Los Angeles (31 page)

“She said you became jealous, that she was teasing you, and you —”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

He went on, describing events that had supposedly happened between the night Angela took me night swimming on that downtown
rooftop and the morning she disappeared, describing things I hadn’t been able to bring myself to remember:

At first she had thought I was just a lonely eccentric, and she had even been attracted to me. She really had come over to
apologize for the noise. She really had grown to like me. But then I had become possessive, even scary, and had begun to follow
her around Los Angeles. I broke into her apartment. I went through her trash, sought out and questioned her old neighbors.

“No,” I told Silowicz, “that was all
after
she disappeared. I was
looking
for her.”

“Angel,” he said gravely, “that was
before
… that was all before.”

“But Angela is dead, anyway,” I told Silowicz. “Lester killed her.”

Silowicz shook his head, making an apology out of his old, broken face — smiling eyes, a frowning mouth. “She had contacted
Frank. She begged him to get you to leave her alone. You had stopped taking your proper medication, and you weren’t seeing
things as they truly were.” He paused, allowing almost too much time before using the strangest expression: “You scared the
daylights out of her.”

The daylights.

What Dr. Silowicz was saying made terrifying sense.

Everything here at Saint Michael’s Psychiatric Center made terrifying, scientific sense.

I looked at my spring-loaded sneakers. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“We didn’t want to upset you,” Silowicz answered. “Your father, especially, he didn’t want to —”

“Like waking a sleepwalker.”

“Right.” My psychiatrist smiled benignly. “An excellent metaphor, Angel, as always… like waking a sleepwalker.”

“What about the note?”

“You wrote that note, Angel.” Silowicz touched his fingers together and leaned forward in his plastic chair. “You wrote quite
a lot of things.” He leaned down to his old brown leather briefcase, which was resting beside his old brown leather feet,
and pulled out a manuscript. I recognized it immediately, the most recent draft of
Los Angeles,
printed on electromagnetic blue paper. “It’s all here,” Silowicz said, handing it to me.

I flipped open to the first page.

“FADE IN,” it said. “EXT. SUNRISE OVER THE CITY.”

Silowicz exhaled. “It’s the story of an albino son of a famous movie producer who falls in love with the girl who moves in
down the hall,” he said. “In the first scene, she brings him a pot of lamb stew.”

I scanned the type.

INT. HALLWAY — AFTERNOON

A BLACK GIRL
in her late twenties, relatively tall, with long straightened hair colored an unnatural reddish blond, she wears jeans, a
Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. Her feet are bare, her toe-nails painted a glittery green metallic. Her eyes are blue.

I turned the pages, reading ahead.

Angel opens the envelope. A stack of
HUNDRED-DOLLAR BILLS
falls in slow motion onto the floor.

CU on note as Angel reads:

When you’re gone I disappear.

When I see you I am resurrected

Dr. Silowicz sighed. “That money was an advance on one of your credit cards, Angel. That’s why Frank hired that private investigator
to follow you. You had been spending large sums of cash and he wanted to know where it was all going.”

“The man in gray,” I said.

Silowicz nodded. “That’s what you call him in the screenplay, though you seemed to think he had a much more menacing purpose.
He followed you to that topless bar.”

I shook my head. “What do you mean?”

“There was a dancer. I never spoke to her directly, but the name she used at the club was Cassandra. According to Frank, you
met her through an escort service… she came to your apartment and you found out she worked there, and you started… well,
you stalked her, too.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “She was a different—”

“She was a completely different young woman, Angel.” Silowicz nodded. “She wasn’t even the same person at all. But it seems
you were stalking her, too.”

I looked into Silowicz’s stubbly, gray face and pictured that waitress I had questioned at the Mask. This was so long ago
now, and the memory was already like old videotape, but I recalled the way she had been so friendly the first time, so evasive
the next. I remembered her furtive glances to the silhouetted figure in the yellow window.

“A different actress in the same role,” I whispered.

“An interesting way to look at it.” Silowicz paused, then added, “And that man, the one who worked there—”

“Lester?”

