“My name …”
“What?” he said, coming out of his fugue.
“My name is Austin Lively. I called you.”
It took a moment, but this got through. He remembered. He nodded with great seriousness, as if it were some deep truth he had just comprehended.
“Oh. Oh yeah. Yeah,” he said. “Austin Lively.”
He took a staggering sideways step. It brought him to one of the deck chairs. He flumped down into it, draining his tumbler even as he went so that the ice rattled against the plastic.
“Three Days in Forever,” he growled.
I don’t know what he could have said that would have surprised me more. That was the name of my script, the script I’d written while I was still in film school, the one that got optioned and then destroyed in what screenwriters call Development Hell.
“You read it?” I said. I couldn’t keep the astonishment out of my voice.
“I read everything,” he said, draining his tumbler again, just for show this time, just for the gesture.
He leaned forward in his chair and snagged the whiskey bottle off its table. Dumped some whiskey in his tumbler. Then put the bottle back and plucked some ice from the bucket and plopped that in the tumbler too.
“Help yourself,” he said.
The only other tumbler was the purple one by the bucket. It had lipstick on the rim: the hooker’s glass.
“No, thanks,” I said. “Why did you read my script?”
“I told you. I read everything. Trying to remember how it’s done,” he added with morose self-pity. He drank. “It was good. Your script. You’re good.”
“Thanks.” It seemed stupid to feel pleased by the praise of a guy like this, but I was. It had been a long time since my last compliment.
“Another Kingdom,” he went on, leaning forward with his elbows on his thighs and his tumbler in his two hands, speaking down between his parted knees to the patio slates. “That’s why you’re here, right? Another Kingdom.”
I was surprised again—and excited now too. Because it felt like I was getting somewhere, that I was on the right track. He knew who I was, why I was here—he must know something more about what was happening to me, right?
“That’s right,” I said.
“Ellen Evermore,” he said. He spoke the author’s name in a wistful, faraway tone, smiling sadly to himself.
“Yes,” I said. “Another Kingdom by Ellen Evermore.”
He was already stretching back in the chair, reaching into the pocket of his white slacks, dragging out his phone. Woozily, swaying where he sat with the effects of the drink, he worked the keys with one hand. Then he held the phone out to me, dropping back hard in his chair when I took it, as if the effort had exhausted him.
I looked at the phone, at the photograph on the screen. Ellen Evermore. And now, suddenly, I understood this whole scene I’d wandered into.
The picture was a candid, taken in what looked like a museum. She was turning to face the camera, turning away from the wall where there hung a painting of a primitive muscleman clothed in fur with a woman on either side of him. Gunther must’ve called to her and taken the picture when she turned. She was smiling slightly, the way a woman does when she catches you admiring her, you know, and she’s pleased but she wants to scold you a little, too, to show her modesty, how silly you’re being. She had a nice face, a hell of a nice face actually. Not beautiful, not like a model or a movie star is beautiful, but there was something about it. It came right out of the picture at you. You could tell: this was somebody. A personage. A whole woman. Young, thirty at the most, but with a sort of serenity and firmness and humor about her—in her eyes, at the corners of her mouth—that made her seem older than her years. You could see she was kind and feminine and gentle, same as you could with Jane Janeway when you looked at her. But she had this authority too. That also made her seem older. Like she had seen things and was honest about what she’d seen and it had made her quiet and wise.
Anyway, I noticed all this, and I noticed she had a fine figure, not skinny and muscular like a lot of girls these days, but full and soft in a modest, old-fashioned dress of royal blue. Most of all I noticed—I couldn’t miss—her hair. Her hairstyle. Because it was the same ’do the hooker had had, her golden hair piled high and interwoven. Of course, the elegant style of it was more suited to Ellen Evermore because you could tell she was elegant all through to her soul, but in its particulars, it was the same as the hooker’s. So that explained what Sean Gunther had hired the streetwalker for, and it explained the crap he was spewing when I walked in, that one girl was the same as another, that one could stand in for all. Trying to convince himself, I guess. The poor bastard.
