My cock felt like someone had shredded it.
As I stood, the sunlight pouring through the kitchen window spiked my eyes. I groaned, then recoiled at the sound of my own rusty voice. I steadied myself against the kitchen counter. I didn't know what drugs I'd done last night, but they had freight-trained me brutally. I felt lucky to be alive one moment, then dearly wished for death the next.
The clock on the microwave told me that it was nearly seven o'clock. Kiki's assistant would be arriving soon, and I couldn't have her catching me naked. Not again. My feet made whitish milk footprints with every step I took. I considered cleaning up the spill, but the idea of bending down made my head throb. Walking was enough for now. I didn't even bother to close the fridge -- it was in the opposite direction I needed. Let her assistant handle it; that's what she was paid for.
Out in the main hall, lying on the bottom step of the massive staircase, was Kiki, naked and curled in a quietly trembling knot as she slept. On the floor nearby was a dildo I can only describe as frightfully large. I had a vague memory of using it on Kiki, of her yelling at me, "Make it hurt!"
The night was a wicked and blurry sequence of incrementally increasing sexual gambits. We'd tried to hurt each other, then soothe each other, then hurt again. We had been beyond insatiable.
"Kiki?" I shook her by the shoulder, wincing in pain at the motion. "Kiki, wake up." I tried to remember her assistant's name and blanked. "Your assistant will be here soon. You don't want her to see you like this."
"...first time..." Kiki mumbled, her eyes -- crusty and blood-shot -- opening as if she couldn't believe she was still alive.
"What's that?"
"Wouldn't be..." She cleared her throat. "Ah, fuck. Fuck. Fuck and fuck and fuck, Randall."
Despite the enormous pain it caused, I crouched down and put my arms around her as she struggled into a sitting position. "I'm sorry," I said.
"Fuck," she said again, tonelessly. "It just doesn't matter, does it?"
I had nothing to say to that. I started to comb the knots and tangles out of her hair with my fingers, when I noticed something on my wrist just above the back of my hand. At first I thought it was a smear of wine from last night, but when I looked more closely, I realized what it was.
There, right where I normally wore a wristwatch, was a small, delicate, perfect tattoo. It depicted a single tongue of flame behind what appeared to be a wrought-iron gate left ajar.
"I don't remember going out last night," I told Kiki.
"I don't think we did."
I stared at the tattoo. "Then how did I...?" I raised my hand to show it to her.
She squinted at it, then started to laugh.
"It's not funny," I told her. But she wouldn't stop. Maybe couldn't stop.
And then I started laughing, too. Why not? There was nothing else to do.
Nothing else at all. It was over.
Wherein I Look for Evidence
As Kiki slept off her hangover, I tried to chase mine away by roaming the house, obsessively searching through every pair of pockets I owned. Tipping over trashcans. Pawing through Kiki's obscene number of clutches, pocketbooks, purses, and handbags.
Looking for used gauze of some kind.
A receipt.
Some kind of paperwork from a tattoo parlor.
Anything at all. Anything.
I found nothing. I never really expected to. But I had to look.
Kiki woke up and glared at me without malice, a glare of the still-groggy, as I tumbled into bed, finally too exhausted to explore further.
"Now what?" I asked her.
"I don't know," she said. "Anything." She touched my wrist, my new ink. "Anything at all, really."
Wherein I Have a Threesome with Kiki and Fi
I have no words.
Wherein I Go Through the Motions
I began to hate Del. I knew that he had done nothing wrong, but he had done much right, and for that I hated him.
I hated him for riding my coattails, I decided. He lived in L.A., made a good living as a screenwriter. He never worried about money. And I had spent two years of my life writing Flash/Back, scrimping and cutting fucking coupons -- coupons, in the 21st century! -- and stressing and killing myself and denying myself. And then he was going to swoop in and chop out pieces of my work and rearrange the rest of it and add just enough of his own bullshit that he could put his name on it? Really? He was going to take a couple of months to massage what had taken years of my life and then he would get a big payday and win a fucking Oscar. Because of my work? My work!
He looked at me over the screen of the laptop. "You OK, Randall?"
"Yeah. Just a little tired, is all."
Another man might have made a salacious comment about Kiki keeping me up late, but Del just pursed his lips in concern. "I have a really good reiki guy. Want his number?"
"No, that's OK." Fuck you, I was thinking. Fuck you and your fucking reiki guy.
We were putting the finishing touches on the draft of the screenplay I was helping with. Because I had initially declined to write my own draft, this was my only chance to influence the screenplay. After this draft, Del was contractually allowed to go off on his own.
He could give it a happy ending. He could just delete everything I'd done at that point, I realized. I had contributed some decent stuff here and there. And he could excise it entirely. No one would ever even see it.
"I just need to lie down," I told him. "Can we call it a day? I just don't feel well."
"Yeah, yeah, of course," he said, voice laden with concern. False concern, I was sure. Where was his fucking tattoo, I wondered?
I went home. Halfway there, Del texted me his reiki guy's number. I deleted it.
Kiki was out somewhere. Lunch with one of her platoon of functionaries.