“Lester,” Silowicz nodded. “It was horrible, what he said… the incinerator, the cremation. But he knew you had been bothering
the dancers, and… well, he hoped it might scare you away.”

“I saw her.”

“What’s that?”

“In Rio. That must have been her, but I didn’t… didn’t recognize her.” I touched my face. Tears. I was crying again.

Fuck.

Finding these memories through the haze of my psyche was like looking for a single tear in a hail of rain.

“So none of these things really happened?”

“It all happened,” Silowicz said, “just not the way you apparently remember. I get the impression that you wrote some of these
scenes ahead of time, then acted them out, and that some of them were sort of… adapted after the fact.” He sighed. “And there
are some beautifully rendered moments.” He moved his head slightly back and forth in appreciation. “When she goes next door
for the hyacinths? Gorgeous, Angel. Really.” Then he winked. “Though I think I recognize a little T. S. Eliot in there.”

As Dr. Silowicz said these things, some of these memories came back. I remembered going to a cash machine and taking fistfuls
of money to the Mask. I remembered sitting down at my computer and typing out dialogue, lighting directions, scene descriptions,
printing out the pages on that electromagnetic blue paper. I even remembered placing that note on the doorstep of Jessica’s
old duplex and then pretending to find it again a few days later. I had been going through the motions of a scripted drama,
obviously, a plot I had worked out with screenwriting software.

That’s why I kept thinking there was a film crew around every corner. Because it
was
a film.

“I stepped across,” I said under my breath. I had found a world, I realized, in which all that had happened was only fiction.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.” I looked up. “Nothing.” All of this had once been real, absolutely real — but I stepped into another world.

Silowicz smiled beneficently. “All human beings create their own realities, to some degree. Yours just happened to be more
vivid than most.” The way he said that was almost proud. “You had everyone so worried.” Silowicz shook his head. “And that
poor kid—”

“What kid?”

“Victor Whitehead. His mother is threatening to sue over what you did to him.”

I tried to think back. I remembered his bedroom, trying to get Victor to recall something about Angela. “What did I do?” I
started flipping through the screenplay.

“You forced him to stare into a lightbulb,” Silowicz answered. “There could have been permanent damage to his retinas if you
had made him do it for much longer. But even more significantly, the little guy was traumatized.”

“Her name, Angela, why did she tell me—”

“She never told you her name was Angela. That was just another part of your script.” He breathed heavily through his nostrils.
“We checked your phone records and saw that you had been contacting… well, you were using an escort service…” I could see
a flicker of embarrassment in his eyes when Dr. Silowicz said, “Frank did some asking around, and apparently you insisted
that all the escorts call themselves by that name.”

I fell silent.

Softly, he cleared his throat. “I think a way to look at it is… is that you split apart, in a manner of speaking, into a light
and dark, male and female, the two sides of your nature. In order to reconnect your two halves, you created this… Angela
character, an image you projected onto these women” — he sighed — “most unfortunately onto your neighbor, Jessica Teagarden.”

I remembered all those different-colored eyes.

I realized now it was because they were the eyes of different women.

“You were trying to get back together, I guess, trying to reintegrate all of those opposing impulses, like the polar opposites
of two magnets.”

I didn’t have an answer for this. I didn’t know what to say. “That’s why I didn’t recognize her in Rio.”

Silowicz nodded. “I believe at that point, you were starting to differentiate. You must have recognized Cassandra for who
she truly was and not as this projected Angela character.”

“A character,” I repeated.

“They’re all characters in your story,” Silowicz said. “Even me.”

“But she’s alive, right? Jessica Teagarden, she’s alive?”

“Yes, Angel,” Silowicz answered drily. “Jessica Teagarden is alive and well.”

“How does it end?” I asked.

“You wrote it yourself — don’t you remember?”

“No.”

He put his hands on his knees and started to rise from his chair. “Why don’t you read it, then?”

______

In the original theatrical release of
Blade Runner,
Rick Deckard escapes from Los Angeles with Rachael. She is a replicant, of course, created by the Tyrell Corporation, but
hasn’t been given an expiration date. The two of them are seen flying in a hover car over verdant mountains, escaping to some
perfect world of undivided natural light. The scene is set to a melancholy yet triumphal score.

