THE STARLET AND THE COUGAR

by Max Lawton

The Starlet was located right off a busy road in Toluca Lake. The constant whoosh of cars streaming by soon became a feature of the landscape for her, no different from the way people who lived by the ocean had to get used to the waves.

Surely, it had once been a motel. Two floors of studio apartments behind flimsy doors, all of them arranged around the swimming pool at their center. The walls were settled by an entire people’s history of California dust. The water in the pool wasn’t precisely blue — it looked yellow in the sun and green at night. Her room smelled perpetually of weed, both because of her own habits and the joint that could always be seen dangling out of the corner of her neighbor’s mouth. The scent of cremated herb combined with the staleness of the years meant that her room had the olfactory aspect of an ancient temple, a place where occult rituals were performed.

The day before, she’d taken a long walk up one of the nearby hills. She lived by the fork in the road where Barham became Olive and Forest Lawn. An enormous movie billboard ornamented a building of uncertain use (not a studio, she didn’t think) just outside her window, the movie changing with each season. Also: a barnred Italian restaurant that hadn’t been open since before Covid.

As she walked, she traced Barham back toward the 101, but crossed the boulevard before it hit the freeway, cutting right onto a side road leading up a hill.

The car sound melts away the higher you get.

Some houses were new, with walls along their perimeters and Ring cameras just above the doorknobs; they looked like a scifi reimagining of the geisha bars she’d seen in so many Kurosawa films. Other houses were barely standing: crooked stacks of sunbaked boards, wooden facade facing the street attacked by time and prominently displaying signs about their owners’ dogs or guns.

Los Angeles is America, after all.

At the crest of this hill, she discovered that, behind the tightly knit mesh of a soft-looking black fence about nine feet tall, she was afforded a perfect view of the crashed Boeing 747 kept constantly on display at Universal Studios. She wasn’t sure what film this was from or what scene this crash was depicting. First of all, she saw the plane, split open in what appeared to have been judicious fashion its general shape preserved, even in death. It lay at the center of a suburban street, the constituent homes of which were smoldering; then, there was a small train of what looked like linked-up golf carts, in which visitors to the theme park rode. Initially, it had seemed to her that this was actually a movie being filmed, especially as she couldn’t recognize the scene. However, the golf carts quickly laid bare the truth of the matter.

What she was seeing wasn’t just fake, it was double-fake: not just a film about an ostensibly possible event, but an amusement-park ride imitating that film.

Above her, a real plane, banana yellow and, therefore, belonging to the Spirit Airlines fleet, began its descent toward LAX . She hoped its passengers couldn’t see all the way down to the ride from up in the sky. Fuselage tugged into four pieces and not a corpse in sight, the plane on the ground offered a terrible invitation to its airborne fellow: to once more be bound to the earth and, simultaneously, to extinguish a small fleet of consciousness within a single cylinder.

Once she’d lost interest in the spectacle, she turned back and, by way of a different access road, began to wend her way down the hill. A scythe-bearing skeleton alongside its trusty canine companion (also a skeleton) on the roof of a single-story Spanish-style home. Cobwebs complicating access to the porch next door. It was almost Halloween.

She focused her attention on a dot of white directly atop the segmented lane line, focused on it until its true form appeared: a shredded bag of trash, its contents scattered toward either side of the road. She approached the bag and began to examine it. It hadn’t been shredded by human hands. Each one of the cuts was too fine. Was it conceivable that a man was going around and cutting up trash bags in the Hollywood Hills with a razor blade? A kind of Black Dahlia killer in reverse?

Well, it looked like the work of either a knife or … a claw. And it was at that moment that, a recent transplant from Russia, she remembered all the rumors she’d ever heard about mountain lions, gooseflesh symmetrically rising on either side of her spine.

Her voice caught in her throat, she knew that she was meant to make a lot of noise if a mountain lion were to try to get close to her, but she saw nothing only the ribboned plastic and an empty tub of Greek yogurt and a plastic Kefir jug, and a holey rectangle of strawberries, several moldfurred specimens left behind inside of it.

