Chapter Forty-Fi v e

· cole ·

This place, this place. Dry Venice, invented Eden, glowing New Age hipster palace where people come to believe in fate and destiny and karma and all of the things that are only true here and only if you make them true.

I was dead in Los Angeles once.

Chapter Forty-Six

· isabel ·

I opened my eyes and didn’t know where I was. And then, even after waking more fully, I suddenly knew, but I didn’t understand.

My brain was a tangle of images and sensations. My own bare legs on top of a comforter, a streetlight moon outside a cracked window, a spidery shadow cast on the wall from a pitcher of dried baby’s breath. Cole’s stubbled chin in the curve of my breastbone, his side, tan and even and endless, his belly button, his hips, his legs, one of his ankles hooked over one of mine, one of his hands carelessly sprawled up against my neck, the other curled in the silky space below my br**sts.

My mind took the images, finally, and put them all together into thoughts and memory. Finally, I understood: I was so, so naked.

We were in one of the bedrooms of the rental. Drunk with each other, existing in a sweaty place outside of logic, we’d stumbled in here last night and fallen asleep on top of the comforter here. Now it was some ungodly time of the morning and — What was I even doing? Who was this other person? What was I thinking?

I extricated myself from Cole and found my clothing on the floor. I reached past it to where my phone was tucked into my purse. Two a.m. My mother would still be at work; she wouldn’t be worried. But of course Sofia had been watching and waiting with sleepless owl eyes, anxious for my welfare. I had four missed calls from her.

“Hey,” Cole said. He looked young and uncomplicated and half asleep. He lifted just his fingers from the comforter in my direction. Sleepily, he said again, “Hey.”

I was suddenly petrified that he would say a name other than mine. I knew in a bruising, truthful way that if he said another girl’s name right now, it would break my heart.

“Isabel,” he said, “what are you doing?”

I didn’t know. I felt unsteady on my legs. I started putting on clothing.

“I have to go,” I said. My voice sounded a lot more awake than his in this room. In the light from the streetlight, I could clearly see the dresser, the mirror, the glass sculpture in the corner of the room. It seemed like it was never dark in any place in this city. I longed suddenly and fiercely for actual night, for a perfect blackness to hide me more completely.

“No,” he replied simply. He lifted his entire arm now, and stretched it toward me. “Stay.”

“I can’t. People are — no one knows where I am. I need to go.”

“They’ll be okay till morning. Come back. Come sleep.”

“I’m not going to sleep. I need to —” I couldn’t seem to work out how to get my dress back on. No part of it was right side out. It was all wrong sides, and my fingers were clumsy.

Cole pushed himself up on an elbow to watch me struggle angrily with the garment. Finally, I aggressively zipped it; the zipper wasn’t even. Who was going to see it this time of night anyway? No one. I couldn’t remember where I’d put my car keys. Maybe they were still out in the conservatory. I couldn’t find them on the side table or in my purse or on the floor or — no, no, I’d come in Cole’s car, I needed a cab, I’d have to call one, I couldn’t even think of — “Isabel,” Cole said from right behind me. He took my elbows and turned me around to him. I resisted, body stiff. I couldn’t look him in the eye. “If you have to go, I’ll drive you.

You’re out of your mind.”

“Please let go,” I said, and it was the meanest thing I’d ever said, and I didn’t even want what I was asking for.

He let go. I expected his face to be blank, the real Cole gone someplace where I couldn’t poke at him, but he was still there.

“Don’t do this to me.”

The emphasis, somehow, was on the word me. That he didn’t expect me to be able to stop from doing the this, whatever it was, but I could at least stop aiming it at him.

I wanted my hands to stop shaking. I wanted my brain to regain control of my body.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’m going to go. Don’t be an ass**le about it.”

I didn’t even know what I was saying. I just knew that I was going. I had everything together. I would call a cab. I would walk to Abbot Kinney and get into it.

