Chandler Morrison
IN THE CEMETERY OF THE HEAVENS
Several months ago, the writer had been needed on set in Palm Springs to provide consultation for the miniseries adaptation of his fifth novel, Victims of Love. The dates he was required in the desert overlapped with Tess’s spring break, so he offered to take her along. “I’ll be working the whole time,” he’d told her with a weariness she could only assume was exaggerated; she couldn’t imagine whatever “consultation” was required from him would be particularly grueling business. “You’ll have to entertain yourself. But the studio is putting me up at the Renaissance, so it shouldn’t be terribly difficult.”
Her friends were going to the usual places—Miami, Cancun, Vegas, Cabo. Her initial plan had been to do the same, but the writer’s offer was immediately more appealing than getting wasted on an overcrowded beach for the fourth spring break in a row. This was how she wound up in the passenger seat of his Bentley, watching the outside temperature display steadily climb as the car raced along the dry roads into the desert.
When they drew near to the hotel after driving for the better part of two hours, she looked out at the forest of windmills with their languorous blades gleaming molten white in the fierceness of the setting sun. Most of them spun listlessly, but some stood conspicuously inert, detached from their active brethren like deformed mongrels among a litter of purebreds. Something about these still shapes—were they broken, she wondered, or simply shut down?—caused a formless, indefinite sadness to well up within her. She had to look away.
For the first couple days, she spent most of her time lying by the pool with her earphones in, floating in a trancelike delirium, high on Valium and margaritas. She rarely saw the writer; he left early and got in late, and she was usually asleep for his comings and goings. He would leave packets of coke for her on the nightstand, and pills in unmarked bottles—party favors, she supposed, from wherever he was going after shooting had wrapped for the day.
On the third night, she woke groggily from an inebriated slumber sometime after one AM, stretched on the bed in her bikini, with no recollection of lying down. The writer still wasn’t there, and she discovered a text from him on her phone informing her he wouldn’t be back until the following night. Whatever the implication of this was, it didn’t faze her. She got out of bed and did some of the coke, shattering the icy shards of frosted tequila still clinging to her brain. Pulling shorts and a tank top over her bathing suit, she left the room to wander down the wide, maze-like hallways that seemed to continue endlessly, deviated by occasional bends that gave way to corridors which would have been identical if not for the different posters of various vintage cars hanging from the walls. She eventually reached the elevators in their glass corridor that jutted away from the hotel, pausing for a while to look out at the fearsome black bulk of the mountains rising over the basin of the valley. She imagined creatures living among the dark rocks, unspeakable monstrosities peering down at her. They called to her in voices she felt but could not hear. A chilled shudder skittered down her spine, and she turned away, summoning one of the elevators and riding it down to the first floor. She walked beneath the high ceilings of the deserted lobby and went over to the bar, which was empty save for the bartender and a tired-looking man in white jeans and an oxblood leather jacket. Tess took a seat two stools away from the man and ordered a martini. The bartender flashed her with a suspicious glance but didn’t card her.
As Tess drew her first sip from the cocktail once it was placed before her, the man in the leather jacket looked at her, staring for several seconds and then dropping his gaze. He smiled to himself and shook his head. “What?” Tess asked, emboldened by the coke.
“Nothing,” the man said, still smiling and shaking his head. “I’m sorry.” He was youngish, maybe mid-twenties, with a handsome, lightly stubbled face and brushed-back blond hair. A stray lock of it hung curled against his tanned forehead. “It’s just, you see it happen in the movies, you know? Guy is sitting alone at the bar, beautiful woman sits down next to him. You don’t think it happens in real life.”
Tess was thrown briefly off kilter—she couldn’t recall anyone ever referring to her as a beautiful woman. Beautiful girl, yes—though it was more frequently “hot girl,” or “sexy young lady” or, usually when she had their dick in her mouth, “delicious little bitch”—but never woman. Recovering quickly, she said, “Well, you know. Life imitates art, or whatever.”
The smile he gave her was surprisingly sad. “No,” he said. “No, it doesn’t.”
His name was Logan Taylor. A director, he was here helming a lengthy shoot for a Netflix miniseries based on Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park. Before this, he’d directed a number of stylish music videos—“Do people even watch music videos anymore?” Tess had asked, and he’d told her no, they don’t, but they acted as a kind of portfolio showcasing a director’s ability. The adaptation of The Deer Park was Logan’s first time working with actual, legitimate actors, and he lamented the experience at length to Tess. “They’re always questioning everything just for the sake of it,” he told her. “‘Would my character really say this?’” he mocked in a whiny voice. “Or, ‘I’m really struggling with my character’s motivation here.’ It’s pathetic. All the action, all the dialogue—the screenwriter took all of it right from the novel. If they truly cared about motivation, they’d read the fucking book. But good luck getting an actor to read anything that isn’t formatted like a script or a press release.”
