Ahead of us, the ruin of the Ambassador Hotel peeks out from behind twelve-story glass boxes stuffed with staffing services and catering companies and temp agencies and bartending schools. In L.A. there are two kinds of people—servants and the people they serve. Somewhere on one of these blocks is the dreaded edifice where, in thirty-seven days, I will meet my fate at the State Board exam.
Jake turns left on a street that flanks the fenced-off Ambassador grounds, then turns again onto a dead end. A low, crumbling brick wall stands between us and the hotel property and in front of each wall is a row of grand palm trees standing their ground. Things like tall palm trees, haughty old things with knife blade fronds that catch the sunlight like camera flashes, can almost make me like L.A. Can almost make me feel a pang of nostalgia for some glamorous hazy past that never existed anyway. Everything looks better in black-and-white, and the Ambassador, with its history of celebrity scandal and splashy tragedy, is definitely black-and-white. Jake parks, grabs a Maglite from under his seat, comes around my side, opens my door, and pulls me out of the car.
Spirals of razor wire crown most of the tall fencing around the grounds, but Jake leads me straight to a gate that has a clean shot over the top. I hook my fingers through the metal diamonds of fencing, wedge my Chucks on a crossbar, and pull myself up. I swing my leg over, reposition, and in three graceful moves clear it and land with a quiet crunch on the grass. My head rings with adrenaline. I wonder if there are cameras, if there are guards, but I guess the only way you really know is if one catches you. I wouldn’t normally mind the risk, but I am one week from graduation and this kind of trouble could be Susan Schmidt’s ideal ammunition. Jake scales the fence so fast I barely see him climb it. The tricky thing about Jake is that he can seem like an incompetent lunatic, but really he has all these crazy skills.
What I hear is a billion crickets and a late-roaming icecream truck with a warped soundtrack and some people screaming with drunken laughter up the block. Jake takes my hand again and we are off like Mission: Impossible superstealth spies across wide-open ground until, lungs aching, we reach the grand, ruined behemoth that looms over us at least ten stories high. Heading toward a service entrance, we pass under an overhang that looks ready to collapse. Behind us lies a massive, empty pool with weeds pushing up through cracks in the concrete.
Jake opens the door without so much as a jimmy of the lock and pulls the flashlight out of his waistband.
“I fixed it yesterday.” He explains the ease of our breaking and entering. “It gets better.”
I feel like we’re in a movie except the genre keeps changing. When it opened, we were getting ready to enter the Cocoanut Grove, where Ginger Rogers would be waltzing with Fred Astaire. Then we had to break in and we were in a spy movie. But now, as we follow the dancing flashlight beam through a maze of corridors until I completely lose my sense of direction, it’s like the scariest horror movie you ever saw. I make Jake walk in front of me because he has the flashlight, but then I change my mind and make him walk behind me because the darkness is thick and creeping up my neck and I would run screaming if I was alone.
Switch genres again and we’re in a sci-fi time travel movie because we turn a corner and find ourselves in a wide, red-carpeted hallway lined by shops that look as if they were abandoned yesterday, except yesterday was in 1952. The shop names are painted on the windows in gold lettering. There is a flower shop, a barbershop, a travel agency with intact Art Deco posters advertising other cities: a dainty Chinese girl in front of the Golden Gate Bridge to advertise San Francisco, an old man with a white beard on a boat in front of the Statue of Liberty. Jake shines the light around slowly, illuminating one circle at a time of the lost world.
“It’s still so perfect.”
“We’re then and we’re now. We’re in two parallel dimensions at once. You can slip through the wormhole if you want. If you choose it. Would you go or would you stay?”
“Huh?”
“Stay or go. Quick. Would you rather be in this hallway then or now?”
“Then. Anything but now.”
“Too slow.”
“What?”
“You hesitated. Hesitate and the universe closes the window. You’re stuck with now. But you’re stuck in now with me so allow me to make your now a mystical thing.”