Cole’s voice was raw. “Fine, Isabel. Just — I get it. You get to call the shots. Call me when it’s good for you, right? It doesn’t matter what I need. It doesn’t matter how much I . . . I get it.

Whatever. I’ll play your game.”

I didn’t reply. I was already gone.

Chapter Forty-Seven

· cole ·

light on which one looks good today

Maybe me

Maybe not do i match your shoes your hair your face

Maybe me

Maybe not back on the rack stretched but not worn i am the used

Chapter Forty-Eight

· cole ·

I wrote the album.

I had nothing else to do.

The L.A. sky turned overcast and smoggy. Everything looked different without the brilliant sun and saturated colors.

The houses were flatter, the cracks in the streets deeper, the palms drier. It didn’t feel like the L.A. I loved was gone, just like it was hiding or sleeping or had been knocked out and lay in a ditch waiting for me to find it.

I was tired of waiting. Of making. Of doing. I wanted some closure, an ending, a feeling I had gotten somewhere.

I wanted Isabel to call me and tell me she had been wrong, that she wanted me, that she loved me.

I called Leon. “Comrade. Do you want to get lunch with a famous person?”

“I wish I could,” he said kindly. “But I have pickups until midnight today.”

That was one thousand years from now. L.A. could be dead by then. I said, “Tomorrow, then. Chili dogs. Put it in your datebook. This time I get to drive.”

I got in the Mustang and drove. I didn’t know where I was going, but it took me to Santa Monica. I knew Isabel was here, but the car didn’t know she didn’t want to see me. I drove into a massive parking garage and sat there. I wanted to shoot up. I touched my skin where I would inject the wolf. I could almost feel it. I wondered if it was possible to invoke the shift without a needle or a temperature change, like that time I’d smelled of wolf when the topless girls came over.

I’d told Jeremy I was taking it off the table.

It was off the table. I’d meant it. It was just harder to really mean it than I’d expected. No. Not really. I knew it was going to be hard.

Withdrawal was never easy.

Isabel was just blocks away. I was tired of checking my phone for messages.

The car was getting stuffy. I opened the door and sat there in the dim blue parking garage and touched my wrist and the inside of my elbow and thought about disappearing.

I heard my name.

“Cole? Cole?”

I turned my head. It was a smallish sort of guy with a biggish nose and sort of greasy auburn curls, standing just outside the car. He was probably my age. His face had a religious cast to it. A familiar, glowing expression.

This was a fan.

I made sure I had my Cole St. Clair face on. I didn’t have a pen to sign anything, but maybe he’d brought one.

“Hey,” I said, climbing reluctantly from the car. I shut the door. “What’s up?”

He mouthed what’s up in a wondering, amazed way. “I’m, uh, I’m sort of, I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry, I’m, uh, awkward, you’re just, I’m . . .”

“That’s okay, slick,” I told him. “Take your time.”

“I’m not a stalker, I swear, I totally am not,” he said.

This was never the best way to start a conversation, but I’d heard it before. I just waited.

“I saw you come in here, I’ve been watching the show, I’m a huge fan of NARKOTIKA. I have, like, all of your albums, twice, and I buy them all the time to recommend them to, like, everyone I know.”

There was absolutely nothing wrong with what he was saying, but for some reason, I felt a little buzz in my throat when he said NARKOTIKA. A sort of claustrophobic squeeze. I had had this conversation, or one a lot like it, on tour. It felt like I was living a memory instead of a minute I was really in. Like I had dreamed two years and now I was waking up and I had never left my old life behind.

“That’s awesome,” I told him. “Always great to meet a fan.”

“Wait,” he said. “Wait, it’s not just that. When you disappeared, Cole . . .”

My ears felt a little ring-y.

“When you disappeared, I was having a rough time, too,” he said. He pulled up his sleeves. In the crooked blue shadows of the stairwell, his arms were a mess of scars. Track marks and cutting. But old. Old scars. “But when I heard on the radio that you were in rehab, I thought, I can do it, too.

