Target

The radio spat scratchy ragtime at them as they sped into the heart of the desert, past Perch Springs, past Valentine and its tiny red schoolhouse made especially for Old World settlers. The journey had given up the night and was now fully engulfed in the fireball of day, the heat melting into their every pore.

"I can't wait to meet Charlie." Clara's eyes were wide and bloodshot from lack of sleep and hot sand creeping into the corners. "He won't know what hit him when he meets me, I'm going to walk right up to him and give him a big sloppy kiss, one that says he can't say no to me, no matter how much he might try."

"Charlie Chaplin," he muttered. The motor oil had lost its lustre and now sat ill in his host's gut. He was going to have to get rid of it soon, and since Clara refused to stop the motor car, his only recourse was to retch over the side. A splatter of black littered the passenger door, marring the shining cream-coloured finish. But Clara had other things on her mind, and the wrecking of a car would only mean finding a way to get a new, better one.

He settled back in his seat, feeling sick from the constant rocking motion of the motor car on the uneven road. Clara's rambling was another wave that kept crashing over him, doing its best to capsize his stomach.

"Charlie's a genius," she assured him. Her dark eyes danced with glory, the whites wide in an unsettling eagerness that infected her entire demeanour. "When we get there, you have to be on your best behaviour, no whining in the background, no looking all rumpled and bored. Besides, your target will be there, at Charlie's house, you can feel that like I can the feel the camera on me, and the flicker of that film clicking frame by frame. We're helping each other now, aren't we? Charlie's mad for girls like me, girls with open minds and willing to do what others won't." Her grin was lopsided, her lips bleeding and cracked, blistered from the relentless heat. "We ain't stopping. We're heading straight on, through the heart of Los Angeles and onto Sunset Boulevard, we're going into West Hollywood, and we're going to Charlie's house."

"Glad you know the route." He yawned and settled back in his seat, the queasy feeling of his inner body sloshing inside of his host easing slightly. "We don't even know how long we've been travelling. He might not be home."

"Oh, Charlie will be home!" Her eyes widened further, shots of red piercing the whites in tributary rivers. There was something wrong with her, he thought, and a real nag of concern assailed him as she began her chatter anew, talking of Charlie, of silent films, of Lillian Gish and switchblades and fat men with wallets and one good fella after another, each with a bottle of good booze.

"Charlie, he'll put me in the lead, and I know I'm going to get it. 'Romeo, Romeo.' Do you hear how I'm saying it? All forlorn and hopeless and knowing it's the end? 'Romeo, Romeo.' He'll point that camera of his at me, his lead star, his main lady, his 'It' girl, and he'll shout, loud as you please–'Fire!'"

He frowned.

"They don't say 'Fire' in movies. They say 'Action!'."

"Don't be stupid. They aim and they shoot with those cameras, don't they?" Her bleeding grin was for the highway alone. "We're ready for you, Miss Clara. We'll try that shot, the one Lillian used last time, in The Sparrow. Steady now. We want to see fear, Clara. Real terror. That's right, like a little trapped sparrow banging against its cage. Hear that? That's the clap of a black clipboard by some nobody, that kid who's just happy to be there. He's on his own dime, but he'll give a feel if he gets a part. FIRE!"

* * * * *

He could sense the ocean, even though they couldn't see it yet. The air was scrubbed clean with salt, oxygen-full breezes coursing over them the more they drove. It was early evening on an unknowable day, but Clara was keen to tap her heels and keep the radio tuned to the same scratchy jazz station, the horn blaring in uneven spurts.

"Just listen to that guy play!"

"He's no Langley."

"This one's got a name for himself. He's been in pictures."

"Ones with no sound. There's no comparing, Clara. Langley's soul is in his horn, and you'll only find that kind of honesty in Chicago, in a basement, with no one caring whether or not they hear it."

"You're a big, nasty grey cloud on a sunny day, that's what you are." She did a sharp turn to the right, onto Huntington Drive, following it south. "This will take us right into Los Angeles," she said, her voice breathless. "You can taste the Pacific, we're so damned close!"

He was exhausted. From one state to another, bathed in blood, he had no energy left for Clara's misguided enthusiasm. "We're close to what?"

"Charlie. The party. Your target. Don't you ever listen?"

His host's eyes were partially closed, an expected darkness overtaking them. He was so damned tired.

"Target," he repeated.

"That's right," she said, falsely bubbly and full of energy for her own goals. The switchblade was forgotten in these moments of vanity, but he knew it was ever present in her possession. Her eyes were wider than usual, a strange mania present in her that sent a shiver of worried understanding through his jelly essence. Her lipstick was uneven. There was a tear at the hem of her dress. There were bloodstains on her shoulder. The feather boa she'd taken as a gift from Reggie was tattered and wilted, most of the larger feathers long since torn out by the wind that whipped at them as they drove. She wrapped it around her neck anyway. She looked like a sick bird with a molting disease.

