The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

SPYDER

The sun is the best bullfighter, and without

the sun the best bullfighter is not there.

He is like a man without a shadow.

-Ernest Hemingway,

Death in the Afternoon

I’ll never forget Layla. Even though nearly thirty years have passed, I still picture her every time I hear a woman laugh. Still. But I see her now the same way I once saw my face up there on the screen, chiseled flat and somehow unreal. Just a dream in the dark, but spooky as hell.

The things we did together. Like the time we drove from Hollywood to the Napa Valley and back, all in one night. Impossible. I mean the Spyder was fast, but it wasn’t that fast. Layla knew how to make it move, though. A couple of drops of her blood in the carb, and that little Porsche sports-car roared like a Sabrejet.

Nothing could slow us down on a night like that. I’d worked all afternoon under a director who’d jabbed at me until I was nothing but a tangle of emotional razor-wire, and Layla had spent the evening doing her spook show, but that didn’t keep us from flying up 101 like a couple of ghosts. Layla even looked like one in her trademark ghoul makeup and the black dress with the plunging neckline, the costume she wore when she did her Rigormortia routine on TV.

It was all kind of cute. Me stealing a look at her cleavage when I had the Spyder cranked on a straightaway, just because I knew she wanted me to look. Layla laughing, catching my telegraphed glance, now and then flashing suntanned breasts knifed by Lugosi’s favorite greasepaint.

Layla loved me, I guess. In her way, she loved me more than anyone else. Maybe it was because I never surrendered to her like the others did. Maybe that’s why she kept coming back for more, each time expecting that she’d finally break me and I’d be all hers. I guess that’s a strange kind of love, but Layla was strange. She had her own way of getting what she needed, even if it meant settling for less than she wanted.

Like the trip to Napa. She said what we needed was something heavy, bloody, nothing less than a good California Zinfandel. None of that sour piss they bottled in the Central Valley would do. We needed the real deal — the product of foggy nights and sunbaked days and oak barrels coopered in the Valley of the Moon.

That sounded good to me — sucker for escape that I am. The day hadn’t been one of my best. I was worried about the picture and the director (who’d been whittling my brains for four straight months), but most of all I was worried about where I was going to be in a couple of years. I’d always wanted to be on top, and once I was on the verge of getting there all I could think about was fading. Just fading, and that isn’t even romantic. Nothing so Hemingwayesque as a bullfighter dying beneath a sun that gleams like a Spanish doubloon.

When I was like that — morbid and scared and way too romantic — I turned to Layla. Back then, in the beginning, she made me feel indestructible, like I’d go on forever.

So we had our little trade-off, Layla and me. It seemed so simple at first. Too bad it changed to something else. Like I said, it was all tied up with our wants and needs — what we wanted from each other, and what we needed to survive; what we were willing to surrender, and what we needed to keep to ourselves. An ace in the hole, some secret part held back for the final hand. It was a very fine line, and we walked it like the edge of a razor blade, and damned if both of us didn’t end up stumbling.

Whoa. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, like I was saying — red lips laughing in the dark. Night wind of California slashing a dead white face with tangles of long black hair. A Spyder sports-car, a would-be movie star, and a gorgeous corpsette riding shotgun.

A quiet graveyard.

How Layla found just the right grave, I’ll never know. But she did. She eased out of the Spyder, cocked those sexy hips of hers, and stared down tilting rows of marble and granite. Then she pointed, her fingers extended as straight and stiff as marble daggers.

We waited in the darkness, the radio cutting in and out, snatches of Fats Domino and Bill Haley worrying the static that ruled the fog-choked night. Layla stood there in the dark, as quiet as stone, and I found myself remembering the crazy party where we’d met. Layla had been as quiet as stone that night, too, until she whispered that she could help me get a break. Whispering hot in my ear as she tried to maneuver me into a dark closet. That was the moment I’d been waiting for since first hearing about her. I told her no, it wasn’t going to be that way between us. And I kissed her, and I let my hand brush her breast so lightly that she couldn’t help but feel it way down deep, and I walked out on her.

