Chapter Text
We saw it coming
but kept walking through the hole
in the garden. Because the leaves
were bright green & the fire
only a pink brushstroke
in the distance.
–Ocean Vuong, “Eurydice”
Was I the creature, or was he?
Because the walls changed, I know they did.
The doors disappeared.
–Puloma Ghosh, “In the Winter”
The road was famed for death, gape of the valley for miles on end; in the canyon sloping down to darkness beside it, deep in the cavernous bowl containing the city of Los Angeles, was a flare, an ocean, a sparking pulse in Ada’s periphery. When she glimpsed it out her window as she drove, she was entranced by how that light, chambered by the steep crooked ridges of the valley and all the shadows which flourished there, appeared to chase her down the road. In her haste she almost skidded off the lane trying to see the basin in its entirety and then decided any view featured so commonly in movies was not worth killing herself for, and kept on. She burned the morning-dark photos of collisions from her mind. She erased the places where others before her had crashed or plunged into fanged crevices below, and she thought of how it only took one moment of inattention, one catastrophic flight of emotion, to end up spinning, veering away from the jaws of one terrible wilderness and crushed inside another. To spend the rest of her days dragging her body out the grave.
Behind her, the long, low bleating of a horn.
Ada chastised herself. She was running late to a party. For the last ten minutes her GPS and phone had failed to regain signal and now that she was lost, driving carefully along a series of vacillating bends that left no room to pull over, there was nothing for it but to turn on her hazard lights and wait.
Again the trail of cars behind her honked and flashed their high beams. She tapped her GPS screen, tapped the Home button to reset the damn thing, to retype her destination, but the only refrain chirped back from the machine, as her onscreen marker veered off into the gray void, was— recalculating . Eventually the other cars swerved around with frightening velocity, and one by one she watched them race the lick of Mulholland Drive with a vicious crack of their engines, and Ada stopped, stomped on the brakes.
It tore open the night, that sound. Like burst fire from a semi-automatic. It vibrated in her teeth.
Ada opened the window completely, pressing the brakes and sitting there in the comfort of the cold. It was a clear, dry starry night, so unlike New York where she had been staying for a month alone, where the first dazzling flurries of snow had fallen yesterday morning, melting in the steam of sewer grates and graying to slush in the rush of heavy traffic. Most Decembers she’d visit a cemetery in Queens to wipe the stones and clear the dead leaves from her parents’ names and then she prepared her offerings—fruit and poinsettias, her mother’s favorite, festive, she thought—and she would burn incense at the place where two bodies should have been. It was less crowded on a weekday morning. Except for an older gentleman knelt under a laurel tree several headstones away, she was unaccompanied.
In truth, she had yet to dream of her parents after they died. Contrary to what Hollywood movies would have people believe about ghosts, they did not come bearing apologies of their own in the middle of the night. They did not manifest in the clangor of bells or the charred swell of smoke to greet her at the door with sweet smiles and a promise. True to their word in life, they did not visit her once. Not in dreams of their brownstone apartment collapsing in flames, ash drifting up in shriveled flakes and casting about in a swirl like black moths, eating through the cotton of her leggings. Leaving a sure mark. Not even then. But sometimes she dreamed of these details as if she had really been there.
Because the details of that fire, like so much else in that former life she fled, did not belong to her.
Anyway, Ada had come to L.A. in search of someone else.
In the winter, she received an offer from the worst man she had ever known to come work for him again. She had not seen Wesker in over two years. She opened his messages and stared at the letters, how ordinary they seemed, and she did not respond. She had that dream only once, in which she stood before a flaming, blackened house, the door frames disintegrating, and later that sweat-sickened night, she awoke to her phone buzzing and rattling just when the sound had begun to burrow like a wasp into her ears. It was not him, but another client offering her a job in the Hollywood Hills for an immense sum of money. High risk, no casualty assignment. She wasn’t sleeping well this year. She could have taken the whole month off if she wanted, for she was a spy and she had that kind of freedom, but the allure of folding back into old rhythms, of slipping loose her body’s ties to move in the guise of another was too irresistible to refuse and she said yes, yes, she would do it.
In the face of her dreams, she would always say yes.
Ada checked her phone, scrolling through her client’s emails. The mansion where she was headed was farther up the road; she was close. She had only to continue this route and then she would see the gates. According to her files, the Castillo was purportedly built over a secret chamber quite beautiful underground, and she was aching to descend, to snatch for herself a little of that lost and fabled beauty.
Zooming out, she looked and looked for the triangular, blue, blinking marker of herself on the GPS screen. Somewhere in that void, she was spinning hopelessly heavenward. Recalculating .
In a huff, Ada yanked on the GPS cable and disconnected it.
*
She soon found herself on an incline, following signs in a tight weave of curves—left twisting around this hill, on the next a hard, sharp right. The road relinquished logic like a dream, and along the edges of a vast wilderness that spread for miles, she kept on. She sped past a family of sycamores, limbs and leaves clutched together. She drove deeper into the mountains where the road no longer swung wildly past cliffs but ascended through the green, ancient largeness of the land and when finally she came to the Castillo, having reached the top of its tilted street, she was a little dizzy. The house, encircled by a stone wall, was impossible to see.