A few months ago, at a party her first weeks in L.A. when she heard someone say the words “mountain lion,” she was confused, but declined to ask for further clarification on the spot, not wanting to seem an ignoramus. As such, upon returning home, she’d googled “mountain lion los angeles” and, after seeing what the creature was in broad terms, had found a good deal of reassuring information about how mountain lions were more afraid of humans than humans were of them, but most of that info seemed to come from vegan-adjacent humane-society-type sites.

Therefore, what had stuck with her most from this particular research session were the horror stories about mountain lions that went on rampages, starting to hunt humans and, in one case in particular, keeping corpses in its cave-lair for several weeks before discovery.

She stood before the scented garbage bag its odor not so much a smell as the inversion of one a 21st-century burnt offering upon the city’s highest altar, the fake plane yet another down below.

If this had been a horror movie, the mountain lion would have been perched on the roof of a nearby home right next to the reaper with its canine companion.

After rotating round in several full circles, as convinced as any human prey could ever be that there was no bestial hunter in the vicinity, she made her way back down this ungentle fell of the Hollywood Hills, rejoined Barham, and, soon enough, had made it back home.

What was it she did all day at The Starlet chain-smoking cigarettes, sometimes so stoned she stared at the individual nubs of the popcorn ceiling until they began to seethe?

She was translating Henry James’s The Golden Bowl into Russian, something that had never been done before. Before the war, a well-thought-of Russian publisher had offered her a generous (by Eurasian standards) fee to be parceled out into quarterly chunks. Enough on which to get by in L.A. Enough, at least, for a studio at The Starlet. How and why she had a green card was a mystery, even to her.

She’d won this contract on the strength of a 20k-word sample she’d done for the publisher, but after that initial triumph, the further she got into James’s dictated word-rot, the less she knew what it was she was even meant to be rendering. Syntax? Vocabulary?

The novel was like a 19th-century marriage plot fantasia, from which the crumb of the bread had been removed, leaving behind only crust, crust, and more crust. This didn’t seem to bother James, as he zoomed in further and further on these dry bits of hard, blackened bread-rind with his prosaic microscope so much so that readers lost themselves entirely upon the crust’s inhospitable sandstone surface.

She didn’t know if it was because of how stoned she was as she worked, but the deeper she got into the book’s nut meat the pistachio shell of her sample long discarded the more frequently she was forced to admit that she just didn’t know what a sentence meant. She’d begin with the English: “These allowances of his spirit were, all the same, consistent with a great gladness at the sight of the term of his ordeal; for it was the end of his seeming to agree that questions and doubts had a place.” She’d read it once. Then twice. Then a third time.

By the time it had found its way into Russian, each clause and phrase had become something like a small moon orbiting her stoned brain.

She saw nothing as she worked no world inside of the text it was all and only surface, a geological exploration of a frozen tundra, under the ice of which she never seemed to be able to find the rocks being researched. And finding these rocks was her job, so, pounding away at ice with her pickaxe, her extremities numb from the cold, she was left bereft of profession; she’d become an archaeologist of ice and wasn’t sure what that even meant.

In the mornings, she’d look at what she’d produced on the previous day and would be consistently horrified by the chat- ter of her rendering. Here lay words, but no meaning.

Perhaps there was a reason why the text had never before been translated.

It made no sense to be translating Henry James in Los Angeles. Who in this sun-scourged Babylon of creeping things (but no cattle certainly not, no cattle) would ever have the time to read Henry James?

At particularly desperate moments, pecking Cyrillic characters into this accursed Word document one by one, she’d decide that masturbation was the solution. After the obligatory period of half-hearted toggling with her clit, she searched out a video that could get her over the finish line (the James doc lurking behind the porn in the background of her home screen, so, in a way, the 180-year-old eunuch was still with her), she’d settle in for five or so minutes, her body and mind already so benumbed that it felt like she was levitating, buoyed up over the hills by the smog. Her recycled (or reclaimed or whatever) wooden desk stood reproachfully in the corner.

Inevitably watching two young guys masturbate each other slowly, sensually, and with an extreme excess of massage oil, her two hands would have to find a rhythm that was both a response to and commentary on the Grecian-looking boys’ tempo. Once she’d locked into it, she’d cum quick, feeling like all three of them were cartoon renderings of beautiful people on the outside of an ancient urn.

