I smell hand sanitizer and chicken broth as we walk toward his room. Love squeezes my hand. “Yay!”
“Yay!” I say.
Dottie steps into the hallway and does a double take. “Lovey!” she says.
Love runs to her and they hug and I stand in the hall trying not to stare into the room where an old man screams help me. Dottie whistles. I hug Dottie as Love disappears into Forty’s room. My heart pounds. “You feel hot,” Dottie says. She puts her hand on my forehead. “Are you sick?”
“No,” I say. “It’s just the desert, I guess.”
“Well,” she says, linking her arm through mine. “We have to talk. Forty has the most wonderful idea about what we can do with you.”
Murdermefeedmealivetodogstrapmedrownmeinapoolintheoceantiemeupstarveme
“Really?” I say. “What, um, what did you two have in mind and, my God, how is he?”
“Come see for yourself,” she says, and leads me into Forty’s room. Music plays and trays of food abound and Ray must have brought his own chair because he’s in a recliner and Forty sits up in bed laughing with Milo, who sits in the other bed.
I walk toward Forty Quinn and he meets my eyes and he smiles. “There he is,” he says. “Good to see you, Old Sport. Have a seat if you can. Settle in for story hour.”
Ray stands, yawns. “I don’t think I need to hear it again,” he says. And whatever the story is, it’s bullshit and Ray would rather leave than go on indulging his son. Dottie takes the recliner and Love joins Forty in his bed. I sit in a shitty, hospital-issued folding chair.
“Well,” Forty says. “The first thing you guys have to understand about me, going forward, is that I’m a writer.”
I might vomit. “Okay.”
Forty takes a pompous breath. “What this means, is that writers write. We shut off our phones. We take off. We get lost in the narrative. You guys, I know I have pulled some crazy shit in the past, but that was then. This is now. Now I’m a working writer, which means I didn’t wanna fucking stay in LA and rest on my laurels and pat myself on the back. I wanted to hunker down in a quiet hotel room and think and do and make.”
Dottie moans. “Sweetie, I’m on your side and I love you. But you could have called.”
Love: “Mom! Enough.”
Forty: “And next time I will call. I was just dying to start in on a new script because that’s how this town is. You’re only as good as what you’ve got coming up.”
Milo now with an amen, brother. I might faint.
“What were you writing?” Love asks.
He looks at me now, intently. He smiles. “Another kidnapping story,” he says. “I pretty much sold it in the room at Paramount a while back, but they got cold feet and now that I’m a thing, you know, they want in again. So I promised them I’ll have a script soon.”
Love is perplexed. “Well, how the hell did you wind up in the desert? Mom says you’re starting to remember more? That a girl found you?”
My heart pounds. He looks up at the TV. “I went on a walkabout,” he says. “I needed to do research. Sometimes, you just have to get out there and see shit if you want to write about it, you know? If you want to write about the outer reaches of the desert, where there’s nobody around, you have to see it.”
Maybe I could get a nurse to kill him and why can’t anyone ask what we all want to ask: Where is the new script? He can’t explain what happened to his computer or his notes because he didn’t bring notes and a computer. He brought cash and coke.
My brain hurts. My palms sweat. “Who found you?”
He smiles. “That’s the thing, Old Sport,” he says. “It’s all kind of a blur. One minute, I’m sitting in the buffet, giving five grand to a couple of newlywed kids who look like they can’t afford to eat in a real restaurant”—FUCKING LIAR—“and the next minute, boom”—MOTHERFUCKING LIAR—“I’m in the desert and this blond girl.” He sighs. He fails. “I just got a flash of her.”
Dottie runs across the room. “What did you see?”
“A sweatshirt,” he says.
Dottie pleads with Forty—try, try to remember—but he can’t remember anything. All he can see is the girl, her shirt.
“And then I woke up here,” he says. “Splat.”
Love kisses his hand. “We need to give her five thousand dollars.”
“We can’t,” Forty says. “She’s gone. The nurses say she took off. She didn’t even come in. They found me outside.”
Dottie starts to cry and Milo puts an arm around her. Love asks Forty how the staff has been here and he says it’s not the Ritz and he looks at me and asks how I’ve been. I look him dead in the eye: “Worried about you,” I say.
“We were so scared,” Dottie says, and she stands. A nurse appears and says she can come back later when everyone is gone and Love runs after her and it’s just me and Milo and Forty and Dottie, who is pacing, worked up, wrung out, hands on hips. Imagine how well I would have done had I had a mother like this, the kind who cares, the kind who is here, no makeup, bags under her eyes from worrying. “Well, remember this,” she says. “You can’t write anything if you’re dead and your father and I need to know where you are.”
“I’m thirty-five years old,” he says. “Where does it end?”
“Not in a desert!” she says, and now she is sobbing. Forty crumples up a paper towel and throws it at Milo. He points toward the door.
Milo obliges. “Come on, Dot,” he says. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“Joe can stay here with me, right, Old Sport?” Forty offers.
I feel myself being murdered, slowly, the way they used to drain the blood out of people. “Sure thing,” I say. “You guys take a break.”
Dottie kisses her son on the head. “Don’t make it so hard for me,” she says. “I love you. Daddy loves you. Let us love you. Let us be there.”
“Mom,” he says. “It was a few days.”
Milo ushers Dottie out of the room and when they’re gone I turn to Forty. “Shut it,” he says. “First the door, then your mouth.”
I get up and walk to the door and I close the door and I return to my shitty chair. He does not encourage me to sit in the recliner and he does not suggest I get in the bed. He points to the chair next to the bed. “Here,” he says. “I’m suffering from exhaustion and dehydration and I don’t need to be yelling.”
I sit in my chair. On the muted television, The Cosby Show begins. Forty opens a drawer in the tray table and pulls out two open bags of M&M’s. He reaches into one for candy. He reaches into the other bag for pills. Fucking Forty. He pops a bottle of Veuve. He pours his apple juice onto the floor, as if he’s in a parking lot and he pours champagne into his cup.
I don’t want to be the first to speak, but I can’t help it. “Is that gonna help with your dehydration?”
“No,” he says. “It won’t help with my exhaustion either, but it’s fine. I’m not the one with work to do.”
I look at him. “Did you call the cops?”
He ignores my question. He looks at the TV. He laughs, demented fucking sicko. “I love this episode,” he says. “You know this one, right, where Theo wants the fucking shirt? Never gets old. He wants that shirt. His fucking know-it-all dad wants him to work for that shirt and his sister tries to make him the shirt at home but at the end of the day, the only way to get that fucking shirt is to pony up and buy it.”