Still, Phil had always looked out for me, with mixed results. I ran into him at a coffee shop one rainy morning in October.
“Hey hey hey. Cassandra Android, how you doing?”
“Phil. It’s fucking great to be alive.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Hey, look—I was going to call you. Got a sec?”
We squeezed behind a table by the window. I sipped my coffee and stared at him. A few months ago Phil had shaved his head. He’d immediately realized this was a bad move and tried growing it back, with the result that he now looked like what you’d get if Edvard Munch had painted Chia pets.
“So what’s up?” I asked.
“So I think I got a job for you. I know this guy, editor for Mojo. That’s a London music magazine. Print mag, not a webzine. He wants to do a story with photos. I thought of you, Cass. It’s perfect for you, a real Scary Neary story.”
“I know what Mojo is,” I said. “Perfect for me? As in, ‘Underemployed Losers and the People Who Hate Them?’”
“That’s my girl! Close, very close! You know Aphrodite Kamestos?’”
“Do I know her? Or do I know who she is?”
“Well, either.” Phil’s eyes widened. “You don’t actually know her, do you? No, of course not,” he said and quickly went on. “This editor, he wants to do some kind of old-time photography feature. 1950s, ‘60s … you know, Avedon, Diane Arbus, that kind of shit. I was telling him how I’d actually been up at Aphrodite Kamestos’s place once. It was wild. So he wants a piece on her.”
“So? You know her, you do it.”
“I don’t really know her,” Phil admitted. “This guy she was involved with, he and I did a little business, back in the day. I still hear from him every couple of years. So I emailed him and asked could he maybe get me an in with Aphrodite Kamestos.”
“Is she even still alive? She must be, what? A hundred?”
“Nah. Maybe seventy. But well preserved. She’s got this place up in Maine, an island. There was a little commune there, that’s how I got involved. I was their private dope peddler for a couple months. So I told this editor I have a contact, I could probably get someone up there again. The money’s pretty good. Plus you’d be paid in pounds—good exchange rate.”
I stared at my coffee and considered throwing it in his face. “Why didn’t you suggest he do a story on me, Phil?”
“He said the fucking 1960s, Cass!” Phil looked hurt. “Christ, I’m trying to do you a favor!”
“Oh, right. A Phil Cohen favor—I almost forgot.”
“I pitched you big time to this guy, Cass. I told him no one else on earth is as well qualified for this particular job as you are.”
“Why the fuck would you say that?” I finished my coffee and pitched the cup into a trash can. “Again: why aren’t you doing it?”
“I’m not a photographer!”
“So why doesn’t this guy send a staff photographer?”
“Because I guess Aphrodite wanted someone they’ve never heard of. She’s, like, crazy or paranoid or something. She wants an unknown.”
He pinched his lower lip between thumb and forefinger. I started to laugh.
“An unknown? What’d she say? ‘I need a total unknown—I know, let’s get Cassandra Neary!’”
“Pretty much.”
“Shit.”
I sat and said nothing. After a moment, Phil shrugged. “Look, I was just trying to help you out some. I mean, she specifically asked for you, God knows why. But it could be an interesting gig. Remember how they used to say if you tipped the country on its side, everything loose would roll into California? Well, it’s like they tipped it up again, only now everything that was still loose rolled back up into Maine. And these islands—Cass, it’s your kind of place. ‘The old weird America’—this is, like, the new weird America. You oughta think about it.”
I sighed, then looked at him. “Really? She really asked for me?”
Phil shifted in his seat, staring at his cell phone. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “She did. Go figure.”
“Okay. I’ll think about it.”
Phil glanced at his watch. “You’ve got, uh, five minutes.”
“What?”
“I told the editor I’d call him back by three—three his time. Five hour difference. And it’s almost ten.”
“But I can’t—I mean, how’d you even know you’d run into me?”
“I didn’t. I was gonna call you—hey, I swear it!”
“But—Jesus, Phil. What, has this editor told her I’m coming?”
He shook his head. “No. I did. I promised I’d send you. Listen, don’t think about it, okay? Just say yes, I can set it up. You got a license, right? A credit card? You’re not a total fucking Luddite, right? You can still rent a car and drive?”
“Yeah.” I gazed brooding out at the street. The rain had turned fallen leaves and blown newspapers to gray sludge. “Shit. Can they give me an advance?”
Phil looked as though I’d asked him to cook a baby.
“Well, is there a kill fee?”
“I’ll get you a kill fee. If it doesn’t go down, Cass, I’ll pay your kill fee out of my own goddam pocket, how’s that?”
“Tell me again why you’re doing this?”
Phil ran a hand across his stubbled scalp. “Aw, man. You know, Cass, you are so fucking hardassed, you know that? I really did think it would be a great gig for you. The legendary Aphrodite Kamestos, the semilegendary Cassandra Neary—I mean, you could get close to her, you know that? I saw her place, that island. What you always used to talk about, all that bleak shit you like? Well, this is it. All these rocks, and the ocean, the sky.”
He sighed. “And, I dunno, there was something about her. When I met you—you reminded me of her. You know?”
“The forgotten Cassandra Neary,” I said. “The never-fucking-happened Cassandra Neary.”
“Forget it.” He glared at me, then said, “You know, I should know better by now. To try and do you a fucking favor.” He picked up his phone. “I’ll find someone else.”
I shook my head. “I’ll do it, I’ll do it. I need the money. I need to get out of town.” I glanced outside again. “So are you going to call me, or what?”
He opened the cell phone. “I’ll call this editor. Then I’ll call this other guy in Maine. I’ll get him to set stuff up, bring you out in a boat or something. Then I’ll call you.”
“Well, that’s suitably vague.” I stood. “So I guess I’ll wait for you to call me, or for some guy to do some stuff, or something.”
Phil nodded. “Great. Hey, aren’t you going to thank me?”
“I’ll thank you when I get paid, how’s that? I’ll take you to dinner.”
I leaned over to kiss his unkempt scalp.
“Thanks, Phil,” I said, and walked home.
5
You’ll think i was leaving the city because I needed to escape from grief, or guilt, or fear: all the reasons people fled in those years, and a lot of them escaped to the same place I was heading.
But the truth is that when Christine had called me that morning, it had been almost two years since we’d last spoken. She couldn’t bear the sound of my voice, she’d told me: it was like talking to a dead person. Or no, she went on, it was like that nickname Phil Cohen had given me. It was like talking to an android, something that mimicked human speech and affect but wasn’t actually alive.
“The terrible thing is, I really loved you, Cass,” she’d said on that last message. “I love you now.”