We continue down the hall until we reach what was once the lobby and it looks like something from The Shining. The ceiling opens up huge and high, and dark wood and wide red carpet stretch in all directions. A white fountain with a tall spire stands in the center of the room. Behind it a grand stairway unfolds to the upstairs. Chandelier after chandelier, each made of a thousand glittering crystal teardrops, hang from the ceiling.
“Oh, my God,” I say, in a normal tone of voice that fades to a whisper because my voice sounds like a reckless violation, as if we are going to disturb some cranky, sleeping spirit.
“Can you hear them?”
I can’t. And normally I’d worry about him hearing voices. But I can feel them this time. There’s something here that wants to be heard. Maybe that something counts on people like Jake, with a fragile brain chemical cocktail. Maybe when he gets somewhere so clearly heavy with stories the weight of it tips his scales just a hair, just enough.
But no. We’re subject to suggestion. Our brains play tricks on us. I’m in a perfect horror movie set so of course I imagine I feel ghosts. And my boyfriend hears voices when his brain isn’t metabolizing adrenaline or something, so he isn’t exactly the best fact-checker.
“Don’t be scared,” he says. “Go on up the stairs and then come down again.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s your big entrance. You have no idea what an audience you have.”
What the hell. I climb the dramatic staircase and when I hit the top I turn right back around and glide back down, my hand grazing the smooth banister. And in my mind I have a dress that grazes the stairs. In my mind I’m a movie star. I’m a princess. I’m unscarred and lovely and whole. He’s right. It may not be much but it’s the biggest entrance I’ve got. Jake waits at the bottom, shining the flashlight on the staircase in front of me, and when we meet he turns it off and lays it down on the ground. The room is bathed in milky moonlight.
There, at the foot of the stairs, he unwraps me, first untying the laces of my sneakers and slipping my feet out of them, then removing my jacket, my sweater, my jeans, one piece at a time, leaving only my striped kneesocks. He bought me three pairs and all I have to do is wear them. What better boyfriend for me?
He picks me up romance novel style and carries me over to one of the dusty, floating white couches, where he lays me down. He runs his hands, ridged and tough as baseball gloves, from my sock-clad ankles over the hills and hollows of my scarred body and up to my face, as if he is testing to see if I am really there, that no part is a hallucination. He smells unshowered as usual but not bad and he looks at my body, transfixed, with eyes pinwheeling backward into some deep blackness that feels oddly familiar. His mouth hangs open a bit, revealing that chipped tooth, and what I feel is unashamed. When he puts his head between my legs I am lost and unashamed. Because what is there to be shy about with a lunatic sock fetishist who is most at home among specters and voices.
We slide off the couch and make love there on the ancient carpet, him with his pants and boots still on, which is how he does it mostly. It is a Marine thing, he explained to me once. He is always on the ready to protect us. But I think it is something else, though I can’t say what. I can’t say I understand him at all, but here we are.
We lie there next to each other on the floor for a minute, staring up at the chandelier, which sparkles even in the dark. Jake gets up and brings me my pile of clothes. While I pull on my underwear, he sits down next to me with his back against the couch and one sturdy arm resting on his bent knee.
“They’re tearing it down,” he says. “Fucking animals. This whole place is scheduled for the wrecking ball.”
/> “They can’t do that.”
“Oh, they can. Real estate, Angel.” He runs his hand through his hair and it stands up all crazy. “First they took the land from the Indians and now there’s no more land to take and no one left to rob from, so they’re taking history instead. They’re stealing their own history from themselves.”
“But look at this place.” A gob of emotion catches in my throat. “It’s a palace. They keep their palaces in France and shit.”
“We’re here to document it. To brand this moment into our organs and then carry it with us like braille on our hearts and kidneys and skin.”
He stands up, ready to move on.
“And now for a vital historical expedition. We’ll still make it back to our home of a prison of a home under the wire.”
I throw on my jacket and pull my tangle of hair out of the back of it, feeling that kind of proud disheveled that makes you want to walk out on the street with your hair still in a fuck knot just so everyone knows that you’re loved. Jake is back in stealth mode. He leads me down a pitch-black set of concrete service stairs, moving quickly, without a pause or a word.
