Los Angeles (7 page)

“All you’ve got is a missing woman,” I said sarcastically.

“All
you’ve
got is a missing woman. All we’ve got is someone who says he received a phone call. You have to understand,” the skinny cop
said, “we get these crazy calls all night.” He was still taking his hat off and pushing his hair back, over and over and over.
“There’s no evidence that anything happened. There’s nothing to even lead us to that conclusion. Anyway,” he added, “it looks
to me like she may have hit the highway.”

“She would have told me.”

“How well do you know her?”

“What do you mean?” I rubbed my hands over my face.

“You said she’s your girlfriend, I mean —”

Trip laughed. “He doesn’t even know her last name.”

“Anyone around here you could ask?”

“Why don’t you wait until morning,” the skinny one said, “ask your neighbors. Maybe someone knows something.”

We stood by the door for a long, awkward moment. “You know there’s a show on TV about a guy named Angel who lives in Los Angeles?”
Trip said finally.

I shook my head. “I don’t watch much television.”

“He’s a vampire.”

As they walked down the stairwell, I heard him, Trip, the cop I had been thinking of as the intelligent one, say, “Jesus,
Mike, we meet some weirdos out here, but
that
guy —”

______

I sat down heavily at my desk, the chair squeaking against my weight. I wanted to piece together what remained, what was left
of Angela in memory, but there were only fragments, scraps of dialogue, out-of-focus images. I had confessed so much, traveled
over so much emotional terrain and in such a short amount of time, and now when I considered what I really knew about her,
I realized that she had told me almost nothing. It was all contradictions, prevarications, meaningless chatter. She had no
past, not even a last name. We had been lying on the floor of my apartment, talking, kissing, drinking, eating pills. Her
mouth had been moving, and words had been spilling out of it like rainwater from the mouth of a gargoyle, but what those words
meant was slipping away. I tried to sort out what was true, what was untrue, what had been simple exaggeration, what were
lies. I tried to pin down in memory what practical clues I had to go on, what she really had given me that might be meaningful,
and found myself at a loss.

“Angel?”
Angela had said.

It was the voice of a person calling from inside the deepest ventricle of the blackest heart of an infinitely terrifying universe,
and it was all I had left of her.

From here I could see into the kitchen, all the way to the blue numbers on the coffeemaker. It had become five-thirty-five
in the morning somehow.

I automatically got up to take one of my twice-daily doses of Reality but paused to read the warning label. I had read it
a million times before, of course, but right now, I was trying to notice things, trying desperately to stay alert. This was
the drug I was expected to take every day, once in the morning, once in the evening, the crystal-shaped green pills that came
with no immediate sensation other than a benign loss of imagination. This was the maintenance drug, with side effects that
included “dry mouth, irritability, problems urinating, memory loss.” Lately, I had been missing days. Since Angela had begun
coming over, I had been skipping it because when I took it, nothing ever happened, there was no sensory effect, nothing seemed
to change except that it banished me to a colorless present tense. To be perfectly honest, I’ve always preferred the kind
of drugs that bring a little something extra to the party.

Besides, right now I needed a clear mind. I needed my thoughts. My memory, weakened though it was by years of chemical abuse,
was all I had to go on.

I put the bottle back down and swallowed a half cup of bourbon instead, then went back to sit at the computer again.

At a certain point, I felt the light of the sun curving around the horizon. All the blinds were drawn, yet the apartment was
growing brighter.

That’s because even in the darkest of circumstances, the light finds its way in. Photons force their way one particle at a
time, if they have to. In a closet, for instance, or a dark room, a sliver of light will appear around the door, a gray line
that, over time, will become to the person hiding there like a razor of illumination.

Try it. Turn out the lights.

A room that was formerly black will gradually become gray, and shapes will appear, eventually shadows will form.

The
picture,
I thought.

Of course. I had taken a photograph.

Surrounding my computers were stacks of junk mail, illegible notes on my screenplay, and old unfilled prescription slips.
Frantically, I searched through the clutter until I found the thick envelope I had picked up a week ago at the one-hour photo
place.

My hands were shaking as I sifted through them.