And I did. I totally did, because of you. Because if you could come back from that, back from the dead, I could do it, too.

You changed my life. That song you guys had, I put the coffin inside/you don’t need to bury me, I know it’s about, about rebirth. . . .”

“Coffinbone” wasn’t about rebirth. It was about wanting to die. All of the songs back then were about wanting to die. My chest felt small.

“When I heard you were in town recording, I knew the time was right for this. And when I saw you drive in here, I knew this was my, this was my chance to tell you thanks. And show you — sorry, it’s still a little raw.” The guy half turned, jacking up his shirt. The skin of his back was red and angry with the irritation of a brandnew tattoo.

In cursive it said, I put the coffin inside/you don’t need to bury me. And then a date. The date he got out of rehab or went in or something. Probably he wanted me to ask. But I didn’t.

There was nothing wrong with any of it except that he’d taken a quote about wanting to die every second of every day and tattooed it on his body because he didn’t understand. There was nothing really wrong with that, either, because it meant what he wanted it to mean.

But I knew what it had meant in the beginning, and the permanence of it, of marking his body forever with my desire to die, made my stomach churn sickly. The feeling didn’t go away when he pulled down his shirt.

“That’s amazing, man,” I told him. “Good for you. Give me a — give me a fist bump.”

He shivered and wiped his left eye and then gave me the most timid fist bump known to man. He looked like he might fall down.

“I just wanted to tell you,” he said again, “what an inspiration you are. I don’t want to stop you from your, whatever. Oh, gosh, this is the best day of my life.”

I summoned a little wave for him as I turned away. As I headed down the stairs, the metal echoed and rattled beneath me. My legs felt wobbly, and my pulse had suddenly begun to race.

He’d done everything right. He hadn’t detained me. Hadn’t asked me to sign his face or his dick. Just said his piece and then gone on his way. Cleaned himself up and unfairly credited me with the burden of his recovery.

But my recovery was such a fragile thing. What happened if you hung your cure on someone else’s, and they turned out to be still sick? I wished for the sailing optimism of my first days here. My bulletproof confidence.

By the time I got to .blush., my skin was clammy. I could feel my heart tripping. My mind said: anxiety attack. My body just screamed. Every piece of my skin was sending a thousand messages a second to my brain. Run. Fight. Get the hell out of here.

There was nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to be anxious over. But then I would turn over the image of that tattoo like a shovel turning over grave dirt. And my stomach would churn. It felt as if the temperature were plummeting.

It’s not cold out here, I told myself. Even overcast, it wasn’t cold. I looked out at the street and imagined blistering sun brilliant on the car mirrors, white light searing the sides of the buildings. But my brain howled the cold at me. My arms were goose bumps with the fake cold.

I had known all along that the more times I forced the shift, the more likely I was to shift accidentally. I had been playing this game for weeks now.

No.

I called Isabel. My fingers were already shaking enough to make hitting the buttons difficult.

Her voice was another cool thing in the whitewashed day.

“Culpep —”

“Is the store empty?”

“Cole, this isn’t —”

“Is it empty?” She had to say yes, because I was already there, my face reflected in the black-ice mirror of the door, my hand on the door handle. I needed to put my head between my legs, to breathe into a damn paper bag, to shut myself in a room far away from the clouds and the world. I needed to get off the street.

“Yeah. Hey, what is —”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I hung up. I threw my phone, wallet, and keys into the potted plant by the front door.

This isn’t happening.

But it was.

The second I pushed open the door to .blush., the second the airconditioning hit my already cool skin, it was over.

Isabel stood in between tables of clothing, staring at me.

Her face looked bizarre somehow, like I couldn’t understand the angles of it.

My stomach seized. My skin was ragged. My breath was in pieces. I couldn’t tell her what was happening. But she didn’t need to be told.

She shut her eyes, just for a second. She opened them. She said, “No. Cole, I can’t —”