At the gates, two security guards in black suits aimed a flashlight at her eyes and asked what she was doing there.
Ada parked next to a Dangerous Animals sign and smiled innocently. She held up her admission ticket. They checked her license too, explaining the rules in a vaguely unnatural British accent—you’d be surprised, they said with a joyless chuckle, by how many fakes we’ve had to turn away—and then beaming light into her face, the older one stooped, dangling her license through the open window.
“Is this your first time at the Castillo?” the guard asked. He enunciated his words like he was speaking to a five year-old. “Did you have difficulty finding the place?”
“Not at all,” Ada said.
“Good,” he said. “Very good. And are you aware the cocktail reception began thirty minutes ago? That you are the last guest to arrive?”
“My condolences. Was there anything else I missed,” she said. “Any more astute observations you’re dying to make?”
The older man didn’t respond right away. He was freckled and short and had a stern, reptilian smile behind his sunglasses, staring hard as though to gauge her capacity for serious trouble. Do you think you deserve it, Wesker would say, challenging her in the same manner with eyes glowing yellow through the lenses he wore, waiting for her to say no.
Ada snatched her license from the guard.
“Step out of the car,” he said.
The night air cooled in passing licks over Ada’s shoulders as she got out. Looking around, she could see the sidewalk curving askew where the landscape receded, the grass dipping and rising into thatches of shrubbery and thorny brush from where any predator, concealed by the deepening shadows, could have leapt. The man grimaced like he smelled something foul, pushed her against the car.
“You want to watch that attitude around folks in there, Miss Chen. Word of advice.”
“Is this necessary,” Ada said.
“Just doing my job. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”
He patted her down, groping and grasping with a satisfied grunt and all the while his partner smiled apologetically at Ada from the curb. A reedy boy in his twenties, typing on his phone, saying nothing. Like this was just another shift he had to get through.
There was nothing more for her to say. She wasn’t afraid. Rather, she didn’t feel anything. She wondered if something was wrong with her, waiting for him to find the tactical garter where her knife was strapped, and then he crouched, searching her thigh. As if on cue, his eyes widened comically like she knew they would, and she noticed the hollow in him, the red spongy universe inside his mouth when he grinned, the crooked incisors gleaming, silver-capped like hollow-point bullets. She had the impulse to pluck them out. Pretty things.
“Now that is my favorite piece I’ve found today. Look here, kid, military grade, custom engraving and everything. A real beauty. Tell me, sweetheart, what do you suppose you were going to do with this?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Ada said.
“What is?”
Three hard strikes, and she had him prostrate on the cement. It was the same tactic she’d used on men twice his size in sparring sessions. Twisting his arm behind his back, Ada yanked him up by his hair. She raised the knife to his throat as a warning for the boy, who had by then drawn his gun, to stand down.
“Let him go,” the boy stammered, but his hands were shaking.
“Are you sure you’re old enough to use that?” she asked.
“You crazy bitch,” the man coughed out beneath her. The pop of adrenaline made her feel good.
“Please,” the boy said, tossing his weapon, raising his small palms.
The fact was most people were predictable in submission. They begged for the same things. Time and mothers and you don’t have to do this . She liked it best when their pride bubbled up at the last minute instead, when they fought.
The man gritted more insults through his teeth, and Ada dug her knee into his back.
“Shit,” he said.
“Do you treat all of Maxime’s friends like this or do you just have a penchant for assaulting lone women at night?” Maxime was the multimillionaire party host whom her client knew very well. “Imagine what he’d have to say about that,” Ada said. “What would become of your job?”
“Yeah? They don’t pay me enough to give a shit.”
“Then how about we make a deal?”
“You’re insane.”
“Just tell us what you want,” the boy pleaded. “Don’t hurt him.”
“The gates,” Ada said, removing the guard’s handgun from his holster, and then his wallet. “Now.”
Availing herself of the gun, Ada trained her sights on the older guard, whom she allowed to stand. He swiped at his bloody nose, and the boy, having opened the gates, scurried over to console him. The older one swatted him away. She demanded the boy’s wallet too. She wanted to know their names, where they lived.
“The deal is this,” Ada said. “You get to walk away with your lives, both of you. And you don’t come back. Down the road, right there. Get walking.”
The man looked at the empty road and at the black silhouettes of sycamores creaking softly and the skinny streetlamps and then, incredulously, back at Ada. “How do you know we won’t just call the police? How can you know that?”
“Because I have your names and addresses, and look at that. Two beautiful girls, two beautiful pictures. I like that kind of collateral in a man. It would be a shame if something happened to them.”
At the mention of his daughters, the man reddened, his face puffed up like he was about to cry or scream but then he just closed his eyes for several moments, the fight escaping him at last in a long, pitiful exhale, and wiping the sweat between his eyes, he began to walk. He motioned to his partner.
“There are mountain lions out there,” the boy said, hugging himself.