I found, on the corner of the dresser Kiki had emptied out for me, Lacey's card. It had no name or other identifying information. It was just a plain white card on which she'd handwritten her secret phone number. Some perverse corner of my brain tittered at the idea of posting it on Twitter. Just to see what would happen.
But I would never do that. Of course not.
I was seized by an urge to call her. I didn't know why. Maybe because she was the one genuinely good person I knew who would take the call. Tayvon was off at war. There was no one else.
Did I think Lacey could save my soul? That was juvenile idiocy. She was a kid. The devil had once called her "dreamy" in a pejorative sense, and I realized how true that was. Did she really think she could change the world by getting crazy people to report themselves? She was a Stockholm Syndrome sufferer, probably freighted with PTSD in the bargain, trying to force a world that was, ultimately, nonsensical to make sense. She'd merely exchanged one implausible dream -- success in the theatre -- with one bigger and nigh-impossible.
Instead of calling her, I wandered Kiki's ridiculously huge house, too big for one person or two people or even a family of five. There were rooms I'd never seen, doors I'd never opened.
I ended up out on what I thought of as "my balcony," scrolling through the illicit little screenplay I'd been messing around with on the side. The devil propped his feet up on the the table I used as a desk.
"You can dance around it all you like," he said, "but you can't avoid it."
"Maybe I just won't finish the book after all. Maybe I'll start writing screenplays."
"Right. Sure."
"And then I could keep my soul."
The devil chuckled. "You idiot. You don't get it, do you?"
"What?"
"Here's the thing," he said. "Here's the thing about what you call your soul."
"What I call my soul?"
"Shush. Poppa's talking. You people anthropomorphize fucking everything. You think of your souls as versions of yourselves, your bodies made all wispy and white and insubstantial. You think of your soul as something that lives inside you. As a discrete, contained unit. But here's the thing: Your soul isn't a si
ngle thing someone can snatch away. It's a mirror of your experiences, fears, joys, needs, desires. It's a feedback loop for your morality and your ethics and your understanding of the world and of yourself and of each other."
"So... What did I sell you, then? I don't get it."
"You sold me all of that. All of it."
"What?"
"I get it when you're done, dumb-ass. I just have to wait until the book is done, and then I scoop up the remaining dregs. I've been taking it from you bit by bit as you wrote the book. Each step that you took towards superstardom was a step away from yourself."
I should have been outraged. I should have been angry. But I wasn't. In fact, it seemed almost funny. I had thought of my soul as a thing, just as he'd said. I had thought of it as an appendage, one I could live without. And after a fashion, I could live without it, it turned out. It's just that "I" was no longer "me." I was now a man who cheated on his girlfriend, a man who helped other women cheat on their boyfriends. The devil had parsed language with the finesse of a politician. Or a writer. He'd never denied exactly what he was up to, but he'd never told me, either. I'd been asking the wrong questions all along, and like a good lawyer, the devil let me draw my own conclusions. All of them wrong.
"How many... How much of what you've been telling me all along was a lie?"
He shrugged. "All of it? None of it? Little pieces here and there? I don't know. I don't fucking know, Randall, and you know the beauty of being the devil? The beauty of being the devil is that I don't have to keep track."
And I didn't care. Moreover, I didn't care that I didn't care.
I looked at the screenplay on my laptop. I was damned already anyway, right? Why not go for it?
Wherein I Fuck over Del
When the time came to turn in our first draft of the screenplay, I gave Del a big shit-eating grin, clapped him on the back, thanked him for all of his help and his tutelage on the fine art of screenwriting. I watched him hit "send" and fire off the draft to the studio folks.
"Do you want to see the rewrites as I work on them?" he asked with solicitous good grace. "Might be interesting for you."
"Sure!" I enthused. "Thanks again for everything, man."
"Good luck with the new book!" he called as I left.
I went straight back to Kiki's and went out onto the balcony, where I spent the next few days ignoring the book and cranking out pages of the screenplay. If someone like Del could write one in a couple of months, then it would be no big thing for me − for a real writer -- to do one in half the time. And I already had a headstart.
I was careful not to use any of Del's ideas in my version. Which was fine because his ideas sucked. I had also been careful to hold back my own ideas, so that I would be free to use them as I pleased in my own draft.
By the next week, Malcolm called to ask what I thought of Del's screenplay.
"I have to be honest with you, Malcolm," I said, as though aggrieved and reluctant, but determined to tell the truth regardless. "I like Del a lot and I think he has some great ideas and he's clearly talented--"
"Hell of a guy," Malcolm interjected.
"Hell of a guy. Total prince. Love him like a brother. But I just don't think he's right for this project."
I could almost hear Malcolm's frown through the phone line. "You were right there, Randall. Didn't you--"
"I tried to sort of guide it in a better direction," I said, imbuing my voice with self-recrimination. "But he came into this project with a lot of preconceived notions and I couldn't get him to budge. The whole metafiction thing. All of the Lacey stuff... I'll tell you something, Malcolm -- I think what he really wants is to write a biopic of Lacey Simonson. I think that's where his passion is, and the studio has the rights now anyway, right? He doesn't really want to be involved in Flash/Back."
I held my breath as Malcolm thought about it.
