Los Angeles (20 page)

This was clearly bullshit.

I looked at Frank, then back at Dad. “Why would you do this to me?”

My father made a sympathetic face. “We just wanted to make sure you found out what happened to her, that’s all, and that you
knew she was all right. That way…” Now he started to chuckle, as though we had put the whole thing to rest. “That way you
can go back to doing whatever it is you do all night in your shitty apartment. What is it? Are you still writing?” He didn’t
wait for an answer. “Why don’t you move in with us? This is a beautiful place to write a screenplay, with the ocean, the beach
—”

“But she called me. She called and said my name, and then —”

“And then what, Angel?”

“She was cut off. But she was calling from the dark. She was terrified. I could hear it.”

“So she changed her mind,” Frank offered, shaking his head. “Maybe she decided she didn’t want to talk to you after all.”

“How do you know that?” I stared at my hands. They were white, of course, and beneath that, pink and blue, the color of my
veins, the color of flesh beneath the skin. There was also a small dot of something purple forming on my skin, just over the
knuckle of my middle finger. I hadn’t noticed it before. It would become cancer later if I wasn’t careful, I thought. Maybe
it was cancer already. Maybe I was dying. Maybe it had metastasized throughout my entire body and I only had a few weeks to
live. I suddenly felt like an actor in a tragedy. “She told me she… she told me she loved me.” I felt ashamed as soon as
it came out of my mouth.

“Girls like her,” my father said, “they say that kind of thing… they don’t really mean it.”

I shook my head. I pictured my own funeral. I imagined Angela staring down at my coffin, my alabaster face serenely offering
itself back at her. I looked out at the Pacific again, at the cold ocean waves. Sometimes two of them collided with each other,
an interference pattern forming as they crashed onto the golden beach. “But why would she just leave her apartment and all
of her things?” I asked. “And I know for a fact that someone has been stalking her.
I saw him.
”

“Who did you see?”

“A man,” I said weakly. “He was wearing a gray suit.”

Frank and my father were looking at each other. I could tell they believed I was crazy.

“Angel,” Dad said, “let it go.”

“Let it go?” I said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

My father shrugged. “There’s nothing else to know.”

“What’s her boyfriend’s name?” I asked.

Frank shook his head.

“What country did she go to?”

“Angel,” my father said, “please stop this, for your own good.”

I had no clear sense of reality anymore. All I could do was look at the light, which fell in soft blankets of orange and silver
over the water and sand in the distance. Beyond us, I could see a haze of smog rising over the rocky hills of Malibu Canyon.
But here on my father’s veranda, the sun beamed hard, unimpeded rays, leaving clean, razor-sharp shadows on the speckled granite.

I pictured Angela, her seal-wet body in the cool water of the pool, her fake hair slick against her head.

Had that even happened? Were those memories even real?

This wasn’t right, I thought. Whatever Frank and my father had found out about Angela couldn’t be the whole story.

She wouldn’t have just left.

And her voice.

And the letter… and the money…

I thought I’d have better luck asking Frank these questions privately later on.

Plus, I felt sick.

Somehow, I managed to get up and move inside without saying good-bye. Melanie, of course, having relocated to the living room,
followed me to the door, holding the squirming Gabriel against her hip.

“Don’t you want to hug him?” She held the kid toward me, his arms flailing. “Your little brother?”

“How old is he?” I asked.

“He’s almost four already. His birthday is only” — she seemed embarrassed to remind me — “three months away.”

“He’s still not talking?”

“… a few words…” She shrugged, as if it were her own fault.

I gave in, leaning toward Gabriel and inhaling his baby smell, then pressed my cheek against his.

There was spit on his skin, and I felt that smear of viscous liquid. I had nothing against this kid, this little boy they
kept insisting was my brother, but I also knew that, at this point in time, there was nothing I could do to help him. He was
stuck with these people.

______

I sat in the back of one of my father’s limousines, directing the route, riding all the way past the red cliffs of Malibu
into the heart of Santa Monica, taking Wilshire into Beverly Hills, up Doheny and, finally, over to Sunset Boulevard. I watched
the sun flash and glow off the polished metal and painted fiberglass of the Los Angeles traffic. Suddenly I pictured Frank’s
associate, Marcel, following me. Had he come into the club with me that night? And what about those criminal charges they
said Angela had?

