The One-Eyed Man Page 14

  There was, most famously, the Shaolin monk who pummeled me insensate with a bamboo staff for reasons I still don’t fully understand, but assume have to do with insulting his beliefs, however inadvertently.

  Not a single episode of the show had aired yet, but even I knew this was the sort of television people would fall all over themselves to watch. At the same time, the worst of the assaults tended to slow production, as they forced Claire and me to retreat home, where she would drink and tend to my wounds as I convalesced.

  One afternoon following the incident with the monk, Claire sat astride my lower back rubbing ointment onto slashes left by the bamboo staff. Her hands, small as mice, moved over my skin, pausing to trace each wound carefully before the sting of the ointment.

  “Does that hurt?” she asked.

  “There is some pain, yes,” I said.

  “And yet there you lie, silent as stone.”

  “There’s not much point in making a fuss,” I said.

  “You’re the first person I’ve ever seen catch a beating and not utter a sound. It’s almost creepy.”

  “Have you witnessed a lot of beatings?” I asked.

  “Witnessed, experienced,” Claire said. “Sort of a rock-’em sock-’em household, growing up.”

  I absorbed this, considered inquiring further, then decided that if Claire wanted to be more specific, it was not my place to prompt her. “There’s no doubt,” I said, “that a couple of years ago I would have screamed like a scalded cat.”

  “I’m such a crier,” Claire said. Her hands left my back for a moment as she scooped more cream onto her fingertips. “Always have been. Used to drive my mother crazy.”

  “Children cry,” I said.

  “Not like me,” Claire said. “There was this cat we got when I was seven or eight. I don’t really remember how he came to us. Probably a stray.”

  “Sometimes they just appear in your life, cats,” I said.

  Claire’s hands returned: warm, bearing goop. “So this cat kind of hated everyone, but he was real sweet on me. He’d hide until I came home from school, then follow me around the house, everywhere I went. Slept on my head all night, like cats do. Anytime I sat down, he was in my lap. A pain in the ass, but I sort of liked it, too. He was warm and friendly and I didn’t really have anything else.”

  Claire paused, and her hands went still, resting flat and warm against my back.

  “Go on,” I said, after a minute.

  She cleared her throat, and her hands began moving again. “There was this old guy who lived at the end of the street. The local creep. None of us were supposed to go anywhere near him or his house. The rumor was this guy hated cats on his property, so he put out poison. And one day, our cat got into some.”

  Claire sat back, leaned left to reach for the bottle of beer on the nightstand. I waited, shifted my hips. She took a swig, put the bottle back, curled herself forward again. The fingers of her right hand ran slowly over a bruise on my left flank.

  “I got home from school that day, and the cat didn’t come running like usual, so I searched the house and found him behind the bathroom door,” she said. “I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say he was sort of liquefying on the inside, the evidence of which was pouring out of pretty much every hole. And the sounds he made, K. I still have dreams about those sounds.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, “that any kid would have cried at that.”

  “I was world-class, though,” Claire said. “I wailed like one of those grandmothers you see in war zones, clawing at a pile of rubble until her hands bleed. We’re talking half the night. ‘Why?!’ I kept screaming, over and over, and finally, after a few hours of this, my mother turned and screamed right back at me: ‘I don’t know!’”

  We were both quiet for a minute.

  “Anyway, that was the end of that,” Claire said finally.

  “People don’t always behave the way they’d prefer, in times of stress,” I told her. “Particularly when that stress is coming from their children.”

  Claire dismissed this with a grunt, and reached for her beer again. “Do you want kids?” she asked.

  “I did, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s sort of an unusual question.”

  “It’s actually a perfectly reasonable question, K.: Why would you rip someone out of oblivion and drag them into this?”

  “Biological imperative?” I ventured.

  “Not good enough, Mom. Why? Why?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “And then the answer comes,” Claire said. “‘I don’t know.’”

  I let the silence gather around that.

  Finished with the ointment, Claire drummed her fists gently on the small of my back. “You’re a mess,” she declared.

  “Does it worry you?” I asked. “How angry I seem to make people?”

  “A little,” Claire said. “But it’s going to make us famous.”

  “The consideration above all others,” I said.

  Claire reached forward and flicked my earlobe with one finger. “Besides,” she said, “there’s this feeling I have that, no matter how crazy things get, you’re totally, utterly, completely in control.”

  • • •

  Every time I got smacked, whacked, or bludgeoned, I could picture Theodore gleefully abrading one chubby palm with the other, visions of Emmys dancing in his head.

  But then, at a café in West Hollywood in the second month of filming, Theodore surprised me by saying he had started to fear for my safety.

  “Started?” I said, twirling a plastic stirrer through my Americano.

  It was just the two of us. Outside, southern California hurried about its business. Chrome gleamed as cars raced by at twice the speed limit. Across the street, in buildings abutting one another, squatted a pawnshop, a sex dungeon, and a Jack in the Box. The sun baked palm fronds and pavement and people alike.

