Face a Week

Tyler Binks wears aviator sunglasses in the shade and would sport a bluetooth headset to his mother’s funeral. He wears skintight Henley shirts and drainpipe jeans that leave nothing to the imagination. He drives a Mini Cooper through the suicidal streetmaze of the Hollywood hills and he’s had plastic surgery to make his smirk permanent. He gets laid ceaselessly.

NBC pays for Tyler’s criminally overpriced mixed drinks and his designer cigarettes. He makes his money by sculpting other peoples’ lives. Mister Binks is an Associate Producer for Homeless Mansion, the next big thing in reality television. His job is to prowl the “set” – some expendable Beverly hills condo with more than its fair share of hooker skeletons embedded in the drywall – holding a microphone and looking for trouble. And when he doesn’t find trouble, he makes it. Executive producers in Big-Brother style booth whisper into Tyler’s bluetooth headset: “Mike looks upset. Go ask him how he feels.” “Tyra seems about ready to break down. Ask her another couple questions.” He is in the business of weaving a compelling narrative out of the relatively uninteresting lives of the everyman figureheads the network has seen fit to bring on television. He loves the job, because he believes it to be a well-paid stepping stone to real production work.

But beneath the rounded sunglasses and the permanent smirk and the tinted windows of the mini cooper, Tyler is a fairly average-looking guy. Scrawny, with short-cropped dark hair and a nose that points at the ground accusatorily. And he knows what he looks like. He knows that when he squeezes past a minivan on those suicidally ridiculous Hollywood streets, the drivers of those other cars are thinking, “boy, what a douchebag.” But to him, envy is the only authentic kind of appreciation. He got into reality TV because he envied the stars, and now he knows they’re not worthy of that. Now he envies serious producers and editors. And he knows that soon, he won’t even need to envy those people. All he can do in the meantime is make sure most people hate him at first sight. Because that’s how he’ll know they love him.

Annalise’s fingers have been known to cut people. Not intentionally, either. Her nails cut like paper; the damage remains unnoticed for a few moments before the blood appears, and then the wound stings inordinately for weeks. That’s putting a bad spin on it, though. Annalise Crowley has the most perfect, delicate fingernails of any woman alive. And she’s held that title for a long, long time.

Annalise never paints her fingernails, but she paints her face. Even at eighty-five years old, her morning routine monopolizes the hours between five and eight AM. She applies blush, eyeliner, eyeshadow, the works, in a manner so skillful that she appears to be a much younger woman who applies no makeup at all. Her hair is dyed platinum blonde and she wears reading glasses as a pendant around her neck. And once she has taken care of everything else, once her makeup is applied and her clothes selected and her breakfast prepared, Annalise sits down and buffs her fingernails

Her fingernails are her pride, and her joy, and her legacy. They are the reason anyone even knows her name. Nowadays Annalise is retired, officially. She doesn’t need to work, but she visits the hair salon she founded fifty-six years ago on an almost daily basis. Her visits are never unwelcome. With her magic fingers, Annalise can shape hair according to her every whim. Her fingers are more deft than the finest comb, and what her bony digits can’t accomplish, her fingernails invariably can. She manipulates hair like a scupltor manipulates clay; she ignores the individual strands and shapes the hair as a cohesive body. When she is finished her creations are almost architectural in scope. Old ladies totter out of her salon beneath flying buttresses of improbable hair. With just a spray bottle and her fingers Annalise can work wonders. With hair gel she is a public menace.

Her own hair is nothing to write home about. She keeps it close-cropped and dyed. The most she does to it is a quick finger-coming in the morning. She long ago cycled through every possible style. It’s not quite as interesting to her when she’s experimenting on herself. Michelangelo never walked around with his paintings strapped to his own chest, and Frank Lloyd Wright would be a madman if he ever agreed to live in a house that he designed. And so it is with Annalise. She’s teased a thousand scalps to greatness, but her own is finally off-limits.