We go through a doorway into what seems like a ballroom. There’s no ambient light downstairs and I see only what hovers in the tight, shaky circle of the flashlight. The darkness all around is dense and crazed with movement, atomized into a million particles. My insides feel the same, like my every cell is shivering.
We cross the ballroom. In the middle of the floor, Jake stops abruptly and whirls me around a few times in a furious waltz. I stiffen uncontrollably. I never dance with anybody because dancing reminds me of Aaron. The images flood me, quick and complete, like a morphine IV, except it doesn’t feel good. It can double me over if I’m not expecting it. Maybe he can tell, maybe he knows without my ever mentioning Aaron’s name. And I’m sorry for that but it’s not like there’s anything I can do. I’ll always at least partly belong to someone dead.
“Can you tap-dance?” he asks.
“No.”
“Too bad. I love a good tap dance.”
We climb onto a small stage shaped like a clamshell, then through a backstage door and down some stairs until we are in a big storage room or pantry or something. A door opens into a cavernous kitchen with hulking columns that scare me as the flashlight moves over them. Stainless steel ovens and ranges and sinks line the far wall. I walk into the kitchen ahead of Jake, but he pulls me back into the pantry. Jake shines the light on the floor and there is a triangle shape, like an arrowhead almost, about six inches on each side, where chipped tile exposes the concrete underneath.
“That’s the fateful spot. If not for that spot, the world might be a different place. Or that’s what we like to think. That it could have been anything other than what it is.”
I look at the dust-blanketed floor and say nothing. I’m used to his non sequiturs.
“By that I mean that this is the spot where Robert F. Kennedy hit the ground,” he explains.
“How do you know?”
“I know things. I read things. I feel things,” he says. “This is a vortex of profound tragedy right here.”
“I guess it is.”
We stand for a minute, in our own warped tribute to a guy who was probably a rich scumbag in some ways but was probably kind of a hero in others. And for how things get broken. We were here. And when they knock it down we’ll remember.
We walk back out the way we came and it isn’t as much spooky this time as it is sad. When we reach the ghost town of shops, Jake stops in front of one called the Jewel Box. He takes my face in his hands.
“If I could I would buy you a rock the size of India right in this shop. Right now.”
I laugh it off and turn my face, hoping he’ll let go and keep walking but he doesn’t. Instead he pulls something out of the front pocket of his jeans. He sinks down on his knee and holds out a ring he clearly got out of a quarter machine at the grocery store.
Fuck.
“Change the future, Angel,” he says. “Marry me. I’ll take you wherever you want to go. We can be in San Francisco by morning.”
I stand there, everything gone suddenly wrong. I’m glad they’re bulldozing this pile. They should knock this place down, this shabby ruin. And here I go throwing another boomerang of hurt. I’m sick of him and these grand gestures that mean nothing. I’m sick of being so fucking careful all the time because poor crazy Jake needs special mommying or else he might go thinking he can fly and go jump off a cliff.
“Get up,” I say, because there is nothing else I can say. “Get off your knees. Married? You mean like grown-ups who know how to live? You mean like people who can actually count on each other? San Francisco? You mean with all the money you didn’t make on your last job?”
And then I say this, but I don’t realize until it comes out of my mouth, until I hear it, that it’s the same thing Aaron once said to me.
“Why do you need to ruin everything?”
Jake should know me. It is not the future I’m compelled by; it’s the past. He should know better than this.
Twelve
The car ride home is silent. I try to apologize, try to explain, but he is seething somewhere deep and far and he is beyond apology and maybe I am beyond forgiveness, but still. Was I that bad?
Jesus is in the cool, metal buttons of my coat. Jesus is in the fist of the baby doll arm. Jesus is in the dust on his boots.
Jake drops me off around the corner of the house, which is what we do so no one sees us together. I step out of the car and lean down to say good-bye.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he says robotically, looking straight ahead, both hands still on the wheel.
