I tell myself the problem is exterior. Without. It’s the city, I tell myself. It’s the traffic. The hateful grinding of machinery. Blank smiles, an emptiness you can see. A void you can reach out and touch.
I tell myself this because it’s an easier problem to fix. All you have to do is run.
Curled across from me in a dimly lit booth at El Cid, Summer Priestly is asking me what I think I’ll find out there in the desert. “I assume their mirrors are made of the same type of glass as anywhere else,” she says. “Do you think you’ll see something different in them?”
I stare at the tumbler of grapefruit juice and tonic water that I don’t want. There are so many things I don’t want. So few that I do. “I’m only going for the weekend,” I tell her.
“And then what? What happens when you get back and nothing has changed?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been trying not to lie to myself lately.”
“All you do is lie to yourself.”
“A matter of perspective.”
She takes off her sunglasses and studies me. “It’s like something has infected you,” she says. “Something is changing. Like a darkness that’s become visible. There’s more of it every time I see you.”
“It’s the city. I just have to get out for a couple of days.”
“You’re wearing white. I’ve never seen you wear white.” She sits up straighter. “You have a ribbon around your neck.”
Our cigarettes smolder together in a heart-shaped ashtray between us. Neither of us touches them. I’m watching the embers burn when I say, “There’s a sense of an ending I can’t shake. Everything seems to be moving toward some kind of threshold.” I glance over at the empty stage. It’s late; we’re the only people here. “The air has a burnt smell all the time. It tastes like permanence.”
Summer’s gaze follows mine. “Do you remember when we came here to see Calliope sing?” she asks. “She was wearing white that night. She had a ribbon around her neck.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“It was when I knew, you know. It was when everything made sense.”
“Knew what. Made sense how.”
“I realized how broken you are. That you’ll never let yourself be loved by somebody real.”
“Somebody real,” I repeat. The words are like melted plastic on my tongue.
She picks up her cigarette and takes a drag. Mine has gone out. “You’re only interested in cruel fantasies,” she says.
I don’t say anything.
“You’re due for a new one soon, aren’t you?” she asks. “Like you said, it was a long time ago.” When I don’t answer, she says, “Oh. You’ve found one already, haven’t you?” Her eyes narrow. Her mouth hardens into a firm line. “Is it the egirl?” she asks. “The one who looks like Brigitte Bardot?”
I pick up my extinguished cigarette and grind it harder into the ashtray. I wish I were beneath it. “Melpomene Lux,” I murmur. Her name is a dark incantation. Black magic. Voodoo.
Summer rolls her eyes. “How tragic. You and your muses.”
“I don’t know how to write about her. The critics will call her a male fantasy figure.”
“Is she a drunk like all of your doomed muses who preceded her?”
“She’s twenty-four.”
“Okay, well, I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”
“It means she’s young.”
“You’re just going to get yourself hurt again. You know that, right? You keep setting these traps for yourself.”
“Better the devil I know than the devil I don’t.”
“What are you going to do when you assimilate this one into your identity? Start wearing pleated skirts and thigh-high stockings? Dye your hair blond and give yourself bangs?”
I touch the ribbon around my neck. “Things aren’t as simple as you sometimes make them out to be,” I tell her.
“Yeah, I don’t know. It looks pretty simple from where I’m sitting.”
“I guess everything depends on how you look at it.”
“How do you look at it?”
“I try not to.”
My phone keeps buzzing when I leave Summer alone in the bar and begin my trek into the desert. I don’t check the notifications because I know by now none of them will bear the name I want.
You’re a robot, one girl shouted at me earlier this week as I slunk from her candy- and latex-scented bedroom. I looked back at her. Mascara tears running down her face, glitter dappled on her cheekbones and across the bridge of her nose. You don’t feel anything, she screamed. What I didn’t tell her was how badly I wish that were true.
Dawn is a few hours away when I arrive in Palm Springs. The black hills are malignant contusions. If I squint, I can see glowing scarlet eyes watching from their crests. Spiteful whispers weave between the warm winds sweeping across the hotel parking lot as I hurry into the lobby. They sound like me. They sound like someone else. I can’t tell the difference anymore.
There are three mirrors in my suite, and they’re all made of normal glass. My hair is longer than I remember it being. Darker, but with blond streaks. I’m not as tall as I’d thought I was. I wonder how long I’d been driving. Through what chasms of space.
Something is changing, Summer had said. Like a darkness that’s become visible.
The glass isn’t showing me anything I hadn’t known. Only things I’d ignored. Things I’ll continue to ignore.
The next day is spent in an insomniac’s delirium, disregarding the persistent vibrations of my phone and chewing valerian root tablets as I shuffle through the twisting, maze-like halls. I keep thinking I’ll run into someone, or something. Medusa. The minotaur. A looming threat lurks around every corner but never presents itself.
Outside, the sun is apocalyptic. It invokes a stirring sensation of spidery madness scurrying along the base of the skull. I stand by the edge of the pool, staring at the shimmering water. The reflection on its surface is not my own. I picture myself sinking, drowning. It isn’t difficult because I’ve done it on so many previous occasions. Suffocation has become a sport and a pastime. I can no longer recall what it feels like to breathe.
Night envelops the desert and I find myself floating through a retirement party for a faceless studio executive in an opulent manor not far from the hotel. I don’t know anyone here. Everyone is younger than I am. The music is too loud and there’s glitter everywhere. The fizzy-sweet smell of champagne. I hear someone mention the studio executive is twenty-six.
The girl I take back to the hotel has an earnestness in her eyes that might even be authentic. I could explain to her how everything is ending but there wouldn’t be any point. Meaning is elusive but illusory.
When she’s leaving a few hours later, I tell her I could never love her.
“Why not?” she asks. She’s standing in the doorway, hip cocked, twirling a lock of her bronze hair. Her smile is playful. Like my statement had been a joke. I guess it could have been, but the lighting isn’t right.
I briefly touch my fingers to the soft warmth of her face. There’s glitter on them when I retract my hand. “You’re too real,” I tell her. “You could never hurt me in the way I need you to.”
She takes a step toward me and timidly asks what kind of pain I’m looking for.
“I’m not looking for anything,” I tell her. “I’ve already found it. I keep finding it over and over again.”
I dream that night of being onstage in a dark, smoky bar, dressed in white, a black ribbon constricting my throat. The voice singing into the microphone sounds like me. It sounds like someone else. I’ve never been able to sing, but the shifting faces in the crowd don’t know the difference and neither do I. There’s a blonde girl standing beneath the glowing exit sign; I can’t make out her face, but I don’t need to.
Waking sometime before sunrise, a girl in my head is whispering, You’re doomed to keep turning into the worst versions of everyone who’s hurt you. I don’t remember who she is, but I remember knowing her, and I remember a time when she’d said this. I remember the last thing she said to me was, Who will you become next?
I stagger out into the dark parking lot, fumbling with a cigarette that won’t light. There’s a fountain near the property’s entrance and a statue of Venus rising from the shallow pool surrounding it. I hadn’t noticed the statue during any of my previous sojourns at the hotel. I go to it, wading into the pool. Mist from the fountain dampens my face and fogs my sunglasses. Falling to my knees at the base of the statue, I contemplate the currency of fake prayers to gods that don’t exist.