I handed the phone back to him. “Nice,” I said.
He took the phone and studied the picture himself. And you know how sometimes you can see a man’s whole history on his face? It was like that then with Gunther. The big first novel, the early fame, the wrong choices that grew out of his own personality and the disappointments that grew out of his choices—and the drugs and booze—and finally this, this loss, Ellen, symbolic of all the other losses and capping all the rest and leaving him to live out the down-swirling pattern of his now-indelible character: you could see it all right there.
“Eh,” he said finally, as if none of it mattered, as if who cared about Ellen Evermore or any damn thing. He stuffed the phone back in his pocket and went after his tumbler hungrily. Then he dropped back in his chair again. “She read my book,” he said. He said it as if he was recalling a distant dream of youth.
“A Thousand Pages of Self-Referential Drivel.”
He nodded—to himself more than me. “That’s why she came. She read my book. Just showed up at my door one day. Looking like that, like what she looked like. With one of those big purses, satchel purses, on her arm. She had her own book in there. Another Kingdom. She had it printed up with this whole elaborate binding …”
He went into another fugue state, remembering, maybe daydreaming. His eyes fluttered as if he might fall asleep right then and there. The booze, you know. It was getting to him.
I tried to keep him going. “She wanted you to read it,” I said. “Right? Young author. Admired your work, and she wanted you to read hers.”
“Happens,” he barely managed to say. “Now and then. Still, sometimes.” He took a deep breath through his nose. It seemed to revive him. He straightened a little in his chair. “You read a page or two, you screw ’em, then you talk some shit about the writing life. They feel encouraged and go away. You know.”
I nodded. I didn’t know actually, but it was easy enough to imagine.
The author’s expression turned inward again. He stared into low space. “She wouldn’t though.”
“Wouldn’t … go away?”
“Screw.” He snorted. “I thought they all screwed nowadays, the young girls. I thought that was the whole point of them.”
I laughed. The guy was so much himself, you sort of had to. “Did you read the book?” I asked him.
He shrugged. Took another slug of booze. “Couple of pages. Enough to get her to do me. Then when she wouldn’t …” He shrugged again.
“So she left?”
Gunther frowned. Shook his head. “No. I mean, yes. But she came back every day. To read.”
“Sorry?”
“My …” He pointed vaguely to the house with his tumbler-free hand. “My stuff. My … whatever … collection. She came every day. Every morning. She …” He gestured weakly with the tumbler, looking for the right phrase. Or not the right phrase, I think. Something more vague than that, something that wouldn’t tell as much truth as the right phrase would have. In the end I think he just gave up and came out with it, truth and all. “She took care of me.” I could imagine that too. Her cleaning the vomit and piss off him after he drank himself stupid. Feeding him. Bringing him back to some semblance of his squandered humanity. No wonder he fell in love with her. “Then … she read. My
… stuff, my … collection. That’s how she found you.”
That stopped me. I felt the excitement again, that sense again that I was getting somewhere. I needed a second or two to think it all through, but I could see I didn’t have much time. Gunther’s eyes were sinking shut again. He was going to pass out, and soon.
“She found me,” I repeated, trying to keep him on task while I figured it out.
“Three Days in Forever.”
I was thinking as fast as I could, trying to put it all together before I lost him. Ellen Evermore had read Gunther’s book and had thought he would understand Another Kingdom. But when she got to him, she found this ruin, this self-pitying drunk of a lost soul, wasting himself in cynical dissipation, unable to understand anything beyond pleasure and pain. So she started to read … what? His collection, whatever that was. Maybe a collection of writers he admired. The writers he studied to—what was the phrase he’d used when I first came in?—to try to remember how it was done. Looking for someone else who might understand. She’d found my script and …
“She wanted to send her book to me,” I said. “She liked my script, and she wanted me to read her novel.”
He barely had the strength to speak anymore, but he nodded.