And the phone was ringing in my apartment when I got home.

I’d heard all the stories, you see, and the funny thing is that there was something inside me that let me believe every damn one of them. Layla the vampire. Layla the witch. Layla and graveyards, and dead cats, and midnight rituals.

My story: Layla, as quiet as stone, in a Napa Valley cemetery

Momentarily, we felt the earth shudder.

Heard clumps of clipped grass tearing beneath the shroud of fog.

Saw his silhouette rise before us.

I guess Layla didn’t know everything, though, because she had to ask him the name of the winery where he’d worked.

I wanted to put him in the trunk. He smelled pretty ripe, and I didn’t want his muddy ass messing up the Spyder’s upholstery. Layla pointed out that we didn’t know how to get to the winery. I asked him for directions, but he couldn’t speak well enough to get them out.

So down the two-lane blacktop we went with a dead vintner sitting behind us — his feet jammed in the little space between the bucket seats; his moldy butt on the trunk; his dead hands on our shoulders, holding on for dear life… or whatever.

The winery grounds smelled of oak and stone. The place was even quieter than the graveyard. The dead man knew where a passkey was hidden. He led us across the grounds, through a heavy oak door, and down a stone-lined corridor that cut into the side of a hill. Being a man of discriminating taste, he chose a rare Zin from prohibition days, when the wineries had managed to survive via sacramental contracts.

He uncorked the bottle with precision and a certain grace, as if he wasn’t dead at all. We all had a little taste. Then we got down to business.

Layla stood behind me. With one hand she undid my fly and took me between those marble fingers. Her other hand held the open bottle.

I closed my eyes. Her fingers moved slowly. She was going to enjoy this, play it for all it was worth, because she knew just how much the director had worn me down, and just how badly I needed her help.

This time she had me at the end of my goddamn rope.

Her words tickled over my neck as she whispered the incantation. “The bottle uncorked by the man who corked it. Thirty years in the cellar, thirty years in the ground. The juice of the grape and the seed of the man. The seed of the man and the juice of the grape…” It went on from there. Then her grip tightened, and her sharp little teeth closed on my earlobe.

Skyrockets, if you want a cliche. In this case, it’s no exaggeration.

When I opened my eyes, the bottle was corked once more and wore a new lead capsule. The dead vintner lay on the floor, withered in his moldy suit. Whatever had been left in him was now gone.

But there was wine on his grinning lips, and Layla knelt at his side. The tiniest of smiles crossed her face as she rose. Her white fingers swam toward me in the darkness, and her red lips parted. Her tongue did a coy little dance over her teeth and she laughed.

She’d seen the look of horror on my face. She’d gotten a little bit of what she wanted, and I’d lost a little bit of what I needed.

A piece of me that I could never get back.

I turned away, bloody Zinfandel roiling in my gut, and hurried up the stone corridor, trying to convince myself that Layla hadn’t pulled me out of a grave, that I was still alive and breathing.

You see, she’d touched me once, and once was enough.

It was the only time I ever let her touch me.

I wrapped a big red ribbon around the bottle of wine and gave it to the director. He eased off after that. I don’t know what did the trick: Layla’s enchanted Zin or the insane deadline the studio had imposed. Either way, the sly old puppeteer didn’t have another word to say about me until the first reviews appeared.

Layla wouldn’t go to the premiere, of course. She said it wouldn’t be good for me to be seen in the company of an older woman who earned her living showing monster movies to a TV audience of slobbering teenagers. She selected a starlet who’d caught her eye, even bought a corsage for the girl. I picked her up at Layla’s bungalow in Hollywood.

Big night. Starlet and Spyder and me. Little pistons pounded in my skull, so steadily that I could hardly watch the picture. I had choke fever real bad; I couldn’t even bring myself to take the starlet’s hand for fear she’d reject me and storm out of the place in search of a real celebrity.