They moved in stop motion and came in 3D.

After the war began, the money from the publisher dried up, and, though she kept on translating, she also had to seek out alternative sources of income.

An acquaintance of hers, a PA on Netflix sets who had been on the periphery of her Moscow social circle, knew of a babysitting job out by Laurel Canyon. Only it wasn’t exactly babysitting; it was more like caretaking, as the person she’d be watching was old an elderly man, to be precise but with all the technical procedures that might usually characterize caretaking for the elderly subtracted from the equation.

“You’ll just be there for company,” her friend’s voice was breaking up on the other end of the phone. She too was probably somewhere up in the hills.

She was given a number to call and called it. The woman who explained what she would be doing spoke in an affectless tone: “You won’t need to interface with the client in the slightest. Which is to say, you’ll be one where and he’ll be another. You should feel free to bring a book or magazine; you’re not being hired to make conversation. We’ll have need of your presence on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. You’ll be paid $1000 per week.”

She gasped just ever so slightly.

“Yes, you shall be remunerated most kindly for your services. Think of it this way: the generous nature of the fee you’re to receive is a sign of the work’s seriousness. A lesser individual would slack off on the job. Or think of it as a joke. Babysitting for the invisible man upstairs. You won’t do that, will you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I thought not. Do you have a car in your possession?”

“No, ma’am.”

And, in fact, it wasn’t just the car she didn’t have, it was also the license she was without unable, therefore, to set sail through this ocean of cars on her own, giving whatever money The Starlet didn’t take from her to Uber.

“Well, if you proffer receipts, we’ll also be happy to refund your transportation to and from the home. The address is …”

She was too in need of cash to worry about the precise parameters of this weird job.

The house was perched on a hill above Laurel Canyon, near where erosion as such had made so many L.A. Times headlines the previous year. For a split second, she wondered if her job wasn’t to watch over the home itself and make sure it didn’t slide down the bluff.

It was a towering edifice, stark and gothic with a view out over Studio City and Toluca Lake. A brick path wound through ferns leading up a gentle fell. The home looked exactly like the one on the cover of the mass-market paperback copy she had of ’Salem’s Lot the first book she’d ever read in English and, as such, a sort of talisman that was meant to crown all her translation endeavors with glory. After ’Salem’s Lot, her hometown reputation for reading a great deal of literature in English hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

Just like the storm-whipped mansion so pithily depicted in colorful cartoon style, so too did this home have a turreted tower with a cross protruding from its peak, rows of spindles surrounding an open front porch, a shingle-covered, high-peaked gable roof, square-latticed windows, arched transoms, elaborate dormers and chimneys, and a cornice decorated with figures, the species of which she wasn’t quite able to discern.

The week previous, at a party in a spacious downtown loft that had taken place two nights after she’d called the woman in charge of the caretaking job (they’d agreed that she would start work a week after their call on the following Monday), a musician with bitten nails, greasy hair, and a cigarette stench emanating from his long leather jacket so long it sort of made him look like a union agitator elected to explain the metaphysics of Laurel Canyon to her after she’d outlined her new job:

“Lemme start from the top … like, when I was a kid, I burned myself a disc of The Downward Spiral from the library. Like, the Nine Inch Nails album. But once I got the CD home, I read the lyrics and, like, to be honest, they scared me … D’you know the record?”

She shook her head.

“So, there’re, uh, three or four fuckedup songs on it. The title track is obviously this, like, super vivid description of suicide, but ‘Big Man with a Gun’ is also about, uh, rape a guy forcing another dude to give him a blowjob with a gun.”

By this point, she’d begun to grow slightly uncomfortable. The guy’s hair was a dirty shade of blonde and his eyes were brown, close-set, maybe even a bit crossed. He was handsome in the way edgy ’90s film stars were (he did kinda look like Bill Pullman), but there was something curdled at the heart of this resemblance something she couldn’t be sure didn’t emanate from the films themselves.

