Over Exposure Part 2

"A loaner," Guy said, smiling, trying to get with the lingo.

Jumpy looked over. His expression was dead tonight, maybe he was working himself up, or he was nervous, Guy couldn't tell. That had been his biggest challenge, trying to capture the interior life of a man like Jumpy. Was he constantly on drugs and so blitzed there was no coherent thought rolling through his head? Or was he dumb, just incapable of nuanced feelings or thought? Based on the writing Guy had seen, he was tilting toward the dumb option. Jumpy couldn't string two sentences together without making half a dozen errors of grammar, syntax, or logic. By the end of a paragraph, Jumpy's ideas were so insufferably scrambled, making sense of his story was impossible.

Guy was getting good detail from these ride alongs, some nice a.s.shole puckering moments of violence, but overall, Jumpy wasn't giving away a lot about his psychodynamics. What pushed the man's b.u.t.tons? Who the h.e.l.l could tell?

After tonight, Guy figured he'd bail on this whole enterprise. He'd had enough of the street for a while. A night or two like the gun buy last week could keep Guy satiated for a good long time. His wife, Sh.e.l.ly, had no idea what he was up to. But she could smell the fear on him when he returned, the stink of sweat and cigarette smoke and the p.r.i.c.kly tang of danger. And she was beginning to make irritable noises.

So after tonight Guy was done. Cash out, walk away with his winnings. Spend the rest of the semester using this brief immersion in the back-alley world of Jumpy Swanson to fuel his imagination for one more crime novel.

He didn't know how Jumpy would take it, him making his exit. Or what quid pro quo Jumpy was expecting. C minus was already a mercy grade. And Guy wasn't about to fudge on his own academic values as payback for a half dozen adventures on the South Florida streets. There would come a day, Guy was pretty sure, when Jumpy would stomp out of his office disgusted with Guy's failure to give him the secret key to the kingdom Jumpy so pa.s.sionately and unaccountably wanted. Jumpy Swanson, an author? Oh, get serious.

Jumpy headed north off Biscayne into neighborhoods Guy didn't recognize. Residential, middle-cla.s.s, or maybe edging down to lower-middle. The cars in the driveways were mostly mid-size, newer models. The houses were dark, maybe retirees or working cla.s.s folks who'd had their fill of TV movies for the evening and had headed off to the sack.

It wasn't the sort of neighborhood Guy had been expecting. Though Jumpy had revealed only that his mob friends were eager to meet Guy, a professional writer. Guy a.s.sumed the gangsters had the customary over-inflated sense of their own glamour and the resulting ambition to have their lives portrayed on the screen, or on the pages of some runaway bestseller.

Guy was always ambivalent about being introduced as a writer. On the one hand it embarra.s.sed him to be the object of admiration to people who had no inkling what the artistic endeavor was all about. It felt silly to get the little bows of courtesy from illiterates. On the other hand, in an instance like tonight, meeting men for whom crime was a way of life, having some professional connection with the larger world was, to Guy's way of thinking, like wearing Kevlar. Sure, he was a snitch. But it was all in the open, and for commercial, not legal gains. He'd make sure these guys got a copy of the next book, maybe even put their nicknames on the acknowledgement page. Johnny, The Nose. Frank, Hatchet Breath, Condilini.

Jumpy wheeled into a yard that was crowded with cars. They were parked in every direction, beaten up compacts, a brand new white Cadillac, a couple of BMW's, a pickup truck from the sixties Hard to decipher the demographics. But the haphazard parking jobs suggested the occupants had arrived in haste and under the influence of dangerous substances.

There was a peephole in the front door. A clich that Guy saw instantly he would be unable to use. The man whose face appeared was fat and his greasy skin danced with colored lights. Guy could feel the throb of ba.s.s music rising up from the sidewalk, a beat that was as hypnotically slow and primitive as the heartbeat of a dying man.

"Who's the p.u.s.s.y?"

"I told Philly I was bringing him. He's the guy, the writer."

"What's he write?" the thug said. "Parking tickets?"

"Open the f.u.c.king door, Moon."

