Negative Space, Mike Robinson [best contemporary novels TXT] 📗

check out the place. It was a new thing, after all, fresh sights and sounds. Inspiration hid in the unknown, unseen and unheard. Maybe lurking in its walls was his next Big Work. Who knew.

Next? You’d need a first Big Work.

Tell them you work at Sirens. Get the VIP treatment.

Behind him, two men quietly discussed the fate of the four officers indicted for assaulting the King fellow. The trial was being moved from L.A. County to Ventura County, where the populace apparently sustained a disproportionate amount of law enforcement officials. One man worried the cops wouldn’t see a single cell bar.

***

A quaint Tudor-style house, almost cartoonishly slim. Beams formed sharp angles along the outer walls, thin windows glaring upon the streets. The house had a tenuous hold on reality. Max took cautious steps up the sidewalk, then noticed someone out of the corner of his eye: a young woman roughly his age.

“This is the place?” she asked Max. “The Schoolhouse?”

“I think so. I’ve never been here before.”

“Me, neither,” she said. “My girlfriend recommended it to me.”

“I’m just here to talk to someone.”

They approached the front door in silence. Max was about to knock when the girl homed in on the doorbell and pressed it. From behind the walls and curtained windows, music played audibly. Occasional cries of pleasure rang out. They sounded almost theatrical.

An older woman, clad all in black, answered the door.

“Hello, welcome,” she said, motioning them in. “My name is Rose. Do either of you have an appointment?”

“I have a reservation,” said the woman at Max’s side, some drill sergeant in her tone. “With Christine for eight o’clock. I know I’m a little early, but I don’t mind waiting.”

“Perfectly all right.” Returning to her desk, Lady Rose flipped through two pages of a large scheduling book. “And you, sir?”

“I’m actually not here for a session.” He brought out the card. “Is...Penelope here? I’d like to speak with her.”

“She’s in a half-hour session right now. You can wait if you’d like. She shouldn’t be too much longer, although I think she has another appointment at eight.”

“That’s fine. Just want to clear something up.”

With a raised eyebrow, Lady Rose asked, “Are you her boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Ah, okay. Sorry. Sometimes we get those around here. Jealous significant others.”

“You can rest easy.”

“Nice to know. You sure you’re not interested in a session?” She smiled at him. “What do you do for a living?”

A memory ran through his mind—his co-worker Tyler, sitting with legs propped in the backroom and watching a Schoolhouse video. Moans of ecstatic agony. The hard fleshy smacks, the grotesque ripples of the woman’s buttocks. The red lines across delicate skin. The sloppy look on Tyler’s face.

“I’m an artist,” Max said. “And I’m not interested, really. Thanks, though.”

Rose gave him a knowing smile. “People are afraid of themselves, it seems,” she said. “They’re so worried they’re going to be judged when they come in here, but really it’s just a release, a liberating break. And it recharges. Puts you in touch with all the things that make us us that no one dares look at. You should know about that kinda stuff, being an artist.”

Max nodded, half-listening.

A door opened. Voices. From one of the hallways, a man emerged—nicely-dressed, blazer draped over one arm, hair gelled, complexion flushed. Pretentiously clean. Max thought him an investor, or banker, someone who played all day in the dollar-cent sandbox.

Maybe it was his own pretensions as an artist, but the money-mover types, these Players, these Movers and Shakers, seemed to Max to betray a woodenness of spirit, a cold mildewed core that was something of an anti-enlightenment. They’d reconnected with the savage neutrality of the elements, but at a much...lower level. A deader level.

This man, however, looked revitalized.

“Amazing,” said the man. “Simply amazing. I felt so...so comfortable. That Penelope really knows her stuff.”

Just seconds behind him was the girl in question. Max’s body stiffened. She wore a skin-tight leather outfit that glistened like oil. A leather cuff hung from her right wrist. She looked vibrant, as well, but an undeniable weariness shaded her expression. Beneath her callused demeanor, Max could still glimpse softness, vulnerability.

It’s her it’s her Christ it’s her—

Karen Eisenlord.

Looking away from her most recent client, she saw Max sitting stiff and aloof. Mr. Mover and Shaker stopped by Rose’s desk to set up a future appointment.

“Max,” Karen said.

“Are you—?”

“Here,” she said, grabbing his arm and leading him toward the door. She called back to Rose, “Taking a smoke break.”

They stepped out onto the porch. Evening had fallen. The long steady exhale of the 405 Freeway nearby. Max pulled out a Taco Shack packet, bit into it and sucked it down fast, setting aflame his mouth, throat and stomach.

“You’re...Karen Eisenlord,” he said.

I’ve been drawing you.

A sillier notion struck him: I made you live. You crawled out of my sketch, into skin.

Karen lit a cigarette, which Max tried to ignore as he drained the packet.

“Penelope at work,” she said. “But yeah. I go by Karen McAdams now.” She blew out smoke. “I thought I might have a visit from you.”

“You went to Norman Ritter?”

“The article guy. Yeah.” She took in another lungful of smoke, curled it out through her nose.

“Who are you?” Max said.

“I don’t fucking know,” she said with a smile. “Do you know who you are? You have a few years on me so maybe you do.”

“Why have you been trying to contact me? How...or...or why are you here? You’re missing in Baltimore. Your face is in the paper. By now, everyone probably thinks you’re dead.”

“I was in the paper?”

Max nodded.

“In Baltimore.”

“Yes.”

“How do you know that, then? Don’t you live here?”

“I subscribe to a lot of newspapers. It’s a long story.”

“Ah,” Karen said. “For your artwork, right? You put missing people in your art or something. I saw it in the article.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m your sister. Well, half-sister. My father went missing when I was a kid. Yours did too, right?”

“Well, yeah. What about it?”

“I think we had the same father. What was your father’s