away.

What is that, she says. Foreplay?

I shove her off me, gently. Then pick up the orange and begin to peel it.

Why do you have a vitamin deficiency?

Because I never eat vegetables, she says. Because I’m anemic.

Yeah, I say. Maybe you should lay off the coke.

Phineas, she says. Don’t…

I feed her a fleshy chunk of orange.

Okay, I say. What kind of towels should I buy?

Thick ones, she says.

What color?

Dark colors. Something that won’t show blood.

Of course.

Then you will be the perfect man.

I feed her more of the orange. Molly nibbles at my fingers and I notice a flicker of electricity in my chest.

By your definition, I say. The perfect man is one who has clean sheets and plenty of nice, thick towels that don’t show blood.

That’s right, says Molly.

She begins to giggle. I feed her the last of the orange and juice runs to my wrist. Molly licks at it, then kisses my hand, sucks at my fingers. Her mouth moves to my throat.

Jesus, I say.

What’s this girlfriend of yours like?

I glance at the script, suddenly uncomfortable…She’s like a hummingbird, I say.

Does she drink sugar water?

She vibrates, I say. She moves so fast you can barely see her.

And should I be jealous of her? she says.

You, I say. You’re a blur. You’re already gone.

This is the end of the scene but I slip my hands under her ass and lift her onto my lap again. Molly fumbles with the buttons of my jeans and I think I’m going to come any minute. I touch her through her panties and she’s wet, she’s melting. Molly pulls my cock loose and begins to run her hand up and down, barely touching me. I push her panties to the side and slip my fingers inside her and now she moves her hips, pushing her pubic bone against my hand and one of us is groaning and then suddenly we pull away from each other.

Whoa. What the hell was that?

Drama, she says. Her voice is bitter.

What’s wrong with you?

You, she says. You still haven’t kissed me.

Bright pocket of silence.

That dialogue, I say. What a load of shit.

I think it’s romantic, she says. Or it would be, if it were real.

It’s embarrassing, I say. It’s pap.

What is pap, exactly? she says.

I stare at her and realize I am not sure. Pap is a sticky, sweet mucus type substance the color of pus. Jesus, I don’t know. Pap is fucking pap.

Well, she says. I think he sounds like you. Your character sounds just like you.

Molly folds her arms across her chest. I shove myself back into my pants, rather grimly. I sit beside her, listening to my rapid heart. I want to scream. I lean over the side of the bed for the bottle of wine. I take a long, greedy drink and pass her the bottle. She lifts it to her mouth and stops, staring at the television.

Oh fuck, she says.

There is a picture of Sam on the screen.

…Samwise Cody, five years old…presumed to be kidnapped… blond hair, brown eyes. Forty-nine pounds, with no identifiable scars or birthmarks…missing two days now.

The camera cuts away from photo of Sam to footage of his father at a press conference. Distraught, unshaven. He appears to be unable to speak.

…is the son of MacDonald Cody, popular U.S. senator from California and one of the power players in the Democratic party, figures to be a factor in the next presidential election… There has been no ransom demand, no contact from kidnappers at all.

I look at Molly. The bottle of wine still tucked between her legs, forgotten. One hand over her mouth. Her hair still wet and she is naked, lovely. But I feel nothing resembling desire. I feel nothing much at all.

This is wrong, I say. So fucking wrong.

It will be over soon, says Molly.

I sink back and yes there is rage in me but not enough. Pale rain clouds faraway and they may not get here anytime soon. They may pass by, they may fade away. I remember nothing but ailments. Impatience, affliction, and morbid restlessness. I cut my hair last night and saw your face. I saw the uselessness of the organism, the sequence of maladies. Disorder of the stomach and love letters amount to threads. The imperfection. The difficulty in forming ordinary vowel sounds. The sleeve of the female engages threads of the male. This is the hum of empty space. This is a photograph of a boy no longer a boy. Please, don’t. Don’t interrupt me. Badly drawn stick figures and the voice of another is like a forgotten blue T-shirt on the floor. He came inside me and said he didn’t mean to. This room has such poor light. Why did you buy an orchid of all things. Because you were not home. Because the phone just rings.