“Don’t speak to her,” the older one said, leading the way down. “You don’t speak to that woman.”
Driving through the gates, Ada watched him perform an exaggerated bow in her direction. That shiver of fury. The rippling unease in his lizard mouth. It made her feel powerful, like she had plucked the wings off a powdery moth and watched the slender body wriggle, like she had glimpsed, for a moment, into the jaws of something bestial just before it disappeared. She feared she had not gone far enough.
*
The GPS lay dead on the passenger seat. In the driveway, Ada killed the ignition, switched off her phone to prevent more texts from coming through, even though Wesker had not contacted her in weeks.
She could hear him still. There were a string of messages up until December. The usual cryptic bullshit: that her blood was beholden to him, he said, always. He was there in the passenger seat. He was on top of her. With teeth. The needles he injected her with in Spain before he escaped, the syringes with which he had siphoned her blood, taking them away—while she was unconscious, he bled her, touched her.
No. She would not think of it. Not here.
In the glove box, Ada locked the wallets and firearms she’d stolen—to dispose of later—and taking a small purse, she went uphill. There was no one else in the driveway. Luxury cars shining sleek under the moon sat empty in the gravel, an alien cavalcade of Bugattis up front. She could hear the road she had traveled, too, the speeding cars blasting music in the distant dark, and the heady screams of women echoed over the canyon to meet her like a benediction. Ada felt a little bitterness at that—the recklessness and the freedom of it.
At the entrance, a rasp of wind pushed against her back.
There was a moment when, looking into the lower windows, listening to the intimations of laughter, she caught through the curtains slivers of human shapes in gaudy reverie. The house in its Gothic gloom was fringed by magnificent trees, its silhouette so cleanly delineated against the purple sky, it glowed. Tall, arched windows encroached by ivy. White spires rising high over the bare, gnarled shadows of oaks. Square turrets on a lone tower. It held her mind silent.
Two hours, that was her limit. Her client’s instructions were simple: find the inner chambers where the gemstones were kept and recover only the sapphire, a family heirloom. She could manage with the knife if things got ugly. Her AR contact lenses she carried in her purse for later.
Two hours. She could manage that.
*
It was the night of the premiere.
The adrenaline had yet to dissipate from her skin. The knife, like an animal cloaked in red curtains, rested against her thigh, obscured by the Valentino dress she was wearing. She liked its weight, the illegitimate savor of what she had done. It made her ravenous.
Ada followed the golden music from the foyer into the showroom where appetizers borne aloft on silver trays were glistening among their sauces. Buffet tables were laid out with platters: crab rangoon, exotic cheeses and fruit, star-shaped plates of delicately wrapped chocolates that burst warm and sticky in Ada’s mouth. Licking the cherried guts, she took another Danish from the stars, marveling at the mosaic tiles shaped like swirling eddies, splashing the walls in cobalt blue for days. A violinist performed shut-eyed in a corner, playing Tchaikovsky, that well-worn ache everyone knew. The floors surged with people in splendid outfits, speaking different languages, and caterers in white suits dashed about with trays.
How many rooms to reach the bottom of this place, step by hallowed step to the innermost chamber, to infiltrate the heart where it was caged? Being in a stranger's home always filled Ada with the same desire. Not for the things themselves, but for a space as grand and as wide as this, somewhere permanent to live that wasn’t an isolated cabin or a hotel room in the city. She wanted to relish this house, to learn its floor plan like a language, to find the perfect opening. She weighed her options. Heading straight for the basement would have been an amateur move, unthinkable, for she was a professional. And truthfully, she was starving. Her heart in its bloody confines was racing.
An animatronic beast in the center of the floor unhinged its jaws and turned its head to growl at Ada as she passed, repeating the same desolate groans she'd heard with more vivacity from the actual undead. It was a prop from the host’s studio collection, part of his film based on the 1998 Racoon City disaster, which up until that point, no one had ever dared to repurpose in a way that wasn't strictly a documentary. A decade later, and the carnage was strewn like confetti: platinum silicone and rubber bodies, weapon props and life size zombie statues displayed in glass cases. The prosthetic human head molds, in particular, had drawn the loudest admirers of all, people cooing over the heads like they were presiding over a natural birth.
A million dollar budget for this shit.
Predictably, Hollywood was incapable of telling a story without commodifying a national tragedy before anyone else could buy the rights. One city’s grave was another’s celebratory showcase. But what did it matter? Ada was going to skip the premiere anyway. It was to be a private screening of the first film in history inspired by the incident. That was what everyone called it now, as if in abbreviation the destruction, the hundred thousand lives lost to the bombings, would seem more like a faraway dream the country had, in a blameless stupor, woken up from once upon a lovely time. The burning homes, a distant stage in the collective mind. The incident , the virus , the Hand of God sweeping up the blood and human dust into an airless abyss, clean. Ada didn’t know what to call it either. She had fallen into a strange fugue after she escaped the city. Ringing ears, hallucinations, animal terrors. She was fluent in six languages and dreamed in fragments, trying to conjure a name for what happened and nothing came close, nothing after she recovered made any earthly kind of sense. Sometimes the words died on the waveless air, failing to catch the flight and certitude of meaning. Or if the words existed, they were broken, too small and shapeless under the weight of experience to remember, to describe what had almost killed her.
