Los Angeles (10 page)

She eyed me. “Other than Jessica?”

“I only ask because she told me her name was Angela.”

I waited to see if this would provoke a response, but Victor’s mom just looked at me. “Why would she say her name was Angela
when her name,” she said with way too much certainty, “was Jessica?”

______

I remembered another night, a night when that cat was still out there stretching her back on the hood of that old Celica and
squealing like a wraith. I remembered standing at the counter and pouring myself another mug of bourbon. It was just the whiskey
now, no coffee at all. I had already swallowed a handful of meds, a blue one, two whites, Xanax, Adapin, I didn’t care what
they were anymore, I wasn’t even paying attention, just as long as I avoided Reality. Angela had finished her Stouffer’s frozen
entrée and had placed the container on one of the stacks of paper beneath my desk.

Watching me from the floor, she sipped her vodka and bit her lip.

“She’s still there,” I said.

“Who?”

“That fucking cat.”

“Is that what that noise is?”

Angela and I had had entire conversations about that cat, but now it seemed she didn’t remember.

I took my mug of Jack and sat down next to her. She crawled toward me, pressing her body against mine.

“Why are you here?” she asked out of nowhere.

“Here?”

“This apartment, this crazy place.” She waved her hand to indicate my desk, the books, the various drafts of
Los Angeles.
“Shouldn’t you be —”

“After I dropped out of college,” I said, “it was decided that I should have a place of my own.”

“Why did you drop out?”

“Couldn’t handle the pressure, apparently.”

“What did you study?”

“Physics.”

“What happened?”

“I freaked out, according to the authorities.” I had never talked about this with anyone before. I don’t even think I had
ever said it out loud outside of Dr. Silowicz’s office. When I recalled that era of my life, it was all textbooks, theories,
equations. All I remembered were the things I had studied — the properties of light, stratified media, calculus, Heisenberg,
Schrödinger, geometric optics, the compression of light by gravity, the influence of gravity on light in familiar systems,
the agency of remote black holes in the deep recesses of space, the recognition of light as a wavelike phenomenon, the creation
of an electron interference pattern one electron at a time, the inadequacy of common sense when it confronts quantum events
…

“Freaked out?”

“I spent some time in a” — I searched for the right word — “
facility,
and then I was given over to the care of my psychiatrist,” I confessed. “He thought it would be a good idea for me to move
away from my family. He said I needed independence, a life of my own.” I shrugged. “I found this place listed in an apartment
directory.”

“What’s to prevent you from… freaking out again?”

I gave a little head jerk toward the kitchen, indicating the miniature city of plastic bottles rising like downtown Los Angeles
from the counter, and answered, “Medical science.”

______

The first thing I needed to do was get the sun out of my eyes. The migraine, though still painful, had become manageable,
and since I didn’t feel like wearing my mother’s pink octagonals during the long drive back to West Hollywood, I made the
short trip from Victor’s duplex in Santa Monica to Venice Beach. I parked, then went on foot to purchase a new pair of sunglasses,
knowing I’d find a pair out here for around five bucks. The sky was a deep blue, with watercolor clouds painted over the sea’s
hard horizon, and a yellow beach sloping down to the surf. There was a rushing in my ears, the sound of waves, undigitized,
nonelectronic, and, to me, odd. It was what most people call a beautiful afternoon, bright and sunny, the kind of day I hate
the most.

Walking in the sun, I shielded my eyes and tried to make sense of my conversation with Victor’s mom.

I was unable, for the moment at least, to process it.

An actress?

Even though both Victor and his mom had identified Angela in the picture, this Jessica Teagarden person had to be someone
else.

The beachfront was lined with people selling T-shirts, hash pipes, sneakers, religion. Luckily I found what I was looking
for right away. A pair of black plastic, polarized wraparounds, they were asshole glasses, I knew, the kind that DJ had been
wearing at the Velvet Mask, but they were fantastically dark and protected my eyes at the sides as well as the front.

