She’d dyed her mousy hair black, bought an all-black wardrobe at thrift stores, and lived for a while rent-free over on Franklin Avenue in a basement, in a sort of commune called Mohawk Manor by its members. She’d hung out at Oki Dog, wandered up and down the Strip, and danced at the clubs. But she made it a point never to join any crowd, never to need anyone. People weren’t worth the trouble.
Then one night a couple of large girls and a boy with a spiked collar got very drunk, and broke into her room and tried to get her to form a vampire coven with them. She had excused herself to go to the toilet, where she’d crawled out the bathroom window and run down the hill to the all-night market a block away. There she’d stayed until dawn, flipping through magazines.
And Shadow had given the stockroom clerk there a hand job, and secured for herself a job on the night shift bagging groceries. For a few other favors, he’d loaned her the money for a rental deposit on this place. Now she’d moved on to clerking at a bigger all-night market, much better pay. She’d been able to buy a cavernous old Chevy Impala, painted matte black over primer. It had an eight-track music system and the floor of the passenger’s side was littered with tapes of the Clash, of the Sex Pistols, of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Buzzcocks. Now she owned the night.
Stretching luxuriously, she threw herself down on her bed without getting undressed. The fire must be out; she heard the big engines rumbling away, like dinosaurs honking and bellowing in the dawn.
Shadow woke in the early afternoon. Remembering the fire, she sat up and groped under her bed for her camera. She took pictures, mostly images of building demolition or car wrecks, with the vague intention of becoming a freelance photographer. There were a couple of exposures left on the current roll. She put on sunglasses and slipped out with the camera, through the ivy and down the hill behind the building. She emerged behind the trash cans and stepped out in the glare of winter sunlight, and there before her was the blackened shell of the garage. Someone had already raked out most of the charred contents, and piled them in a heap. The remains of a mattress, a wooden bed frame, a chest of drawers, a bookcase: someone’s old life, all gone to charcoal and ash. She squinted at the pile and walked closer.
The cinders must still be warm. A kitten was perched on top of them, a tiny, orange torn like a live coal, blinking sleepily. Shadow, struck by the juxtaposition, lifted her camera. For a moment she hesitated; photographing a kitten seemed such a
Samantha
thing to do. She decided the irony inherent in the image made it okay, though, and took a picture.
The click of the shutter startled the kitten; it leaped from its nest and vanished in the weeds at the edge of the parking lot. She thought of following it, but that was definitely a Samantha thing to do. She used up the last exposure, going around to the front of the garage, to frame a shot with burnt beams and dangling wires against the pitiless white sky.
A week later Shadow picked up the developed pictures from the drugstore on the corner of Hollywood and Highland. Sitting in the Impala, she flipped through them. A car wreck, a dead dog with its intestines spread over two lanes of traffic, the bulldozers just closing in on the old Hollywood Motor Hotel… and here was the last shot, the burnt remains of the garage. She didn’t see the shot with the kitten, and went through the envelope again.
Here was the black pile of cinders: How had she missed it?
She frowned at the picture and held it up to the light. She had missed it because there was no sign of the kitten. There was, in approximately the same place in which it had been lying, a baby. No; a baby doll, must be. The kitten must have fled just before the shutter clicked. Yet, how could she have missed an image so wonderfully grim as a charred baby doll?
But there it was, unmistakable, the figure of a baby baked red by its bed of coals. Disturbing on so many levels. Maybe one of the free papers would buy it. She shrugged, putting the envelope in the Impala’s glove box, and drove to work.
The following afternoon, Shadow lost a little of the night.
She had risen early—maybe noon—and gone down to a poster shop in Artisan’s Patio that did enlargements. She dropped off the best pictures and their negatives, including the one with the doll, and ordered a set of eight by ten glossies. Then she drove out to Studio City and bought groceries at the Ralphs market: hair dye, lowfat milk, Flintstones vitamins. As she pulled out of the parking lot onto Ventura Boulevard she noticed the Impala was making a whining noise.
