The Bright Spot Read online

  It had never once run dry or gone broke, the story went, though the new neighbors were on the case. It was an eyesore, they said, clearly visible from their cars rushing by, closer and closer all the time—as relentless as the rising tax assessments on these mostly-paid-for dumps. Pretty soon their owners couldn’t afford to live here anymore. In the meantime, they had Murphy’s.

  This night, there looked to be about twenty dollars in the Tupperware, and about six cases of assorted beers packed into the fridge. There was a box of white wine, and Luella had some of that in a coffee cup she got out of the kitchen—even as she was telling me it was off-limits. I had an Icehouse, not my usual choice, in honor of those founding cases Luella told me about.

  There was a big TV on top of the fridge, another alley refugee that wouldn’t fit through Murphy’s back door. Ancient DVDs played continuously. A blue tarp was strung over it to protect it from the elements, making it look like it was wearing a glowing blue bonnet. Sometimes everybody watched—Luella said—sometimes nobody did. This was one of those nobody nights. Everybody was too interested in who Luella’d brought home to the neighborhood.

  “This is Nick,” she said. “We work together.”

  “Is he the one you’re always talking about?” one of the women said, laughing, shaking her shoulders.

  “Yes,” Luella said. “If you must know—he plays Marlow.”

  There were several whoops and cheers, and the whole crowd toasted me. When the hubbub died down and we took a table in the back corner by ourselves, I asked Luella, “You tell everybody about our work?”

  “Tell them? I’m worse than that. I smuggle out copies. They pass it around. There’s a couple of bootleg boxes in the neighborhood, one at the library, when it works. Why not?” she said. “It’s fun. They like hearing about it. They think it’s glamorous. They don’t care how bad it is. They know somebody making virtuals. Beats the hell out of some workware job, doesn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” I was having trouble adjusting to all these people smiling at us who’d virtually experienced Luella and I doing something I only hoped to do.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. What?”

  “You’ve never done a workware job.”

  “True. I’ve managed to avoid them. You going to hold that against me?”

  “Only if you’re defensive about it. Nobody wants to do them. And if some rich kid like you manages to end up poor, why should I have a problem with that? I’ve been poor all my life.”

  “You’ve caught me at my most affluent—no debt, no possessions. I thought all you poor kids wanted to be rich.”

  “We do. I’m just not very good at it.” She laughed, and our eyes met, and we were content with that for a while. I was used to looking at her in character—looking like Luella, but chiseled into some state of refinement through acting and makeup Gary thought suited Tiffany. The real Luella was altogether different. Like the difference between a cut rose and an oak tree.

  Then Clarence’s wife, Sylvia, came to our table and welcomed me to the place, told me I could come back anytime, with or without Luella. “Unless you’re a cop.”

  “Not guilty,” I said. “Cops and I don’t get along.” That was all I wanted to say on that subject. “Where do you get your old DVDs?” I asked, nodding toward the antique set playing Signs . No wonder nobody was watching. Aliens invade Earth so Mel Gibson can get right with God. Didn’t aliens have better things to do with their time? Even totally implausible ones?

  “Clarence has a big box of old movies his boss gave him when he cleaned out his garage—back before everything was ’ware, when Clarence had a job. Folks bring them in now and then. We make do. Like everything else.”

  “I’ll bring some next time. I’m a collector. I have lots of dupes.”

  Sylvia smiled. “What’s your name again?”

  “Nicholas.”

  “What do they call you, Nicholas?”

  “Ted.”

  Sylvia laughed big at that. “All right, Ted. We’ll see you around. Luella, I like your boyfriend.”

  Luella said, “He’s not my boyfriend, yet.”

  Sylvia winked at me. “Honey, this is your lucky night.” Then she was gone to another table to thank them for bringing the wheel of cheese and can of crackers that was the hors d’oeuvre for the evening.

  Lots of people stopped by our table. It was an older crowd mostly. They’d known Luella since she was a kid in the neighborhood, known her mother, Bea, who’d passed a few years back. That’s how they put it. They were old-fashioned that way. They spoke fondly of Bea and Li’l Lu beside me, told me stories, and checked me out.