Someone was clearly mistaken — Frank, probably. He had been misinformed.

Or he was lying.

Not far from down on Sunset was the Tower Records, and on impulse I asked the driver to stop. I jumped out of the car, slipped
through the automatic doors, and went directly to the new rock section. I found the display for ImmanuelKantLern. Their new
disc was stacked under a poster of the band, a group of sullen young men standing around in an empty parking lot at dawn’s
first light, each member staring off in his own mock-profound direction.

My father had said she went away with a musician, and this was the only group Angela had ever mentioned.

Back in the limo, I tore the plastic wrap off the CD and looked closely at each member. They all had spiky rock-and-roll hair,
numerous tattoos, weird piercings. Each member of the group had the last name of a famous European philosopher. There was
Timmy Schopenhauer, Jason Montaigne, Eddie Hume, Jared Burke.

I looked at the bass player, Joey Descartes, the one Angela said she had slept with. He wore an adolescent sneer on a thirty-year-old
face.

After a few minutes, the driver took me over to Hollywood Boulevard, then pulled onto San Raphael Crescent.

“Hey,” he said as I was getting out, “you’re Milos Veronchek’s kid, right?” He was a lanky young man with soft brown hair
and ruddy skin.

I hesitated. “Yeah.”

“I feel stupid asking you this, but” — his face was apologetic, as though expecting a punch — “do you think I can give you
a screenplay, and if you like it… I mean, seriously, dude, only if you like it, you could pass it on to your dad?”

I had no reason to be mean to this guy. “Sure.” I shrugged. “But you know, I don’t see him very often. It might be a long time before I’m out there again.”

He looked up at my apartment building, obviously wondering why I lived in a place like this if my father was the great Milos
Veronchek. “I just thought that if I could just get this screenplay to someone like your dad, you know, then maybe I could
get an agent.” He leaned down and pulled out a manila envelope. “And if I could get an agent…”

The next step was obviously fame, stardom, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice; his expression indicated the world of possibilities
that would follow.

“I’d be happy to.”

“You gotta try every angle,” he said, handing me the envelope, “even if it seems desperate. You know what I mean? Like Tom
said in
Risky Business
” — he laughed — “sometimes you have to say, what the fuck?”

______

Inside,
Blade Runner
played on the television, the characters murmuring at low volume. My desk waited; the computer screens glowed as if in anticipation.
The stacks of colored paper remained on the floor: red, orange, yellow, green, violet, blue, hot to cold, the visible spectrum
of colored light. I dropped the limo driver’s screenplay onto the floor, emptied my pockets onto my desk, slipped into the
kitchen, and poured myself a deep mug of bourbon. I took a long, hard swallow, followed it with a couple of tabs of Ambien,
then brought the mug with me into the bathroom, where I was finally able to pull my clothes off without interruption. I brushed
my teeth, spat the usual bloody pink foam into the sink, and when I took another sip of the whiskey, I felt that malicious
sting and, after a moment, a welcome numbness.

In the kitchen, I dialed Franks cell number.

“Hello?” he asked.

“Frank,” I whispered, “are you still at my father’s?”

“I’m in the car,” he answered flatly.

I brought my voice back to a normal volume. “Tell me the truth.”

“The truth, Angel?”

“Where is she? Did she really go away with that band? Is it ImmanuelKantLern?”

He sighed. “If that’s what your father said —”

“Jesus Christ, Frank, I’m not asking what my father said. He’s not God, is he? Just because he says something doesn’t make
it true. I’m asking
you,
okay? I’m asking you if she really went away with that fucking band.”

Frank allowed a moment to pass, a theatrical demonstration of how little he appreciated me talking to him this way. “We’re
talking about Cassandra, right?” he answered finally. “The girl from the Mask.”

“Yes. The girl from the Mask,” I said. “Why do you keep asking me that?”

“I just want to be sure.”

“Tell me. Just fucking —”

“According to our information, yes, she went away with that musician.”

“The guy from ImmanuelKantLern.”

He breathed heavily. “I guess that’s what they’re called.”