The movie plodded along. My face seemed to hang on the screen for minutes at a time, so huge, but like I said, flat and somehow unreal. And then the last scene finally came, all tears and shadows on the big screen. My own voice wailed at me while I made promises to a sick man who was supposed to be my father.

Eyes closed, I tried to picture it as it had happened — the director whispering instructions in my ear, the bright lights, the camera drinking it all in, the old actor lying on a phony deathbed. But I couldn’t hold the images in my head. The pounding pistons crushed them, and I was left with a single vision.

All I could see was the dead vintner lying on the stone floor, a trickle of dark wine staining his withered grin. A dead grin, but a grin unsatisfied.

All I could hear was Layla’s mocking laughter.

I was the toast of the town for a little while. Parties. Meetings. Dinners. Then a new picture came out, and it was someone else’s turn.

For the first time I saw the nasty hook hidden in the game. Every morning I picked up the newspaper and flipped to the movie section. And every morning my sense of security shrank a little more, in direct proportion to the size of the movie ad. First my photo disappeared. Then the director’s name vanished, followed by the names of the supporting actors. Finally, my name went. All that was left was the name of the picture, along with a note that it was IN COLOR and the theatre was AIR-CONDITIONED.

Pretty soon I was the second half of a double-bill.

One morning I ran into Layla at a coffee shop. She looked up from the paper and said, “You’re not here at all.”

“It’s over,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It’s time to start again.”

She was smiling, but her words hit me with the finality of a curse.

The columnist lived in one of those suicidal houses that teeter on the side of a steep hill. Places like that are all sparkling glass and architectural majesty on a sunny day, but they invariably surrender to melancholy and jump to their deaths when gloomy storms blow hard off the Pacific and mud-slide season begins.

Normally, such a breathtaking combination of design and location would have left me with a fullblown case of vertigo, but the fog was in pretty solid on the night of my visit. I was brave enough, and drunk enough, to play with the weirder possibilities of the stage with which the columnist’s overpaid architect had provided me, because I was intent on giving the self-important scribbler the thrill of her life.

And giving Layla a bit of the knife.

The scribbler was actually nervous. It was almost as if she’d never done anything like this before, and I knew that wasn’t the case. I couldn’t figure out why she was jittery, until I got close to the window and glimpsed my reflection.

As per Layla’s instructions, I’d dressed for the part — engineer boots, jeans, tight white T-shirt, red windbreaker. I had to laugh. I really did look like a teenager.

“Normally, there’s a wonderful view of the city lights,” the columnist said.

We weren’t far apart. I let out a sigh, just heavy enough so that my breath tickled her bare shoulder. I didn’t touch her, but I got a little closer and held her gaze. Then, as soon as she opened her mouth to speak, I said, “I guess that works both ways.”

She smiled, but I knew she didn’t have idea one.

I worked up an embarrassed grin. “The view, I mean. We can’t see the city. The city can’t see us.”

She laughed, sipped her drink, and started looking for a place to set the glass. Slowly, I moved behind her. I brushed the back of her hand, took the glass. She didn’t care where it went. I knew that, because I could see her face reflected in the window, and her eyes were like a couple of glowing coals.

“Someone might see us,” she said. “There’s a house below this one, closer than you might think — ”

My hands went to her hips and I pulled her to me.

She did a slow, easy grind against my jeans.

End of discussion.

The fabric of her dress was so damn light, like it wasn’t there at all. I let my hands drift beneath it. My fingers traveled her thighs, her smooth, nyloned flesh. My tongue darted over her neck, and I tore away what I found under her dress.

She planted her hands against the window, pressing so hard that I was sure the glass would shatter. Slashed wrists hanging through a gaping hole, me wiping down everything for fingerprints and sweating — I could picture the whole awful scene.

But it didn’t happen that way. Her eyes were closed now. And she certainly wasn’t worried about the neighbors.

I watched her reflection. I watched the fog.