The door opened and the wall of music rushed like dark wind from the house. Guy waded past Moon. The man was at least four hundred pounds and he moved with a sluggish wobble like a deep-sea diver running low on air.

"What is this place?" Guy spoke an inch from Jumpy's ear but wasn't sure he heard. Jumpy made no response, just led the way across the room.

The living room stretched half the length of the house and through sliding doors looked out on an empty swimming pool and a dark ca.n.a.l. The strobes were covered with colored lenses and Guy was almost instantly seasick. No furniture, no rugs on the terrazzo. Half a dozen mattresses sprawled around the room, where knots of naked people squirmed in the flickering light.

"You brought me to a freaking s.e.x party, Jump?"

The music cut off halfway through his question and Guy's voice echoed through the room. Someone t.i.ttered and there was a m.u.f.fled groan. A second later as Guy was still processing his embarra.s.sment, the music restarted, something faster and even louder, and the strobes picked up their pace as well. The air was tainted with chemical smells, booze and weed and other compounds he could only guess at.

Guy followed Jumpy over to a makes.h.i.+ft bar, a long picnic table laid out with iced buckets full of long necks and pints of gin and bourbon. Jumpy mixed a gin and tonic in a clear plastic cup and handed it to Guy.

"Relax you, put you in the mood."

He made his own drink, then held up the plastic cup for a clink.

"To improving my grade," Jumpy said.

"To creating credible characters." Guy wasn't backing down on his values for some quick tour of a sleazy hash den.

Jumpy gulped his drink and Guy followed suit, mano a mano.

Jumpy led Guy deeper into the house, down a long narrow corridor. This was architecture Guy had seen in dozens of Florida tract homes built in the sixties. Three bedrooms down that tight corridor, a single bath. Sliding doors on the closets and hard surfaces in every direction. He had never considered such s.p.a.ces forbidding, but given the present circ.u.mstance Guy held back a few paces behind Jumpy, and started to consider his options for escape.

At the end of the hall, the music had softened to a thudding growl. Jumpy halted before a closed door and tapped four times and a voice answered from within.

Jumpy opened the door, then looked at Guy hanging back.

"You want to meet my people, right? Get down and dirty. That the idea?"

Guy felt his fear tightening into something more extreme. A dark knot of dread. He was not up to this. He felt trapped, cornered by Jumpy. Conned into deeper water than he'd bargained for. A wave of paranoia rolled and crashed in his gut.

"Philly, meet Guy. Guy, Philly."

The man was bald and short and his stomach was as tight and perfectly round as a bowling ball. He wore striped under shorts or perhaps pajama bottoms, but was otherwise naked. The room was lit with a vague blue light as though rare mushrooms might be growing in long trays somewhere nearby It was the master bedroom and was probably half the size of the living room. Its sliding gla.s.s door had a view across the ca.n.a.l, into the patio of a house where an elderly couple were slow dancing under paper lanterns.

Philly shook Guy's limp hand and stepped back to size him up.

"This is Mr. High and Mighty? Pardon me, Jump, but he looks like a f.u.c.king twit."

Guy was turning to leave, to run back the way he'd come, jog all the way home if it came to that, when a hand touched his bare ankle, the fingers sliding around the k.n.o.bby bone and taking a strong grip.

Down in the blue haze on the bedroom floor he saw the girl, naked, with enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her wispy red hair was tangled and dirty, and there was a sloppy grin on her face as if Mindy Johnston had finally entered the gossamer stratosphere she was always writing about.

Guy staggered away from her touch and lost his balance. He shot out a hand to steady himself, but the wall beside him moved away. As Guy lurched toward it, the wall moved again. He flapped his arms like a clumsy tightrope walker, and after another moment found his equilibrium.

The gin and tonic, or whatever it was, spun inside his skull.

"You son of a b.i.t.c.h." Guy turned and stepped into Jumpy's face. "What the f.u.c.k have you done?"

"Hey, Professor, come on in, the water's fine." It was a woman's voice he vaguely recognized.