I raised my voice, trying to rouse him. “What happened then? You looked me up. You found I was at Mythos.” Again he nodded, his head listing to one side, his mouth slack, drool collecting at the corner of his lips. “So you submitted the book to me through your friend at Mythos, Henry Quint. For her. Not yourself. You did it for her.” Now even nodding seemed to be too much for him. “What happened then?” I asked him, nearly shouting to try to wake him up. “Why did you withdraw it? Or was it her? If she wanted me to read it, why did she withdraw it? Mr. Gunther …”
I actually stepped forward then, actually gripped his shoulder and shook him. It made his eyes fly wide. He struggled to sit up straight. He looked up at me where I stood over him as if he was startled to find me there.
“Mr. Gunther, why did she withdraw it?” I asked again. “Do you have a copy? Do you know where Ellen Evermore is now?”
His answer came out slurred to the edge of incomprehensibility. “… lobal.”
“What?”
He tried again. “Left me … disappeared … Global …”
With that, the plastic yellow tumbler fell from his slack fingers. It clattered onto the patio, spitting a stain of whiskey onto the slates, spilling a few melting chunks of ice. Gunther’s head fell forward, and he started snoring heavily, unconscious.
I SHOOK HIM again, but it was no use. He was all gone. I stood there, looking around me, at the glittering pool water and the glittering city lights below and the glittering stars beyond. I sighed, frustrated.
Then I decided to search the house.
It was a crazy idea. The minute it popped into my head, I could see how crazy it was. Gunther might wake up and find me inside. He could call the police on me, have me arrested. He could even shoot me dead, if he had a gun handy.
Sure—but on the other hand, it’d be kind of an adventure, wouldn’t it? Daring, even fun. After all, I was still the dashing hero who had pulled that maneuver that dumped the black Mustang. Wasn’t breaking into a house the sort of thing a swashbuckler type like myself would do next?
Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me there wasn’t much choice. I needed to find that book. It was my only clue to what was happening to me. I knew Ellen Evermore had brought a copy here. Maybe she’d left it behind. Or maybe she’d left a forwarding address or an email address or something like that.
By the time I finished explaining all this to myself, I had already left the snoring drunk slumped in his chair poolside. I was down the slate path. I was at the front door.
Gingerly, I tried the knob. The door was unlocked. I pushed it open just a little and listened for an alarm. No alarm, none that I could hear at least. I slipped inside.
Well, right off the bat, there was another part of the story clarified: what Gunther meant by “my stuff, my collection.” It was all over the place. Manuscripts, hardcovers, paperbacks, loose pages, even a few e-readers and a couple of computers—they littered the room. Nice room too: a small foyer and then two steps down into a broad sunken living room, an expanse of elegant tile with a black-metal fire pit in the center. There was a wall of windows beyond that, a view of night and stars and the lights of Hollywood. There was a black leather sofa in front of the pit. It was practically upholstered with pages and books. There was a long, low coffee table with a mosaic surface covered in volumes and a computer and more pages. There were two armchairs, one to either side of the fireplace, both buried in pages, e-readers, books.
Everything else was books too. Walls, nooks, crannies. Fine wooden shelves packed tight with volumes, all well thumbed, well read, well worn. Lampstands with shelves underneath. A writing table near the window with shelves for a backboard. A couple of side tables with shelves. All the shelves crammed tight with books and pages. Trying to remember how it’s done.
I came down the foyer steps slowly, nervously, as if I was expecting the books to jump up suddenly and rush at me from every side. I stepped cautiously amidst the mess, moving little by little across the room. My eyes passed over the bindings and pages, pausing here and there on a title or a name I recognized. Famous titles and famous names, names and titles from today’s best-seller lists, and some titles I only recognized because I’d read them for my job.
I could imagine—I could almost see—Ellen Evermore, seated here then there, different places around the room, going through them all. Each book, each script, each page. Paying for the privilege with her patient care of the stinking drunk who used to be an author. I wondered if she’d realized how the helpless wreckage of a man was helplessly falling for her. Or was she too busy searching through the volumes? Searching for me, as it turned out. Why me? Why did she want me to read her book? Or had she made a mistake in having Gunther send it to me? Is that why she had withdrawn it? And where had she put it? And where had she gone after that?
