Truly Like Lightning Read online

“It’s all the meat you can’t eat, beaks and assholes, ground up and pressed, and deep fried,” Mary answered.

  “Gross,” Deuce said.

  “What’s wrong with beaks and assholes?” Hyrum wanted to know. “And balls.”

  Mary got kind of excited for pizza. She gave some cash to each kid to go roam around and see what they wanted to eat. Free will. This is what they were doing. She wasn’t gonna ride herd on their palates all year.

  So if this was the experiment to save the family, the family was gonna have to save itself. And she was gonna get herself a couple thin-crust slices.

  When they got home, they were all overstimulated and exhausted; the four of them piled onto Mary’s bed and took a fitful, gaseous, three-hour nap.

  Only Hyrum stirred, lunging into the bathroom to throw up three Big Macs, after which he sat in front of the living room television entranced but somehow not entertained by NBC’s highly touted primetime fall lineup.

  The rest of the family was awakened by a knocking on the front door. On her way to answer, Mary noticed Hyrum in front of the TV and asked, “Didn’t you hear the door?”

  “No. My ears aren’t working right,” Hyrum said.

  She flicked on the lights. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”

  “It’s not dark, this TV light is on,” he said, pointing at the television.

  “What are you watching?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? You’re watching something.”

  “No. I’m just looking.”

  Mary opened the door to Maya Abbadessa laden with plastic bags full of gifts—clothes, books, a new electric guitar and an amp.

  “Merry Christmas from your friends at Praetorian Capital,” she said. “Oh wait, do you guys celebrate Christmas?”

  “Yes, we do,” said Mary, stepping aside and helping with all the shopping bags. “But not usually in August.”

  “There’s tons more stuff in my car.”

  Maya returned from her third trip back to her car. “Back-to-school gifts. Praetorian wanted you to have phones, for safety—so here’s one for Mary, the Dodgers case here for Deuce, and here’s a Hello Kitty case for Pearl and Jungle Book for Hyrum.”

  They took their new phones and beheld them like they were moon rocks. These children had never even used a house phone. “They’re all set up for you—we’re really just thinking of your safety, you can’t be in this world of today without a phone and we didn’t want you to be at a disadvantage.” The kids started playing with their phones, trying to figure them out.

  “Call me on my telephone,” Pearl said to Deuce.

  “What’s your number?”

  Mary showed them the basics. They started yelling their numbers and calling one another.

  “Mine has a camera,” Hyrum said. Pearl’s phone vibrated; she screamed with delight and surprise.

  “Press the green part of the screen to answer.” Maya instructed the kids like a priestess at a shrine with special knowledge of the god. “They all have cameras, and flashlights, and calculators for math class. There’s also a bunch of clothes here for you guys. I just wanted you to feel comfortable, like you fit in, tomorrow.” For his part, Hyrum was testing the weight of his phone as if to gauge what kind of a weapon or projectile it might make.

  “Oh, this is a pretty dress,” Pearl said, rummaging through one of the shopping bags.

  “I thought so, isn’t it adorable? Sexy, but classy.”

  “Does that cost like a thousand dollars?” Hyrum asked.

  “You shouldn’t have,” Mary said, meaning it, though the clothes did look kind of cute and fun. Pearl left the room to try the dress on.

  “I don’t want to fit in,” Hyrum said.

  “You don’t have to fit in, Hy,” Mary said.

  “I can’t get these pants over my temple garment,” Deuce grunted, struggling with the bulk of his so-called Mormon underwear.

  “That brings me to another issue. And fitting in,” Maya said. “There are a handful of Mormons at your schools, but they don’t wear that, what did you call it, ‘temple garment’? And it’s such a thing, you know, I was wondering if you could leave them for at-home wear, maybe, just at first.”

  “No way,” said Hyrum, his eyes back on the TV.

  “What do you think, Mary?” Maya asked.