That is one ending, anyway.

In the director’s cut, which is the version I had permanently lodged in the DVD player of my San Raphael Crescent cave, there
is a different ending entirely: Deckard discovers Rachael waiting for him in his apartment. He could kill her, or
retire
her, in the parlance of the movie, but of course he doesn’t. Instead, he takes her by the hand into the elevator. The final
shot is a freeze-frame, and it is unclear to the viewer if Rick and Rachael will even make it out of the building alive, unclear
who is human or even what human is.

Some have even suggested that Deckard was a replicant, too. Recently, in fact, Ridley Scott admitted that he was.

I sat in my little white room at Saint Michael’s Psychiatric and read my whole screenplay straight through to the end.

The last line of
Los Angeles
describes Angela inside Lester’s cremator, fumbling for her cell phone.

She hears my voice answering, “Hello?”

“Angel?”
she says, as the flames engulf her.

I put down the blue draft of the screenplay I had written and felt the credits rolling on my own science-fiction movie.

Picture a contemplative shot of my white face apprehending a dazzling southern California sun from the window of Saint Michael’s
Psychiatric. Picture an ever-widening helicopter shot of the Greater Los Angeles area, the other lives it implies, the other
stories unfolding.… Picture the screen going black, the lights coming back on, everyone in the theater getting up to leave…

I
N THE MORNING THE LOS ANGELES SUN ROLLS OVER THE DUSTY
San Gabriel Mountains and snores through a gray-brown smog that drapes the city like a dirty sheet. When the smog lifts and
the sun crawls out, hungover, its eyes swollen, its hair a mess, it takes a few moments for its daily ablutions, then puts
on its gaudiest, most audacious costume — it becomes Louis the XVI, Amen-Ra, and Vegas Elvis all rolled into one. It wears
brass buckles, gold rings, and a glittering necklace hung with pendants of BMWs, Mercedes, and Porsches.

If you turn your eyes to the Los Angeles sun on the freeway, it flashes a gold-toothed smile and twists its frosted hair with
a silvery pink fingernail. Call me later, it mouths. It has to run. It doesn’t have time to talk. Its people are waiting.
The commercial directors, television show producers, and studio cinematographers, they’re all out at this early hour, waiting
for it to arrive like a white limo at a movie premiere, their eyes squinting, their weather-worn faces crinkly and lined,
and the L.A. sun has gotten up just for them.

Throughout the afternoon, it rises, glorious, arrogant, demanding its juice, its trailer, its retinue of assistants and grips.

But when the day ends, the Los Angeles sun flashes its satin cape and beams for all the attention it has received throughout
the day.
Good night,
it says like a lounge singer leaving the stage, giving us one last flamboyant bow, its voice velvety and its eyes misty with
sentiment.
Good night.

Good night, sweet ladies, good night.

Meanwhile, the L.A. dark, sheathed in blue denim and black leather, has been waiting out in the parking lot, smoking a filterless
Camel. It leans back against the hood of a convertible and watches the starry sky, seeing but not seeing, like a
noir
detective. It doesn’t give a shit. It looks straight through you. If you try to approach it, it just shakes its head and
looks the other way.

Don’t bother me,
it says.
In fact, fuck off.
It doesn’t want your attention. It doesn’t need you and it never did. Who is it waiting for? Someone else. Someone more interesting
than you.

And then it disappears with your girlfriend.

W
HEN I STEPPED INTO MY NEW BEDROOM AT MY FATHER’S
house, I found that my entire belongings, everything I owned — books, compact discs, clothes, even my stacks of colored paper
— all of it had been removed from my apartment in West Hollywood and brought here. “We’re going to spend time together,” my
father said, “you and me and Melanie and Gabriel.” He coughed one of his rumbling coughs, an old man’s cough, and led me into
a bedroom. “You’re going to stay with us, and of course you can come and go as you please, day and night, and not worry about
anything.” Then he added what was supposed to be a humorous afterthought. “But you can’t leave the country.”