At the party, everyone involved in the film’s production congratulated each other.
That city, swinging like an iron pendulum—there and falling back, swept by rain, and falling back again—in Ada’s memory.
Leon , she thought, wondering what he would make of this. Would he enjoy it less? Straying from the showroom, Ada searched for one familiar face in the chattering tides, only to be met with a cheerful outburst from the flock. They were like children, so thoroughly entertained by silicone and rubber.
By the time she saw one of Wesker’s clients hastily approaching, the gathering like an overture had swelled out into the halls and Ada was drifting along with it. She felt her edges in the next instant give way to the presence crouched inside her, prowling at the fleshy boundary which separated her from the rest of the merry world, watching the walls shed their pretty color to expose what had always lived there.
“Sweetheart?”
Ada smiled at the woman in the belted pantsuit. Josephine, a horror actress and investor in the black market arms trade, led her to the sitting room, happily making introductions to the other girls from her group.
“What were you doing alone there, Marienne? Did you not see us?”
“I got caught up there for a second. Glad you found me.”
They had met a year after the disaster. Wesker had been there to negotiate that first bioweapon contract with Josephine, charging a fortune for the Hunter Alpha security system—twin monstrosities to protect her home in Palm Beach (“Better than your average guard dog” was the selling point). But Josephine was also fond of cocaine, which Ada used to bring in abundance for all of them to share. That was why his clients loved her more.
“You look amazing in that dress.”
“Thank you.”
“You remember Bea, Sebastian, and Julia.”
“With pleasure.”
“And Peter. He’s recently back from Reykjavik on a whim and well, god, it’s been forever. He brought a little vial of volcano ash for us to play with, isn’t that something? So don’t feel bad if you came empty-handed. It’s about time we treat you for once.”
Ada, saying nothing, exchanged an awkward wave with Peter, a white middle-aged critic wearing a cowboy hat and a Cartier watch.
“We were just talking about signs. From the Chinese zodiac! Peter was saying how the year of the ox is upon us. What does that mean again, if you’re born an ox?”
“That you’re a stubborn son of a bitch. What’s there to know?”
“My cousin reads the four pillars of birth for a living, so actually, it’s more involved than you think,” Julia said, giving her bangles a fair shake.
Everyone laughed.
“We’ve really missed you,” said Josephine to Ada, “now you must tell us where you’ve disappeared to. No, come now, Marienne. How was the drive here? Not too difficult, I hope. Did you miss L.A.? Did you miss us terribly? Oh, speak, speak!”
“ Ah, oui . Terribly so.”
“And your husband, is he…?”
“A non-issue? No, I promise it was amicable. We’ve parted ways, you see. The business has stayed with him for the long-term, and for all the better. I’ve found time on my hands, as the expression goes.”
“My dear!”
A wave of endearments and joyful touches surrounded Ada for whom this attention provided a welcome reprieve from her loneliness, from the daily austerity to which she had grown well accustomed. She was uplifted by their considerations, and seduced by Vivaldi playing from the adjoining room, the sprightly violin floating upon the air, she shucked off her weariness. She proceeded into the noisy gathering, light burning out of every fixture, and played her part. The artists were dazzled, as expected. Delighted by their questions, Ada pretended to grow shy. She did not care much for their company, to be clear, but whenever she was called to put on a show, to overthrow her life in a succession of beautiful phrases as she pleased, Ada committed. As Marienne, she discarded reality, played up the French accent. She was traveling America for the arts, she said. For the presidential inauguration which was sure to be quite the spectacle, protests be damned. She was learning how to paint, she was dancing and writing, she had discovered happiness again. Oh, but she was happy!
To Ada, there was no greater magic than making others believe that you were what you most longed to be.
Sometimes she enjoyed these empty motions more than her own life.
Sensing her friends were sufficiently moved by this performance, Ada prepared her lines about Wesker. She wanted to know where to find him.
“I don’t believe I’ve seen that man happier than when he was with you. I don’t understand it,” Bea said, plopping onto a brocade couch with a hand cupping her cheek. “He acted like he hardly knew us, didn’t he, Josie?”
“That’s right. When I asked after you, Marienne, he said I shouldn’t worry about it, that you’d be taken care of, and that was that.”
“So he’s been around,” Ada said with false disaffection. “When was this?”
Josephine, lying on the same couch with Bea, popped a cigarette into her mouth, lighting it. “A month, was it? Two months ago. Wasn’t here long. He and Maxime went off to settle some business in one of the rooms up there, very hush-hush about it too, and then he was gone. Like lightning. Just gone.”
“He was so preoccupied with work he didn’t say where he was headed? Sounds like him,” Ada laughed.
“God he was so dull!” Julia said.
“You aren’t expecting him again, I imagine.”
Josephine shook her head. “I wouldn’t wait around for him, dear. People so rarely know what they want in love these days, who they want to be. But look at what you’ve accomplished in life already, Marienne. And you are still so young.”