  “I think back to our first conversation with Andrea,” Theodore said, “and I wonder if she wasn’t right about security. If maybe I wasn’t a bit cavalier. I knew, of course, that you would make people angry. What I underestimated was their eagerness to assault you when their ire is raised. This is a vicious time we live in.”

  “I’m not really worried about it,” I said.

  “Well that concerns me, too, my dear,” Theodore said. “That you’re not worried about it.”

  “I rarely worry about anything,” I said.

  “May I be frank?” Theodore asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “It makes me wonder if you aren’t mentally ill, in some way.”

  I thought about this. “I don’t believe so,” I said. “And let me add that the old notion about crazy people having no idea they’re crazy isn’t true. In case that’s what you were thinking.”

  “It was, in fact.”

  “Though it is true that with certain mental illnesses, it can be difficult or impossible for the afflicted to understand that something is wrong with them. Paranoid schizophrenia, for example. But I think we can both agree that I’m not schizophrenic.”

  “We can.”

  “And even schizophrenics sometimes understand they aren’t well. They’re just helpless to do anything about it.”

  “My dear,” Theodore said, “no one is suggesting that you’re schizophrenic. But may I offer an analogy?”

  “I assumed you would get around to it sooner or later.”

  Theodore sipped from an espresso cup not much larger than a thimble. “Watching you in the raw footage,” he said, “I was reminded of my enthusiasm for professional wrestling.”

  “It has borne some similarities, of late,” I said.

  “Not the glamorized, hypertheatrical version you see on television, which bores me to the point of despair,” Theodore said. “I’m talking about real wrestling. Which can still be found today, but not on television. Did you watch professional wrestling as a child?”

  “Not much,” I said.
“I remember it being a very big deal, but I had little interest. I know of Hulk Hogan and André the Giant. A gentleman with the unlikely name of Koko B. Ware also comes to mind, for some reason.”

  Theodore wheezed. “Koko was an entertaining character, for certain, but he was no wrestler. Not the kind of wrestler I’m talking about. So it’s safe to assume, then, that you are not familiar with a man known as Abdullah the Butcher?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  Theodore shifted forward, and the chair squealed under his bulk. “Abdullah was a practitioner of what’s known in wrestling circles as the hard-core style. Baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. Electrified ring ropes. I once saw a match in Tokyo that featured a tank of piranha. Take the most violent thing you’ve ever witnessed, multiply that violence by an exponent of ten, and you still won’t quite understand the brutality of hard-core wrestling.”

  “Doesn’t really seem like your kind of thing, Theodore.”

  “My dear,” he said, “I adore violence. So long as those engaged in it are willing participants.”

  “What about when the willingness of the participants is in question?”

  “As with?”

  “Cockfighting,” I said.

  “Those birds are hardly forced to fight, K. They struggle to escape their handlers so they can get at each other. They stomp on the vanquished, repeatedly, until forced to quit. Beautiful, savage creatures, with their plumage and bloodlust.”

  “Well I’m no fighting bird,” I said, “but all the same, I am a willing participant.”

  “Which brings us back to Abdullah the Butcher,” Theodore said. “Because he appeared to be a willing participant, as well.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Over the years, Abdullah became infamous not for the amount of punishment he inflicted upon his opponents—though that was considerable—but for the damage he did to himself in the ring. Do you know what the term ‘blading’ refers to?”

  “I could make a guess,” I said.

  “It’s when wrestlers use a broken bit of razor to cut their own foreheads. A small blood offering on the altar of entertainment that many, many have made, and quite willingly. But Abdullah bladed himself with a frequency and enthusiasm unlike any other. He slashed arteries on purpose, delighted in disfiguring himself. Eventually his bald head bore long grooves into which he would insert poker chips, as a sort of grotesque parlor trick.”

  “It’s a strange and multifarious world we live in,” I said.

  “But see, K., the point is that as much as I enjoy hard-core wrestling, I gradually came to hate watching Abdullah the Butcher.”

  “Because he was not a willing participant.”

  “Correct. He merely appeared to be one, when in fact he was genuinely sick. And being compelled to do something, even if that compulsion is internal, is not the same thing as doing it of your own volition.”

  “So you’re convinced that I’m like Abdullah the Butcher.”

  “Convinced? No. But after watching you bait that Shaolin monk, I began to wonder.”

  “I hardly baited him,” I said.

  “K.,” Theodore said, “you challenged the deeply held beliefs of a man whose only vocation is the practice of lethal acts.”

  “Exactly the point I was trying to make,” I said. “There has to be some dissonance when you promote a pacifist philosophy yet spend all your waking hours studying how to kick the crap out of people.”

  “My dear,” Theodore said.

  “At the very least, he exposed himself as something of a hypocrite,” I said.

  “Here is something life has taught me,” Theodore said. “If a man carries a weapon around as a matter of course, there’s a very good chance he will sooner or later find occasion to use it. No matter his espoused philosophy.”

  I stared out the window. Los Angeles’s endless traffic continued to whiz past in either direction. A man emerged from the sex dungeon in tears, looked up and down the sidewalk as if lost, then stumbled into the Jack in the Box. The sun shone like a klieg light; even the homeless wore sunglasses.

