by Keith Rosson
She didn’t dissipate in a cloud—there was nothing so definable as that. There was simply the usual absence of her. She was there and then she was gone.
But I had heard her. I had been able to listen to her. There was that.
I stood next to the sink and quickly wiped a tear from my eye. “I’ll let you get dressed,” I said to Casper, my voice husky. I shut the bathroom door behind me, primly took my glasses off, folded their stems, put them in my shirt pocket. Buried my face in my hands and wept.
• • •
An hour later I’d cleaned myself up the best I could. The desk clerk gave us the address of the closest car rental agency, and Casper and I took a cab there. This part of town: parking lots, office parks, strip malls, all of it so like Julia’s part of Eighty-second Avenue as to be interchangeable. Occasional clusters of street corner doom-sayers held signs declaring the End Times. One proclaimed in a nearly indecipherable scrawl DEAD MEANS DEAD FOR GOOD. I carried Suyin’s story inside me like an ache, like a blade I kept wrapping my hand around.
We paid the cabbie and I looked around the parking lot and said, “We have to move, Casper. We have to get going.”
“Okay,” Casper said, giving a little shrug. “That’s why we’re here.” He took his cap off, put it back on.
“I just don’t have a lot of time.”
He cast me a shrewd look, his eyes dark under the bill of his hat. “Anything you want to tell me, Marvin? Something in particular going on you want to bullshit about?”
I started walking toward the rental kiosk, the wind blowing my hair back, carrying the scent of hot tar, garbage. “No. Not right now, anyways. Let’s just get moving, okay?”
Got the rental car and found a copy shop where we printed directions to the studio. Modern phones could do this in seconds now, but my technological prowess began and ended at sending email invoices to distributors at work. I had a landline at the shop and a flip phone with a prepaid card in my pocket. Casper was still wearing the same goddamned shirt we’d picked him up in. We were working with what we had.
I white-knuckled my way through traffic. I was an idiot. Unprepared, and deserving of what I got. I could feel self-pity and desperation settle over me, hook into the back of my neck.
“I don’t know how people stand this,” I said at one point, my hands locked in rigid attention on the wheel.
“What?”
“The traffic,” I said. “The stupid fucking traffic. Is it always this bad?”
“I don’t know. It’s LA. This is just part of the deal, right? You okay, Marvin?”
“We’ve managed about fifty yards in the past twenty minutes. People do this every day. Years of their lives, probably.”
“Man,” Casper said, smiling, “this is the place to be, dude. Are you kidding me? There’s a reason why everyone wants to be here.” He drummed a little rhythm on the dashboard. The car smelled new, a coffin embalmed in that chemical smell. “You talked to that ghost, Marvin. That’s crazy. You know that’s crazy, right?”
“I guess. I’m trying not to think about it right now.” I tried to merge and had a moment of bright, feverish empathy for Vale and his anger.
We eventually found the cluster of studios and soundstages where To the Point was filmed, but got lost in the labyrinth of parking lots and connecting roads. Acres of pavement. The tourist section of studio hangars gave way to sad patches of scrub grass and blunted, leafless bushes that stood in ditches between the lots, winding back roads and chain link fences choked with brambles.
The place became quickly charmless. Casper blithely noted that it seemed like we were lost. It was odd to think that so many fantastic and made-up worlds were contained inside all of these buildings, when the outsides were so bland and uniform.
I finally parked in a half-full lot that faced an outbuilding the size of an airplane hangar. There was a line of utility vehicles bracketing the face of the building. No one was outside. I didn’t recognize anything. “How did we even get here?”
“Like I said, we’re lost.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“We could just walk in.” He shrugged. “Let’s just try walking in somewhere. Let’s just go in that building and talk to someone.”
“And then what?”
Casper shrugged. “And play dumb? Try to find, what show was it?”
“To the Point.”
“Just ask where the To the Point studio is. Say we’re late, act like we’re in a big hurry. Like we’re supposed to be there.”
I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. Pictured an hourglass, me at the bottom of it, buried under sand. My black lens with a funnel of dust falling on it, my mouth filling up. I was freezing up, like I had at Vale’s ex-wife’s place.
“We’d never find it,” I said. “We haven’t really thought this out, have we?”
Casper made a little exasperated noise, jabbed his hands palms-up at the window. “Come on, Marvin. The studio is right there. Fly by the seat of your pants, dude. You need to find this woman, let’s do it.”
I started up the car. We wound our way through more lots, pulling over to the shoulder once to let a pair of guys in one of those little golf carts putter by.
“You could ask them,” Casper said. “Ask those guys.”
We came to another lot, this one with a small guard booth and a retractable gate.
“Ram right through that thing,” Caspar said. “Jesus, just do something, Marvin.”
“Casper, please.”
The guard sighed when we pulled up. This part of the studio had an air of desolation about it. Like this guard, when she saw people, saw them for the wrong reasons.
She laid her arms on the sill of the booth, looked down at us. “You guys must be lost.”
“We’re actually looking for the To the Point studio.”
She pointed a finger back the way we came. “You’re about two miles off, guys. Lot 2, Studio F.”
“Studio F. Great, thank you.”
She smiled wanly. “You know you’re gonna need laminates to get in, right? Either that or head on over to the main entrance, and you can get tickets for guided tours at any of the gift shops.”