The first photo was of a house, an ordinary one-story dwelling in the Valley with a red-tiled roof, a lavender bougainvillea
half in bloom. The next one was of the same house at night, the windows glowing like bug lamps over a darkened lawn. I stared
at it but did not remember taking this photograph. Here was a brown-haired woman inserting a key into the door of a gray-morning-mist
Ford Taurus. She was thin, with limp hair that hung halfway down her back, wearing a canvas tote bag over her shoulder. Behind
her, sunlight perforated the trees of a parking lot like a thousand prismatic needles piercing a veil. There were other pictures,
too, photos of the same woman walking through a long, linoleum corridor. Here she emerged from a Hallmark store. In this one,
she entered a gray institutional building.

I had no recollection of taking any of these pictures. Maybe there had been a mistake at the processing place, I thought,
and these photos belonged to someone else.

But then I came to the last one.

It was Angela all right, sneering into the lens, her face completely out of focus, offering that petulant middle finger.

Okay, I thought. That’s a start.

In the bedroom, I slipped out of my robe and into a pair of black cargo pants and a black shirt, the same uniform I had worn
to the Velvet Mask a couple of weeks ago. It was morning now, and I noticed through the kitchen window that the sky outside
had turned the color of that scary Buddha’s tie, silvery gray, with an argentine glow originating from the east. A heavy smog
had lowered, too, and it seemed like the city itself wore that old charcoal-colored robe of mine.

I stepped next door into Angela’s apartment and found that the cops, thankfully, had left the door unlocked. I was thinking
there must be
something
with her full name on it somewhere… an envelope, an old credit-card receipt, a magazine. I took a look around the living
room. There was the blue love seat, the cheap rattan table and aluminum folding chairs, the matching rocker. Nothing. I went
into the bathroom. The medicine cabinet contained a single bottle of Motrin, nothing else. The sink featured a red toothbrush
and a tube of Crest. In a kitchen drawer, I found a set of cheap utensils, newly bought, but nothing useful. On the counter
was Julia Child’s
The Way to Cook.
I flipped it open, and it automatically settled on the recipe for lamb stew. There was a gravy stain on the list of ingredients,
a splash of savory brown obscuring the words. I looked in the trash and found an empty carton of orange juice, a few paper
napkins, and finally — yes,
this
was what I was looking for — way at the bottom, a couple of envelopes.

One was just an offer for a credit card and was addressed to someone named
Jessica Teagarden,
indicating a street in Santa Monica called Orange Blossom Boulevard. The other envelope, turquoise blue, greeting card-size,
bore the same Santa Monica address and said
Jessica
in blocky handwriting. It had been torn open, and whatever it had contained, like Angela herself, was gone.

Jessica Teagarden—was that her name? So why would she tell me it was Angela?

I couldn’t be completely sure if this Jessica person was really Angela, or if someone named Jessica had simply been over and
used Angela’s trash can, but it was the only thing I had to go on. She had gone by the name Cassandra at the Mask, I reasoned,
so maybe Angela was just another alias. Or perhaps Jessica was just someone Angela knew, a friend who had been over to visit,
another girl who danced at the club, and maybe
she
knew where Angela was.

I went back into my own apartment and grabbed an amber cylinder containing pink, oval-shaped anti-social phobia meds from
the kitchen counter. I’d need a whole handful of these, I thought. Christ knew what I might encounter out there in the light.

______

Minutes later, I was squinting directly into it, the harsh sun flashing off the gleaming metallic paint and glittery chrome
automotive accents on the 10. I was feeling that rush, the surge of medication kicking in, chemicals being rerouted, synapses
suppressed, that smooth adjustment to my jagged psyche. I was thinking about what had happened to Angela. I had imagined an
enclosed, dark space, her body sealed inside it, and then I remembered the way her hands felt on my chest, those sharp, glittery
nails scratching the outlines of imaginary figures over my skin. I wondered irrationally if she had been spelling out a message
of some kind, if she had been trying to tell me something.

I was looking straight into the bumper-to-bumper traffic, the brutal glare resonating off the metallic cars, when the girl
in the Honda in front of me adjusted her rearview mirror and flashed a vicious reflection. And there it was. I rubbed my eyes
for a few seconds, hoping it would go away, but it was still there, just a dot at this point, a minuscule speck of shine in
my field of vision.

The aura.

