Get up, she said. Get off that and I’ll drag this downstairs for you.
Outside, Lelrine clambered off the hood of her purple Datsun, where she had been perched, flirting with Quinn. She charged toward Michelle bearing a copy of Michelle’s book. Michelle autographed it. She inscribed, To Lelrine, On the day of my departure. I will never forget you. Lelrine looked different in the daylight, with no makeup on her face or rice in her ass. She was in her walk-of-shame ensemble of satin hot pants, a ratty T-shirt stretched like skin across her intense tits. Michelle would have to find out from Ziggy if they were real. Michelle sort of loved fake tits. It was her favorite part of any strip bar, the girls with the boobs that looked like someone had hurled them onto their chests from across the room, strong as muscles with a little wobble. They fascinated Michelle.
She waved to the pair as they drove off in the little purple car. She sat on her front stoop and thought nostalgically how she would never sit there again. So much had happened on that stoop. She’d cried, of course, over girls who had stopped loving her, and she had smoked many cigarettes, she had drunk beers. She’d written part of her book here, her back against her front door, pen in a notebook, crying over a girl who had stopped loving her while smoking and drinking beer. She wanted to nail a plaque to it, the stoop. There was that one sweet crackhead related to the woman who lived on the first floor. Michelle would often come down and see the lady sitting on the stairs, nodded out. Michelle would startle her and the lady would swiftly begin sweeping the stoop with her hands, brushing debris into her palm with her fingers.
I’m Susie’s cousin, she’d say in a stuffed-up voice. Susie said I could sit here. She’d dust a little path for Michelle to pass through.
It’s Fine, Michelle assured her. Generally Michelle didn’t mind if people sat on her stairs. Sometimes gangs of boys with bottles of beer would be intimidating, but they weren’t shitty to her and once even helped her upstairs with her laundry. Susie’s cousin was very tender and had such a strange, froggy voice. Stitch enjoyed imitating her.
I’m Sooseez cousin, Stitch would roll her eyes back and pantomime sweeping with her hands. Sooseee said I could sit here. Stitch did really good impressions. She did the Susie’s cousin imitation to Ekundayo once and it made her hostile. Ekundayo acted like drug addicts were holy and became defensive if you laughed at them, like you were being racist or poking fun at a disabled person.
It’s not funny, she said.
It Actually Is, Michelle said. It’s Actually Quite Funny. Stitch also did a killer imitation of a junkie they’d seen nodding off with a bag of chips in his hand at the gas station, but she only did it privately, to Michelle, to make her laugh. People could be really sensitive about drug addicts.
Michelle thought about Stitch, upstairs in her bedroom, her choppy haircut asleep on some strange pillow filled with barley or natural husks. The pillow was horribly uncomfortable but Stitch swore it was good for your neck. Stitch. Michelle’s eyes teared. She wasn’t going to wake her friend up, Stitch knew she was leaving. She could have come down and said goodbye. Whatever. This city was stupid. Michelle lifted herself off the stairs and walked slowly toward the U-Haul, where Quinn sat resentfully in the driver’s seat.
15
The heat in the truck’s cab was grisly. California was on fire and once out of San Francisco the highway shimmered in the windshield like a mirage. The land on the margins was dry, even charred. The farmland decreased as they drove. The water was too ruined for effective farming and the animals were out of whack, the bugs and the birds, the pests and pollinators. They drove past wide plowed fields whose sickly crops had been abandoned. What Do You Think That Was? Michelle asked, staring at the mangled stalks, everything hay colored beneath the brutal sun. Quinn shrugged and kept her eyes on the road.
Michelle hadn’t left San Francisco in eight years and Quinn, a native, never had. The ocean was a giant toilet lapping at San Francisco’s edges, but mainly things were functioning. On the highway Michelle felt alarmed at all the dead land. These towns were abandoned. A gas station had been torched, blackening everything around it in a wide, ruined circle. Michelle leaned back against the leather seat, her skin stuck hotly to it, suctioned with sweat. She watched the wasteland glide by on the 405.
Then, the cows. The cities of cows stretched out into the trashed landscape for miles, a pixilated black and white, their spotted backs blurring together until the sight of them all became something else entirely, a surrealist landscape, an M. C. Escher drawing referencing infinity.
The smell was something to complain about for the first twenty minutes. It was as if their faces were being cruelly mashed into a vat of wet shit. The humidity rose as they entered the cow cities, the steam of the animals’ sweat and breath and farts, the water systems churning to douse them, all of it changed the air, saturating it, carrying the stench. The sounds, too, the dull bleats and moos. The cows continued alongside them forever. Cowshwitz, Quinn spoke. She had heard of this part of the drive. Her husband had warned her of it, gambled she’d become vegetarian by the time they drove out of it.
The lovers tried various things to save them from the smell, such as cupping their hands over their faces and inhaling instead their own rank breath. Michelle lit cigarettes. She held a carton of chocolate milk over her mouth and nose like an oxygen mask, smelled sweetly sour candy before the stink of shit rushed back in. They breathed through their mouths, giving them the disgusting feeling of eating the smell. Their tongues rooted their gums, searching for the taste of cow dung. Eventually they could no longer smell it, despite the bovine landscape shifting toward the horizon, their collective motion like the swells of a gentle tide. It was creepy to know the horrible shit cloud was still with them, entering their bodies. They would try to locate it, pulling air through their noses the way Ziggy smoked her cigarettes, but they smelled nothing, nothing at all. And so they relaxed, succumbing to their bodies’ merciful denial.
Michelle allowed the incomprehensible landscape to fuck with her mind. The round-backed cows became a sort of sea, she then allowed the sea, emerging beneath the cliffs, to become a menagerie, the lumps of trash beneath the pudding waves taking the shapes of animals she’d seen in books and magazines — a thick gorilla, a wide-eared elephant, the spindly neck of a giraffe. The waves drew back and heaved forward, the nauseated contractions of someone poisoned. Michelle saw real buses and airplanes, shopping carts and the roof of a home. An old telephone pole strung with gunk. She unfocused her eyes and they became dinosaurs, sea monsters. Broken boats bobbed, abandoned, looking like ghostly pirate ships. Perhaps some of them were. Across it all a web of oil stretched, like ebony lace or fishnet stockings.
Los Angeles
1
I just can’t open my screenplay with a scene of myself smoking crack in Ziggy’s van, Michelle thought, and deleted twenty pages of text from her desktop. It felt like she’d deleted her stomach, something vanished in her body — well, that was rash. Too bad. The computer glared at her with its vacant cyclops eye, daring her to try again, to tell a universal story.
Michelle wracked her brain for successful books with prominent crack smokers. The A. M. Homes story where the suburban straight couple smokes it after the kids go away. Permanent Midnight, where the guy wrote for ALF but was really a total crackhead the whole time — that one got made into a movie, even.