"I don't know, Randall..." he mused. "Look, I'm your agent and your advocate, and I see what you're saying. I've read the script and it's really rough. But we expect that at this stage. As he works on it..."
"I just think there's room for something a little closer to the book. There's a way to pull off a dark ending without losing the audience. Can I send you something?" I asked, my finger hovering over the "send" button.
"Sure."
Boom. I sent the screenplay, my screenplay.
"I'm going to hell, aren't I?" I asked. I sensed the devil standing over my shoulder. I had become more and more attuned to him. Or maybe it's just that now I was aware.
"That's an interesting question to ask, coming from someone who's sold his soul," the devil remarked.
"What's hell like?" I asked. "It can't be like they show in the movies. I won't buy that. Tell me it's a little more creative than that. Or maybe it's just boring. Is that it? Is is like sitting in a room with gray walls for eternity?"
I expected something mocking from him, but instead, he just came around to sit opposite me, elbows on knees, leaning in. He stared at me for a moment, some relative of concern in his expression, then said, "You really want to know?"
"Yes. Please."
"Hell isn't a place, Randall. It's a state of mind. Even the Catholic Church says so. And that state of mind is, basically, 'away from the Old Man's grace.'"
"That's it? That's how bad it gets?"
He shrugged. "That's what you get when you're in a situation in which one side has better PR and gets to define everything. If you buy into the Catholic Church's propaganda, for example, then being away from the Old Man's grace sounds like the worst thing in the world. But let me tell you something, man. I've been in the Old Man's grace and I've been away from it. And--"
"Are you going to tell me that there's no difference?"
"No. Not at all. Look, all things being equal, sure his grace is pretty good. I'm not going to lie. I enjoyed it. But being away from it isn't the torture and torment they want you to believe it is. It's just...not as good, is all."
"It's just not as good..." I mumbled.
I was still thinking of it later, as I tossed and turned in bed next to Kiki that night. I wasn't one hundred percent sure what it meant, but I thought that maybe -- just maybe -- it meant I could survive this.
Not that I deserved to.
Wherein It Doesn't Happen. (Nor Does the Other Thing)
On the six-month anniversary of the day we met, Kiki hired the chef from her favorite Japanese restaurant to come make fresh sushi for us in her kitchen. We were served by a stunning actress-wannabe Kiki's assistant had located for us. She nearly glowed every time she came within any sort of proximity to Kiki, and I began to develop scenarios in my mind that would lead to a repeat of the session with Fi, only with a fresh face in the role of Fiona.
Kiki seemed to not even notice the girl. She had been excited and enthusiastic about this dinner a month ago, when she'd planned it, but now that it was here, she was listless and quiet.
"What does it feel like?" I asked.
She pursed her lips. Sour words. Sour thoughts. "I don't know. I don't remember any more. It's like I've always felt this way."
"I could just not finish the book," I told her. "Really. I've been thinking about it. It would mean a big change for me, but maybe I just stop doing books. I could do movies. TV. Hell, I could write plays or do something on the web or who knows what?"
"I guess..." Kiki poked at her sushi with her chopsticks, worrying a California roll into a pile of rice, avocado, and cucumber. "I guess I thought...or was hoping, really...that one of us..."
"That one of us wouldn't be damned."
She threw down the chopsticks. "I can't eat any more. I'm sorry." Before I could stop her, she ran from the room.
That night, for the first time since we'd met, we spent the night in the same bed without touching each other.
Wherein My Evil Backstabbing Pays Off
Eventually, the studio got around to reading Del's script.
And mine.
"Guess what?" M
alcolm said excitedly when he called me, and since he said it excitedly, I didn't even have to guess.
"What?" I asked, as though I didn't already know.
"They don't want Del's version. They want yours. They want you to be the screenwriter."
I feigned surprise. "Really? Me? That was just something I knocked out..."
"You're too modest. It's excellent. It's really, really good stuff, and they can't wait to see what you do in revising."
"I'm flattered."
"So, just say the word and I'll get started on the deal. They got this first bite at the apple for free because you basically did it on spec, but don't worry -- we're gonna get you some serious coin."
"I'd love to do it," I said. "I think it would be fun to try something different from novels."
"Great, great. I'll tell the studio so that they can dump Del and get started on your contract."
A few days later, I happened to bump into Del while leaving the production company office after a meeting. He pulled me aside in the parking lot.
"I don't get it, Randall. What happened?"
"I guess they didn't like our draft, man."
"But they said you turned in your own."
"Yeah, well, they didn't like the one we did together, so I tried something on my own."
"That's not what I heard. I heard you turned yours in around the same time."
I shrugged. "I don't know what to tell you."
"I thought you liked what we did together," he said, seeming more hurt than angry, more befuddled than outraged. "I just don't understand."
"I don't know what to tell you," I said again, when the truth was, "I don't care to tell you."
"Good luck with it," he said, still wounded, still confused. "It's a brilliant book and it deserves to be a great movie."
At home, I wondered about that. Wondered about his parting comment. Could he really be that idealistic? Could he really, truly care only about the work, not about his own ego?
Impossible. People like that didn't exist. They never had.