Stealing a moment’s calm from Josephine’s cigarette, Ada, taking a drag, held on and held fast, stifled the urge to snap. He had been here. Conducting his business like he was any other man. And in a way, he was. People always asked what kind of person could become a killer, an apparition projecting unwanted from the ether and disappearing at will, his voice carrying distances to find her and leaving no trace behind. A bottomless void. He could be anyone.
Another breath drawn in, and she ashed in a diamond cut tray, relishing the taste of the smoke settling in the old familiar places, the way it moved inside her like a living thing.
She never told anyone this, but once, Wesker had made a life-changing proposal. He said it like that, if you agree to this one thing, I can change your life forever. He called it a gift, an experiment that accelerated regeneration in human cells and tissues, regular injections of something called the C-virus to heal her combat wounds faster, making her gradually impervious to injury and to the most indecipherable anguish, as if the only pain that mattered was the kind you could see. The drawback was that pleasure, too, would become inaccessible, lost forever, which, in the scheme of things, made no calculable difference to her. She had spent decades numb to certain sensory and emotional experiences. That wasn’t new. That wasn’t why she refused.
The tissue samples, the organs, the bones and teeth and blood vials packed in black cases, and the infected embryos he sold in the early days of their partnership—he never needed her blood for that. So why had he taken it?
Returning the cigarette to Josephine, Ada muffled these concerns, releasing wreaths of smoke from an immaculately composed impression. She imagined those crimson-filled vials he must have labeled with her name, used up, discarded, the last remnants rotting. She felt like she had been separated from something, a deep untethering she could not explain.
She breathed, and air seeped back inside her body.
“Ladies, I’ll be just a minute. I’d like to have a word with Maxime,” she said.
Josephine pouted like a child. “You’re leaving us so soon, Mari? After you just got here? But we haven’t seen each other in ages. Oh, it’s been ages and ages.”
“I promise I’ll come find you at dinner. Besides, I haven’t had a chance to congratulate Maxime on his film. It would be a shame not to, don’t you think?”
“At least come sit with us for the screening,” said Bea, swatting Ada playfully with her velvet shawl. “Anyway, you won’t find him here. He’s been a while in the gallery, if he’s not upstairs already. Here, I’ll take you.”
“No, no, that’s alright. I’m sure I’ll find him.”
She couldn’t, though. She couldn’t even locate the gallery through the morass of bodies, men standing around in bow ties and tuxedos, their conversations circulating the house with intensity like smoke, trailing Ada everywhere she went. She didn’t stick around for the details, wasn’t interested in them anyway. Whatever they snickered about was old news, the petty humiliations and scandals tossed like an extended dirty joke about someone they knew; but none of them were Maxime, and so Ada moved on. No luck in the study room either. She counted more actresses and writers, and the younger girls who formed their own tittering circles gave Ada a sour look when she passed them in the loggia. She didn’t recognize their faces. Tall and plump, they roamed the halls in beaded gowns, clouding the air with their fragrances: sweat and wine and lemony perfume.
Absurdly, Ada wished she had worn a formal gown. Her off shoulder dress had seemed sensible earlier, but now it felt tight around her breasts, the high slit above her leg announcing plainly: an interloper.
When she asked someone for directions, they pointed west, toward the opposite wing, and to get there, she had to squeeze through the living room. On the walls were replica Old Master paintings by Titian, Caravaggio, Goya and all the rest of them. Candelabras burned tamely in arched alcoves between tall Greek pillars.
And in that living room, as though she had summoned him after all, on the fringes of a gregarious group of men sitting round the fireplace, was not Wesker, no, but Leon S. Kennedy.
Leon .
Well, she thought, boldly striding across to the other side, she was fucked either way.
*
“Surely I’m not alone in this,” one of them was saying, “but we’ve had experiences right? Moments when we might have seen figures out the corners of our eyes. Heard voices while we were totally lucid.”
“Making more out of things than they’re worth is what it sounds like.”
“Is it?”
Ada, weaving expertly through the masses, found a spot next to a Goya painting and observed Leon from afar. There was much excitement stirring up from the mens’ discussion as they brayed, arms slapping at each other’s shoulders whenever one of them said something crass or stupid. Leon stood apart from them near the wall, reading. But then he saw her.
“Take for instance this house. You can ask anyone,” one of the younger actors said, a bearded man waving around a fire poker.
Surrounded by other bodies, the air felt close, hot.
The man noticed Leon breaking away from their group, and with the poker aimed at him straight, he said:
“You there. Let me ask you something. Are you religious?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s a simple question, do you believe in the relinquishing of the human spirit or not?”
Another actor chimed in. “Give it a rest, Tor. How many people have you interrogated to death already about this? Shit’s getting old.”
“Interrogating about death and interrogating to death. A clean distinction. Yes or no, man. For posterity.”
Leon frowned. “Think you better ask someone else.”
“Okay, not a true believer then. Fair. How about this, do you know where you’re standing right now? This place, do you know anything about its history?”