And there was Layla. Her generous breasts pressed against the other side of the window, and her hands covered the same spots that the columnist’s covered, but Layla’s fingers were longer, slimmer. She held the hem of her black dress between white teeth.

Layla in the fog. Hips moving hungrily, sex glistening.

I couldn’t hold back any longer. With one hand, I pulled the columnist against me and held her still. The fingers of my other hand coiled in her hair.

She screamed.

It wasn’t a scream of pleasure. Her legs gave way, and I heard the awful sound of her rings scrapping glass as she fell forward. With one hand holding her hips and the fingers of my other hand tangled in her hair, I kept her from pitching through the window.

Outside, nothing remained of Layla but a swirl of fog.

The columnist’s reflection was suddenly gaunt and terrified. “Someone saw us,” she said. “Someone’s out there — ”

“No,” I said. “It was just the fog. The wind picked up. It was swirling.”

She dropped to her knees and turned toward me. “No. It was a person… a woman… and she was watching us. God, if she had a camera — ”

She left the rest unsaid.

She left me the perfect opportunity.

“If she had a camera, I’d like a couple of prints,” I said. “That would show people around this town that I’m determined about my work.”

The columnist looked at me for a long time.

I didn’t say any more, just held my little grin, and she got the message.

She decided that it was her turn to make me happy.

We stayed in front of the window. She made me feel so good that I wanted to close my eyes, but I resisted the temptation. Instead, I watched the fog.

And, just for spite, I made damn sure the fog was watching me.

My name appeared in four straight columns, much to the studio’s delight. I guess I don’t need to tell you that I got the part.

It’s the picture that most people remember. I even wore the red windbreaker — the same one that I wore to the scribbler’s house — and most people remember that, too.

There’s a scene in that picture where a guy calls me a chicken. I get all broken up about it, and we go for a little chickie run. Stolen cars and a big cliff by the ocean. The same doe-eyed starlet that I’d taken to the premiere of my first picture sends us on our way, looking like daddy’s most frightening wet-dream in a tight cashmere sweater.

I live. The guy who called me a chicken doesn’t. I get the girl, too.

Kind of like my night with the woman in the glass house.

See, we had our own little game of chicken, Layla and me. That’s what the whole scene with the columnist was really about. Layla was taunting me, just waiting for the woman to crack so she could get inside her. She wanted nothing more than to be inside the scribbler’s head when I went into action. That’s how badly she wanted another piece of me. But I’d learned my lesson at the winery, and I didn’t give her a chance to do anything this time — you might say that I jumped at just the right moment. Layla might as well have sailed over a cliff in an old Ford, just like my rival in the movie.

That was my magic at work. I had to show Layla that I could succeed on my own, without her help. But something kept me from stopping there. I rubbed it in, like she’d done with her spooky laughter at the winery after I’d let her touch me.

So I gave the columnist what I refused Layla, and laughter didn’t go along with it. We kept at it way past the point where pleasure turned to something raw and unstoppable. And the woman — who looked nothing like Layla — became Layla for me. I wanted a piece of her. A real big piece. I pinned her to that wall of cold glass and kept her there until the smell of her perfume was long gone.

That’s when the fog went wild and tore itself apart.

And then the morning brought the sun.

It was hard work, that picture. I got to know the little starlet, and she had about a million questions for me. The only problem was that she didn’t pay too much attention to my answers.

We wrapped on schedule. Before I could blink, the studio tossed me into a picture about the oil business. I didn’t get the lead, but I was going to be working shoulder to shoulder with some of the biggest names in the business. Believe me, I was nervous about it.

Location shooting was starting right away. I only had a couple days to get myself ready and head down to Texas. Things were moving fast and I was flying pretty high, but I wanted to see Layla before I left. This was the second big gig I’d gotten on my own, and I wanted to let her know it. But there was something else. Something in me wanted to keep her interested, too. I didn’t want to lose her. Maybe I felt like we were even now, like we’d come to a new point in our relationship. A place where I might be able to let her touch me without worrying that she’d take something away. A place where I could touch her, and make her smile, and hear her breath catch in her throat, and not stop there… and go on with the rest of it without wanting anything else from her.