He turned back to the mattress and saw beside Mindy was Paula Rhodes, a new grad student who'd been struggling to find her place in the program. A bit more mature than the others, a woman who'd written for New York travel magazines and already had a Masters degree. She, like Mindy, wanted for some unG.o.dly reason, to write poetry. To sing the body electric.

She had risen up to her knees and was reaching out to Guy with her unloosened b.r.e.a.s.t.s wobbling and her eyes on fire with chemical enthusiasm. Around the room, he made out at least four other students from the program, all of them tangling and untangling like a nest of snakes.

"Hey, I want to thank you, doc," Philly said. "You got us hooked up with a better cla.s.s of consumer than we been seeing lately. I owe you, man."

Moon, the bull-necked gatekeeper, appeared in the doorway. He too was now wearing only his underwear. Saggy white briefs with dark hair coiling out around the edges. In one hand he was holding a silver tray with syringes and rubber straps, and an array of other nefarious equipment that Guy didn't recognize. In the other he gripped the barrel of the SAW. Eight hundred meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred round magazine.

Moon presented the hors d'oeuvre tray to Guy, poking him in the sternum with its corner.

"A little hit of research, Guy?" Jumpy said.

The walls of the bedroom were breathing in and out and the lights had invaded the interior of Guy's chest.

"You used me. You son of a b.i.t.c.h, you used me to take advantage of these kids."

"I used you, Guy? I f.u.c.king used you?"

Mindy Johnston's hand snaked inside the leg of Guy's trousers, her fingers trickling up his calf. Her voice a swoon.

"Come on, Professor. Come on, it's fun. It's so wild."

Guy looked across the ca.n.a.l and saw the old couple still fox-trotting to some melody that didn't pa.s.s beyond their walls. He thought of Sh.e.l.ly, his wife of ten years, the way they used to dance in their own living room. Languorous steps, drifting around their barren house for hours at a time.

Jumpy edged to the door, slipping past Moon into the hallway. Moon slid sideways like the bars of a cell locking into place between Guy and the world he'd known.

"Hey, Guy, enjoy yourself, man. Moon'll show you the ropes, won't you big fellow?"

The pig-faced man had stashed the tray and gun somewhere and now had a grip on Guy's right biceps and was injecting a solution into a bulging vein in the crook of Guy's arm. The room was bigger than Guy had originally thought. The ceiling was no ceiling. Where the roof should have been, there were stars, whole galaxies exposed, comets shooting from left and right. A cool solar wind swirling down from the heavens.

"This is what you wanted, right?" Jumpy said from the hall. "Up close and personal."

There were bare hands on his ankles drawing him down to the quicksand mattress, down into a pit of flesh and crazy colored lights, a world he'd written about before. But he'd gotten all wrong. Completely wrong.

BELLS.

In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bellsa"

From the jingling and tinkling of the bells.

"They're back," she whispered. "The bells. They're jingling. Listen. Listen, G.o.dd.a.m.n it."

Isaac squinted up at the ceiling as though straining to hear. A white ceiling. The four-bladed Hunter fan was turned off, the better to hear the bells. They lay silently side by side with the tumble of sheets at their feet. Both of them still sweating from the s.e.x. The scent of their juices ripe in the air.

Isaac said, "I wish I could hear them. I truly do."

Janet pressed her head back in the pillow, squeezing her eyes shut.

She'd cut her hair this week. There was a trendy name for the style, but Isaac thought her stylist must've used a hatchet and a pair of pinking shears, leaving less than an inch of s.h.i.+ny jet black ruffling against her white skin. She'd not told him she was having it done. Just went off and returned with it hacked away, an act of defiance, or self-destruction. Her shrink had labeled her impulsive act with some jargon Isaac couldn't recall Janet's hair had been growing uncut for a decade. When he first saw her, Isaac thought she resembled a folk singer, a throwback to their grandparents' era, the ends of that feathered hair teasing at her b.u.t.t.

Still, the new buzzed look turned him on, this strange woman lying beside him with the fine dusting of hair. While they made love for the first time in months, he'd rubbed his hands through it, feeling the shape of her skull so close to the surface. Not at all like the tangles and layers of her old mane. He was touching her hair during his climax, doggy style as he preferred. That short, boy's cut making him rock hard, firing him up and out, over a high, cascading ledge that he'd forgotten was there. Sending him freefalling on that thousand foot plunge into a groaning, wailing release.