A collective groan issued from the back, and the man named Tor smiled wearily at this, motioning for peace like a teacher at the end of a long, mutinous day.
By this point Leon had sidestepped the greater gathering near the fire and hovered inside the Moorish archway, her only exit that led to the gallery. At times, even with her attention fixed to the other man in avoidance, Ada could feel the pull of Leon’s gaze on her body, his silent insistence matched evenly by her reproach. She knew he hated to be ignored.
“I’m just saying, when you can see bullet holes in the banister over there, and when a mafia man gets whacked in his own living room, right here in fact, sixty years ago, and when an oil baron hangs himself in the same place, fifty years before that, I’m just saying, alright, some of that energy dissipates, and some of it stays.” Tor pointed to a spot on the terra cotta tile like he was waiting for a miracle to occur. Like at any second a mutilated body would materialize to prove his point. The others laughed, and the flames in the hearth crackled. “Think about it. The generations of violence sitting alongside us in this very room. Oh yes. It’s quite a fascinating piece of L.A. history.”
“Here he goes. Again with the immortality of the human soul.” A chubby man wearing a blue bow tie gestured to the crowd. “What’s next, you’re gonna tell us the holy spirit lives in the elevator?”
“Allegedly, yes, Piotr. Like I said, people were killed here.”
“May they rest in peace,” someone murmured, and everyone agreed.
“What a crack-up,” someone else said. “You know that shit isn’t real. Or else prove it.”
“Oh I intend to after dinner. It wouldn’t be proper otherwise,” said Tor, tossing the fire poker to the ground with a heavy clank.
Eventually the listeners, as they did before in birdlike configurations, broke away and came together and settled back into their own concerns, this time trading complaints about the heat. A path opened up to the other end of the room. They were getting sweaty and restless, fanning their shiny faces. They were arguing, giddy for the dinner bells to ring, and their collective hunger felt like too many arms around her throat and Ada shivered. Leon was still there, excusing himself through the human currents to meet her.
Going back the other way, Ada bumped into a statue, reflexively apologizing to the figure before she realized what it was: a female taxidermy fawn, meticulously preserved in a full-bodied run, dead. The spotted fur she touched just to be certain, then the nose which was dry and the pink supple folds of the inner ear she traced for good measure—too cold to hold anything but a sheer whisper—and the damp-seeming black eyes in which she found her face reflected like a moon, a pale smear rippling unsullied in midnight water—dead.
“Festive,” Leon said, coming up beside her to look. A watery presence enclosed by those eyes soon shadowed hers, and Ada hurried off.
“Hey,” he said, when he caught up to her in the hallway. “Can we talk?”
Ada was surprised by the earnestness of the query. Frustrated at her inability to do anything but stand there, she opened her mouth to conjure the right words in the most effective arrangement she could muster. He had to be joking.
“We agreed on this,” she said.
“I know. I just. Didn’t think you’d be here.”
“Likewise,” Ada said. She was tempted to run. Or repeat verbatim the terms they had agreed on. That if encountering each other on a mission, they would not by any means break cover. And they certainly would not, ever, exchange so much as a trifling glance in the other’s direction as they had done a moment ago, across a swath of Hollywood’s shimmering elite artists, unless it was a matter of crisis, in which case, Ada had impressed on him many a time before, one of us had better be dying or one of us had better be dead . She had uttered these words as solemnly and unflinchingly as though they were gospel.
What couldn’t he understand?
“Your timing is terrible,” she said instead.
“Yeah. It usually is with us, right?” He blanched at this grim joke. “God. Sorry. That was. That came out wrong.”
“Forget it,” she said, then steering them off that subject: “You got an invite, I’m guessing?”
“Funny thing about that. When the director asked me to fly out, I thought it was a joke,” Leon said, lowering his voice, “Didn’t know what to expect coming here. But it got me out of a deployment to Europe, so, hey, can’t complain. And in a heartbeat it hits me. No one. And I mean. No one here knows who the fuck I am. Except you.”
“You always said anonymity was a blessing. Guess you got your wish, didn’t you?”
“More or less.”
They leaned against the wall to let caterers pass with glasses of red wine and Leon plucked one neatly from a silver tray and swallowed half. When he offered her the rest, an uncanny echo of the last time they saw each other, Ada’s stomach seized with a nagging, fervent clench.
“You working tonight?”
Ada sighed. “What does it look like, Leon?” It happened at a gala in spring. When she’d accepted a drink from him without hesitation and let herself be swayed by the casual warmth and sweetness of their banter for the first time in months. As though they were friends. As though the calamity they had survived in their twenties could not touch them anymore. And it had felt so good to Ada then, to lay down the cautious, reigned-in self that insisted on practicalities, to breathlessly give in, for an open-mouthed minute beyond reckoning, to several hundred heartbeats of a pleasure she had missed.
Then, just when she found herself alone with him, just when he began questioning her intel on Wesker, the building had been attacked.
