“You think I’m an amateur?” He laughs and whips out a fake ID. “I’m Monty Baldwin, motherfucker! Get it? The lost Baldwin brother. Fuck yeah.”
And, of course, that would be Forty’s dream in life: to be a Baldwin brother, surrounded by brothers instead of Love. “This Baldwin will be back,” he says. He jogs toward the manger’s office, his backpack bouncing, and I remember that first night at Chateau when I wondered if he and Joaq Phoenix were buddies.
I get out of the car and walk into the cemetery. The sun beats down on me and the dead people are nothing but bones under the dirt. The causes of death are listed: suicide, gunshot, plague. The cause of Forty’s death will be me, but it won’t say that on his tombstone and I wonder how many of these stories are true.
There’s a shovel against the side of the motel. I wish I could bury him here, but there are too many people around: truck drivers, hippies with GoPro cameras, a family fighting over whether this is too much for the kids. I just need Forty to check in, to talk with the manager. I read about the manager online and he’s the kind of guy that remembers everyone. He will remember Monty Baldwin. He will confirm that he seemed on something. Even if he says Forty was talking with someone in the parking lot, I am unrecognizable in my baggy clothes and Colts jersey and rental car.
I trudge back to the car, keeping my head down. I take out five Percocets. I mash them down and dump them into a bottle of water I bought at the gas station. As I shake, Forty emerges from the manager’s office and returns to the car.
“Want to check out the hot springs?” I suggest when he slips into his seat. I Googled the springs when I was learning about the Clown Motel. It’s true. You really can kill people in the desert. “They sound pretty crazy.”
“Alkali,” he says. “Fuck, yes. I have some iowaska and oh, Old Sport, you haven’t lived until you get in that water and you just see shit. This is what we were missing.” He belts up. “Just straight-up road trip, writing all Kerouac and what’s the guy, the one with Johnny Depp, the one in Vegas with the backpack and the drugs and the sunglasses.”
Jesus fucking Christ. “Hunter S. Thompson.”
He claps. “Hunter S. Thompson.”
“Yeah,” I say, and I can’t get out of this parking lot fast enough. I hand him a bottle. “Here,” I say. “We gotta hydrate before we trip.”
He tears off the cap. He didn’t notice the broken seal. He gulps. “Old Sport,” he says. “I like the new you. Fuck all that shit in Hollywood and the family and the pressure and the nonsense. We’re artists, man. My sister isn’t. God bless her but she’s not, you know.”
He turns on the music, my Pitch Perfect pool mash-up. He laughs at me and says my horrible taste in music is proof of my creative genius. “This is it,” he says. “Freedom.”
I put the car in reverse. “Yeah,” I manage. “Freedom.”
He unzips his backpack and takes out a butter knife and dips the soft-edged blade into a bag of blow. He sniffs and this might be another Fincher occasion. I might not have to kill Forty. At this rate, he’ll do it to himself.
44
THE alkali springs are disgusting, just two brown holes in the desert, like something you’d see in Little House on the Prairie or some Charles Manson documentary. It’s disgusting in every way you can imagine. There’s a fucking Magnum condom on the ground nearby, used, crusty. The wrapper is here too, along with a can of Bud.
Forty swipes the can and sips—I might vomit—and he strips down and there’s blood on his shirt—somehow he managed to cut himself with his butter knife—and I turn away. I never wanted to see him naked but I did want to see him here, alone, in the middle of nowhere, near Area 51, nothingness filling the land for miles.
He screams and pounds his chest as he steps into the water. “There it is!” he cheers. “Fucking springs, baby! Woo!”
He drank the Percocet water on the way here and not only is he still alive, but he talked the entire car ride here. He’s not Henderson and apparently it takes a pharmacy to kill a pharmaceutically enhanced person like Forty. I hope I have enough.
Forty settles in and someone else’s ass was there and animals probably dip into this and people are foul. “Come on, Professor,” he calls, waving. “I know you’re all New York and shit but there’s nothing gay about getting into a spring with another dude.”
“I’m good.”
“Come on,” he says. “This is God’s hot tub. This is home, Old Sport. Get in here. Man up. Live up! Feel the fire! You get in here, this is how you make a movie. You let your mind go.”
He waves his arms at the blue blanket sky and howls. I sit down in the dirt. “You know,” I say. “There are just as many creative people out there who aren’t into this sort of thing. Woody Allen would never get into dirty hole of hot water.”
Forty laughs. “He’d fuck a tween though.” He smiles. “He’s an artist! We’re weird! Professor, you need to get your weird on. Stop being so safe. You think, you bear down, but do you ever just go for it? Honestly, you’re a great writer. But I think you’d be golden if you had the guts to get in it.”
This coming from a guy who sold my scripts in his name and I go back to the car to make him more Percocet water. Every time he does coke, he fights my downers. He’s making this so much harder than it has to be and we can’t stay here forever. I shake the bottle and offer it to him.
“I’m fine,” he says, waving me off. “Get in!”
It’s my turn to tell him I’m fine and he attempts to swim in his little hole, as if there’s room. It’s fitting that he will drown in two feet of water when his sister appointed herself a national advocate for water safety. I sip my water, no drugs.
“You sure you don’t want some?”
“Fuck, yes, I want a sip!”
His memory is eroding. I read about wet brain. Maybe that’s what it is, Forty swallowing the water he said he didn’t want a minute ago. I need him lower, weaker. Henderson had no tolerance. He went so quietly in the end but this is ridiculous.
“What else you got in your bag of tricks?” I ask.
“Iowaska, baby!” He reaches in for his tea. He drinks. That’s a good boy. Let that tea mix with the Percocets. Let the poisons collide. He passes me the bottle. I pretend to drink. I am a good boy.
In Closer, Jude Law tells Natalie Portman, “This will hurt,” and then it does hurt. That is where I am right now, no matter what a dick he is. It’s starting to hit me. Killing Forty will hurt Love. In a fucked-up way, she won’t know how to live without the drama and this is going to be harder than I thought. But then, all change hurts. In the end, Love will be a new person without her brother. She’ll sleep better. She won’t have to find a way to forgive him every time he fucks her over. She won’t have to let him into her home or rationalize her feelings. Imagine what she could do with the power, the power I’m giving to her by doing away with him.
Forty flips onto his belly, a baby whale. He dips his butter knife into his bag. “I feel whoa,” he says. “Like whoa.”
“Just go with it,” I tell him. “Ride the wave.”
“Wouldn’t that be cool if there were waves in here?” he asks. “You ever think about that? How there can’t be waves without a lot of water?”
This is the part of college I never wanted: a self-important fuckwit contemplating the sea. I get my phone. I can’t listen to this shit. It’s only going to get worse as he slips away and loses access to his brain, what’s left of it. I have a new e-mail, a Google news alert. My chest tightens. I click on the link and it takes me to the Providence Journal Bulletin. There is a picture of Peach Salinger, looking happier than she ever did in real life. Peach’s parents love her more dead than they did when she was alive. They whitened her smile and enlarged her eyes and now they are seeking justice.