Los Angeles (24 page)

Once more, but far more carefully this time, I stepped around the gray building.

It was late afternoon now, and the sunlight was harsh, burning. I could feel it stinging my skin, clouding my eyes. I should
have picked up some sunblock at the gift shop, I thought. I was so stupid. Humid weather has a way of magnifying the rays
of the sun, actually making them fiercer as they refract through the microscopic beads of liquid condensation in the air.
It made me think of the neon lights piercing the dim atmosphere of the Velvet Mask, searing through the vulgar darkness. How
long was it since I had been there? I felt as if I had traveled a million miles, and that it had been a thousand years since
I had received that call.

I slipped into the concert hall parking lot for the second time that day, where I noticed more activity than before and that
the enormous bus had been moved off to the side. Once again I heard music. I slumped down against the wall in the small space
between the building and the bus and thought for a minute.

Frank’s assistant wouldn’t find me here. It wasn’t possible. I had the backstage pass in my hand, as well as my ticket. I
had everything I needed.

All I had to do was wait.

Just then, the door of the bus opened and the road manager stepped out. Thankfully, he didn’t turn his head and see me, and
he walked straight into the building, leaving the door of the bus open behind him. No one else came out, but I heard a noise
coming from inside, a familiar, soaring cacophony — it was the music of ImmanuelKantLern, if you could call it music. I got
up and walked carefully to the door, taking that first step off the ground. There was the driver’s seat, empty, and a heavy
curtain separating the back of the bus from the front. I ascended another step, the racket becoming even louder.

“Hello?” I held my backstage pass forward like an amulet. “Hello?”

I pulled the curtain aside and looked down the narrow aisle. There were bunks, shelves with mattresses for sleeping on the
road, but no one in them. The music was coming from all the way in the back. Someone was smoking back there, too. I could
smell the fresh cigarette burning and the old tar and nicotine that had been soaked into the upholstery. I moved slowly, one
step at a time, until I pulled another curtain aside.

There he was.

Eyes closed in an expression of pure rapture, Joey Descartes was playing a black Fender, sitting on a built-in couch. A cigarette
dangled from his lips. On the floor by his feet was a small electric amplifier. He had blond hair cut in the current rock-star
style, carefully messy, with muscular shoulders and a hairless chest. Shirtless, his skin was pasty, almost as pale as mine,
and he wore antique leather pants. There was a red tattoo of a heart, not a Valentine heart, as you’d expect, but a ventriculated
human heart, concretely enough, inked over his own. I waited until the song was over, a repetitive dirge that never altered
its consistent throbbing pulse, one note that never modulated or wavered.

Then I took another step forward.

She was sitting across from him, a paperback novel open on her lap.

It was Angela.

But it wasn’t Angela.

“Angela?” I asked, knowing it was the wrong girl but still somehow wishing she would transform herself into the right one.

It was as though an actress were playing Angela in the biopic based on her life. She had the right outlines, the right clothes…
she was all the right colors… but her facial features, especially her eyes, were all wrong.

Everything was wrong.

The fact that I had come here was wrong. Her identity was wrong. What I thought I was doing here was wrong.

She looked up at me, whoever she was, confusion written across those gorgeous features.

“Angel,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

I stared back at her. “Who are you?” I asked. “How do you know my name?”

“Who the fuck are
you?”
Joey shouted, and at the same time, he came toward me, wielding his black Fender like a club.

______

There is another kind of darkness, one that has nothing to do with the absence of light. It is the darkness of being unconscious,
of time gone, of memory lapsed. It is interesting, isn’t it, that the absence of memory is called a blackout, that sleep itself
is remembered as darkness and awareness as light? These are more than just metaphors, I believe, and have more than a symbolic
significance. It is a glimpse into the actual, it is the way the instrument of our consciousness measures the universe itself.
Am I in darkness or in light? Am I awake? Am I alive?

And then there was light. I
am
awake, I thought.