He continued: “Anyways the cherry on top of the whole thing is that, uh, Trent recorded the record at 10050 Cielo Drive. Ring any bells?”

She shook her head.

“Did you see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? ”

She nodded.

“Great … so, I’ll just assume you know that there was, like, meant to be a real murder at the end, but the super-cool thing Tarantino does is make it not happen. Like when Hitler gets fuckin’ massacred in I.B.”

And she knew what I.B. stood for but who the fuck abbreviated movie titles at random like that?

“10050 Cielo Drive is where the actual murders happened. Where they wrote ‘pig’ on the wall in Sharon Tate’s blood. The Manson Family, I mean. So, like, Trent named the studio Le Pig as a kind of homage to that, which must be why the record’s so out-of-control good, like, I never thought any of his other albums even came close. But, in any case … that’s what Laurel Canyon means to us. I’d be careful out there if I were you.”

It was 12:55 when she entered the house, first having creaked up the porch’s wooden steps, a capacious leather purse containing her laptop, The Golden Bowl, and a big bottle of water slung over her shoulder. She was slightly stoned but would be able to keep her shit together should she have to interact with anyone never mind the fact that she was told she wouldn’t be seeing anyone.

Something watching her from a higher peak in the middle distance as she followed the path from the road and through the front yard.

Right when she stepped onto the porch, she was confronted by the stench of damp soil and lichen. It grew more powerful once she was inside.

The door was extremely heavy, and she stepped into the house and onto its granite tiles as if it were the floor of a medieval European cathedral. The vestibule’s vertical space was unimpeded all the way up to the turret, forming, from where she stood, either a tunnel or an arrow all the way up to the cross that marked the mansion’s peak. She hadn’t noticed from the outside of the house, but the top of the turret was made of stained glass. Colored light drifted down from that cylindrical space, so high above her head, but was extinguished upon the granite’s dun, forest-colored surface. This descent seemed to be a metaphor for something for the soul’s movement down from heaven, then into the world of earthly things, then, finally, into the soil: sealed into the depths of the earth with the same mercilessness that whatever was sealed beneath the granite tiles was kept there.

And what, in this home, did the world of earthly things consist of? At least 10 clocks —pendulum clocks, mantel and tabletop clocks, cuckoo clocks, and grandfather clocks, all ticking in perfect unison in the vestibule and study, the latter’s shelves stuffed with old books the titles of which were in a language (or languages) she couldn’t read. Beyond that, every piece of the study’s furniture was surfaced in gilded cloth: a sofa and three bulky armchairs. The study was connected directly to the vestibule without the intercession of any door, but there was a closed door at the other end of the study, one she knew she wasn’t meant to open.

She felt vaguely sheepish for agreeing to such a strange arrangement. At least the friend who’d referred the job to her knew where she was and what was up (but how the hell had that friend known about the job? It had never been explained quite to her satisfaction. A friend of a friend of a friend).

As she sat down in a particularly heavy gilded armchair, burgundy cushions notching into her spine, she felt that the musician had cursed her new position with his furred tongue; absent his warning, she wouldn’t have had the feeling that she’d burrowed a tunnel through the newsprint-smelling paper of the Stephen King book the feeling that she’d become a kind of weirdo Ben Mears.

Stoned and translating instead of drunk and writing: the 21st century compared to the 20th.

And yet, for the next two months, she barely budged from the gilded armchair on the days she went to work.

The house was silent, and the old man remained upstairs. Perhaps, she thought, he was the colored light streaming down from the turret.

Each Sunday, she’d find an envelope of cash on the smallish chest of drawers right by the door. Her name written on its milkwhite surface in splotchy cursive characters. She hadn’t yet given the woman any Uber receipts and wasn’t sure of how that handover would work. She assumed that she’d be paid in exact change.

Gradually growing bolder as regarded her level of stonedness, she was now showing up to work high as high could be, but not not ever smelling of weed.

Sitting with HJ her own nickname for James in the gilded armchair, her progress through his text had been stymied. Each sentence eventually became a mantra that she was unable to properly render in Russian, but of which she’d memorize each and every part.

•

Waking up soaked in sweat, a perfect outline of her body beneath her in drips and drops. Bladder bursting.

