“You got an employee?”
“I’ve got an intern.”
“I didn’t even know you had an office.”
“I don’t. She works out of my apartment.”
Harmony raised her eyebrows suggestively. “I see…”
“You know, that’s the second time I’ve mentioned her to someone, and the second time I’ve gotten that joke. I’m not Bill Clinton, okay? This girl is thirteen.”
“Thirteen?”
“Yes, but I’m not Roman Polanski either. There’s absolutely nothing sordid going on. See, this is the problem with living in a tabloid culture. We see everything as a scandal in the making.”
“That’s funny, coming from you.”
“You think that,” I said, lowering my voice, “but what I’m creating here is an anti-scandal. This is a bomb that’s going to defuse itself. If anything, it should teach the cynics and moral mouths of this country not to be so quick to judge.”
“So that’s your message with this thing?”
“No. My message is ‘stop kicking my client.’”
For some reason, that tickled her funny bone. She just couldn’t stop chuckling. Once the waiter came by with our food, she looked down and giggled into her fist.
I grinned at her. “It’s not that funny.”
“I know. I know…”
Once the waiter left, Harmony sobered up and ate her meal. She had decided to “keep it light” with a Cobb salad. I didn’t want to tell her but she’d probably have to eat a ham steak the size of a Michelin in order to get the same number of calories as that thing.
Even as she ate, she had aftershocks of chuckles. I marveled at her.
“Harmony, I’ve got to tell you. You’re not the person I expected to find when I looked up your background.”
She lost her humor. “What do you mean by that?”
“It’s not an insult. I’m giving you praise.”
“I believe you. I just don’t know what you mean by it.”
“What I’m saying is that for someone with your life story, you’re a hell of a lot sunnier than I expected. I mean if I went through all the awful things you went through, I’d have a chip on my shoulder the size of a Lexus. I’d be an angry, bitter, hateful nutjob. And I don’t mean a standard, mutter-to-myself-on-the-street kind of nut. I mean I’d be building a death ray.”
Harmony stared at me with dark perplexity. “Okay…”
“Let me ask you a question I know the interviewers will ask. How have you managed to cope so well?”
After a moment of quiet reflection, she gulped a forkful of blue cheese. “Shit. I guess I’ll have to come up with something.”
“You must have some idea.”
“I think I know. I just don’t think it’s gonna play well.”
“Then try it on me. What do you think I’m here for?”
She took a deep, halting breath. “Okay. When I got hit by that police car, it was a bad thing. But in some ways it was also a good thing. Getting my head knocked in like that. I know that sounds messed up but ever since the accident, because of my brain damage…I mean I still got all my memories and shit. But ever since the accident, they seem like they all outside me. It’s like none of that stuff ever happened to me personally, you understand what I’m saying? To me, it was all just like some movie I watched from the front row.”
“Wow.”
She shrugged. “Sometimes I wish I had a stronger memory, especially of my mother. And then sometimes, when it comes to the bad stuff, just remembering the movie is enough to set me off. Like this morning. That’s rare though. At the end of the day…I don’t know. I don’t know how I’d be if I didn’t have that distance. Maybe I’d be just as messed up as you expected me to be. I can’t say. I just know that the police car hitting me turned out to be a good thing. Except for all the headaches.”
I sat in silence, parsing her circuitous new data. Ever since she flashed me her first loaded look, I’d known how perfect she was for the role I was casting. But now I felt a strange sense of artistic possessiveness. Suddenly I was afraid to share her with the world, for fear they wouldn’t get her right. I certainly had qualms about sharing her with the media, with their quick cuts and dynamic framing techniques. Damn those lazy fucks. Those lowbrows and philistines. They’d flatten her many layers. They’d take this lovely swan and cram her into a duck-shaped hole. Worse, they’d force me to help.
“So what do you think?” she asked. “Is that gonna play well on TV?”
“I think you’re going to play well on TV. But we’ll definitely have to work on trimming your answers.”
“You’re the boss.”
“I’m not the boss,” I stressed. “If anything, you and I are partners on this.”
Harmony shrugged before getting back to her fatty salad. “Boss. Partner. Whatever. You the one with the freaky super-brain.”
________________
On Tuesday, my freaky super-brain wondered if Lisa Glassman was abstinent.
________________
Excluding our lunch break at the airport, I had driven Harmony around for six hours and 149 miles. At 3:20 we made our final stop in Koreatown, just around the corner from Alonso’s building. I turned off the ignition and looked at my passenger.
“Well, good luck. Hope it all goes okay.”
She laughed. “Thanks.”
“Actually, if you reach under your seat, you’ll find a small cardboard box.”
She did, and she did. “What’s this? A parting gift?”
“Just something you’ll need.”
Inside the box, snuggled in its plastic tray, was a brick-red wireless phone, plus accessories. I had hidden a pressed stack of seventy-five twenties beneath the tray. That was the parting gift. She wouldn’t find it until she got home.
“This for me?”
“That’s for you. That thing cost me five C-notes, so treat it well.”
“Five hundred dollars?”
“It’s worth it. It’s got a special chip in it that…I don’t know how it works. All I know is that nobody will be able to pick up our conversations. But listen, it’s only going to work with me, because I’ve got the exact same kind of phone. The call has to be secure on both ends.”
She kept flipping it over in her hands. “I never had one of these before.”
“This is how we’re going to communicate from now on. So don’t lose it. Don’t lend it out. And always remember to keep the battery charged. That’s very important.”
She put the phone back in the box. “Shit, man. This is starting to feel real.”
“Hey. Look at me.”
She turned to me. She was back to being the quiet and awkward Harmony I had chatted up at the Flower Club. We’d come such a long way in just forty hours. And yet all I’d really done was bring her from one game of dirty pool to another.
“I’m going to be with you every step of the journey. I’ll be all around you, like a guardian angel, keeping you out of harm’s way. You won’t be able to see me, but you’ll hear me. You and I will talk a million times a day. You think you have brain damage now, just wait until you’re done with that thing. We’ll be lucky to have four neurons left between us.”
She wasn’t as amused by that as I was. “You gonna call me or can I also call you?”
“You better. If you have any concerns, I want to be the first and only person you talk to. You have any problems, you stub your toe, I want you to call me. Any time of the day or night, as often as you like. I’ll always be reachable.”
“What’s your number?”
“I already programmed it into memory. It’s under ‘Slick.’”