Sinner

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.