“Shit,” she muttered, and when the light changed she pulled into a 76 station on the other side of the intersection. The whine got louder.
“Sounds like you need transmission fluid,” said a man at the self-serve island. She shrugged, but went inside and bought a bottle.
She got on the freeway and for a while thought the problem was going to go away but the minute she exited at Odin the whine returned. It was worse; it became a groaning scream as she turned onto Highland, and now the Impala refused to change gears. Somehow she swung around the corner onto Camrose, but barely made it thirty feet uphill before the shrieking Impala slowed to a crawl and then lost any forward momentum.
“Shit!” She managed to steer to the curb as she coasted backward, and put on the emergency brake. She got out and walked around the car, bewildered and furious. The Impala was bleeding red syrup. Was that the transmission fluid she’d just added?
“Shit!” She kicked one of the Impala’s tires. The nearest gas station with a mechanic was all the way down on Highland and Franklin.
The mechanic wasn’t interested in helping her. She had to convince him she found him really, really attractive and would do anything, no really
anything
if he’d tow her car off the street and have a look at it. He made her prove it. She never minded hand jobs so much, because at least she was in control, and it was better than him touching her with his black-rimmed fingernails.
He roared with laughter when he saw the transmission fluid running down, and informed her, without even opening the hood, that she’d need a new transmission. He told Shadow what it would cost, and her heart sank; she hadn’t paid that much for the Impala in the first place. But she went with him when he towed it back to the gas station, and told him she’d be in to talk to him as soon as she’d gotten her groceries out of the back seat.
Hastily she threw her eight-track tapes into the grocery bag, rummaged around under the seats and found a sweater and thirty cents in change; she put the sweater on, pocketed the change, and was out of the car with her bag and over the wall behind the gas station in under a minute.
Fuming, Shadow took an indirect route home, along the alleys behind buildings, along back fences, and crossed over to Camrose behind the American Legion Hall. As she cut across the lot by the garages, she saw a little kid staring at her from the weeds, a boy, red-haired, maybe five or six. Was he lost? She ignored him and scrambled up the hill to her apartment.
Now Shadow had to walk down the hill every evening and catch the 81 bus, which ran to no schedule. If the driver felt like arriving early, he did, and made no effort to wait if Shadow hadn’t reached the bus stop yet. If he ran late, he might blow through the Camrose and Highland stop, leaving Shadow screaming obscenities from the bus bench.
“Doesn’t do any good,” said a man who gave her a ride out to the valley. “Anybody who matters has a car, honey. They figure only losers need the bus to go places, and if they don’t like it, who cares?”
She was worn out, with the long walks to and from the bus stop. She bought a box of Instant Breakfast, thinking it might give her more energy; but she worried about it putting weight on her, once she read its ingredients, and so about one night in three she went into the employees’ restroom at work and made herself puke it up again. Finally she bought a thermos and filled it with black coffee, and took it with her instead. It got her through the last couple of hours of her shift.
The photo enlargements came in and were impressive enough to be encouraging. Shadow bought a portfolio at the art supply store and spent a long day waiting in the outer offices of the art directors of the two local free weeklies. She was told she might want to look into getting a union card; she was told she needed to invest in professional equipment. Everyone agreed, though, that the shot with the baby doll in the ashes was striking.
“Because, you know why? It’s an illusion,” said the art director at the
Hollywood Free Voice
. She held it up to the light. “There’s no baby there at all, if you look at it closely. It’s just flames, or smoke or something. Really, that’s a hundred-to-one shot.”
But she didn’t offer to buy it.
By the time Shadow got out of the
Hollywood Free Voice
office, which was all the way down Santa Monica at Western, there seemed little point in going home to sleep for an hour. There was a coffeehouse by the bus stop; she went in and got an espresso, and sat at one of the tables with her portfolio, flipping once more through the pictures.
Was
it a baby doll? It was blurred and soft-edged, but you could see the face and the arms, and at least one leg.
“Damn,” said someone, leaning over her. A hand reached down and pulled out the other shot, the one she’d taken of the burned-out garage. “Nice work. You an adjuster too?”