I took Ocean, then Wilshire Boulevard all the way back to Hollywood before turning onto Sunset.

Rush hour, it was slow going, and definitely the long way, but I didn’t feel up to the freeway right now and I was still tender
from the migraine. Finally, I turned onto Hollywood Boulevard, then San Raphael Crescent, parking Mom’s old Cadillac in the
rear lot of my building and taking a moment to look around for the cat. I hadn’t heard her since early yesterday morning,
before dawn, when Angela had disappeared.

Where had she been for the past twenty-four hours, anyway? Had someone taken her in?

I noticed that the old man seemed to have vanished, too. His yard, normally so manicured, so artfully groomed, had become
overgrown. The flowers still flourished, radiant blossoms in a rich profusion, especially the hyacinths, but the grass had
gone wild and was starting to dry, brown patches forming here and there.

I gave up and went upstairs.

I closed the apartment door behind me and sat on the flokati directly in front of the television. Onscreen was the scene where
the replicant named Roy steps into Tyrell’s enormous bedchamber with a combined look of reverence and anger. Tyrell explains
why he can’t extend Roy’s life. “To make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system,” he says, “is fatal. A
coding sequence cannot be revised once it has been established.”

“Coding sequence,” I murmured.

I suddenly remembered the envelope I had found in front of Jessica Teagarden’s door in Santa Monica. I pulled it out of my
pocket and tore it open, and into my hand fell a huge stack of hundred-dollar bills.

Jesus Christ.

There was a letter, too, a poem of some sort, fragmentary, erratic, printed out on a laser jet in characterless Helvetica:

When you’re gone I disappear

When I see you I am resurrected

I wake up thinking of you

Go to bed dreaming of you

Breathe because you breathe

You are the blood in my veins

air in my lungs taste in my mouth

This is a threat a promise a warning

You and I will be together

Picture a new life

We are in a car I am driving

You are beside me

There is music pulsating

White clouds in a blue sky

The green earth rolling

In this version we have escaped

I stared at the precise, blocky type and tried to imagine the mind that had composed this letter. I counted, and the bills
added up to ten thousand dollars.
Ten thousand dollars.
I had been up far too long now. I was beyond bleary, having graduated to a state of complete derangement, and my stomach
was a vacuum.

Someone had been stalking her, I realized. And then I thought of something even worse.

Angela had been kidnapped. This person, whoever had left this bizarre note, had captured her. That’s why she had called, I
thought.

I got up, slipped my robe on, and made myself a Stouffer’s meatloaf with mashed potatoes and brown gravy. I also poured a
deep mug of Jack and stared at the blue letter, pacing around and around on the flokati. It had to be one of the men who went
to the Velvet Mask. He had developed an obsession.

“Let me give you a lap dance,” Angela had said that night.

I shook my head. “You’re out of your fucking mind.”

“It’s a thirty-dollar value.”

“I’m gay.” The idea of a lap dance in front of other people weirded me out completely, and I was prepared to say anything
to get out of it.

She narrowed her eyes. “You are not gay.”

“I am so,” I retorted childishly, “I am very gay.”

“Have you ever had sex with a man?”

“Please —” I shook my head. “Angela, I can’t.”

“You get a hard-on when I kiss you.”

“That’s involuntary.”

“They’re
all
involuntary.” Then she laughed softly, saying, “Until you reach the age of sixty, and then you’ll do anything to get one,
including —”

“I can’t” — I shook my head no — “I can’t do this.”

“Come with me.” In the unearthly light of the club, her voice was quiet, smooth, as electric as the bands of neon that wrapped
the stage. It intermingled with the sound of the grating, pulsating music and the low, slurred voices of the men who were
drunk on the sight of naked women.

Angela tugged at my hand, and I resisted, saying, “Really, Angela, thank you, but —”

She led me into a small dark room with tiny booths and sat me down on a chair, throwing her legs over my lap and wrapping
her dark arms around my scrawny white neck.

