SmokeLong Quarterly

The house is burnt pink and deep in the canyon. Phil and I have sex on the shag carpeting while a lizard watches from a fogged tank. This is the first time I’ve seen the house. It’s also the first time he’s felt my breasts. Phil is a documentarian—more of one than me, who’s only trying. He has a long brown ponytail. He likes lizards and alien things other people consider weird. I wonder, while he’s in me, if I’m one of these things.

***

The house is large. I wander while he showers: muslin curtains, lemon tile, clammy air. Through a sliding door—the desert, flat and baked. I touch the glass and see her: the actress, freckled and aging beside the pool. Phil slips a pruned finger into my shorts.

“Why didn’t you tell me your mother was here?”

“It’s her place, really,” he says. “I look after it. And her.”

***

Before we met, and even now, I liked to look Phil up online. There’s no service in my camper so I use Wi-Fi from rest stops. Sometimes I touch myself—not to him, but to his films. The last came out seven years ago and won an award from a respectable, but lesser-known, festival.

His mother’s been in over forty movies. I find a pirated version of her latest, a comedy. In one scene, a young man fucks her. Her skin jiggles. The joke is that no one wants to see her like that—not even him.

***

Phil’s next film is about the desert. Each year, he says, ten or so hikers die there. He edits naked at his monitor. I’m supposed to be watching, but I just lie beneath the fan.

“So people lost out there never get found?”

“They get found,” he says. “Just already dead—dehydration.”

I go to the kitchen to fill him a glass of water. The actress is by the pool again, wearing a gummy swim cap. She points toward the house.

“Termites,” she says. “Phil is supposed to call someone.”

***

Phil is supposed to teach me to overlay silence with sound—wind chimes, cicadas, the hum of a fan. Instead, we shower. He tells me I smell like damp swimsuits, but he likes it. I don’t tell him about my camper’s broken tank, the Poland Springs baths, the cost. I tell him to call the exterminator.

***

Two weeks, then three. Phil sleeps late. The actress and I drink maitake tea in the sun. She asks about my documentary.
“I’m driving across the country,” I say. “Filming the road. This stop’s just a stop—learning from one of the greats.”

“Sounds exhausting,” she says.

“Discomfort and sacrifice. Your son says those are the basis of art.”

“Does he now?”

She brings me into her bathroom. Cracked adobe tile, copper sinks, a drawer of lotion samples and loose pills. She asks me to help sort her medication. She’s not blind or shaky, just unsure, like a child told she’s doing it wrong. I find nail polish—a red called In the Flesh.

I offer to paint her toes. She blushes. Doesn’t like people seeing her legs. I tell her I won’t look. Her skin is loose and dry. The color goes on thin, darkens with a second coat.

“I like you more than the other girls my son sees.” She lights a blunt. “How is he? How’s the film?”

We haven’t fucked in four days. I tell her it’s okay.

She exhales.

“I wrote him a check last week. He needs more already?”

***

The grant for my documentary wasn’t large. Half went to the camper, a quarter to the first two months—Redding, Sacramento, Eugene. I write out how long the rest will last me, then how long if I quit coffee and steal toilet paper.

***

Phil says I’m distracting him. He needs to edit alone.

I leave his wing and watch the exterminator drag chairs into the desert, fifty yards from the patio. “They were feeding on the wood,” he says.

“Like parasites?”

“Like parasites.” He looks at the desert. “The heat’ll take care of the ones in the furniture. More natural than chemicals.”

***

The actress sends me for groceries. Her credit card is cool in my palm. I buy nectarines, sea lamprey, candiru catfish. A jar of Tiger Balm. When I come back, she’s a hot mass beneath the sheets.

“Let me give you a massage,” I say.

“I’m not in pain.”

“It’ll help.”

“I don’t like being seen.”

“We’ll keep the lights off.”

Her skin is like meat in watery plastic. She tells me my hands feel good. That her body used to be something, and now it isn’t, and that’s a cliché.

“Why did you do that film then,” I ask, “if you don’t like being seen?”

She wipes her nose. “Phil wanted me to. For the pay.”

***

Phil says I should keep filming. Go to the Sequoias. Live among Ponderosas and tourists. He’s bored of fucking me.
“The American Road,” he says. “That’s a title.”

***

I ask to join him on his reshoots before I go. We drive three hours off-road, the truck packed with water and camera gear. He parks by a cluster of mesquite and spends an hour setting up the shot, the sun hard and high. He looks through the viewfinder and asks me to grab the lens cleaner.

I climb into the driver’s seat. The key turns, tires catching sand.

In the mirror, Phil stands with his hands on his hips. Exasperated, ready to tell me I’m a child.

He grows smaller like that.

***

The actress and I will eat osso bucco for dinner. We’ll go through her things. I’ll sleep in Phil’s bed. In the morning, I’ll call him twice, maybe three times. I’ll tell her not to worry, that he’ll be back soon, and that I’ll stay and take care of her until he is.

I’ll rub lotion flecked with charcoal into her shoulders, the dips of her temples, and then into my own.