“What are you talking about? The Marines again? You already know they won’t let you back because you’re how you are. Come on. You’ll get over this. We’ll get through this. This is your home.”
“Because I am how I am? Maybe I am just what they want. They aren’t you. Now go home. Adios. Sayonara. Je t’aime. Boo hoo.”
I slam the door behind me, but I hear it crash shut and I am sorry that I did. When I turn around he’s already pulling away without a backward glance.
I sign in twenty minutes late. There’s no getting around it since compulsively honest Missy signed in fifteen minutes late right before me. Missy with the PTSD and the OCD and the paranoid psychosis and the touch of Tourette’s. How can you get mad at her? I’ll get a reprimand for tardiness at the very least, if not a write-up. No way Susan Schmidt is going to let this one slide.
I look at the sign-in roster and automatically know what everyone did with their evening. We wing nuts at Serenity House are often credited with things like “unpredictable behavior,” but it isn’t. It’s so predictable. For instance, I know Missy (11:15) probably went to a meeting and then out for a coffee with some people afterward, including at least two predatory men who dig her Rosemary’s Baby vibe. She’s in bed now, but she’ll get up again to check all the locks and all the lights and all the appliances. One unpredictable thing about Missy: you never know when she’ll sleepwalk into your room and pee in your trash can.
Althea didn’t sign in because she never went out. In a pool of light thrown by the standing lamp, she hunches over the coffee table studying a spread of tarot cards. This house is like the waiting room of the cursed.
“Hey, Madame Zora.” I walk past her toward the kitchen.
“You want a reading?” she asks, looking up from the cryptic tableau of princes and knights and swords and coins and suns and moons and queens and devils and hanged men and hermits. “For some guidance?”
Everyone else is in bed already.
“I want a fucking vodka tonic for some drunkness.”
“We choose our reality by the language we use.”
“Well, then, I want a miracle.”
“How it works is, you say, ‘I am a miracle.’ Are you sure you don’t want a reading?” She pulls her limp hair out of her face and secures it with a band from a
round her wrist.
“Thanks anyway.”
“Namaste,” she says, bowing slightly, her palms pressed together at her chest as if in prayer. I do the same back because it seems like a nice thing to do, before I pass by her and into the kitchen. I don’t turn on the light but I can make out the blanched shapes by the moonlight coming in through the bare windows.
Starving hungry, I open the fridge. Inside it is packed with Tupperware containers and pickle jars and ranch dressing and milk cartons, all labeled with names written on masking tape. Violet labels all of hers with a purple marker. I take out the jar of Violet’s crunchy peanut butter as desperation overrides any sense of personal integrity. I barely buy any food for myself because I try not to eat so much, though I always fail miserably. I start a new diet every morning and by noon I have hit the pretzels, the Starbursts, the caramel macchiatos. Whatever anyone has at school and offers me to snack on. Impulse control is a symptom of one of my mental illnesses; I can’t remember which one.
I take a commemorative Elvis mug out of the cabinet and scoop four large tablespoons of peanut butter into it. I filch someone else’s unlabeled maple syrup off the top of the microwave, drizzle it on top of the peanut butter, then stir it all together. I squat with my back against the sky blue cabinets—some resident project paint job—and lick the concoction off the spoon, heavy and sweet. I close my eyes and my body dissolves until I am nothing.
This is the last time I do this, I resolve as I get up for more. I grab a bag of chips from the top of the fridge and I swear to myself, I start a diet tomorrow. Then I put one after another into my mouth and I’m unaware of chewing, unaware of swallowing, I’m aware only of disappearing.
Only when my stomach churns so badly that I can’t stuff anything more down my throat do I stop and sit there, staring blank eyed at the wall, holding Chandra’s decimated Kettle Chips. Like always, memories of Aaron wipe my brain clean of anything actually happening in the present. Thoughts of him stab at me every quiet moment. And most loud moments. And most times in between. The periods when I momentarily manage to forget him are the exception.
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