A place where we could meet as equals.

I phoned her.

She said, “I’d love to see you.”

For a gag, I bought one of those rubber shrunken heads with wild red eyes that glowed like embers. It was intended as a peace offering, really, something that would make Layla laugh in a way I wouldn’t mind.

I never did give her that head, though.

Layla didn’t want a peace offering.

She wanted some kind of cheap revenge.

I parked the Spyder in front of her little bungalow and trotted up the steps. Just when I was about to bang on the screen door, a little whimper came from inside.

I hung back from the door, my back against a tangle of bougainvillea that climbed a web of trelliswork screening the front porch. Though the layout of the living room was second nature to me, it was pretty dark in there — all the drapes were closed, and I had trouble making things out. Fortunately, a few candles glowed in the far corners of the room, guttering when caught by the feeble breeze of an oscillating fan.

Layla sat on the couch, naked, not moving at all. A yellow summer dress surrounded her feet as if she’d just slipped out of it, a pool of silk on the hardwood floor. A man sat beside her. He was fully dressed, and every now and then his big shoulders heaved.

I recognized his voice. It was the guy who had directed my first picture. He was busy spinning stories of his long friendship with Layla, hinting that he needed some payback from her. “You know how it is,” he told her. “I’m not the fair-haired boy anymore. Back when I started it was genius-this and prodigy-that. You remember. What a future I had. But now it’s nothing but complaints. Can’t he do anything new? What happened to his spark? His daring? All that high-hopes-gone-for-naught crap.”

Layla laughed.

It was almost as if her laughter was a reward for his wit in the face of doom, but I knew better. She was laughing at me. Me, crouching against a nest of sweet bougainvillea like a cheap voyeur. Me, stiff and straight and breathless as a corpse, honeybees buzzing around my head.

The director moved closer to her — nuzzled her neck, ran eager fingers over her breasts — but she only laughed some more, as though a particularly precocious child were tickling her. It was plain that he didn’t have a damn thing that she wanted. Not anymore. The sly old puppeteer had given everything to Layla long ago. Layla was the director of this little scene, and she was determined to give me a glimpse of my future.

She thought she was that smart.

She thought I was that stupid.

Somehow, I couldn’t believe that she thought so little of me.

I was pissed.

I tied the rubber shrunken head to the rear-view mirror of the director’s Mercedes.

I got in the Spyder and drove all the way to Marfa, Texas.

I ate up the sunshine down there in Texas. Couldn’t get enough of it. I tried to do good work on the picture, and I think I succeeded. For the first time in a long time, I was way past worrying.

The pressure was off, and I was on my own.

It was funny to be there in the middle of the whole thing (and a world away from Layla), not giving a damn one way or another while the rest of them scurried around as if their lives depended on their next move. The reigning big stars wearing big star masks, not even daring to be themselves when the lights went off and the camera lenses were covered. The studio boys downing Pepto, having anxiety attacks over the tiniest screw-ups. Only the union laborers seemed sane, showing up day after day, knowing checks would be waiting at the end of the week and in years to come regardless of rain or hail, sleet or snow.

Weird to see the whole situation so clearly, so suddenly.

A bunch of kids hung around the set. I did rope tricks for the little ones and told dirty jokes to the older kids. One little girl asked me for a lock of my hair, and I traded her for a box of color crayons.

The crayons were a lot of fun. I had a copy of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon with me, and I highlighted it with the enthusiasm of a demented English major. Passages to do with disability, I shaded green. Disfigurement was blue. Yellow was degradation.

Death was red.

There was a whole lot of red in that book.

The red crayon was nothing but a nub by the time I finished reading. With the last bit of it, I wrote nasty letters to the director of my first picture and the woman who lived in a glass house. I told them that they were both dead and weren’t smart enough to be down.