  The younger ones asked Luella if she’d heard about Mike, who turned up dead the other night, and she had. They shook their heads. Nobody seemed surprised. They’d all gone to school together. He dealt. He was dead.

  What I kept noticing was how everybody talked to Li’l Lu with a touch of deference. They’d liked her mother. They liked her. They wanted to like me— because she did—but I better not fuck up and hurt a single hair on her head. I couldn’t imagine anywhere on the planet I could take Luella where my friends would do the same for me, nor would there be nearly so many. We’d be lucky to have enough for poker. No one had to tell me I was a lucky man, I felt it like a warm glow, like an alien invasion.

  Some older folks called her Bea’s Lu, apparently coined to distinguish her from some other Lu who had been around sometime or other. It came out as one word. It took me a minute to figure out what they were saying.

  “What is that?” I asked, “the hive bathroom?”

  “Be nice,” she said.

  “Gladly. Maybe it’s an archaic verb. Beslew. As in ‘Ye have beslew my heart.’ ”

  “Do you always talk so pretty?”

  “I can talk any way you like.”

  “I just bet you can.”

  “It’s true, you know—I’m completely beslewed.”

  “Keep talking,” she said. “You’re doing all right.”

  Luella stuck with wine. Sylvia unearthed a hidden Guinness for my third beer. I was deeply flattered.

  “So, you want to walk me home?” Luella asked. “I’ll make you an omelet.”

  “I’d love to.” Neither one of us had had anything to eat but cheese and crackers since a takeout Chinese lunch.

  “We can take the alley. I’ll introduce you to Buck. He’ll take to you quicker if you come in the back door. Through the front, he might think you’re the postman.” Home turned out to be four doors down. Buck turned out to be her dog, a Pekingese-chow mix, who raced around deliriously, bringing me his toys, hoping I knew what to do with them. He fetched, he tugged, he sat up and begged. “Pick him up,” Luella said. We were sitting on the sofa. She was rolling a joint.

  I wrapped my hands around his rib cage, lifted him up facing me, and looked into his dark, wild eyes. He went still and serene, with a look of supreme delight on his smashed-in mug, his black tongue peeking out the corners of his mouth. He was lighter than he looked. He was mostly fur.

  “It’s the lapdog gene,” Luella said, licking the paper’s edge with the tip of her tongue in a slow, steady motion. “Pick him up, and he’s all blissful submission. Put him down, and he’s all play. Go ahead. Put him in your lap. He’ll be your friend for life.”

  I put my knees together and placed him like a lion at rest. He sat there as still as a statue in front of a Chinese restaurant. I scratched the top of his head, and he closed his eyes in doggy nirvana, groaning with delight. Luella lit the joint and handed it to me.

  It was my lucky night. No matter how things turned out later. That was one incredibly lucky night, even if the omelet didn’t get made till late the next morning.

  By the end of the week, as promised, ReCreation called us back in to work. We were, by then, an item, but we decided to keep it to ourselves. We were actors. Pretending we were something we weren’t came naturally.

  T
he monster and the kid had been predictably cast. The monster topped out at nearly seven feet and had hands like hams. He was very soft-spoken, however, and painfully polite. The kid was another matter. He looked like a mad scientist’s kid brother—very Aryan, eyes like circles of cloudless sky, skin like a bucket of cream, too beautiful for his own good. He looked ten and was actually thirty-one. He was a professional (he told us every few minutes) who’d been in the business over twenty years. He’d made sacrifices, he said pointedly.

  By this I gathered he’d had genetic modifications some years ago to keep his fading career as a kid actor going, and now, without the money to reverse the procedure, he was stuck with looking like a kid for the rest of his life. When he wasn’t telling us all what a pro he was, rattling off credits, quoting reviews, dropping names, he was hitting on Brenda and Luella, reassuring them that some things hadn’t been modified in the least. Surely if the kids who didn’t like William’s fate in the original Frankenstein met this William, they’d be begging the monster to wring his arrogant little neck. His little prick while he was at it.