  “I thought,” I said to Theodore, “that I was doing exactly what you wanted. Which is to say, the thing that I’m inclined to do.”

  “You are, my dear,” Theodore said. “I just underestimated how dangerous it could be. I started this, and I have an obligation to protect you.”

  “If it’s any comfort, I was doing a good job of getting beaten up and shot all on my own.”

  “Nevertheless,” he said.

  “But so what is it you’re proposing?”

  “That’s the thing,” Theodore said. “We want to preserve the environment of authenticity we’ve created—and let me tell you, K., there is nothing on television as honest or raw as the footage we’ve shot to this point—so we plan to hire a small security detail that shall remain secret, even from you. Full disclosure, we already have hired a small security detail. Two men. Ex-Spetsnaz. Dangerous fellows.”

  “Ex-Spetsnaz?”

  “They can be trusted. Like most post-Soviet Russians, they value money over all else, and they’re being paid quite well.”

  “Seems very serious,” I said.

  “We require professionals,” Theodore said. “Men who are as good at blending into the background as they are at handling a sidearm. You won’t meet them, unless, God forbid, something goes really wrong. But they’ll always be there.”

  “By which you mean they’re here right now.”

  “Well, not here, necessarily, in this coffee shop. Then again, they might be. That’s the point.”

  “It’s maybe worth thinking about how this could make things worse, rather than better,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just playing devil’s advocate,” I said, “but consider what these ex-Spetsnaz might have done to the Shaolin monk, for example.”

  “I couldn’t begin to speculate,” Theodore said.

  “Because as much as that hurt, I don’t think gunfire would have been the appropriate response.”

  “Ultimately that’s their decision, my dear. We pay them for their judgment as much as their skill. And they’re very well insured.”

  13

  AN ANOMALY OF AERODYNAMICS

  Ex-whatnaz?” Claire said.

  “Spetsnaz. Russian special forces. Possibly also formerly of the GRU. Though Theodore didn’t say as much.”

  “So are they watching us now?” Claire asked.

  “One would imagine,” I said.

  “They’re on the plane with us right now,” Claire said. This existed somewhere between statement and question.

  “I have to assume. Based on what Theodore told me.”

  “That’s just weird,” Claire said. “I mean, I don’t like this at all, K.” She sat up and gazed around the cabin, craning her neck over the back of her seat.

  “Theodore anticipated that you would feel this way,” I said.

  “Are they, like, armed?”

  “Again,” I said, “one presumes so. Although they probably had to check their weapons, considering that we’re on a plane and all.”

  Claire pressed the flight attendant call button. “Wait,” she said. “What do you mean, Theodore anticipated I would feel this way?”

  “He said as much. At our meeting.”

  “You had a meeting without me?”

  “He said not to bring you. For this very reason.”

  “What reason?”

  “He believes you’re too invested in being a celebrity to want to risk mucking up the show with a security team.”

  “That’s not the problem. At all. I just don’t want some creeper following me around everywhere I go, watching every move I make.” She seemed to consider something for a moment, then punched me on the arm. “And what the hell? You agreed to take the meeting without me?”

  “I didn’t think much about it one way or the other. He said come alone, so I went alone.”

  “K.,” Claire said, gl
aring at me, “there’s a big difference between ‘come alone’ and ‘don’t bring Claire.’ A big difference.”

  “That’s a fair point, I suppose.”

  The flight attendant, all frizzy-haired impatience, appeared from the front galley. “Can I help you?” she asked, leaning over us to switch off the call button.

  “I need another vodka and soda, please.”

  The attendant looked at Claire for a moment. “It is my obligation to make you aware, Miss, that we have a three-drink limit on domestic flights. Company policy.”

  “Thank you,” Claire said. “For making me aware.”

  “This will be your third. For the record.”

  “Thank you,” Claire said, her eyes suddenly ablaze, “for sparing me the trouble of doing simple arithmetic.”

  They eyed each other a moment longer, and then the flight attendant returned to the galley.

  “I think she’s making up ‘company policy’ on the fly,” a man across the aisle from Claire said. “Pardon the pun. I’ve had four of these already.” He held up a can of beer.

  “She probably just doesn’t like other women,” Claire said. “Catty bitches. The world’s chock-full of them.”

  The man stared, nonplussed.

  Claire turned back to me. “Is he one of them?” she whispered.

  “I doubt they would be drinking.”

  “Maybe that’s part of his cover,” Claire said. “Besides, they’re Russian, right? I thought they were drunk all the time. Like, as a people.”

  “As with most stereotypes, it has a basis in observed reality, but there are surely exceptions.”

  “Jesus, K., I really don’t like this. It’s pushing all sorts of buttons I didn’t even know I had.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “Did Theodore give them access to the video feeds?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We could ask.”

  “Because that I don’t like at all. Watching us when we’re in bed. In the bathroom. Nuh-uh.”

  “I guess it’s hard to understand why that would bother you,” I said, “when presumably thousands or maybe millions of strangers will be watching us in bed and in the bathroom.”

  “Totally different. Totally.” Claire gave me a pointed look. “I mean, don’t be an idiot.”