I sent the Hemingway book to Layla’s favorite starlet, air-mail.

Then I spent a glorious day under the Texas sun, covered in black oil and laughing like a hyena.

The best thing about coming back to California was the smell of the ocean. I sucked it in while I drove to the little starlet’s beach cottage. The Spyder’s lights cut through the evening fog. The salty air burned my lips, which were chapped courtesy of the Texas sun.

The starlet was surprised to see me. At least she pretended to be. We sat in her living room, which was pretty spare except for a hi-fi and a bunch of 45’s. There was only one book in the room, and it lay among the records like a machine gun in a water pistol armory.

“I haven’t had a chance to read it yet,” she said, her eyes searching the sharp stands of beach grass that dotted the dunes outside the room’s large picture window.

The grass leaned with the wind, slicing wisps of fog that haunted the beach. I shot a knowing glance at the fog, and the starlet was smart enough to catch it. “She wants a lot, doesn’t she?” I said, and the girl who liked to ask so many questions nodded, her eyes suddenly wary, as if she could actually see Layla pressing her ear to the window.

I settled into a director’s chair stolen from the studio, letting my voice boom so that it echoed in the sparely furnished house. “Well, the trick is not to give her what she wants. That’s how you keep her interested.”

“That’s easy for you to say.”

I nodded. That was the truth. It was easy to say, hard to do. The director had never learned that. Neither had the columnist.

“It’s something you have to learn,” I said. “Or maybe it’s an instinct.”

She didn’t look at me. Her eyes scanned the beach.

My eyes scanned her. Lazy, dark curls. Worn jeans clinging to her ass, her thighs. One thumb nervously tugging a frayed belt-loop, the cleft of her back dotted with gooseflesh. And reflected in the window, against the hard gray beauty of the fog, a cotton shirt knotted between her young breasts, the knot rising and falling with some urgency as her breaths came sharp and fast.

I smiled at the thought of how she’d look on the big screen once she made it out of the background, once the camera drank of her and no one else — each perfect little detail magnified, each imperfection snipped away in the editing room. It was easy to see why Layla would do almost anything to get a piece of someone like her, or someone like me. Compared to us, directors and columnists didn’t have much to offer.

“Maybe I can teach you.” I rose from the chair. “Give you something… ”

That got her attention. “A few pointers?”

I grinned. She was really listening now. “No. I’ll give you something that you can use… a little piece of me.”

She came to me then, and we didn’t give the fog a second glance as we settled on the hardwood floor.

But I felt the fog when I hit the road. Running in my bones like cold Pacific tides, stinging deep and clean in the cracked slivers of my chapped grin.

Couldn’t smell it, though. Couldn’t smell the ocean, either.

All I could smell was the Spyder’s guts: oil and gas…

… and a few fresh drops of Layla’s blood.

I see them every now and then on the talk shows. Layla and her starlet, who isn’t so young anymore. They usually want to talk about some TV movie deal they’ve managed to scam, but invariably the host wants to talk about me.

And, after some phony protesting about the sanctity of my memory, that’s what they do. They also show up at my grave every year on the anniversary of my death, along with a bunch of middle-aged folks who tend to favor red windbreakers and white T-shirts. Layla makes a little speech, the starlet sheds a few tears, and then they get down to the business of autographing publicity photos that they posed for nearly thirty years ago.

It must have been tough for Layla, not getting what she wanted out of me. I think it was the first and only time that ever happened to her. Except with the starlet, of course. She must still be working on that, though, because she’s certainly not keeping the alcoholic babbler around out of love. No. After all these years I’m convinced that Layla’s still trying to get at the little piece of me that I shared with that sad, confused woman.

Blood out of the proverbial turnip.

After I totaled the Spyder, the whole thing blew up in Layla’s face. That was the best part, and I’m almost glad that I was still around to see it happen. First the scandal magazines hounded her with stories about witchcraft and voodoo and all that, but those idiots didn’t even realize how close to the truth they’d come. They just made up some junk, ran a couple of Layla’s ghoulish Rigormortia publicity pictures, and let it go at that.