It was a piddling outbreak, all things considered. No casualties, four wounded with minor injuries. Nothing compared to Racoon City and Spain, and briskly contained by the federal agency Leon worked for. Nevertheless, it confirmed Ada’s suspicions: his dogged surveillance of her activities, the dangerous enterprise of loving him.
“Looks like,” Leon said, narrowing his eyes as if divining her future, “well, like you hate these things as much as I do.”
She smiled at that, then caught herself. Moving her hand to cover his and holding the glass together, everything about his rough-knuckled skin alarmed her. But it was pleasant to touch, as that of a long forgotten word was to the ear, a shape refiguring across the tongue into elegance right where it belonged; and so soft between the fingers, those spaces opening where hers had once fit and folded inside seamlessly. She nudged the glass so as not to splash his tuxedo, and told him to keep it. He hummed, a noncommittal little sound.
“You’re not actually planning to stay to watch that nonsense later, are you?” he asked.
“Why else would I be here?”
“Sure. Okay. Classified, right?”
Be easy, she wanted to say.
“Thought you of all people would be rushing to see it,” she teased, trying to be light, easy.
“I’ll wait for the DVD.”
Down the hall a deep vibrato resounded over the party noise, and Ada looked. It was Tor, dancing like a fifties star. He commanded the room with his energy, singing along to Chet Baker’s My Funny Valentine to everyone’s delight. He was, surprisingly, good. Ada waved when he noticed her. She felt like she could breathe. With an impish glint in his eyes, Tor advanced like an executioner upon them.
“Your little prophet,” Ada said.
“Oh, fuck my day,” Leon said. “Listen, you want to take the lead on this one? I’ll make it up to you.”
“Not a chance.”
But before she could abandon Leon to his fate, the music changed and Tor stopped singing, wagging his finger at Leon like a cantankerous professor.
“I don’t believe we’ve properly met, have we? After you scuttled away in the living room, it got me thinking, shit, I’ve seen you before. But I can’t for the life of me recall where. No, I’ve got it. That Calvin Klein campaign, 2007, am I right? Your face. It’s a dead giveaway.”
Ada smirked at Leon’s hand tightening around the wineglass. “John gets that a lot,” she said, ignoring the scoff he made. “I’m Marienne by the way. A pleasure.”
“Tor Fredriksen. So have you two seen the rest of the place? What’s not off limits anyway.”
“Off limits?”
“Well, they can’t have people running around like rats until the real party begins, can they? I assume you’re staying after dinner if you want to find out, yes? A new game is in the works. Courtesy of Maxime, with a little help from me.”
“Aren’t we lucky,” Leon muttered, knocking back the rest of his wine.
“The director is a wanted man tonight. Any idea where one might find him?” Ada said, and Tor, offering to show them around the house, walked them to the den. He was in his late forties—long-haired, lean and spray tanned, already at that desperate age, his enthusiasm for their company reeking of a loneliness that begged permission to speak forever. Ada was embarrassed for him. He seemed to inspect her face for more information but then brushed it off.
“You’d have better luck stealing from the Taj Mahal, I’m afraid. Listen, come to the show later. He’ll be around. But why don’t we have ourselves a stroll, alright? Let me introduce you to some good people here, yes? Some fantastic people.”
Ada could not get away from the incoming prattle fast enough.
“I was actually on my way to the powder room. But you two go on without me,” she said. Then, to ward off Leon’s presence: “Tor, play nice with this one. He can be a bit difficult to crack. Take it from me.”
Leon fixed her with a pointed look. “Pardon?”
“I enjoy difficult,” Tor said.
“It was nice meeting you. Both of you,” she said to Leon, earning a dry retort at her back:
“ Likewise, Marienne.”
He watched her closely after that. For the rest of the evening, at dinner, Ada tuned him out and sat with the other women as she had promised them. She devoured her swordfish with prim focus, watching with amusement as the guests erupted into anecdotes and ecstatic debate on the paranormal, some of them hazy-eyed from the wine, reaching for bottles to pour generously into one crystal flute after another, trading alternately bleak and optimistic ideas of the afterlife. More than once, Leon’s gaze fell upon her, swift as a shark. What was he trying to prove? That she had always been someone else in disguise? Even with him? That he would catch her in the act, devouring her skins, that he could be the one to uncover the burning blood beneath? No. She would never make that mistake again. Not with anyone.
Tor was right. The staircase was closed after dinner. The landing was surveilled by two guards, probably to dissuade guests from following Maxime up there, wherever he was hiding. She tried the elevator but the doors would not shut. There were more buttons than floors, blank buttons that went nowhere when pressed. She returned to the living room and was equally disappointed by the thick press of people. So many people. Over the mantle, taxidermied animal heads winked at her with the gleeful cruelty of so many dead eyes.
When Maxime finally appeared wearing a red velvet suit for the occasion, hoisted on the shoulders of his production team who carried him through an archway and down the hall, down the maw of his private theater where everyone followed in a frenzy to be near him, touching him as worshippers would touch the hand of god, and when they finally released his body, delicately lowered him to the stage like he was a beloved pet, everyone leaping from their seats whistled and cheered and pumped their fists. The theater smelled of bleach and clean leather. The seats were velvet, heated and reclinable. In her head, Ada mapped the closest exits, waiting out the strangled few minutes for Maxime’s speech to end.