Antonio is a man whose face is in retirement. Skin that once contorted in pain, that grew dark as real chocolate and thickened under the relentless Mexican sun, now spends summers beneath the brim of fedora. He has lines etched so deep into his face you could climb them, but he keeps his cheeks smooth with a straightrazor he’s had since he was thirteen. He doesn’t shave for the ladies, and he never really did. Antonio’s whole body is a callus, but with the stubble gone, he can feel just a little bit more of the breeze that blows through the train station where he spends his days.

Antonio wears old clothes with no holes in them. His eldest son, the professor, bought him a new wardrobe ten years ago because he used to wear nothing but his old farmhand clothes. They hung in tatters around him, and he didn’t much care, because in the company of the men he spends his days with, tattered clothes are a kind of badge of honor. But he was embarrassing his son at social functions, and so he got new clothes. Flannel shirts and jeans, just like he’s used to, but without the telltale signs of real wear.

The other old men at the train station still laugh at him about the new clothes sometimes, but they laugh at everything. That’s why they all get together, is to laugh. Three old men, two with white mustaches and Antonio with his cleanshaven face, their backs broken by a lifetime of labor and their faces lined with laughter. Every day they meet in the train station at 3:15 PM, when the tourists get off the train from Mexicali to stretch their legs. The sightseers and the punks and the hippies file off the train to get tamales and paletas and souvenirs, and as soon as they’re all off, right on cue, the train starts to move. All the gringos on the platform turn in unison. Some try to chase down the train, some start to cry. The train pulls ahead just enough to back onto another track leading to the next platform over. And the old men laugh and laugh.

They take bets on who’s going to melt down. They speculate on whether anyone is going to get run over this time. But mostly, they just laugh. And eventually the gringos see them laughing, and some of them laugh too. It’s at those moments, with everyone laughing, that Antonio runs a rough hand over his face and knows that every line is exactly where he wants it to be.

Giles is a brown and silver smudge somewhere at the edge of sight. He is the thing you think you saw, only it turns out it was just a shadow or a stack of rusty buckets. It is not actually either of those things, though. It’s Giles, doing something unsavory. He’s got streaks of white in his reddish-brown fur, so he looks like someone painted racing stripes on him, and his black paws and forearms look like little tailor-made boots on the ends of his nimble little legs. His eyes manage to be beady and wide open at the same time, as innocent as a dead tree, and about as intelligent. He’s neither.

Giles is the errand-boy of Arkus Fitch, professional housebreaker, pickpocket, cardsharper and amateur gardener. Only he’s not actually an errand-boy. He’s an errand-weasel, but that doesn’t sound quite right. And really he doesn’t so much run errands as he adds a certain thematically appropriate touch to Arkus’s ensemble. Giles loves Arkus’s ensemble. All the leather straps, and hidden pockets, and dangling sacks of such and such a thing are great fun to climb on. Since he spends most of his time riding on his owner’s shoulder, Giles never really has to walk anywhere, and so he has the luxury of using his feet entirely for sport. He will sometimes spend hours exploring the network of tunnels and compartments implicit in Arkus’s outfit.

Arkus doesn’t even feed Giles, he just hides food in one of his many pockets and lets the weasel find it himself. This has made Giles very good at the only thing Arkus ever actually expects him to do. When it comes time to break into a house, Arkus will send Giles through some tiny crevice so that Giles can climb up and undo the latch from the inside. Then the weasel’s work is done, and he’s free to plunder the larder of whatever house they’re in. He doesn’t understand where his master goes while he is eating, nor does he understand the profusion of bags Arkus always comes out of the house with. All he’s been able to figure out is that more bags means better food hidden in the pouches, and more and fancier pockets to find the food in. That information is enough to keep Giles unlocking latches, night after night, so that he can continue to play hide and seek in an ever-changing sea of pouches.