  Mary had hated the undergarments at first, felt desexed by them, and they had never seemed practical to her, especially in the heat. She knew it was one of the more idiosyncratic aspects of the faith that non-Mormons tended to focus on and make fun of, had been aware of their existence even before she converted. It’s easy and lazy, she thought, to make fun of the archaic-seeming underwear and the outlawing of coffee and alcohol. And then there was the rampant rumor that because of the active and strict prohibition on premarital intercourse, young female Mormons were experts at oral and anal sex. In this manner, went the thinking, they still remained technically virgins along scriptural lines. She even remembered the term “Mormon mouth hug” for a blow job from back in the day. The mass culture in which she came of age had been silly and obsessed by sex; and as a kind of pansexual being, she had checked out of it even before she ran away from the world with Bronson. From her walk around the mall today, the culture seemed to have not matured a day since she left it; if anything, it felt younger, further regressed.

  “I also got some regular old American underwear for you guys. For you, too, Mary,” Maya added. And although Mary knew that hers was an all-or-nothing soul susceptible to any slippery slope on any moral mountain, she was trying to be a flexible parent, even open, maybe even, god forbid, hip. She knew Bronson would probably be pissed, but he didn’t wear his temple garment most of the time either.

  “Well, you can make up your own mind while we’re here, Deuce,” Mary decided on the fly. “If you wanna try them on without, go ahead.”

  Deuce ran out with some clothes, and came back moments later. “I still don’t think they fit,” he said. “I mean they’re tight on the thighs, but really loose at the waist.”

  “That’s the way they fit. They’re called ‘skinny jeans.’”

  “They don’t seem so practical, like I couldn’t do real work in these.”

  “I suppose not, it’s more of a ‘look,’” Maya said.

  “A ‘look’?”

  “Yeah, it’s kinda rad. I think you look great with that shirt. Charlie Brown in skinny jeans. New and improved Greg Brady.”

  Mary laughed, she got that one. The Brady Bunch, another undead memory sprung to life, like a zombie. Pearl returned from the bedroom in the light blue dress, stunning. Her radiance was so evident, there was really nothing cogent anyone could say. Except Hyrum, who looked up from the TV, and said, “Cucamonga!”

  Maya amended that with “Whoa.”

  Deuce asked, “What ‘look’ is that?”

  Maya laughed; Deuce was being funny. He’d been so serious and sincere up till that point. None of these kids had made a joke in front of her. She thought it was a good sign. If a teenager couldn’t be ironic, school was going to be hell. High school was irony finishing school after all. Duh.

  Pearl had taken her own initiative and removed the temple garment before trying on the short dress, exposing her thighs. Mary looked at this young woman, and wanted to cry, cry because of the child’s burgeoning beauty and her sudden maturity; and the love Mary had for these children pierced her heart through and through harder than God ever had. That was her dirty secret. Her dark pride.

  Mary knew that Pearl hated her right now, with the intensity that only a daughter can hate her mother, or stepmother, and even though Mary understood why, and felt righteous, there was no pain like that inflicted by an angry seventeen-year-old girl on the parent she felt didn’t understand her. That pain, mixed with the pride, overwhelmed Mary in the moment, and she felt frozen. Mary had never been good at dealing with big feelings. As a child, she had swallowed them with food and become fat, and then she had buried them under t
he roar of motorcycles, narcotics, sex, and stunt work—hell, she had even swallowed her feelings with swords on the Venice Boardwalk. She realized she was no better at managing all this than before. Her chest was tight, her head swimming. Already, she missed Yalulah. She even missed Bronson. She missed the trinity at the top of their household; she felt illegitimate and ill-equipped as a single mom.

  So Mary swallowed her tears now. She cast a disapproving glance at Maya, and then turned to Pearl—“Find another look,” she said, sounding like the ghost of her mother. “You’re not wearing that on your first day of school.”

  12.

  MALOUF WAS EASILY DISTRACTED by the new thing, any new thing. As the summer months shimmered by in a blur of polo matches, Malibu beach parties, political fundraisers in Santa Barbara, and divorce proceedings from his third wife while reconciling fitfully with his estranged second wife, Malouf lost all feel for Maya’s Powers deal, and as a consequence, Maya began to disappear from his radar.