He had an undeniable arrogance about him, but it wasn’t as showy or grandiose as the writer’s. Tess liked him, and she liked the way he looked at her. It was different from the way the writer looked at her. There was a reverence in Logan’s eyes when they were upon Tess, a subdued and patient amazement. The writer looked at her like something to own. Something to eat.
They sat talking until well past three—Logan spoke far more than Tess, but she didn’t mind. He had a pleasant voice lacking in pretense or affectation. In combination with the gin and vermouth, it had a way of lulling her into a pleasing state of dazed hypnosis. The substance and context of whatever he was saying didn’t matter; Tess was content to float on the musical timbre of the flexing and contracting of his vocal cords, nodding and smiling in the right places, murmuring what few words were necessary to keep him going.
It was still hot outside, where they shared a cigarette beneath the awning over the front entrance. Logan smoked Pall Malls, which Tess found odd and amusingly pedestrian. When she told him this, he laughed, and then he kissed her. She allowed it, mostly because she liked how he had tossed aside the cigarette and, without asking permission, closed the distance between them so he could seize hold of her, pressing his liquor-tanged mouth to hers. Most males were always asking for that sacred word of consent before taking any such action. “Can I kiss you?” they’d ask, and it sounded so pathetic, so bleating. She often responded with, “I don’t know, can you?” Even the writer hadn’t first kissed her until she’d been splayed naked on his bed, at which point consent was a forgone conclusion. This was what she wanted—a daring display of boldness, a willingness to take a risky leap from a precipitous ledge. Still, she’d intended to allow it only for a few seconds before politely pulling away, citing someone else, but she found herself falling into it for reasons not known to her, pressing against Logan and draping her arms around his neck. She felt weightless, swept away, plummeting.
In the elevator, they were upon each other again, kissing and sucking, biting and pulling. The heat rising within Tess felt strong enough to ignite. Logan’s hands on her skin were like flame-reddened coals. Her desire was a desperation, a painful, physical thirst threatening to consume her if not soon sated.
Stripped bare on the bed in the director’s darkened suite, Tess experienced this new man’s naked proximity in and around her body with a kind of shock. She’d not had sex with anyone but the writer since she’d begun seeing him. Variations presented themselves at once. Gone was the director’s polite and subdued manner; he made love with a ferocity so violent Tess felt absurdly like it was an act of defiance against the writer’s gentle attentiveness. The first minute or two was thrilling in its newness, but then he was pulling her hair too hard, gripping her neck too tightly, thrusting into her with too much force. She became frightened, and she contemplated telling him to stop in a brief flight of fancy, but of course she couldn’t. She could only lie there and wait for it to be over.
She dressed in silence while Logan lay spent and self-satisfied, watching her with eyes once again kind and reverential. They made plans to meet at the bar the next night, but Tess knew she wouldn’t go.
Except, it seemed, she did go. After a mostly lost day stoned and drunk by the pool, there came a curtain of opaque blackness, and then she was awakening on sweat-soggy sheets amid a tangle of warm limbs. She freed herself and stood at the foot of the bed, gazing at the naked bodies sleeping upon it. On either side of the director lay a blonde girl. One of them might have been fourteen. The other couldn’t have been older than eleven.
Riding the elevator up to the writer’s floor, fragments of obscene images flashed in Tess’s mind. She lied to herself and reasoned they were false memories; she never would have agreed to the horrible things—evil things—she saw herself engaged in amid these grotesque snapshots burning in her brain. She told herself this, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. When she let herself into the writer’s room—he still had not returned, a kindness granted from a God in which she didn’t believe—she had to rush to the bathroom so she could vomit into the toilet. Liquor and pills came up, but the images remained inside her.
She wept herself to sleep that night.
Three days later, when it was time for her to leave, she rode the elevator down to the lobby to wait for the Lyft for which the writer had paid to take her back to Los Angeles. The elevator stopped at the third floor, and the doors slid open. The director stepped inside, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, a beach towel draped over his shoulder. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. He didn’t acknowledge her, or even look at her. The doors opened again at the first floor, and he wordlessly went out to the pool as if she hadn’t been there. She let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding.
It didn’t happen, she told herself. None of it happened. I got too drunk and did too many drugs, and I dreamt all of it.
But then she saw the two blonde girls sitting at a table in the dining area near the bar. Their faces were solemn, and their youth was even more horrific in the daytime. The older one locked eyes with her, and she whispered something to the younger one, who turned her head to look at Tess. Tess rushed outside and dropped her duffel bag on the pavement so she could dry-heave into a bush.
On the ride back, she vowed she’d never again go to Palm Springs. She told herself something sinister lurked out there in the desert, a black disease which had taken root and flourished in its necrotic potency. But as the spires of downtown Los Angeles came into view, she wondered with mounting fear if the disease had metastasized long ago, and if it had been inside her all along.