It wasn’t composed of glowing colors like the brilliant red, yellow, and orange Angela had described, and there was nothing
karmic or spiritual about it, believe me. This was a migraine aura, an amoeba-like shimmering thing that appears directly
in my field of vision and heralds an oncoming migraine. It usually appears after I’ve inadvertently looked straight into a
bright light—the brighter the light, the bigger the amoeba, the bigger the amoeba, the more painful the migraine.

I knew that within a half hour, it would grow and the pain would ascend, bringing with it a dull throb behind my left eye
that eventually would become a cutting blade of luminous torture, that eventually ripples of nausea would undulate through
me, gathering strength until they became tidal cascades. I would taste that gush of warm saliva at the back of my mouth and
then experience the unquiet, queasy feeling of needing to get it out, a Stouffer’s frozen dinner entree, generally, or microwavable
French bread pizza, whatever it was, to get it the flying fuck out of my body. I could look forward to spastic convulsions,
puking until there was no longer any food in my stomach and all that was left was acidic, green bile, some of it squirting
out of my nose.

I didn’t know if I should turn around and try to make it back to my apartment or pull over and try to ride it out. I’d spent
more than one afternoon lying in the back of Mom’s old Cadillac, stretched on its smelly rear seat, parked in the shade, a
T-shirt covering my face to keep out the invading light. Right now, I took the first exit and pulled over behind a strip mall.
It was almost noon, and the sun, having burned away the smog that blanketed the city, blazed angrily through a hazy sky like
the eye of an Old Testament God.

Why hadn’t I brought my sunglasses? It was unlike me, jumping into the car without thinking. Usually I was so careful when
I went outside. Usually I wore long sleeves, a baseball cap, and the darkest shades possible, with glare-resistant, polarized,
ultraviolet filtering lenses. I checked in the glove compartment to see if I had left a pair in there but found nothing. I
picked through the empty soda cups and fast-food wrappers on the floor of the passenger side. Nothing there, either. I explored
under the front seat with my hand and felt something complex.

Aha.

A pair of Mom’s old enormous, octagonal, pink-tinted, tortoise shells. How long had they been down there? Years, probably,
since the car had been hers, which also demonstrated how long it had been since the floor had been vacuumed. They were prescription,
unfortunately. My own eyes, despite their photophobic sensitivity to brightness, were spared most of the usual problems associated
with albinism and are close enough to twenty-twenty that they don’t require prescription lenses. My mother, on the other hand,
was practically blind.

I slipped them on, seeing the world, ridiculously enough, through rose-colored lenses.

My mother’s migraines have always been worse than mine, too, if you can believe it, and hers can happen almost anytime, regardless
of whether she is looking into the light. She closes her eyes and a vibration ripples across her forehead as though someone
dipped an imaginary finger into the surface of her skin. I can see it instantly, the pain building there. She affects a weak
smile, lights a Benson & Hedges 100, and starts massaging her temples, stroking her eyelids with her French-manicured nails.
Sometimes the pain strikes her instantaneously, like an invisible knife has soared down from the heavens and stabbed her in
the back of the head. By the look on her face and the way she moves, a hand flying to her face, a violent jerk away to the
right, it seems like she has been hit by a bullet. Every now and then she actually faints.

When I was old enough, I’d say, “Mom, why don’t you lie down?”

She’d sigh, telling me it was nothing, that it would “go away in a sec.”

“Mom,” I’d say, “they never go away.”

Sometimes she’d yield, but mostly she’d try to stay in the light until the nausea overtook her and I had to escort her to
the bathroom. At least twice a month for my entire childhood, I’d spend half an hour outside her bathroom door, wherever we
happened to be staying at the time, listening to my mother’s breakfast of grapefruit and black coffee gush into the toilet.
She went to doctors about it for years, had taken every conceivable medication, including ergotamine, ephedrine, beta blockers,
and Imitrex, not to mention phenobarbital, Percocet, and Fiorinal, plus acupressure and biofeedback therapy. But nothing ever
worked. When she came out of the bathroom, she would be as pale as me, saying, invariably, “Angel, I have to lie down.” She
required absolute silence at that point, and if we were staying in a hotel, I would call the front desk and ask if the maids
could please be quiet in the hallways.