  This lack of stick-to-itiveness was instinctive for the man, but it was also a management style. Malouf was a dog lover, and something of a self-educated, self-proclaimed expert on animal behavior (hence those weighty books about evolution and octopuses and parrots on his desk), and he knew that the best way to train a canine was “irregular reinforcement.” A dog will learn a trick better if you randomly reward him for doing a task, counterintuitively more effective than giving him a treat every time he does what he’s told. The dog enters into a state of agitated unknowingness, not sure how to please the master, and therefore works harder to do so. “I sat on command once and got a treat, and then I sat a few times and didn’t, must’ve been something I did wrong—I’m gonna sit extra hard and fast next time” is how Malouf imagined the doggy thought process.

  He enjoyed trying to think like a dog. In fact, the only books Maya’d ever seen him really reading, and not merely displaying, were on animal training—dogs, monkeys, dolphins, whales—the higher mammals, but also smart birds such as parrots and crows. Trying to think like a human was no different to the boss. “Humans, most humans that is, apart from the winners, Wharton,” he confided to Maya once, “are herd animals. They want hierarchy. When you get married, I’ll teach you how to make the special sauce—‘Least Reinforcing Syndrome.’” He never did tell her what it was, but that was the Praetorian world, with all Malouf’s capitalist pups cycling in and out of favor, performing tricks for their capricious owner, never knowing when they were doing the right thing to please the alpha. In this way, sadomasochism could be rechristened as corporate “culture,” and an inability to focus for any length of time (“curating ideas”), coupled with a latent violent disposition (“alpha”), could be rebranded as “business acumen,” or even mythologized as “genius.”

  The troubling signs were everywhere if you knew where to look, and the trend was not her friend. In late September, she had walked to Malouf’s office to share an update on the Powers kids at school: they seemed to be doing fine; he’d been on the phone, and waved her away dismissively. She stalled long enough in the doorway to hear that he was talking to his dog groomer. Shortly after that, she swung by to give him some data, and Darrin was sitting across from the boss. They didn’t invite her in, but Malouf asked her, as she stood in the doorway, if she liked cars. “Sure,” she said, “I love my Tesla.”

  “Tree hugger. Windmills give you cancer,” Darrin sniffed, witlessly rotating his arms like a wind turbine.

  “Have you ever driven a Lamborghini?” Malouf asked.

  “Nope,” she replied. Didn’t seem like a big deal to her; she wasn’t a car guy.

  He tossed a key at her. “Take my whip for a spin.”

  Darrin impudently interjected, “Careful, big man. She steals Maseratis, you know.”

  Malouf blinked slowly a few times to signal his irritation. “Yes, I know she’s fast and furious, I heard all about that, but what has she stolen for me lately?” Maya didn’t like all this “she” business.

  “So take her for a spin,” Malouf continued, “and then get her washed and gassed up, before two p.m.?”

  Jesus. The fucker was sending her, with her Wharton MBA, to wash his fucking car. She had a good mind to steal it now. She laughed like she was in on the joke, rookie hazing hahaha, but she felt like screaming. At the car wash, she thought about buying a Cokie on him, but decided against it.

  She started spending more time at the gym, trying to sweat out her anxiety and hoping that she might come up with another good idea under duress and iron. Her ass was getting to be top shelf. She entertained idle thoughts of fucking her trainer. She even tripped on mushrooms again at home alone, hoping for a second stroke of lightning, and came up with nothing but a couple scars on her face where she went too hard at some pimples in some stoned, anxious, self-critical stupor.

  Walking through gentrified Santa Monica with its modest-looking multimillion-dollar homes, she knew that she had come on the scene many years too late. That gold rush was over here. She ran scenarios and numbers in her head, of betting on land that was undesirable now but might come into favor when climate change erased Malibu in fire, Santa Barbara in mudslides, or a major earthquake toppled Venice into the sea, and suddenly Culver City was beachfront. Carpinteria, anyone? But such apocalyptic thinking put her in a dark mood, and she knew Malouf preferred the short to the long game, which is why he’d gone so cold on and inattentive to the Powers deal.

  One morning, her assistant told her that Malouf wanted to see her, and a sense of foreboding came over her. She walked into his office to a big smile. “There she is! My star,” Malouf said. “Have a seat.”