"I need to fix my eyes," she said, a shaky fingertip smudging the days old kohl that lined them, smearing them into black pockets, giving her the appearance of a corpse. She snatched her hand mirror out of her hand bag and with one hand still on the wheel, she fished out her kohl with the other. She propped her hand mirror onto the steering wheel with her elbows, and in this awkward pose managed to apply another line of black without poking herself in the retina. "There," she said, smiling at her ghoulish reflection in her hand mirror. "Let them try to say no to me now!"

"You haven't eaten," he reminded her. "We could have stopped at that gas station, back around Pasadena. You should have had a sandwich, at the least, and a cup of coffee."

"I don't need that sort of thing, not anymore," she said, her words a harsh whisper against the road, his doubts, her own intentions. "I'm going to go to that party, and Charlie is going to have one look at me, and it's all about becoming the flickering light. That little dash between dark and light, that's going to be me, that's going to be my grey shadows up there. Nothing else. Nothing at all, and that's the way it should be."

She drove right, onto Mission Road, and then west onto North Broadway before crossing interstate five. They sped above the Los Angeles River, the desert already a distant memory behind them. Long, spindly palm trees lined their ascent into the arms of Hollywood, a quick jaunt past Sunset Boulevard, where Clara's wide, crazy eyes were pinprick stars in the surrounding darkness. "Almost there, almost there…" She let out a horrific, tortured squeal, one more suited to her victims than as a cry of victory. She released her hands from the steering wheel to punch the air, her feet kicking in happy, barefoot glee. Lines of blood were etched across her ankles. She'd cut her toes driving without shoes.

They pulled into a modest looking house, its front end surrounded by cars of all shapes and sizes, a buffet for those enamoured by the wheels only wealth can buy. She slammed the brakes and pulled the car into park beside a black Chevrolet, the wide expanse of her trunk blocking it in.

"You should park across the street," he tried to tell her, but she was already out of the car, heedless of her bleeding feet, her tattered feather boa trailing behind her. She was roadkill, and she didn't care. She'd made it to Hollywood, to her own target, to this party, and nothing else mattered but shadows and her mindless vanity.

The door swung open and they both slid in, serpents uninvited to that first, perfect garden. She waved her hand high, heedless of the odd looks the wealthy patrons of the party were giving her. "Charlie!" she shouted, trying to gain a small, rather shrivelled man's attention. "Charlie! It's me! It's Clara!"

He broke free of the tousled redhead at his side and made his way slowly towards her, his cane offering him poor support. This wasn't Charlie Chaplin, of course, and judging from the tall glass in his hand it was clear he had more than a small rum runner connection. "Clara," he said, and his voice was broken glass. He held out his arms and she ran into them, giving him a severe kiss on the cheek. "It's good to see you. It's been a little while. Chicago, it's too cold and too far for me, I like the ocean air." He smiled softly and patted her cheek, his eyes as cold as hers were black. A mutual assassin. "Imagine that, you showing up here. You got nerve, kid. You got some kind of crazy devil in you to bring you here."

He glanced up, catching a good glimpse of her companion. "Hey, Frankie. Look who it is. Our old friend, Clara." She winced as he dug his fingertips into her clavicle, her smile faltering slightly as she looked back at the man who had been her companion for her bloodbath of a trip. "Bet you never thought you'd see her again, did you?"

Charlie's watery eyes narrowed as he looked on him. "Frankie…You not feeling good or something? It's the strangest thing, I thought you were on the patio, out the back, by the pool. You got changed, too." He shrugged. "Do what you want, you always do, pal. Just like my little Clara, here. Now come on, sugar, you and me, we got some catching up to do."

"You got a part for me, Charlie? You going to put me in your pretty pictures?"

"Sure, sure. I'll make some pretty pictures of you, all right."

She giggled as Charlie led her into the melee of people, the party in full swing. It wasn't much different from the speakeasy in Chicago, the same worn faces, the same drunkard props at the bar drooling onto the counter. The only difference was the softening salt air that coursed over them, and the desert warmth that refused to fully leave. A Chicago that was easier to bear.

A hand rested on his shoulder. Its familiarity sent a shiver of memory through him, and he closed his eyes against its onslaught.

"I can't believe you brought her here," a voice, so similar to his own, hissed at his ear. "She's a cannibal. She wants to be in films so she can bend out of the screen in spirit and tear into the crowds so she can eat them."

He turned, and wasn't surprised to see a familiar face. It held every nuance that was his usual features, apparent after every host was taken over. A certain cut to the jaw, a definite height and shape of the neck and shoulders. The face was always the same, and it was this face, his own face, that stared back at him in longing sympathy.

"Frankie," he said. He cocked his head to one side and his larger twin did the same. "I was wondering who that was."

"It was you," Frankie said.

"I don't understand."

Frankie smiled. He placed his hands in his pockets, casual and cool, an easiness about him that was envious. "She never told you how she made you." He let out a bitter laugh. "Of course not. Clara and the truth don't see eye to eye."

"Who are you?" he asked, a sudden rush of anger burning inside of him. This man who had his face, his mannerisms, his structure–he seemed more solid, as though there was more of him holding him together. Frankie nodded and gave a friendly wave to a pretty young woman and her beau as they passed. When they were gone, he slid a cigarette out of his side pocket and slowly lit it.