“What?” Shadow looked up at him. He was a little older than she, wore glasses, was smoking a cigarette.
“Are you a claims adjuster?”
“No,” she said.
“So, this is just, like, your hobby?” He sat down at her table uninvited. She sized him up: nice clothes. Long-sleeved shirt, narrow tie. He was coked up. He used the same black hair dye she did; she could smell it, under his aftershave.
“I’m breaking in,” she informed him.
“Good!” He stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and held out his hand. “Jon Horton. How’s it going?”
“Shadow,” she said, shaking his hand warily. He put both elbows on the table, took his cigarette out again and had a deep drag on it.
“See, I’m an insurance adjuster. I take a lot of shots like that but I can’t use them, isn’t that a bitch?”
“Use them for what?” she asked, wondering if he was gay.
“I’m publishing a magazine,” he said. “
Negative Pulse
. You’ve heard of it?”
“Maybe, yeah,” she lied.
“Poetry. Stories. Artwork. It’s, like, this necessary corrective for fucking hippie fantasy shit. We want stark images. Bitter truths, okay? We’re reminding the complacent bourgeois assholes out there that
this
is real life, okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
He talked a lot more. He told her all about his life, what a rebel he was, how he’d run his high school paper and how angry he’d made the principal when he’d done an article exposing something—Shadow couldn’t quite tell what—but that was just the way he was, he was driven to challenge authority anywhere.
Eventually he came around to talking about
Negative Pulse
again, and how great it was going to be when they got an issue out.
“And, see, here’s the thing, Sandra: I think your picture would look great on the cover.” He leaned back, stubbed out his cigarette and raised his eyebrows at her.
“How much?” she said.
“What?”
“How much do you pay?”
“Well, eventually, I mean, we’re just getting started. It’s a communal effort on the part of all the artists involved, see? We’re all investing in
Negative Pulse
because we believe in it, we believe it’s like this spirit of the times, right? So we’re all making sacrifices to get it up and running.”
“Shit, look at the time,” said Shadow. “Josh, you know, that sounds great and everything but I really have to go catch a bus now, okay? Got a business card? I’ll call you sometime.”
Two nights later, as she walked up the hill from the bus stop, she thought saw the little boy again. He was standing back by the garages, staring at her. No; this must be his older brother. He had the same red hair, but appeared to be about ten. She looked in disbelief at her watch. It was 5 in the morning, and freezing cold. She almost spoke to him, but something in his stare creeped her out.
Shadow kept walking, wondering why he hadn’t figured out about cutting screens and breaking in through back windows; it had always worked for her, when she’d been locked out.
She went up to Woodland Court to avoid cutting past the garages, meaning to come down the front steps. Near the top, a dark figure stepped out of the bamboo.
“We meet again, little one.”
“Shit.” Shadow stopped. It was Julie, the queen of the coven from Mohawk Manor, in her white makeup and vampire cape. She must have gained thirty pounds since Shadow had seen her last. A figure moved out from behind a parked car, off to her left: Darlene, the other vampire girl. Shadow heard footsteps running up the hill behind her and turned to see Todd, the boy with the spiked collar, holding his cape out to either side as he ran.
“Yes; we have our ways of tracking you down. We really feel you ought to reconsider
ooof
ohjesuschrist!” said Julie, as Shadow hit her in the stomach with a well-placed Doc Marten. Julie collapsed, clutching her fat gut. Shadow whirled around and bashed Todd right between the eyes with her thermos, but didn’t wait to see the result; she dove under his cape and ran down the hill, then skidded around the corner and raced uphill on Camrose. She had to stop for a minute at Hightower to catch her breath, but they didn’t seem to be following her.
It was an old neighborhood, never planned; it had evolved as houses had been built up into the hillside. No streets connected with the upper homes. They were reached only by the elevator in the tower that had given the street its name, or by a series of high, narrow flights of stairs and walkways that zigzagged back and forth across the hill. Shadow had explored it all, when she’d first moved into the neighborhood.