He used to go sailing into that void every time they f.u.c.ked. But after two years together that phase had melted away. Until this new cut. Until her fit of reinvention. All because of the bells. This certainty Janet had developed that there were bells tinkling within the walls of their old house.

For weeks the fixation had been rattling her normal insouciance. Janet's yoga-induced, vegetarian and chamomile serenity was gone. In recent days, at random moments she would come to an abrupt halt, swing around, stare at the thick plaster of the living room wall, or the kitchen, or the TV room, and she'd point and whisper to him to listen. Listen, d.a.m.n it, couldn't he hear?

Beside him now she opened her eyes, lifted her shorn head from the pillow and fixed him with a wretched look.

"They've stopped," she said. "Can you at least hear that they've stopped?"

"That," Isaac said, "I can hear."

Isaac took a joint from the side table, lit it, drew a slow drag and let the smoke crawl back out his mouth in a yawn.

"You're mocking me."

"I'm lying here smoking."

"You don't take any of this seriously. I'm going crazy and you're just acting like nothing's happening."

He was silent. They'd covered and recovered this ground. He didn't want to argue. He wanted to savor the erotic afterglow, the arousing pretense that she was someone else, a stranger he'd met on the fly. That this encounter had been a wild, zipless f.u.c.k. That's what they'd called it back in the day. Hooking up, a one night stand. If she'd only quit talking and let him luxuriate in the last few glowing seconds of his fantasy.

"It feels different this time. More quiet than usual. I can't describe it."

"Maybe they've left." He offered her the joint but she waved it off. "Maybe they've taken their bells and gotten the f.u.c.k out of our walls."

"Mocking me," she said. "Again and again and again."

With her toes she tweezered the edge of the sheet and pulled it up to cover her. She had the most prehensile toes. He'd found it s.e.xy once, the things she could do with her feet.

"No, Isaac," she said. "I'm afraid these bells are here to stay."

He wondered how long it would take her to try to validate what she thought she was hearing. Bring a friend over to listen, for instance. Though she had only one friend. Carla, a ma.s.seuse at the same spa were Janet worked. But Carla had a new boyfriend and was spending a lot of her off hours with him, so she hadn't made it over yet. s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the lucky guy, then ma.s.saging the knots in his trigger points, easing his tensions inside and out.

Three days ago Janet bought a small Sony tape-recorder and she'd been carrying it around with her in the evenings after work, waiting for the next episode of tinkling. Going to tape the bells and play them back for whoever would listen. So far she'd fumbled with the switch when the bells came, or they'd stopped tinkling just as she got it on. The devilish bells were proving too quick and slippery for validation.

Isaac approved of the recorder. He told her so.

"You're doing something positive, that's good. Is this something Ray suggested?" Ray being her shrink. Wednesdays and Fridays at five-thirty, an hour session at one-sixty five a pop. Her medical insurance wasn't covering it, so Janet was using all her tips from the Emerald Spa where she did facials, six customers a day, extracting blackheads from the cheeks and greasy noses of rich old ladies and goombas from Miami Beach, every cent of that money was going to Ray so Ray could steer her through this obsession and return her to normalcy. Make the bells stop ringing.

He could hear them going at it, Ray and Janet, their tango of psycho-blather.

Did bells have any special meaning to her?

Not particularly.

Were there any bells of significance buried in her past?

Well, there were church bells when she was growing up. Presbyterian bells. But she was an atheist now.

Did the bells make her miss her childhood, miss church, miss that time in her life when she still had faith in a higher power?

No, she didn't miss any of that. And anyway, these bells were more like sleigh bells, or chimes, a higher pitched jingle They didn't have the seriousness and weight of church bells.

Did you ever go on a sleigh ride as a child? Perhaps something happened on that ride, some trauma? An unwanted s.e.xual advance perhaps.

I grew up in Orlando. No sleigh rides, no hay rides. Nothing but endless traffic, lots of horns, but no bells.

Are there any other bells in your past?