The kid has hands like water striders. They never stay still and the nails grow long and they get into everything like the creeping rot in this goddamn swamp. He wears mens’ shirts because there aren’t any kids in this town, and even with the cuffs rolled up to his elbows he looks like he might at any moment try and turn someone into a frog. His head is an earthquake hazard, balanced as it is on his toothpick neck. He hides his mismatched proportions under a blue trucker’s cap, and is saving his breath for after his voice changes. Miles Pendish is the unintentional mascot of the Blue Tip Bar.

No one can give a satisfactory account of where he came from, but that’s hardly surprising given the Blue Tip’s affinity for attracting blackout drunks. All anyone can say is that he walked in two years ago with a laundry bag slung over his shoulder, and when Big Tim the Bouncer jokingly asked for his ID, he dropped to his knees and started scrubbing the floor. The Blue Tip is not the kind of place where the floor gets scrubbed often, and when Miles managed it in one night, they decided to keep him.

Sure, he steals from the tip jar. Sure, he drinks gin like an old pro and carries a sailor’s knife and when Loose Lily comes in for a drink he rubs charcoal on his chin like a five o’clock shadow and polishes glasses meaningfully at her. But he keeps the place clean and he takes all his fights outside, and for some stupid reason the patrons like him. Clem Kelso, the barkeep, likes him too, owing to the little piece of herself his dead wife left inside him. So Miles stays, and Clem feeds him on pulled pork and macaroni and cheese, and they both wait for the day when the boy will disappear again.

Clem Kelso is three hundred pounds of good-natured regret in a Hawaiian shirt. He’s got forearms like hamhocks, big enough to break up bar fights even considering his lack of practice. When he’s opening the place up at ten in the morning, when he’s closing it down at four, he smiles with his mouth and lets his eyes go soft as he polishes the neverending cascade of glasses behind the bar at the Blue Tip.

The Blue Tip is an ounce of half-remembered class in a metrick fuckton of godforsaken swamp. The runoff from the oil refinery upriver sloughed through here years ago and left everyone dead or insane. So insane is what Clem makes due with, listening night after night as stories devolve into arguments devolve into brawls across the scuffed mahogany bar. The lights are dim, which worked just as well for a class joint back in the day as it does now for a grubby hole in the center of a larger, grubbier hole.

It’s not that he’s above it all. Hell, Clem wouldn’t own the damn place if he didn’t like it. He lives for the dirty jokes, rewards them with a laugh so rich it sounds like a roar and vibrates sensitive eardrums. If one of the patrons scrapes enough together to buy him a drink he can even be goaded into telling the one about the blind priest and the bag full of peaches. So it’s not as if he doesn’t like it, no. It’s the opposite if anything. It’s the only thing he has a hope of liking. The Blue Tip is his home, his ex-wife is a belligerent ghost in his head, his family is a bunch of blackout drunks slowly gearing up for the evening’s brawl across the bar. The closest he’s got to a son is a hard-drinking imp with a bobble-head and knife-sharp hands who stumbled into the place months ago.

But at the center of Clem there is some thing, some millstone constantly working, that hates this poisoned pit his hometown has become. A part that doesn’t want to bother waking up day after day, giving a boost from the gutter into a slightly nicer gutter. He wants to leave. If only he wasn’t needed here.

List Owens is one of those people whose age is impossible to guess, but he can tell you how long he’s been alive down to the microsecond. His pale skin is stretched over an angular skull with a thin layer of downy, platinum hair on top like a baby’s. His eyes are tiny, sinking into chiseled divots in his skull like they’re trying to examine his brain. Or what’s left of his brain. Most of the storage capacity of List Owens’ brain has been replaced with a solid state hard drive and an optimized search function. He now has perfect access to every moment of his past.

List Owens has been alive for thirty-eight years, six months, twelve days, etc. He got the surgery right when it became commercially available, back before FDA regulations and government scrutiny. The hard drive cooks the inside of his skull. It’s changed the color of his hair and he sees snakes everywhere. And there were some things he would rather not remember, now that he remembers them. He can relive embarrassing moments from highschool in real time, with all the accompanying emotions. He remembers the time his insane grandfather vomited a cascade of Lithium onto his chest as he held him in his arms. He remembers his lesbian babysitter who stalked his mom and put him in a scissor lock whenever they were alone together. Sometimes he opens his eyes and realizes he’s been living in a realtime memory for over three days. Then he drags himself into the kitchen, eats everything on the bottom shelf of his refrigerator, and then passes out in the shower.