Minutes before: on the street where she’d seen the shredded bag of trash. Pinned up against the fence’s environmental-noise-reduction padding and the cougar standing before her. Its eyes not leaving her midsection which was to say, never meeting her gaze, bleary with terrified tears. Then, after five or 10 minutes of this, the cougar began to speak in the musician’s voice:

“Yes … certain that you can see it now … no more hiding from the facts … that mankind is generally unhappy the world as it stands a narrow illusion, a phantasm, an evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”

The beast lunged forward and she wakes up to the sound of tapping at her door.

She doesn’t bother to go look through the peephole and see what’s there. Eyes pinched with fractals of sharp sand.

She gets up and goes to the bathroom faucet for a drink. A squirt of piss into the black toilet before sucking at the sink’s cylinder of aerated water.

•

Exactly two months since her first day, a Monday, and stormy weather in L.A. Such a rare occurrence that the newscasters must preemptively wage war against the people’s hysteria.

Forty-five minutes of traffic en route from Toluca Lake. Without traffic, it’d only take 15. Water pouring down the slopes all around the house. The trees that had been planted to prevent erosion quivering, as if to say: one home in the vicinity is sure to go down.

The door slams behind her even though she pulls at the brass handle no harder than usual.

The colored light down from the turret trebled in power as a function of the storm light; the entire vestibule has the aspect of Balkan cathedral in the wake of national tragedy. The clocks, normally so orderly in their ticking, now utterly out of joint.

A rumble of full-throated thunder as she sits down in her usual armchair.

She opens the Word doc and begins to weave her way through the hairpin turns of HJ ’s gear-shifting sentences: “They had these identities of impulse they had had them repeatedly before; and if such unarranged but unerring encounters gave the measure of the degree in which people were, in the common phrase, meant for each other, no union in the world had ever been more sweetened with rightness.”

About to read the sentence’s first clause once more when suddenly a heavy beat is struck against the wooden door at the other end of the study.

She isn’t supposed to talk to anyone isn’t supposed to see anyone. Is she meant to respond?

Another heavy thump upon the other side of the door’s dun brown.

“Hello?” she replies. She still isn’t sure whether she’s meant to say anything back, but she can’t keep her mouth shut. The room becomes very large and the moldings at the tops of the walls fill up with TV static.

Another heavy thump and she shuts her laptop slowly, the contours of HJ ’s incomprehensible sentence exploded from her mind.

“Hello?” she says once more, this time certain of her intention.

She thinks of running out of the house, of screaming, of calling 911. She can taste the musician’s furred breath underneath her own tongue.

Another thump.

She thinks of running up the staircase’s emerald carpeting. Of hiding in another one of the house’s rooms. Of somehow becoming one with the turret’s fractalized light, thus dispensing with any possible threats to her corporeal form.

Another thump just as thunder seems to shake the very hills upon which the house sits.

About a mile away, a cozy, glass-walled bungalow from the ’70s surfs down a muddy slope. The insurance payouts are sure to be enormous.

Another thump.

She doesn’t respond.

She does nothing.

The cougar waits patiently on the other side of the door, its fur matted down with unseasonable rain.

I LIVED HOW I DIED.

Maya Martinez

“I lived how I died.” is an excerpt from Hell or Mercy? a chapbook of poetry by Maya Martinez published by Other Weapons Distro and available for purchase on their site: otherweapons.noblogs.org

Wearing the shape shifting bustier. I purchased the age defying elixir. I served the children no preservatives. I paid the gardener. I went to the pharmacy. I grew the windowsill herb garden. I waxed my lip. I cooked from scratch. I cut off my pinky toe to fit in my shoes. I watered the hydrangeas. I brought my neighbor her mail. On long walks I wore those butt lifting sandals Oprah told me to wear. I hid the money. I packed the lunches. I laid at the foot of the steps. I screamed. I looked through the phone. I ordered the silverware. I spied on my children, in the good parent way. I portioned out my laxatives.

