Time to wake up.
I grab my phone and scroll through my emails. Sweet nothings from Ben. Credit-card payment is due—I’m almost out of debt. Spam offering me hot Asian women.
I roll out of bed.
Time to make the Kathi donuts.
I knock assertively on her door before inserting the key card. I walk inside her room. There’s trash on the floor. The TV is on. The bathroom lights are on. Something feels off. How can she live like this? Is this living? Is she living?
I look at Kathi Kannon, film icon. I’ve seen this before. She looks just like she has in my imagination, just as I’ve seen in my nightmares, the kind where you wake yourself up by the sound of your own gasping for air—because in these dreams, she looks dead.
But this is no dream.
My movie-star boss is looking blue, maybe dying from a drug overdose.
Roy stirs and the movement startles me. He jumps down from the bed and comes to me—begging? For what? For help?
Assistant Bible Verse 139: Always assume the worst.
I rush to Kathi’s side. “Kathi!” I shout. Her famous breasts are flopped to and fro, the nipples pointing in opposite directions under her thin nightgown.
Roy presses against my calves, wiggling nervously, like he knows something I don’t. Or perhaps my fear is now contagious, Roy taking a defensive position behind me, bracing himself, abandoning me on the front line.
“Kathi,” I repeat, my voice pocked with worry, wondering if she’ll stir and her blue skin will flush pink as she takes a deep, dry breath.
“Kathi,” I say a little louder.
“KATHI!” I shout.
Roy looks back and forth, from me to her, me to her, willing me to do something.
I hope we survive Seattle.
I’m blushing. I’m sweating. I’m thinking, Fuck.
Assistant Bible Verse 140: Be prepared for last-minute auditions, paparazzi in the azaleas, mouth-to-mouth resuscitations.
I touch her shoulder. Cold. I put my fingers on her neck. Cold. I put my hand over her heart. Cold. I push, and her body heaves, bounces on the bed. I push again. I put my other hand on top of the first and push down again.
“Kathi? No!” I yell. “I need you! Please don’t leave me!” I push, push, push.
One, one thousand. Two, one thousand. Three, one thousand.
Pump, pump, pump.
The bed bouncing, bouncing, bouncing.
“HELP!” I yell, turning to the nightstand, to the phone. With one hand I grab the receiver, and I take my other hand off her cold chest to dial.
“Cockring?!” she gasps.
I stop, turn, stare at this miracle.
Assistant Bible Verse 141: The job never ends.
Roy hops back up on the bed, licks her face once, and then circles and circles until he plops down in a perfect little ball of comfort. He’s thinking, Naptime. He’s thinking, This is just another morning.
I hang up the phone.
Kathi says without moving, “What time is it? Were you just screaming?”
I exhale, not just my breath, but I release every cell, every muscle, every thought. My mind goes blank, my body limp, standing, swaying slightly before her. I think of Kathi as my mother for a brief moment—flashing back to Mom’s death, watching her collapse in church and seeing her lifeless body, remembering my deepest prayer that she would just stand up, be reanimated, alive again. I remember wanting to run up to her, to grab her, to shake her awake. I wish she would have snapped to attention all those years ago, just like Kathi Kannon did a few moments ago. I wish I could distribute miracles equally among the women in my life.
“My throat hurts,” Kathi says. “And my back is killing me.”
“Time to go to work,” I say, worried I’m talking to a ghost.
She tries to sit up in bed but struggles. As she moves the comforter away from her, I think I see vomit in the bed, or maybe it’s just some other kind of mess in our lives. She pulls the comforter back again to hide it.
She looks up at me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I say, and in a fever begin to tidy up, walking to a lamp to turn it on.
“Wait. Were you just touching my breast?” she asks, waking, awareness starting to pump through her veins.
“No, I was giving you CPR.”
“That’s not how you do CPR, Cockring,” she says. “It’s okay. You don’t have to deny your sexual feelings for me.”
“I thought you were fucking dead.”
“Dead? That would have been a travesty of a travesty of a blap.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“I’m not dead, I’m jet-lagged.”
“This seems like more than jet lag.”
“It’s rich-people jet lag. It’s worse for us.”
“I give you an F,” I say.
“For what?”
“You know what!”
“Then I give you a C for giving me an F!” she yells.
“That’s fine, because I already know I’m an A and the C is just because you’re mad at me!”
“I’m not mad, I’m sleepy!” Kathi tries to sit up again, but she’s wobbly. She coughs. She tries to move the covers off her legs, but her movements look mired in molasses. She hovers on the edge of the bed. She steadies herself on the nightstand.
“I don’t think I can film the show today,” she says.
“They’ll be pissed.”
Kathi glares at me, our nonverbal communication. I concede. “What do you want me to tell them?”
“I’m sick. I’ll do it tomorrow,” she says. “Or this afternoon maybe.”
“I’m not sure that’s how it works.”
“Then fucking cancel it, Cockring. Get us a flight home. Fuck it.”
I nod okay but don’t move, my feet locking my body in a stare-off with her.
“What now?” Kathi asks, noticing my gawking.
“What if you had been dead? In this shitty hotel room, at this shitty hour, far from home, on a stupid weekday morning, about to shoot a stupid TV show. Is this really where and how you want your life to end? You want this on your IMDB page? Am I supposed to update all this on your Wikipedia?”
Kathi sits still for a moment. Then, “What’s a Wikipedia?”
“You can’t die this way.”
“Why not?” she asks.
“Because you’re too interesting and special. You need a quirky death when you’re, like, a hundred. And don’t do it in a way where I’ll be blamed.”
“You’ll be with me when I’m one hundred?” she asks.
“Maybe.”
“You’ll be my Roger?”
“Roger? Jeez,” I say.
“What’s wrong with Roger?”
“Nothing. He just seems, I don’t know, defeated. He’s lost in Miss Gracie’s life. Why do I have to be him? Can’t I just stay Cockring?”
“Maybe.”
“The point is, you have to die alone somehow, in some capacity in which I could not save you or have even known you were in danger—like you choke on your Weight Busters alone in your room at three in the morning. Or you fall asleep with a cigarette and burn to death.”
“Jesus Christ, Cockring,” she says.
“You know what I mean. Sorry. This was a scary start to our morning.”