He was part of an online community of “grinders,” people who pushed the limits of what it meant to be human. They implanted chips under their skin, plastered walls with QR codes, hacked together bionic legs and heads up displays. When the hard drives went public, it was a natural progression. Perfect recall, the prospect of camera attachments, RFID scanners, the crucible of the whole transhuman movement located in the center of his skull. He was the test case for the technology, and gladly so. Now they pay victims of violent crimes to get the upgrade, half the police department has it, and most of the US Bureacracy can hardly even be called human anymore. But List has discovered a different application.

List was a DJ before he got the upgrade, and he’s still a DJ now. He plays pretty regular gigs at warehouse clubs all over Los Angeles, and he sets his brain to automatically bounce a folder of his latest recordings to the venue on the day of his performance in case he loses himself in memories. He doesn’t have to immerse himself in the contents of his mind like this. The technology provides or a summary-type view of his experiences. He can peruse them at his leisure. But List is a DJ, and to him, a true DJ knows his source material from beginning to end. His songs are not cobbled together from milk crates full of old records, or monumental torrent files. His music is distilled from the sum total of his life experience. A song he rocked out to when he was sixteen forms the backbone of a scratched-together dialogue between his heroin-addicted ex and the girl she was when he fell in love with her. A gypsy folk song he heard on the radio during a hitch-hiking trip haunts the corridors between slamming doors, screaming punks, hare krishnas and his grandfather’s socialist diatribes. His head is a recording studio, his ears are ambient mics. His experience is his art, with no intermediary but himself. He does the mixing on a synthesized deck native to his internal hard drive. Nothing really bothers List Owens anymore, because the louder things get, the sicker his basslines.

Amelia Grey could make a modest income selling her hair for wigs, but she donates it to cancer kids instead. Right before she cuts it off every two years she starts getting more and more people walking up to her on the street, offering her modeling gigs and acting jobs. The homeless men are so sweet, too. Amelia has hair like spun gold, and when she grows it long it falls in gravity-defying coils around her upside-down teardrop face. It clashes horribly with her orange crossing guard uniform.

Every weekday morning during the school year Amelia wakes up at 4AM to get to the crossing that she guards. She’s only just turned thirty and she wakes up at a time she used to think was reserved for old people. It’s been four years, and so she’s used to it by now. The darkness used to upset and confuse her internal clock. She used to resent feeling sleepy at nine PM. Now she’s addicted to coffee and can’t sleep past six if she wants to. Her day-glo orange uniform hangs in the closet next to the motheaten formal dress she wore to her brother’s funeral.

Amelia has a body that could stop traffic, if she dressed for it, but she relies on her standard-issue stop sign instead. Four years and she doesn’t know any of the children by name. They’re always changing, and it’s not as if they really talk. The parents all thank her for doing what she’s doing, but through the sleepiness and the morning fog no one ever seems to recognize her. Day after day she patrols the same intersection, slowing a metamorphosing torrent of minivans. Some days she cries, but usually after work, during the five-mile walk home.

Amelia works as a waitress at Denny’s, taking shifts at odd hours and abusing the free coffee. She takes night classes at community college. She always seems to be one semester away from graduating. And everything she does is subordinated to her crossing guard schedule. Sometimes she sleeps sitting up in bus stops, but only when her hair is too short to draw much attention. Life for Amelia is a series of crossings, and the only thing she can do is make sure they are safe ones.

Elena Arbizu has had seventy years to sink into herself like a nesting doll. She waddles through her graveyard three times a day: in the morning to unlock the gates, at night to lock them, and some time in the middle to inspect the graves. Spanish graves are marked with grand statues and ornate sheds, and the miniature city of marble and plaster seems to grow up around Elena as her bones settle and shrink. Some day they will reach the sun.