"She was the one who did it. Who tried to kill me. She almost got her wish, but I managed to get away, even if a little bit of me got left behind." He took a drag of the cigarette and let out the thin smoke in a single breath. "That's what you are. Poor Mikey, getting full of that little bit of me, just because she happened to feel a tiny bit of remorse." He laughed and shook his head. "You know what we're made of. Jelly and black tar. Well, she shot me point blank in the face and the host just crumpled up like paper and I fell out. Then she went ahead with that stupid switchblade of hers and started cutting into what solid bits of me she could. Of course, I managed to scrape most of myself together, but I guess you're that little bit I left behind." He took another drag of the cigarette. "I have to give you credit. You lasted all that way with her, and she never once tried to cut you up. That's something even I couldn't accomplish."

He couldn't understand. He didn't want to. It wasn't like this for them, it was humans who were fractured and blindly searching for memory, who put images on screens in hope of silver light to trigger some forgotten emotion within themselves. They wilfully ignored the truth. They didn't see the director shouting orders in the background, the actors carefully memorizing their lines. They didn't see the rising starlet running her palm across the front of the producer's trousers. They saw shadows and light and believed in nothing.

He held his hands against his head, pressing his palms against his temples as though warding off a terrible noise. Langley's horn was a crescendo in his memory.

"Don't tell me any more," he pleaded.

"You know who you are," Frankie harshly chided him. "You're the shadow, that flicker of myself that follows the rules, who can't leave them behind. Cutting you out was the best thing Clara ever did for me." He tossed the remains of his cigarette into the pool behind him, the surface one of polished pearls. "Do you know who our superiors are? Dead weight. That's right, there is no home to go to, no place to rest our weary heads when our target is achieved. They dumped us here to punish us. Criminals who dared to feel singular instead of part of their constantly churning, never fluctuating futures."

"The future was always changing, and there were consequences," he tried to argue. He could feel his voice getting hysterical, his throat constricting in fear. "We can't just walk away from our responsibilities."

Frankie let out a scoff at this. He grabbed two drinks off of a visiting tray from a harried waiter and handed one of them to his twin. He took it and downed it, wishing it was motor oil.

"You should drink more of this stuff," Frankie advised him. "It makes a good preservative. Better than the oil."

"I don't want to talk to you…."

"But you will. What choice do you have? You're me, after all, a little piece that got chopped off and was allowed to grow. I feel sorry for you. Sorry for myself. All you've believed yourself to be is a task, a thing to get done. I'll bet you spent the whole trip obsessing about your target, and how he'd better be here for you to kill. Do you know what the target really was?" He took a sip of his scotch, wincing at is went down uneasy. "It was you. And me. I was so angry they put me here, so miserable to think I was stuck with that psychotic bitch, Clara, I wanted to end it all. And I knew how to do it. Just a wrong look her way, a little threat to her ego by brushing her hair from her eyes and trying to be coy. It's that easy. That's how the devil springs out of her, and it cut me down, blew my host's head off and hacked me into pieces." Frankie let out a bitter laugh over his drink. "Shame it didn't work, of course."

He collapsed against the side wall, settling in among a dried flowerbed. The drink in his hand rolled onto the patio stones, and a drunken actor kicked it out of the way. "Suicide."

"Murder in all forms."

"It's not right. Killing isn't right."

"You picked a strange travel partner, if that's what you believe."

He felt sick, the oil he'd consumed earlier wanting to visit him anew. He grabbed another cocktail off of a wandering tray and downed it, much to his twin's amusement.

"I killed a man," he confessed

His twin merely shrugged. "Who hasn't?"

"He was innocent. He just wanted to find his brother."

Frankie tapped his fingers on the side of his glass. A nervous gesture. A thought turned physical.

He took another swig. A warm rum on a hot night.

"You're right. That is very sad."

They stood studying one another for a long moment, imperfect mirror images that couldn't quite recognize each other. Finally, he let out a long sigh and forced himself to stand, his twin offering his hand to help him up.

"She's a bad person," he said, meaning Clara.

"We're all bad people," Frankie said, reassuring him with a soft squeeze on his shoulder. "But take some good advice and cut her loose. She tried to kill us once. You know what she's like. She doesn't leave anything half finished."

Frankie patted his back. His name was called, and it floated above the crowd, a singsong need for a dance. "That's her," he said, and bit his bottom lip. "She tries to kill me and now she asks for a dance. I know how you feel. You want to be rid of her, but you can't. She'll kill you before you get a chance to do that for yourself. She's like that motor oil, slick and black as death and just as smooth as it goes down. Inevitable. Quick to run you down."

And with this he slid into the crowd, off to his fate with the girl and the switchblade, leaving his accidental twin behind. He had to wonder, how many other splinters of himself were wandering out there, each captivated by a task he couldn't properly fulfil. There could be dozens.

Clara had shot him point blank in the head. The splatter of his essence had to have been significant.

He'd forgotten to ask, how small had he been before he found his way into Mikey's body and grew into it. An inch worth of jellied substance? A droplet?

There could be hundreds of fragments of himself out there, lost, wandering the linear desolation this violent world alone. A mob army of disconnection.

He sloshed within his host's gut. Sick. Unsettled.