I lived how I died. Every day became louder. I didn’t want to be known. I wanted to stop all the care I acted with in my hands. I fantasized about selfishness and silence. I was tired of loving others. At night I wondered. I would lay awake at night whispering to myself, “I wish I had one real thing in my life,” in my nightgown, looking up at the ceiling fan, counting the turns.

I lived how I died. With a pure sense of wonder. I wonder what it’s like to be famous, I wonder what that girl feels like, I wonder who is staring back at me in the mirror after I’ve stood there for hours it seems, talking to my reflection. Saying things like “this is me, that is you,” I repeat my name over and over. I ask my reflection, “why are we here?” I tell my reflection, “these are my hands” and “why can I move?” I repeat my name, move my hand, and ask the mirror, “why is this my name?,” “what are the chances of this being me?,” “why was I given this name?,” and “what is my purpose?” After a while something beautiful happens. I do not recognize myself; I do not feel like myself. I begin to wonder, “Is this my higher self?” The person obstructed under the wants of others. The person untouched by children, love, and age? That’s when I became suspicious of all this. God’s scam. I know my eyes are the window to my soul. I once was lost, I would run from the mirror, wash dishes, paint my nails. But now I am found. My body is a prison, and it doesn’t scare me so much, because I will claw my way out. How, you ask?

Clawing my way out with my higher self clenched in my jaws. Firstly, I’ve been making my own sense of things lately. As you can tell. After the whole mirror birth. So, my plan, it’s kind of like karma, with a twist. I can attract situations into my life. So can you, if you truly want. Don’t believe me? Before I had these lips, they came to me in a dream once. I saw them on my dream face, and I thought yes this is what my soul wants.

Do you know what your soul wants? Do you want to know what your soul wants?

Because you can

But probably right now you’re thinking you can’t

What percentage do you believe in yourself? How about you?

Or you?

What about you back there?

Do you want it? To reach out and grab what’s yours?

Because you can Stop thinking you can’t

Do not do that

Do not worry about fitting in because you’re custom made

And guess what baby

The light is coming to give back everything the darkness stole

Little known fact, everybody dies but not everybody lives.

Take a deep breath today now the past, who? Some people well they visit my past more than I do, And guess what, I don’t live there anymore, guess what? I sold the building.

YOU get to write your story I get to write my song

I want you to imagine yourself getting what you want getting what your heart wants ok now reach out in front of you and touch it

Ok now grab it really fast hurry before it gets away Ok you grabbed it that’s good

That’s good we are manifestinggggggggggggggggggggg

Now that we have what we want in our grasps

I want you to (sing) kiss it love it lick it shove it never let it go

Baby that’s your dream baby that’s your dream kiss it love it lick it shove it never let it go

Baby that’s your dream baby that’s your dream

In the end we only regret chances we didn’t take. The timid approach to risk

What if this happens what if that happens wah wah wah News flash it’s already happening!!!!!

The minute you were born it got risky and let me tell you wait till you see the cost

Because it’s going to cost us all of us it’s going to cost us things we can’t even imagine.

I don’t know if I want to live long but I long to live. When you look out the window do you see the sunset or the specks of dirt on the window?

Because that will say a lot about who you are and what you want and what you’re willing to do.

I bet the people here are thinking who is this person? Where did they come from? They don’t know me? They don’t know who I am. What I feel. I live in New York!

Well actually I do. I do know you because I also work at a taco restaurant just like you and you and you. You all may not remember it, but we all worked at the same taco restaurant.

Remember remember remember that day in early July when the heat index was 104 and we had to refill the water dispenser so we were lugging these heavy water buckets outside and everyone in line was watching us and was also sweaty too and half the menu is in Spanish so people really have a hard time understanding what they’re ordering and a woman in line mid50s with red curly hair asked us if the chicken was spicy and we said at the exact same time “Maam that’s the spiciest taco on the menu” remember? remember? That happened because we all are connected.

I still think about what you looked like at sunset when we were bussing tables and you spilled ceviche juice on your shirt so I spilled ceviche juice on my shirt so you wouldn’t feel alone.

I love you I love all of you and I never want you to feel more alone than you want to. Ok?

All I can really leave you with is Don’t choke on your own regret we are headed to the promised land.