I tiptoed past the fire pit. And then I saw it. The sight made me stand still. I drew a long, slow breath, trying to keep myself calm.
In the middle of the bookshelf against the wall to my left, the last in a row of bookshelves, right up beside the writing desk at the window, there was a low, inset cabinet: more shelves behind two glass doors. I could see even from where I was standing that this was where Gunther kept his most cherished volumes, old leather-bound antiques. Smack in the center of them was one thick red volume with golden letters on its ribbed spine. I couldn’t read the title from there, but I knew right away what it was. I just knew. I took a slow step toward it, then a second, then a third. Then, yes, I could make out the words: Another Kingdom.
I went the rest of the way to the cabinet. Tugged on the knobs of the glass doors. Locked. I tugged again. Still locked, locked for sure. There was a keyhole on one door, near the middle where the doors met. The keyhole seemed to stare at me. It reminded me of the ogre in the dungeon, the ogre’s single eye.
I hesitated, at a loss. I thought of grabbing the paperweight off the desk and breaking the glass, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Seemed wrong, vandalizing the man’s home while he slept. Instead, I took out my phone and hunted up a video online: “How to Pick a Lock with a Paper Clip.” There were several videos of that title to choose from. I selected one in which the lock looked like the lock in front of me. I pressed play.
“Okay then!” said the willowy, long-haired man in the video. “Today I’m going to show you how to pick a lock with a paperclip …”
A few minutes later, I was on my knees working with a pair of paperclips from the writing desk’s front drawer. I had the video playing through for a second time, and I followed the instructions as the willowy man gave them. I’m not sure I actually believed it was going to work, but lo and behold, the latch snapped back just like the willowy man said it would. T
he cabinet door swung ajar. Yay, internet.
I tossed the paper clips to the floor. Swung the door open the rest of the way. Reached for the red volume. Touched its red leather spine.
Then someone screamed. Sean Gunther. Sean Gunther screamed out on the patio. I leapt to my feet. Looked toward the window—but I couldn’t see the patio from there. Sean Gunther screamed again and there was a splash.
Something was wrong. I had to go help him. I turned to the door.
The kitten-faced man or woman from the black Mustang was standing there, standing in the open doorway.
He—or she—was holding a gun pointed at my chest.
“IF YOU MOVE, LITTLE PEACHES, I WILL KILL YOU,” HE said. He spoke in a feminine voice but a man’s voice—that is, a deep man’s voice with a sickly sweet, feminine tone. He was wearing tight, skinny black jeans that showed off the womanly shape of his legs. He now had a black windbreaker on over his copper T-shirt, so I couldn’t see the big man muscles of his arms anymore. Still, his upper torso was man-sized, no question. His small, kitten-like face had a coy, flirty smile on it. His eyes appraised me sexually, going up and down my length, even as he held the gun steady.
Out on the patio, out of sight, Sean Gunther gave a strangled groan of anguish. Kitten Face pouted at me, as if it was all such a pity, wasn’t it?
“Who are you? What do you want?” I asked him.
“Quiet, baby, or Mama spank,” he said, lifting the gun a little.
Sean Gunther screamed again, tears in his voice now. It reminded me of the screaming heretic in Galiana. Not as bad, not that high-pitched agonized wail from the bowels of the castle dungeon. But I could hear that Gunther was in pain, real pain. I thought of the thug who was probably out there with him.
I considered Kitten Face. It’s a funny thing about having a gun pointed at you. How many movies had I seen, how many books had I read, where the hero had that happen? Sometimes I’d watch a scene or read a scene and think: Why doesn’t he just go for it? You know? Why should he do whatever the gunman tells him to do—put his hands up or get in the car or get on his knees or lie down on his face—if the killer’s going to kill him anyway once he’s helpless? Why not just go for the main chance, whatever’s left?
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