  “Let’s talk concept,” Gary said, getting things started. Gary believed in bottom-up intelligence, by which he meant he wanted our ideas since he rarely had any of his own, and he didn’t entirely trust Wally’s.

  I groaned and stared at the ceiling, longing to will myself back in bed with Luella, but it didn’t work. William, I missed his real name, jumped right in. “My character’s the one with the issues here, right? The real struggle. The whole tolerance thing. Overcoming fear and prejudice.”

  “Oh brother,” I said.

  “Let him finish,” Gary said. “How do you see the other characters?”

  He placed his perfect little fingertips together. “Fixated on me. My big brother Victor there couldn’t get along with the big guy, and now he’s my best bud. Got to hurt. And the female creature’s got to be disappointed, hooked up with a monster. Great idea: She makes a play for me behind the monster’s back, and I take pity on her.”

  Gary looked momentarily impressed.

  “Wally!” Luella surprised everyone by shouting down to the other end of the loft. Wally raised his head above the fog of composition.

  “Wally,” she said, “do you know the story of Pygmalion?”

  He shook his head.

  “Let me tell it to you.” She left the meeting and sat down with Wally. A few minutes later, they summoned Gary, who argued with them for a while, but soon relented. Luella and Gary returned, and Gary delivered the word from the oracle:

  “Victor brings the female creature to life and falls passionately, obsessively in love with her. She returns his love. The monster consoles himself with his pal, William—who, like I said before is, well, nice.”

  “What is this ‘nice’ shit?” William demanded. “Am I playing a damn queer or what?”

  “Be tolerant,” I suggested.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” William snarled. “I was talking to him.” He pointed a menacing tiny perfect finger at Gary.

  “Nice is just nice,” Gary snapped. “You want the job or not?”

  Since he put it that way, yes, of course he did, but William hated me and Luella forever after. He probably hated Wally and Gary too, but Wally would never notice and Gary didn’t care, so what did it matter?

  As Luella and I rode the bus back to her place, which had also been my place for the past week, we were both in a funk imagining working on this idiot project for the next several months. God knew what Wally and Gary would have us doing next, and that insufferable William ... We commiserated for a while as the bus jostled along.

  Then out of the blue Luella asked me if I was interested in taking on a one-time job some weekend. “It’s a real-time interactive. You ever do that?”

  “Once or twice. A murder dinner-theater thing. It’s like busking in a box. Is it a better gig than this ReCreation nonsense? I’m more than half ready to dump them altogether.”

  “It’s more interesting. It’s historical—right after the war. It’s very tightly scripted, but you’re such a quick study, you won’t have any trouble with that. You also have to be ready to think on your feet, ad-lib if necessary. I think you’d be perfect. The pay’s good. Interested?”

  “Definitely. What’s not to like?”

  “It’s probably illegal.”

  “Does anyone die?”

  “No. They’re just deceived.”

  “Do they want to be deceived?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Then I’m your man.”

  “I’ll set it up, then. It might be a few weeks.”

  MEAN STREETS AND HAPPY TEARS

  3

  Be all that you can be, in the A-a-army.

  —U.S. ARMY RECRUITING JINGLE

  SOME WEEKS LATER I WAS ALL SETTLED INTO THE neighborhood. The street alongside Murphy’s was being repaved to accommodate the increase in car traffic brought on by the new neighbors. The buses could navigate the old roads okay, but cars and their owners were more delicate, more in need of a helping hand from the state. Where the rich folks went, the latest in pavement technology soon followed. Isn’t that why we all pay taxes?

  A workware crew, naturally, was doing the job. Every evening they got a little closer to Murphy’s, until finally they were working right alongside the place, just the other side of the chain link, under the big lights they use, brighter than daylight, but colder and whiter. Nobody even bothered to put a DVD in the set. Everybody just sat there watching them, talking about them. Not them, exactly. The life.

