The performance artist sits mute and still. She looks to him like fatigue dumped a load of human in a hallway, like refuse. Can a person die of inside-hospital ennui?
“I bet you get a performance out of this,” he says.
“Yeah? And what the hell would that look like?”
In the urban dictionary next to the word emo is this girl. “Well,” he persists, “you know, there’s a Beckett play. It’s called Happy Days. There’s a woman in it named Winnie, who gets buried in mud. Up to her breasts.”
“You don’t say.” The performance artist eyes the elevator.
“Yes, but we never learn how she got buried.”
“Fascinating.” The performance artist gnaws at a new finger.
“Or trapped.”
She chews her fingernails.
“What’s he done? Becker? Anything on streaming?”
“Beckett. Samuel.” Briefly he wants to slap her into womanhood.
Mercifully, the elevator makes a holy ding and the filmmaker enters stage left. The playwright walks — nearly hopping — twelve steps in sets of threes to meet him.
He touches the filmmaker’s arm — Jesus, this guy is big. I mean, nothing he didn’t know, but Jesus. He could do some damage with those cannons. He pulls the filmmaker aside, whispery, needy, as if they’re guy pals or comrades or anything but what they are: the brother who abandoned her and the husband who can’t cope with her descent. “Just give it to me straight, no chaser. What’s going on? Really.”
The filmmaker’s skin looks blue-gray and heavy mugged. “She’s. . I don’t know how to answer that. None of this makes any sense.” His eyes are marbled in hues of hazel specked with brown.
“Well, what was the instigating event? All they’re telling me is that she suddenly went deaf and dumb, and went on some kind of Kafkaesque hunger strike.” He swallows, trying to lower his voice an octave.
“One morning she seemed a little distracted. Staring at the wall. That’s all. I said, ‘Baby, are you okay?’ She turned to me and smiled. We kissed. I went to work. So did she, I assume. I assume the day was like any other day — it rained, she taught her classes and I taught mine, neighborhood dogs barked, the mail came. I came home that night, she was on the floor. Unconscious.” The filmmaker draws a breath, sucking oxygen like a human vacuum.
“She just dropped? Just like that?” Don’t say DEAD don’t say dropped DEAD don’t say DEAD. The playwright’s sphincter twitches. His lover’s voice in his head: Be aware of social codes be aware of social codes be aware. But it’s not working, the hallway lights of the hospital are too bright, the filmmaker is so physical, he’s like walking physicality, and the playwright’s longing to write it all down is creeping up on him, like it always does, like black letters and words growing larger and larger until they’re walking around on the white floor before his eyes, big as people, the word DEAD bigger than any, with cartoon-muscled arms and shoulders.
“Yeah. Look, I don’t really want to talk about this right now.” The filmmaker closes his eyes and rubs at them with his thumbs.
“Okay, yeah. Of course. I’m going to see if I can find a doctor to talk to me.”
“You know what?” the filmmaker nearly shouts. “You do that. You get a doctor to talk to you. I’m sure you New York people deal with this stuff all the time, right? Depression? Neuroses? Pathologies? You want to know what they’ll say? They’re gonna tell you the same story they told me. They’re going to tell you there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s a goddamn physical specimen. See how far that gets you.”
“Nothing wrong with her.” The playwright starts ticking the fingernails on his thumb and forefinger in sets of threes.
“Look, I’m sorry,” the filmmaker says. “I told you, it’s hard for me to talk about this right now. I haven’t slept much, and my kid is with my mother. .” His hands knot themselves into fists. Dangling fists with nothing to do.
“You got it. Not another word out of me.” But the playwright is lying. He suddenly feels a sense of thrilling danger. Several sentences line up in his mouth. He bites the inside of his cheek.
But then comes another menacing ding, and the elevator door opens again, wide as a fucking mouth.
There he is, Mr. Asshole. The painter, the exiled ex-husband, the walking ego with a ready dick. Who the hell invited him?
The performance artist stands up. The filmmaker has his back to the elevator, so he doesn’t see the painter until he realizes the room has gone quiet again. The playwright feels coiled, urgent, ready to lash.
“What, did somebody die in here? You all look like fucking corpses.” The painter, laughing his ass off. Stale booze fills the air.
The performance artist flushes in the face like she’s eaten niacin; she puts her hand up like a stop sign and closes her eyes.
The playwright counts to three; he can feel the action before it happens.
The filmmaker, now husband, he’s turning, turning, he sees the painter, until one man faces the other.
The filmmaker throws an exquisite left hook and drops the painter to the floor.
Blood mouth-splatters across the linoleum.
Orderlies rush in like moths.
Then, in three seconds that feel more like minutes, the playwright snaps out of it, rushes over to the filmmaker, grabs his big-ass arm, and ushers him out of the building. No sense in anyone getting arrested right now. He hurries the filmmaker through an EXIT door into a stairwell, down and down and down until they reach the parking lot.
There, in the lot, things slow back down to human speed. They walk to the filmmaker’s car like two men walking, though one of them is counting steps. He can still feel the filmmaker’s rage. If I die at the hands of this man in a parking garage, in some ways it will be a fitting end. Dying, finally, in his sister’s moment of peril.
They arrive at the door of the filmmaker’s car. The filmmaker opens his mouth again, then closes it. The playwright touches his shoulder. “Look, you just go home now. Try to get some rest. I’ll call you if there’s any change. Just get out of here for a little while. You need a break.” He has no idea where this modulated voice comes from, but he suspects he’s channeling his lover. Have empathy for others have empathy for others have empathy. Even if you have to pretend at first. Is he pretending?
The filmmaker drives away, taillights illuminating the exit. The playwright makes his way back up the stairwell from the parking lot in steps of threes.
Back in the hospital hallway, the painter is now upright in a chair, hurling slurry, hushed obscenities into the dead white hallway. “Cocksucking motherfucker. .” The playwright touches touches touches his own elbows as he crosses the room and takes a seat.
Settling in with his laptop, he looks at them — the painter and the performance artist — and he sees it: She’s here for him. Not for his sister. She knew he’d show up.
Just look at them. They’re like a human West Coast tableau. Like scraps of indigo and blood-colored glass, foreign money, vintage jewelry and hip little buttons, hair art, toy soldiers and firecrackers and pieces of wire and bullet casings and the feathers of birds, the bones of animals, a half-smoked joint and a bunch of foreign beer caps and Dunhill butts. The look like they should be at Jim Morrison’s grave. Père Lachaise. Drinking Courvoisier. The painter takes out a flask. The playwright smirks.