Television’s no good, so I pay for sat-connect to lose myself in the streams. Cricket appears in block green font, iLux in gold cursive, Holiday Inn in retro-1950s lettering. Shitty offers and add-ons before I reach the streams. Mook’s body whenever I close my eyes and a barren sickness at reliving his zebra-slashed face. Prime-time listings—Chance in Hell’s on tonight, the season finale. I hit the vending machine for a dinner of cherry Pop-Tarts, Ho Hos and Pepsi. Walking the hotel hallways, I feel the dead body’s somehow still present with me—like it’s a black spider I’ve seen slip from view behind the furniture but know is still there. It’s there, across the city, but it’s there. Gwendolyn Tucker on Chance in Hell, two-time CMA performer of the year, eighteenth birthday announced on the Grass on the Field blog. Eating the crusts of the Pop-Tarts first, then the middle, streaming Gwendolyn Tucker as she fucks her “Regular Joe,” a roofer from Tennessee. Recaps of how the Regular Joe entered the Chance in Hell lottery on a whim while buying hot dogs and coffee at an Exxon, of how he survived the initial Internet and text message voting, and the elimination challenges, Jesus Christ, I’ve dealt with images of the dead for so long I thought I’d be numb to something like this, but I’ve never seen a ruined corpse so close, never had to smell something like the tang of all that blood. Camera crews highlight the Regular Joe’s hometown, a hardscrabble cluster of trailers and ratty ranch houses, and show him working his job, hammering shingles with a crew of guys, rolling from house to house in his Ford F-250 Super Duty. A Republican, a good American. He’s married, his wife’s a spitfire brunette—Chance in Hell shows her laughing, uncomfortable. “I feel sick about it in a way,” she says, “knowing my husband will be having sex with Gwendolyn Tucker and all, but this is Chance in Hell so I’m real proud of him and Lord knows we could use the money and I’m such a huge fan of her anyway.” Everything’s confused when I try to sleep, Mook’s body and crime scene images of Twiggy—Timothy’s here, Timothy’s here—headless and handless, of Hannah Massey lying reposed in river mud. Take it as a matter of faith that nothing exists and maybe never has. I wake up screaming—
Dr. Reynolds,
The moment you contact me, or the moment you contact my friends or family, I will release all evidence in the Pittsburgh City-Archive linking you to the death of Hannah Massey. If you leave me alone, Hannah will stay buried—
3, 18—
Simka would call it PTSD. The past week and a half holed up in my hotel room, thinking every cleaning lady that pounds my door is Timothy pounding my door—thinking every car in the lot outside my window is Timothy’s car, every headlight flash is Timothy’s headlights. I spend hours peering through a slit in the curtains, taking notes about the cars pulling into the lot, parking, leaving, trying to figure which one might be his, if any. No one to turn to. A police cruiser circles through every afternoon at 3:30—it’s some schedule, some patrol routine, but I break out in cottony-mouthed panic that they’ve tracked me here. Two in the morning, three, I want to confess to the murder, confess that I murdered Mook just to end this waiting, end seeing Mook whenever I try to sleep, fitful sleep, the blood scent of his room stinking up my room when all this place really smells like is pizza boxes and coffee. I finally let the cleaning service take care of things—the room smelled fresh for about a half an hour after they left but that blood scent’s seeped into everything again. It’s all in my mind, an hallucination of blood, that’s all, that’s all.
I spend most nights talking with Simka, but all we talk about is the past—I haven’t told him that whoever killed Mook will kill me, too—Timothy—that I’m waiting for my death sentence in a Holiday Inn.
I talk with Gavril. Zhou’s been staying with him—Kelly—he’s sent pics of the two of them in London, bouncing around like tourists in love at Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, the London Eye. I tell him I’ve tried to ping Kelly, to explain what’s happened, but she won’t respond.
“She thinks you killed him,” he says. “I told her that’s ridiculous, but she’s scared—”
“I didn’t kill him. Tell her I didn’t kill him—”
Despite Gav’s swagger I know he’s terrified. He tells me he’s already been in touch with some producer friends of his, a stringer for TMZ and another at CNN, who are interested in the footage of the murder.
“I’ve teased the story—high-profile businessmen, college girl sex, murder, cover-up. I told them it’s breaking fucking news about one of the richest men in America. You give the word, the story hits the streams—”
Gavril’s reviewed what I’d sent him about Hannah Massey—and now the weight of her murder bears down on him, too, I can tell, like he’s carrying a bit of radiation close to his heart. Gavril’s world is beauty and fluff and light, or should be—but he’s feeling the threat against him now, knowing that he’s been drawn into this mess because of me, because of his association with Kelly.
“Maybe you should come out here,” he says. “Maybe we can hide out for a while. I have contacts in Brazil, maybe we could head down to São Paolo together, wait this out on the beach—”
“I don’t think I can wait this out,” I tell him. “Timothy’s been waiting this out for a decade at least—I can’t last like that. You can’t. Gavril, you can’t just disappear—”
“Fuck that, brother. I’ll transfer you cash and you can buy a ticket to Heathrow. You could be here by tomorrow. We could take the train to Prague, wait at my mother’s farm—”
“I shouldn’t have mixed you up in this,” I tell him. “Christ, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what was going on—”
“I think I’m falling in love with her,” he says long after midnight.
“Kelly?”
“I think once we’re finished with the shoot tomorrow, I’ll try the Lady Chatterley thing with her. Out in the fields—”
“Christ, Gav. You’re supposed to be channeling Robert Frost—”
“This business can be cruel to the ones we love—”
When his voice ends, the early hour silence is oppressive so I turn on the TV and classical music on KDFC and stream and piece together the traces I’ve saved of Albion. Albion. Every night I wait for Mook’s body and Hannah Massey’s body and Twiggy’s body. I close my eyes—and it’s like they’re lying in bed with me, these ghosts.
Waverly once asked me to track a ghost for him. Albion. I unroll the paintings of the Christ House and spread them out on the sofa—scan them and search the universal image cache. There are hits, but only low-res matches on San Francisco art blogs, unmarked and unlabeled. E-mail the bloggers through contact pages, inquiring about these images.
I pick up a magnifying glass at Walgreens and spend hours studying each painting—obsessively detailed, the wood grain’s drawn on every board, veins drawn in on every leaf of weeds. Are these Mook’s? No signatures—the style’s much different from Mook’s usual work, more like a cubist version of Andrew Wyeth than the graffiti agitprop he’s known for. Timothy? I saw Timothy’s memory maps in Simka’s office, and even though they were good, they weren’t this detailed, this perfect. I may have found a partial fingerprint in the charcoal dust of the drawing of the front porch. Studies of a single house. Fetishizing the house. Only one of the six paintings seems to be an interior view, a view of a window with hints of trees, a faint representation of a fleur-de-lis, partially erased, the planks of an unfinished hardwood floor, but the point of view of the painting is torqued, disorienting.