Elena has worked in the graveyard since she was a girl, and now her granddaughter Adriana works here too. They don’t do much unless there’s a corpse to prepare for burial, and more and more of that is done by private contractors anyway. Mostly they just sweep the graves or knit scarves in the shack by the gates. Elena wears a blue shawl and a white blouse almost every day, so that even the graves with no flowers will have a little color as she walks by. She knows the names of those who visit faithfully, and they know her. Up until recently she took it upon herself to gently guide the grieving out of the graveyard, but her knees and her voice are going, and she finds it difficult to come up with some of the right words now. It’s as if she can see them in the air in front of her, but she can’t read them, and the last time she tried to comfort a young college boy at his father’s mausoleum the words became so difficult to find that she was reduced to tears. He thought she was crying with him and thanked her, but she has had Adriana handle the job ever since. She has a feeling that her granddaughter has a think for the boy anyway.

But as old as she gets, and as much as her joints creak, Elena refuses to give up her midday walk among the markers. She takes her cane and a thermos full of gazpacho and she says hello to the dead. She sees the names of people she knew, people whose children she knows, people whose names she heard spoken when she herself was a child. Each family shares a mausoleum, with size appropriate to wealth, and each day Elena ends her walk at her own family’s tiny mausoleum. Every day the roof seems a little higher, the ground a little closer. And one day, some day soon, she will become so small that they will not even need to open the doors for her. She will slip right under the door, and shrink down into the earth.

Doctor Charles Pengrove is unsettlingly tall, and looks as if he got that way by being stretched on the rack. Even his face is disturbingly long, with wrinkles that are almost completely vertical. Most of his hair is gone, and what’s left is combed futilely over his liver-spotted scalp. He wears a monocle in an attempt to disguise the fact that his right eye is significantly larger than his left, but it really only serves to ruin his depth perception. He wears cardigans over dress shirts, the sleeves of which he keeps rolled up because they fall short of his wrists anyway. His fingers look like letter openers.

Ugly didn’t sneak up on Doctor Pengrove. Ugly has been with him since he was a boy, and he’s had decades to come to terms with it. His refuge is hypnosis. When he was sixteen he saw a hypnotist do a stage show at the county fair. What hooked him wasn’t the spectacle of the thing – the people clucking like chickens and talking to aliens – no, it was that first moment when the hypnotist put his hand on a woman’s shoulder and said, “Sleep.” With a word and a gesture, he closed her eyes. He made his words the only thing that mattered. And so Charles Pengrove taught himself hypnosis.

He went to college for Psychology. He got his PhD and got a job as a teacher, continuing his training all the while. With hypnosis, he could reach into peoples’ brains and tweak their controls. He could help people to see past prejudices, to be happy around him, to enjoy their lives. But all of that feels shallow now. He has a thick black book full of the phone numbers women have given him. He used to cross them out when he’d fucked them. He could still do it, if he wanted to, but there is no longer anything erotic for him about having sex with a hand puppet. He spends the time he used to spend at bars alone in his office, staring at his stuccoed ceiling, hypnotizing himself. He expands his awareness to the edges of the room, and gradually he formulates a system.

For years he’s used hypnosis as a way to get people to do what he wants them to do, but now he realizes that there is a far deeper array of settings he can adjust. With a carefully planned hypnotic regimen, he can transform an ordinary student into a politician, or an inventor, or an actress. Anything they want to be, he can make them the best at it. By optimizing their minds for the task at hand, by removing all the clutter, he can create the perfect students. And so he does. He trawls his classes for candidates, for students desperate with dreams. He induces trances, and he shows them photographs and plays recordings, and embeds packages of data deep within their psyches. He is the common denominator in all the great figures of his era’s cultural revolution. But just like before, with the women in the bars, no one knows it is Professor Pengrove who is responsible for these things. To know would break the spell.