I opened my eyes all the way and found myself alone in a space approximately the size of an elementary school classroom. No
windows, no furniture, only four blank walls, a concrete floor, and a ceiling inset with lifeless fluorescent lights. I checked
the metal door and found that it was locked. I didn’t know if I had been unconscious for hours or only minutes or even seconds.
The bass player must have really clocked me with his Fender, and then someone must have deposited me here. Automatically,
I touched the light switch by the door and let the light fall away. I needed the darkness. I brushed my fingertips against
the wall and guided myself to the spot farthest away from the door, then slid down to the concrete and wrapped my arms around
my knees.

Sitting in the dark, I whispered my own name. “Angel.” I said it the way Angela had said it on the phone and listened to see
if she had been in a room like this when she called. But the word echoed strangely back to me, as if the darkness itself were
responding. I waited for my eyes to adjust. There wasn’t even that usual sliver of yellow bleeding around the cracks in the
door, which would eventually illuminate the whole room. No. This darkness was absolute. This was darkness itself. Just as
it had been when Angela blindfolded me, there was nothing to which my eyes could react, no photons, no particles or beams
to find their way in. My extreme light sensitivity wouldn’t help me here. I kept saying my own name, “Angel,” saying it over
and over so I could hear its echo, until eventually I heard the whispery voice speaking all on its own.

It was her. It was Angela. She was speaking to me, calling from the dark.

“Angel.”

I waited.

“Angel, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” I answered, “I can hear you. I’m here, I’m in the dark with you.” I scanned the cloud of black in front of me. But
my eyes might as well have been closed. “Where are you?” I asked. “Tell me where you —”

“I’ve been waiting for you,”
Angela said.
“Waiting.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You said you would rescue me.”
It was the same faint voice she had used on the phone, hushed, fearful.
“You told me you would come for me, that you would find me, that you would come.”

I got up and moved around the room, fingertips tracing the smooth walls, a hand reaching unsteadily in front of me. “I know,”
I said. “I’m looking for you. I’m looking everywhere. I’ll find you, I promise. It’s just —”

“It’s so dark,”
Angela said.
“Angel, it’s so dark in here.”

“Don’t be afraid,” I begged, my arms reaching out. “Please, Angela, don’t be afraid.”

“I’m so alone,”
she said.
“Where are you?”
Her voice was growing fainter, as if she were slipping away.

“No,” I told the darkness. “I’m here. Every second, Angela,” I said, “I’m here with you. I just can’t —”

“Angel,”
she said,
“what is the darkest place?”
Her voice was almost completely gone now, barely audible at all.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean. Please, Angela —”

Then the door opened like a rock that had been rolled away from a sepulcher, and a Brazilian security guard said something
in bewildering Portuguese.

Lying on the floor, the side of my face pressed to the concrete, I looked up at him. He waved toward the hallway outside,
and with some difficulty I pushed myself up and stepped into the light. He dragged me by the arm through the brightness of
the corridor, then eased me out the back, releasing me in the tropical night air like a trout thrown back into a stream.

It was night.

I realized now that I had been somewhere inside the concert hall. After knocking me out, Joey probably didn’t want to bother
with the local police and had me locked up to keep me out of the way.

I walked past the trucks and the ImmanuelKantLern tour bus without looking back and found myself after five quick minutes
in the very center of Rio. It had rained, a tropical burst, and the streets and sidewalks shone slickly, reflecting the gleaming
traffic lights. The buildings leaned toward me as though in a German Expressionist painting. I had become off-balance, and
the sounds of the city were distant, incomplete. My neck, arms, and face had been burned in the afternoon sun, and I was dizzy
from hunger, starving because I hadn’t eaten anything since those two little cookies at the café. I wanted to go back to the
hotel, but wasn’t sure if I was headed in the right direction, and at first I tried to use the sound of the ocean to guide
me.

It was somewhere to my right, I was certain.

No, wait, it was ahead of me.

Fuck.
I should have found a taxi at the concert hall, but now it was too far behind to go back. I turned down one small street
after another.

Where was I?

On either side were apartment buildings, windows flickering like the eyes of jack-o-lanterns. The streets seemed to be getting
denser, smaller, with no main avenues presenting themselves.

Then I saw him. “Hey!” I shouted.