After he thanked everyone for their donations, which would, in their entirety, fund The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he beamed. Fifteen million dollars, he said. More than the presidential campaign dinner which he had hosted last month. More thunderous applause.
“More than that,” Maxime continued, “I want to congratulate my team, whom without their diligence this film would still be but a floating entity in my creative subconscious, a gravitational pull toward that rich unearthly matter which unsettles, obsesses and frightens us all. Really, just a scrabble of notes falling out of my pockets in disarray.” Here he paused, until the laughter subsided. “But that is what the best horror stories are made of. That is what they do to us. They transform us. They have the power to revive and obliterate the soul with unequivocal measure, they create a portal that once you enter you will never emerge whole. But why would you ever want to leave?
To demonstrate an example of such a portal, I want to call on one of my closest friends who guided me toward many artistic breakthroughs, Tor Fredriksen, the leading screenwriter for The Culling, who also happens to be a certified clinical hypnotherapist. Tor, my good man, the floor is yours.”
In that moment, as Tor began speaking, (“I’ll be upfront, ladies and gentlemen, this won’t work for everyone”), Ada felt the world drain colorless and shrink. Was this Maxime’s plan? To pacify them like cattle in the dark, to prey on the audience’s half-drunk, suggestible state with a magic show for children, ensuring their confinement? What else to call the ruse but that? A parlor trick. When a person claimed to see into your soul and promise relief from the past with a ten-minute paint by numbers meditation, it was the definition of insanity. And yet in a shock Ada found herself unable to wrest free from the invisible force holding her still. Near the aisle, unwillingly, in the heated seat and with a silence stoppering her throat, Ada, resisting as best she could Tor’s instructions, made of her mind a shuttered room. A cold windowless room locked from the inside. No unscrupulous visitors could claw their way through if she could help it. No light could pantomime the shape of ghosts she once loved. Light peeking from beneath the crack of the door she’d built. Tor was counting down from five and, with incrementally slower breaths, counting back up, inviting the audience to focus on an imaginary painting. Inside the frame lay everything they feared. Ada watched the audience succumb stupidly to the mantra, their heavy heads wilting. Shoulders slackened. Faces wiped clean of worry. A single spotlight followed Tor onstage, the way he asked for the listeners to follow his words, sinking deeper and expanding, to keep breathing.
In the dawning quiet, Ada braced for gunfire. For clamor. She waited for an explosion to rattle and dismantle the building, for the inevitable screaming, and she wondered at the stillness in the midst of her tumbling mind, the way it swerved from one despair to the next darkening possibility. But the crash, the wailing, the fire she had come to understand as her earliest fear, the burning she could almost taste by memory alone, never happened.
She was safe.
“I want you to imagine the waves,” Tor was saying, “I want you to imagine…”
But that wasn’t what she saw at all.
*
In the living room, the fawn was still running in place, forever young and wet-nosed, the soul housed in its bloodless flesh. A death reliving.
In the gallery, a painting originally commissioned for the Palace of Versailles, a battle at sunrise.
But her favorite curiosity, the one before which she presently found herself transfixed, and when during the intermission she had gone to the bathroom a little dazed, she locked the door and there it was: a trompe l’oeil mural of a garden seen through Spanish archways, bougainvillea spilling over the edges of the frame, into the known world. Stems wavered in a wind beyond her reach. The petals curled like silken tongues dripping with a fresh rain. It was one of those new age bathrooms that emitted birdsong near the toilet, and she listened to them a while. She could hear the birds and the wind and the rain turning in time together. Ada closed a hand around the blooms, empty space where there should have been a pink, wet smear of pleasure.
After the hypnosis show, there was much commotion in exiting the theater, and she chose the smallest bathroom because a line had formed at the others, people went in together to share drugs, it was that time of night. She checked for her knife. Still there, strapped to her thigh garter. Deep in her face, those dark-mirror eyes, still there. Then she took out her other ones.
Bringing the contact lens to her right eye, Ada saw that the painting behind her had changed. Somehow, from farther away, the mural had shifted. The leaves parted imperceptibly. She was sure of it.
A touch of red, burning. A thumbprint of a face smudged in the deep distance by smoke, black columns billowing over the vast plains miles and miles away. She was sure she had, among other things, left that shadow of her self behind.
With the single contact in place, her face unchanged but for a new determination to complete her objective and fast—the family heirloom for which she had come, on orders given by her client, waiting unattended in the basement, and for answers as to Wesker’s location that only Maxime could give—Ada fixed the painting with new eyes. She squinted to activate the lens and a myriad of human traces appeared to her then in divine succession, in glittering blue contrails and oily blue stains that crept from the walls to the floor. The mural, however, was, by some miracle, pristine and untouched by the living. What it seemed to offer pricked at Ada like a thorn at her side, a rarefied passage into some sweeter, gaping universe, inviting her to step into the frame and walk. And out she walked.
*