The light touch of rose petals on my shoulder.

I am asleep, or nearly so. I’m dreaming in my own voice. This can’t be good for anybody. Molly has turned the light off and she lies half-naked beside me, not quite touching me. But I can feel her breath on my skin and the rose petals might have been her lips. The television is still on and I am grateful, because the silence can be too much to bear. I might have been dreaming but I thought I heard the rest of the news. The sports, the weather. Partly cloudy tomorrow. Partly, partly. Uncommonly hot. A train wreck, brutal traffic. Power lines down. Forest fires and earthquake weather. Followed by a story about a monkey. A monkey has apparently escaped from the Oakland Zoo. A three-year-old ring-tailed lemur by the name of Casper.

And then in the dark hours, the following conversation. Awake or dreaming. Drunk and still dreaming and who is speaking I can’t say.

He could be mine. He’s the right age, anyway. And he does look like me.

Are you talking to yourself?

But a lot of guys look like me. I have an ordinary face and god knows who else she was fucking.

Who.

The whore with the ruined face.

Jude, you mean.

You’re not the father. You’re dreaming.

I’m not dreaming.

Wake up. Please wake up.

I could teach him to ride a bike, to throw a baseball. I could buy a new car, a family car. I could buy a big American car with airbags and we could take him fishing. I can see the three of us in a little boat, laughing and eating sandwiches on white bread.

Three people in a family car doesn’t make a family.

But it looks real. It looks like a family.

Do you even know how to fish?

Hah. I could teach him to be a fisher of men.

Who am I speaking to?

Disconnected. Drunk and still dreaming.

I wake up and my chest is slick with sweat. Molly snores softly beside me and there’s no way I’m going back to sleep right now. I get up and pull on a pair of jeans. The clock says four a.m. but that means nothing. It would be useful, though, to explore the house a little during the wee hours. Maybe I can find something to eat in the kitchen.

I check on the boy first. He sleeps in a fierce ball, one corner of his pillow clutched in his fist. His face is peaceful, his cheeks rosy. I can see his eyes flickering behind their almost transparent lids. I touch his hair and move on.

I turn the corner into the kitchen and stop when I hear voices. Jeremy and Daphne are in there, making out like teenagers. Which they are, basically. Jeremy sits in a wooden chair and she straddles his lap. Her tank top is pushed up and I catch a very brief glimpse of her breasts by moonlight and they are still amazing. Jeremy is whispering sweetly into her ear and she is stroking his hair. I slip away without them noticing me and I find myself smiling. For some reason, I feel like the world might still be okay.

I drift down to the Lizard Room and just being in there gives me the creeps. The televisions are blank and lifeless and I am tempted to screw around with the controls to see if I can find anything on the monitors. But this idea makes me uncomfortable, like the smell of vomit. And I know that I would fuck something up and then Miller would know I was in here. Then I notice a flicker of green lights coming from a cabinet door that hangs open. I shrug and take a look inside to find stereo equipment. The green light is coming from the digital meter that indicates the recording levels. I don’t hear anything, though. I adjust the volume and fiddle with various controls and I get nothing. I find a pair of small headphones and put them on and Jude’s voice fills my head. I sink into crash position, hands over my ears.

Jude- Don’t fucking touch me. I don’t want to be touched right now.

Miller- You’re pathetic. You must be the only narcissist on the planet with a face that would make children run away screaming.

Jude- You can’t hurt me. You can’t hurt me.

Miller- I don’t want to.

Jude- You’re such a liar.

Miller- What do you think Poe is doing downstairs, with Molly? Do you think he’s fucked her yet?

Jude- Doesn’t matter. His heart is his problem.

Miller- For now, anyway.

Jude- He won’t let you do it, you know.

Miller- What?

Jude- He won’t let you kill that boy.

Miller- I’m writing this picture. He’s got no control.

Jude- Believe me or not. I don’t care.

Miller- What about you? Do you think he will let me kill you?

Jude- I don’t know. He might have no choice.

Miller- Because I will, baby. I will break you in half.

Forever, it seems. I wait in the dark forever but she never answers him.