  Maya sat and spoke: “I don’t have any news from the desert. It’s gonna be a while—”

  Malouf cut her off with a raised hand. “See no evil. Hear no evil. It is I who have news.” He wiggled his Muppet brows, convinced his archaic diction was irresistibly charming. “I have a deal I’d like you to get involved in, wet your beak.”

  “Amazing,” Maya said, but she already knew she didn’t like where this was going because his affect was weird, playful, sadistic.

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Praetorian has purchased the rights to the Hammer film catalogue. Are you familiar with Hammer films?”

  “Not really,” she said, fearing all her darkest work scenarios were about to come true.

  He produced a thick brochure titled “Hammer Films: A Legacy of Horror,” and handed it to Maya. Apparently, Hammer Film Productions Ltd. was some dinosaur of horror schlock. Founded in 1934, and responsible for such gems as Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972, duh), and the provocatively titled The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974). Many of them starring the redoubtable Christopher Lee, who she thought she might have heard of.

  “Lots of vampire stuff,” Maya said.

  “I know, isn’t it awesome?”

  No, she wanted to say, not really very awesome at all. “Yeah,” she said.

  Feasting her eyes on the endless, blaring, screaming titles—Maniac (’63), Paranoiac (’63), Fanatic (’65)—a trilogy? Trilogic? Trilogiac? The goofy B movies spun before her eyes, as Malouf went on, “These were way before Twilight or Walking Dead or any of that shit. So we now own all these titles, and I’d like to figure out if there’s any diamond in the rough in there, waiting to be remade. I mean, Spider-Man was a bullshit comic for kids, right? People would’ve laughed at Spider-Man as a critical darling or legit moneymaker thirty years ago. Batman? Bullshit. Schlock. For kids. On TV with Adam West, that’s where it belonged till it turned into the billion-dollar industry that ate Hollywood.”

  Maya nodded. Ah, so that was it. Here was some backdoor, bargain-basement starfuckery. Malouf wanted a Hollywood play, a shiny new toy, so he bought up this IP ghetto. Now he wanted to gentrify it and then cash in. The first step on the way to owning a studio and ownership of a world that had made a serf of his artistically souled father and paid him a pittance for backbreaking work, and had
deformed him as a boy. His Moby Dick, his Rosebud. In the meantime, he’d be able to rub elbows with some stars by overpaying them to lend their names to imbecility.

  “I mean, who was Robert Downey before Iron Man? A has-been, and who was Iron Man before Robert Downey? A never was. I want you to find me another Iron Man to reboot in there, and I’ll find another Robert Downey.”

  “How can I help?” she joked, co-opting Malouf’s signature line. Looking at the brochure, she said, “I feel good about The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Feels like a winner. Oscar bait. I’m thinking Meryl Streep?”

  A little pushback; Malouf appreciated it.

  “You laugh, but they laughed at Stan Lee, didn’t they?”

  “Stanley who?”

  “Stan Lee—Stan Lee. Marvel Stan Lee.”

  “Just fucking with you, Boss. I don’t know, I wasn’t born, did they laugh at Stan Lee?”

  “Probably. They had every right to.”

  “So I’m confused as to what you want me to do.”

  “I think you’re a bit of an artist. The desert thing showed real imagination, vision, a real sense of drama and the long game. I don’t know how it turns out, but I like you thinking outside the box. I don’t trust any of the other Young Turks here with artistic shit. They actually like these movies.”

  “I’m not sure this is art.”

  “It’s art if we say it’s art. Create the standards by which you will be judged. People write PhDs on Batman now. I want you to go through the entire catalogue, see every movie, and report back to me. I want you to write synopses and flag ideas of interest.”

  “Excuse me for saying, sir, but wouldn’t you be better off hiring someone with Hollywood experience? What about your friend Rob? He seems like a smart guy.” She was referring to Rob Lowe, a pal of his. She’d seen Lowe around the office, always smiling and friendly and handsome, like a picture of Dorian Gray come to charming life. Why don’t they go remake that?

  “No!” he thundered. “Rob is a super-smart guy, believe you me, but experience is the fucking enemy. Haven’t the last four years taught you anything? I want fresh eyes on this shit.”