Layla didn’t quit, though. I’ll give her that. Even when she hit bottom, she kept pitching. The director and the columnist faded from view despite her best efforts. She went through a mess of Tab’s and Ty’s and Troy’s, but none of them made it any where. Pretty soon she was left alone with the starlet. That’s when she decided to go into the legend business.

I’m not sentimental about it, though. Layla was the one who wanted to play chicken. I just went along for the ride, so to speak. But if she was the one who lost her temper, well, I was the one who made her lose it.

I guess that makes me the big winner, doesn’t it?

See, I’d realized what Layla didn’t know, what none of the people who worshiped her could ever learn. The wanting, the needing, is the best part. Once you get something, you’ll never hunger for it in that same way again. And once you surrender something, you’ve lost it forever; it’s what you are, and it’s gone gone gone. Ask the director, or the columnist, or the legion of Tab’s and Ty’s and Troy’s.

As for me, I’d decided that it was better to keep the lion’s share all to myself. Layla wasn’t going to have it. The director and those like him weren’t going to strip it away, bit by bit, year by year. I never wanted to wake up and look in the mirror, wondering where it had gone.

Quit while you’re ahead, is what the game is called. That’s how I saw it then. From where I’m sitting now, it doesn’t seem so clear-cut.

But when I climbed into the Spyder that last time, I figured I was headed straight for hell. Layla’s chosen revenge was fine by me — let the Spyder roar and the blood flow. That was how I felt about it. I was going to die young and leave a good-looking corpse and all that. I was counting on the power of legend — a handful of Technicolor hours that would never change — but I never figured I’d be around to see the legend take hold.

I guess I’d never considered the business end of the proposition.

The studio laid it on heavy with my family back in Indiana. The body of his car was aluminum, you see. It couldn’t stand up to such a battering. It’s so tragic. What a future he had, and to be left a cripple. Brain-damaged. Horribly disfigured. Better to place him in a private sanitarium. Let the world think him dead. The fans would pry, you understand, torture him. This way he will always be young. And the desert is such a peaceful place.

Things have been quiet for a long time, but it’s never quiet inside my head. I always demand blue sheets on my bed. When I sleep, I dream of Joselito and Granero and Maera — Hemingway’s bullfighters, all three buried long ago in the rich soil of Spain. I dream of these men in their suits of light, and of angry black eyes and sharp horns.

The walls of my room are a bright and cheery yellow.

Evenings I watch the desert sky. On temperate nights the nurses wheel me outside, my faded red windbreaker draped over my shoulders. Wonderful colors bleed overhead, night after night. Always something different, if you’re willing to watch. Sometimes the sky is as red as blood, but it never seems to make any difference, even though I keep hoping that it will.

I miss the color of blood. Real blood, I mean. I remember the hot brightness rushing out of me as the broken steering wheel speared my chest, remember how I painted myself and painted the Spyder and how the speedometer was masked by a curtain of blood. I remember staring down at the torn pieces of flesh that clung to the twisted metal and clung to my bones and knowing that every piece belonged to me and every drop of blood was mine and everything around me in that moment was as simple and clear as the waxy red shine of that stubby red crayon down in Texas.

And then they came and scraped me out of the car and stitched me back together. And in time the angry scars faded from scarlet to dull, dusty purple. All of it happened so fast, really, and then it was over.

And there was no turning back.

Like with Layla and me. I know that I was right about her and all the others, and about being hungry.

Like I said: once you get something, you’ll never hunger for it in that same way again.

But that doesn’t mean you won’t be hungry.

The walls of my room are a bright and cheery yellow, and the sheets on my bed are blue, and the sky is often as red as blood. But I know that my life is a dull, dusty purple — the color of a scar — and a blood-red sky can never change that.

Because in this desert the blood in the sky dried long ago.

And the fog never comes.