“Angela,” I said, “don’t.” She had slipped a hand up the front of my shirt, lifting it away from my skin, even pushing her
fingers down the front of my pants.

“Angela,”
she said back, mocking me,
“don’t.”
She breathed against my neck, her lips soft and warm.

I tried to squirm away, but she wouldn’t let me. “There are people,” I whispered.

“Of course there are people, you alien. This is Earth.”

“People watching.”

They weren’t, really. It was too dark back here, and there were partitions anyway.

“Let them.” Her hand made it all the way into my pants and her cool fingers curled around my penis.

I took an involuntary breath.

She hissed, “I want you to fuck me, Angel.”

“But not here,” I said, relenting. “Not right here, for Christ’s sake.”

“Tonight.”

“Fine,” I said. “But not —”

“You promise?”

I waited in the neon darkness of the Velvet Mask for what seemed like an eternity. It was actually five hours, until two in
the morning. I waited while Angela, there known as Cassandra, took the stage in a continuous rotation with the others — Jennifer,
Sandy, Tiger, Victoria, Ashley, Katrina, I had learned all of their pseudonyms — waited while she gave intermittent dances
to the Japanese salarymen and drugstore clerks, the ad guys on commercial shoots, Midwestern conventioneers, and other assorted
assholes, until finally she abandoned her own car and came home with me in the Cadillac.

______

In my parents’ old house in Beverly Hills, there was a room that, as far as I know, no one ever entered but me. The walls
of this room were lined with shelves, and the shelves were stacked with volumes of books that had been bought all at once,
not because they were interesting but because they were decorator items. There was a full set of classics, from
The Scarlet Letter
to
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.
There was the
Compleat Works of William Shakespeare,
of course,
Goethe’s Writings,
and, most impressive of all,
The Great Books of Western Civilization,
which included Darwin’s
Origin of the Species,
Newton’s
Principia Mathematica,
and Immanuel Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason.
There were also two guide volumes, a
Syntopicon,
that came with the set and that led a would-be reader through the complex concepts of these significant works.

On the spine of the first of the two guidebooks were the words
Angel to Love.
On the spine of the second guide book were the words
Man to World.

For some reason these titles fascinated me.

“Angel to Love,”
Angela repeated now. She reached across the gray leather interior of the Cadillac and placed a hand on my leg. I couldn’t
remember doing it, but at some point I must have told her about those books. “That’s you,” she said, laughing, “you’re my
Angel to Love.
”

As a kid, I would actually touch my pink fingers to the gold-leaf lettering on their spines and repeat those titles silently,
my blue lips moving.
Angel to Love, Man to World.

I guess I wanted to be the
Angel to Love.

But who was the
Man to World?
Could that be me someday? Was he the same person as the
Angel?
Could
World
be a verb like
Love?

Inside the books was tiny black type that was way too official and grown-up to understand, and by the time I was old enough
to actually read something like that, I had realized that these books were only props left over from the set of a movie my
father had made and that no one in his right mind would ever actually read them.

Angela and I were currently inside our building, climbing the stairs. She was ahead of me, holding my hand and pulling me
up each concrete flight. Now we moved into my apartment and she was slipping her shoes off. “Maybe I should take a shower,”
I said. I was shaking, the skin of my whole body tight against my skeleton. It was like I was cold, my teeth chattering.

“Come with me.” She pulled me into the bedroom. “Come with me, my
Angel to Love.
”

______

I slept through what remained of the migraine and woke up just as the sun was descending, casting its last light over the
western sky. Minutes later, I showered, dressed, and jumped in the Cadillac, making the short trip from Hollywood Boulevard
to Sunset. At the Mask, the bouncer sneered and tried to stamp my hand. “What’d I tell you?” he said. “Everybody comes back.”
It had been two days now since Angela had disappeared, two days in which I had contacted the police, searched her apartment,
questioned her old neighbor. In two days, I had virtually run out of options. I knew it was unlikely I’d find her here, but
I thought
somebody
had to know
something.