Oliver.
46
The bag is off my head and it’s over. Oliver saved my life. My son won’t be an orphan and you won’t have to mourn, wishing you’d told me that you love me when you had the chance. Oliver is a hero and Oliver kept an eye on me because he was worried about me. RIP Shortus was a fake friend but Oliver is a real friend and that’s what they say, that you’re lucky in this world if you have at least a couple of real friends. True friends.
But all friends are flawed and I’m still tied to the tree and he’s in Shortus’s cabin and this day in the mountains needs to end. “Oliver! Any luck with finding a knife?”
“One sec, my friend!”
RIP Shortus is dead, yes, but the Pain Pong tournament is starting up again, no more nice adrenaline to lift me out of my body, and it’s impossible not to think about what Oliver did wrong. That fucking video of me and RIP Melanda and I say it again, calm. “Oliver, I don’t want to rush you, but I’m pretty bad out here.”
He hops down the front steps of the cabin and he’s carrying an Atari game set like he didn’t just end a man’s life. “Check it out, Goldberg. I was just looking for one of these on 1stdibs!”
He takes a picture of his new toy but he can’t send it to Minka—no Wi-Fi—and my skin suit crawls because oh that’s right. My friend Oliver is a sociopath private dancer slash screenwriter and without him, I die in these woods, just like RIP Shortus.
“Oliver, I don’t know how to thank you.” Oliver, move your ass and get me off this fucking tree.
“No need,” he says. “We talked about this. When you win, I win. When I win, you win.”
Then why did you show Ray that fucking video? “Well, still, thanks.”
He pats me on the back, as if I’m not tied to a tree. “And I’m sorry about Love,” he says.
What about THE VIDEO, you fucking asshole? “Thanks,” I say. “I’m just still in shock right now.”
Oliver begins slicing the ropes and he’s no naval-boys’-camp-trained RIP Shortus. He’s terrible with a knife—fucking gun people—and he keeps dropping it on the ground and what if he has a heart attack? What if he dies before he finishes his work? “So I got news. I got a new agent.”
I AM TIED TO A TREE AND I GOT SHOT IN THE HEAD, YOU ANGEFUCKINGLENO. “That’s great.”
He drops the knife and it grazes his hand and now he is bleeding and how the fuck did he hack it in the kitchen at Baxter’s? “Yeah,” he says. “And we’re taking my show out next week.”
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.”