  The smell drove a lot of people away, including Lu, but I stuck around. They said it was the smell, but it was a lot of things. It was one thing to watch a workware crew if you never thought you’d be in their number, but if you had been or even thought you might, it was painful to watch. Masochistic, you might say.

  Lu had struck a nerve when she asked me if I’d ever done a workware job. Each year as I got a little older, and my earnings as a professional actor got a little smaller and jobs harder to find, I imagined myself being one of those guys someday. That one there, duck-walking around like it was perfectly natural to walk that way for twelve hours at a stretch, plugging components into the roadway without a real inkling of what he was doing, as gray as a goose, his eyes as dead as a camera lens. What had he been in his younger days? Singer? Stockbroker? What failure had put him out there? Birth or bad investments or bad reviews? No, it was the good reviews that did you in, that kept you hanging around, hoping for a break, so you never got it together in what everyone else called the real world, and then all that was left was workware. That’s one thing about workware, you didn’t waste any time hoping. Not one little bit.

  “They can’t hear nothing we’re saying,” Dell said, watching them squirt the road with plastic paving, implanting the sensors, aiming the lights, dancing around the guck and the stench like a ballet in double time. The street ballet. Without the workware they couldn’t stand the heat, the smell, the chemicals in their lungs. They wouldn’t know the simple color code that told them which one was the thingamajig and which one was a gizmo, which wire would fry you to a crisp and which one wouldn’t. Without the ’ware they’d be lying dead in the street. With it, they worked so fast it was like watching a shell game in twelve-hour shifts. Under all those shells, a human was hidden.

  “They hear just fine,” Amber said. “They don’t understand nothing.”

  “Same difference,” Dell said. “If you’re not understanding it, you’re not hearing it. You don’t remember it, anyway.”

  “They don’t need to understand anything but what they’re doing,” Lyndon said. “No distractions. It channels your energies.”

  “Channel, my ass. Everybody needs to understand more than work. ’Less they wanta be a fucking machine.” Dell glared at us fiercely.

  Lyndon wasn’t cowed. “Maybe they’re safer being machines. They’d be dead without the ’ware. That’s why soldiers and firefighters got it. My dad
dy was a fireman, twenty-five years....”

  “Screw soldiers and firefighters. Screw your daddy too. They can have it. Fighting fires and wars and shit is one thing. Making roads for rich people to drive their cars on—what’s that shit anyway? Let ’em pour their own damn roads.”

  “You tell ’em, Dell.”

  “It eats your brain, I’m telling you. They say it shut down at the end of your shift, but it don’t. I’m telling you, I know what I’m talking about.” He eyed us all defiantly, hoping someone would argue with him. Lyndon was thinking about it. He might be a peaceable fellow, but he didn’t appreciate that crack about his daddy.

  Sylvia’s shadow fell over the discussion. “Dell done laid himself too many roads, roofed too many houses, hacked up too many hogs and chickens, cleaned up too much shit—ain’t that right, Dell?” As she spoke, she set down a rum and Coca-Cola—Dell’s preferred poison when he could get it—on a little napkin in front of him. There were even a few ice cubes floating in it. Veterans Day at Murphy’s.

  “Damn right,” Dell said, toasting us all.

  By this time the road crew was out of sight, and the new road looked ready for traffic. They wouldn’t waste any time. The bus we took to work now was driverless. I went home and crawled into bed with Lu, holding her close.

  “Tomorrow’s the big day,” she said.

  “Right,” I said, but I couldn’t get the image of the workers dancing out of my mind. Dell’s voice insisting: I’m telling you, I know what I’m talking about.

  I smelled coffee. I felt Lu’s lips at my ear. She whispered softly, “Ted ... Oh, Te-ed.”

  I was lying in bed on my back, my eyes closed, Buck on one side of me in pretty much the same position, snoring softly, Luella on the other, whispering in my ear.

  “Why’re you calling me Ted?” I mumbled groggily. “You mixing me up with some other guy?”