I couldn’t believe it. Walking up ahead of me, his head down… there was no doubt about it.

He turned to look at me but kept walking, increasing his pace.

“Hey!” I said again, and took off after him.

What the fuck was he doing all the way down here?

I started to run, and he started to run, too. I followed him half a block before he turned down a narrow alley and disappeared
into the shadows.

I ran through the alley and came out on the other side, panting. Where did he go?

Then I saw him just beside me. He was crouched down, hiding in some bushes, waiting for me to pass.

I stepped forward, acting like I didn’t see him, then jumped into the bushes and grabbed him by the collar. He thrashed against
me, but I was able to pin him down.

“Who are you?” I said. “Why are you following me?”

The man in the gray suit didn’t answer, staring back at me with terrified eyes.

“Why are you looking for Angela?” I said. “Tell me.”

“Please,” the man said with a heavy accent. “Please.”

I reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out his wallet. Flipping it open, I saw an I.D. card of some kind,
as well as credit cards from the Bank of Brazil, and even what appeared to be a local bus pass.

This was just some Brazilian man, I realized. Just as Angela had been replaced by a stranger, so had the man in the gray suit.

I got up.

He rose, wary, brushing himself off.

I handed him his wallet. “I’m sorry,” I said.

I didn’t know what else to say. I had just attacked a complete stranger.

He backed away then, pushing through the bushes, and hurried down the street. He would be looking for a cop, no doubt, and
no one would be easier to identify than a red-shirted albino in the streets of Rio.

I hurried under a cover of trees, kicking the dead leaves of succulents beneath my feet. I had to get back to the hotel, I
thought, to make my way back to the airport, to get the hell out of this country. I turned one corner, then another, looking
for something that would lead me to a street where I could find a taxi. Finally, I saw what I thought might be a wider avenue
up ahead.

But within seconds I was against a wall, the serrated blade of a kitchen knife pressed hard against my throat.

They had come out of the shadows like thugs in a movie, one of them tossing his cigarette to the side, the other with a hand
seemingly idle in his pocket. Right now one of them — he couldn’t have been older than fourteen — tore through my pockets,
quickly finding my wallet. He spoke rapidly, in an unidentifiable dialect, but I clearly understood his amazement at discovering
the thousands of dollars in there. I had given a lot of that money away by now, but there was still plenty left. Christ. It
was so fucking dumb. What the hell was I doing, carrying all that cash in the middle of the night in Rio de Janeiro? It was
textbook stupidity. The kid with the knife to my throat wore a studied maniacal look. He tilted his head so I could see the
psychotic whites of his eyes. It was deliberate, I knew, meant to provoke the greatest possible fear, and a director would
have said it was over the top.

Then, for some reason, I became absorbed by the interference pattern of a street lamp shining across the park. There was a
row of thick trees there, and behind them two sources of light. One was a chemical yellow, the other a bright white neon.
The two beams of illumination overlapped. They didn’t blend, exactly. Instead, one seemed to occlude the other, and inside
the area of interfering light was a fascinating pattern of oblongs and crescents, an effect physicists call a moray.

The scene was lit. The cameras, I imagined, were rolling. I waited for the director to yell “Cut!” and for my muggers to ask
if it had all been too much.

“No, no,” Ridley would say. “That was perfect, absolutely terrific. But let’s do it again just to be safe.”

I felt the blade of the knife pressing harder against my throat, and the whole time, I kept my eyes on the intersecting patterns
of light. This is just a scene, I told myself. This is merely a moment in a movie. Ridley and his crew were right over there,
concealed by the darkness, hiding behind their equipment. Not coincidentally, I began to think of an experiment Isaac Newton
had conducted with knives. Newton, at least in regard to physical optics, is associated more than anything with the prismatic
decomposition of white light. In one historic experiment, he created a wedge-shaped slit with two blades. Then he shone a
beam of light through the slit. On a white piece of paper a few feet away, he created a diffraction pattern. Light, he learned,
curves
around an object, it doesn’t move in the perfectly straight line that common sense dictates; instead, it curves the same
way ocean waves curve around a rock.