“Frank, I’m hanging up now.”

“Angel —”

When I thought about it, it actually made sense. Someone had been stalking her, so Angela had hooked up with her old boyfriend.
She would go away with him for a while and come back when it was safe.

In the living room, wearing my old robe, I inserted the ImmanuelKantLern disc,
Jokes On You,
into the stereo, listened once, perplexed, then played it again, hating every dragging beat, detesting every artless measure.
There was something awful about this music, something degenerate and sleazy. It had the guise of sincerity, but I detected
a cynicism beneath its surface, as though the band were playing down to its own audience.

Jokes On You,
all right.

But maybe I had become out of touch. Maybe I was just too old.

The main thing was the bass line, a burning, unrelenting depth of sonic distortion that reached lower than the human ear could
apprehend. The vocals were trapped somewhere between rapping and singing, and the guitar whined, sniveled, and complained.
I had to strain to hear anything redemptive in it at all, finding only an angry satisfaction, a bitter agreement with the
band’s alienated, anarchist posture.

On the computer I checked out ImmanuelKantLern.com, discovering the schedule of concerts for their current world tour. Right
now, it said, they were in South America. My father had been right — it had to be them. For the next two nights, as a matter
of fact, they were playing in Rio. Perhaps she had gone off with them to South America and couldn’t get through to me. Maybe
that’s where Angela had been calling from when she was cut off. Could she have been on the plane, ascending into the brightening
sky, I wondered, while the small cabin darkened?

I took the mug of Jack and dropped down onto the flokati. Dead hyacinth petals were strewn everywhere, now brown and wilted,
filling the room with the smell of decay.

“You only think you’re white,” Angela had told me one night. “You know that?” This was a continuation of a conversation that
began early in our relationship and meandered through subject matter like Mulholland Drive through the Hollywood hills.

“You keep saying that. Why do you keep saying that?”

“You’re white on the outside, Angel, dark on the inside.”

“I don’t like those symbols.” I took a sip of bourbon. “They’re too reductive. And besides,” I said, “I thought you told me
I was orange and red.”

“Everything’s a symbol,” she said, raising her head so she could see my face. “Everything’s a symbol, jackass. This is a world
of symbols for another world.”

“What do you know about other worlds?”

There was a flash of anger across her features, like fast clouds passing over the moon. “I know this world is bullshit.”

“There is a theory about other worlds,” I told her, suddenly excited to be talking about something I knew. “It comes from
the uncertainty principle. It comes from the study of light.”

Angela sighed, rolling her eyes.

“For every optional circumstance, for every quantum uncertainty, another world breaks off,” I went on, “so every optional
world exists.” I held her gaze to make her listen. “This isn’t science fiction. There are actual physicists, true-to-life
scientists, who believe this.”

Angela took a swallow of her vodka, then took a long drag on her cigarette, leaving a trace of pink lipstick on the white
filter.

“There are other worlds,” I told her, “and this one is only as real as the rest of them. All worlds are equally viable.”

She seemed older to me at that moment, the lines and creases around her eyes deeper than usual. “Are we going to have sex,”
she asked, “or not?”

I fell asleep on the rug, remembering Angela, trying to, anyway, listening to the music of ImmanuelKantLern, with the empty
mug in my hand and the dead blossoms of hyacinths distributed around my exhausted body like flowers around a coffin.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I crawled off to bed, wishing I could crawl off to one of those other worlds.

T
HANK YOU FOR CALLING
V
ARIG
A
lRLINES,” AN ACTUAL WOMAN
finally answered. “How may I assist you?”

“I need a ticket.” This was the following morning, minutes after I woke up.

“Where would you like to go, sir?”

“To Rio de Janeiro.”

“And when would you like to depart?”

“Right away.”

I packed nothing, thinking I would pick up whatever I needed when I got there. Besides, I told myself, I was only staying
for one day. I could get a change of clothes and a toothbrush anywhere. I suddenly realized I would need my passport. Shit.
Where was it? I searched frantically through every drawer in my apartment, finally discovering it in an old silver box at
the back of my closet. Then it occurred to me that Frank would see the charge for the ticket on my credit card — Christ, it
would stand out like an anarchist flag — and he would immediately inform my father.