You Love Me(You #3)(119)

And no one will buy it and it won’t be because of karma. That’s just how it works in L.A. “How’s your hand?”

“Oh right,” he says, and at least he’s back to work on what matters: Me. You. Freedom. “So my show, you wanna hear the pitch?”

I had three “friends” on this planet, Mary Kay. My drinking buddy turned psychopath friend Seamus is dead. Ethan is engaged to Blythe, and this one is a malignant narcissist. “Sure!”

“Cedar Cove meets Dexter.”

The referee in Pain Pong calls a time-out and the blood stops circulating in my body. I look at him and he looks at me and he smiles. “I wasn’t lying to you, my friend. We do have each other’s backs.”

Oliver’s “show” is a roman à clef about my life—that’s stealing—and his protagonist is JOHNNY BATES—“You know, for The Shining and for Psycho”—and Oliver hasn’t just been stealing my money. He’s like your dead husband, stealing my pain. Oliver’s going to sell his show to FX or HBO or Netflix—not gonna happen, ideas are a dime a dozen and I can’t picture him actually writing the fucking thing—and he’s so slow with the knife, droning on about spin-off potential. You’re out there somewhere, thinking I’m not trying to win you back and I snap. “Fucking A, Oliver, why did you give Ray that video? You swore you wouldn’t do that.”

Oliver stops cutting the rope and that was not the result I was going for. “Well, you know why I did that, Joe. Because the Quinns bring out the worst in us.”

It’s a child’s answer and it was stupid of me to ask and I WANT OFF THIS FUCKING TREE. “Did he hack your phone?”

“Look,” he says. “Minka and I have a huge collection now…” YOU’RE WELCOME, OLIVER. “And we need more space. Ray was talking like he’s about to fire me. He said I’d get a huge bonus if I found something on you… I’m sorry, my friend.”

He doesn’t chase his apology with a but and he plays with his fucking knife, the knife that also happens to be the key to my liberation from this truth. “There’s a twist, though.” Fucking hacks and their twists. “Next day, Ray does his research. He realizes that I withheld the video and… he fires me. And that’s why I came up here, my friend. I couldn’t let anything happen to you…” Maybe his heart is bigger than I thought. “You’re my only source of income until I sell Johnny Bates.”

He’s lucky I’m tied to this tree and I summon the last of my fucking empathy and thank him again and he goes back to saving me—finish the job, you prick—and describing his male lead, as if that’s what the world needs, another sociopath on TV—and he says that Johnny Bates is mysterious and well-read but a little rough around the edges. Finally Oliver gets the top rope but my body lurches back, my muscles are broken from Pain Pong and I lose my balance and again he has to save me from falling. Again I have to thank him.

“You okay, my friend?”

No, I’m not okay. I got shot in the head and hit on the head and now this fucker is twisting my life into some gleaming, steaming pile of shit for TV. “I’m good. Just really need to rest.”

Oliver shuts up about his shit show and he’s getting better with that knife and now my legs are free—Hare Oliver, Hallelujah—and he clips the zip ties and I have hands again, two feet instead of one stump. I am dizzy and the car is not close and he says we can’t think about leaving until we clean things up.

“Come on,” he says. “It’s not as bad as that dungeon in your house.”

My Whisper Room is not a dungeon and I’m too weak to help him and he tells me to take a bath and did you fuck Shortus in this tub? I don’t know. I don’t care. I bathe and Oliver scrubs the floors, periodically interrupting his flow to tell me about his TV show and finally I am clean and the crime scene is clean and we are on foot, walking, limping.

“So,” he says. “You wanna come back to L.A. and help me on the show? Ray says he blackballed me but my agent says he’s full of shit.”

“No thanks.”

“Really? I’m offering you ground-floor access, my friend.”

Access to what doesn’t exist is access to nothing and I shake my head. “Gonna stay here.”

“Well, ultimately, I suppose that’s best for both of us. Ray doesn’t want you in L.A. and this way, well, hey, if Johnny Bates gets a third season, maybe we shoot up here.”

I can’t think of anything to say that he won’t interpret as an insult. He stops walking and he huffs and he puffs and he obviously misread my silence. We should be walking, Mary Kay. Animals in these woods don’t stop to chat but Oliver’s too fucking arrogant, human in the worst possible way, having just killed a fellow man. “Listen,” he says. “You took a hit back there…” Ya think? “But you gotta let that shit go, Goldberg. You’ve gotta see the error of your ways.”

I will punch him. “The what?”

“Hear me out, my friend. You moved up here to get soft and you did get soft…” I hate that he has a point but he does. I didn’t see it coming with RIP Shortus. “It’s like my agent said about my draft…” Say the word agent one more time, asshole. “There is such a thing as too soft, my friend. You can rock down to Menopause Avenue and spend every day in a library… but humans are what they are. And if you want something, you have to go hard, my friend. Always.”