Casper leaned over and bowed down so the guard could see him. “Listen, I don’t mean to be a pain here, but you need to get Tom Pugliesi on your little radio there right now and tell him I’m here. Shit’s fucked.”
The guard nodded, frowning. “Oh, late for an important meeting, huh?”
“Exactly. You’re exactly right.”
She rested her chin in her hand. “I’ve heard every name, guys. Every name, every scam you can think up, I’ve heard.”
Casper looked at me, shook his head. “Tom Pugliesi. She thinks Tom’s fake.” He stared up at her again. “I don’t show up, hon? Heads will roll. First yours, honestly.”
“Well, I’ll get on my radio, friend, but it’ll be to call security. You can try your luck at Studio F but they’re going to tell you the same thing.”
Casper sighed, ran a hand down his face. Took off his hat, put it back on. “Ma’am, do you have an employee number or something like that? Pug’s gonna shit a brick in approximately three minutes, and he’s an ugly dude when he’s unhappy. Did you ever catch the Treacherous Means pilot we did last season? About the deaf-mute bounty hunter?”
“Nope.”
“That’s because the star we got—young kid, boatload of talent, knew jujitsu, all that—was fifteen minutes late to a meeting with the Pug and a bunch of board suits. Fifteen minutes! Pug killed the whole fucking show, ma’am, a pilot and nine episodes. I know I don’t want to get on his bad side, how about you?”
She looked at Casper with dead, eternally patient eyes as she keyed the mike on her radio. “Dispatch, this is two-five. I’ve got two douchebags at Gate T-1 here. Repeat, two d-bags at Gate T-1. I’ll get you their plate number in just a second, over.” She took her thumb off the mike.
I sighed. “Thanks for your time.”
“Douchebags?” Casper said as I drove away. He sounded hurt. “Two douchebags? That’s cold.”
• • •
I started to head to yet another lot, another nondescript patch of pavement that would undoubtedly lead to the same exact answer that we’d already gotten. It all just came tumbling down on me. The weight of it. I’d run out of time.
“I am fucked,” I said, and gunned the engine, veering through the empty lot and pulling snarling cookies, the stink of rubber trailing behind us. Casper grabbed the handle above the door.
“Marvin?”
I jumped out of the car and slapped the hood. I bellowed, spun around in the empty lot and bellowed again. Flung my arms out, felt my voice crack. There was nothing around us besides a few panel trucks and nondescript vans and another closed-up soundstage the size of an airplane hangar—even the guard’s booth was a good half mile away.
I was out of ideas.
I was dead. Any time now. It was a matter of hours.
It had seemed possible, for a moment there. Finally, some kind of answer. Joan suddenly cutting through the endless dark. But no.
Casper got out and laid his arms on the top of the car, resting his chin on his forearms. “Dude. The position of freaking-the-fuck-out-guy has already been filled. Vale’s got it, and he’s been great at it. What is your deal?”
I shrugged, and kept shrugging. I looked ridiculous, I was sure. “I’m out of time,” I said. “I’m just out of time.”
Casper ran a hand over his new haircut. “Why?”
I let out a big sigh. There was nobody here. I had tried to find the To the Point soundstage and happened upon the most remote, desolate area within the entire studio. In all of Hollywood, probably. It was ridiculous. The whole thing was ridiculous. The Man Who Couldn’t Find a Building.
“I have to tell you something,” I said.
“Okay. Good.”
“It’s kind of a lot to take in.”
“That’s what she said.”
I just shook my head.
Casper held his hands up. “Trying to lighten the mood. Sorry, Marvin.”
“Get in,” I said, and we got back in the car. I turned around and headed back down the road we’d come in. To Lot 2, Studio F, I couldn’t even say. Didn’t know. I was just going to drive and see where we wound up.
No more time. No more plans left. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt—and this was saying something, considering—as lost as I did right then.
“Okay, so.”
“Hit me,” said Casper.
“I was born in Moineau, France,” I said.
“Cool. Sounds fancy.”
“In 1381.”
8
Information gave him the address of Brophy’s agency. He wrote it down on the back of Casper’s cult pamphlet, his handwriting shaky. Afternoon traffic was gutted and slow and when he got another nosebleed he held a handful of fast food napkins to his face and bellowed with the uselessness of it all. Alcohol itself had abandoned him. Light at the edges of his vision was wavering and strange.
Brophy’s agency took up the bottom floor of a sleek cube right between Wilshire and Santa Monica, a smoked glass exterior and brushed steel cast about at shipwrecked angles. Dying or not, the guy was doing well for himself.
Vale parked and fed the meter and waited. Sat there watching the door, knowing Brophy could be anywhere. Might not have come into the office that day. Was out banging a starlet somewhere. Pulling fresh blood from a teenager and infusing into his own body, who the hell could say?
Vale measured time in cigarettes, kept thinking about Marvin, about the idiocy of hurling Casper’s backpack in the parking lot, throwing that empty box like an asshole. Another bridge burned. Candice was like a door he kept walking past without looking at.
After three hours, Brophy came out of his office, yammering into his cell phone. Again, the shock of it: he’d lost so much weight, his stork legs scissoring along as he walked, two sticks swaddled in the excess fabric of his slacks. He keyed the door to a white Jag and Vale pitched his cigarette out the window like some ridiculous private eye.
Left, right, left. South on the 405. Then the 10, the 101, past West Hollywood, up in the Hills.
Geographically, some of it was coming back to him. He tried to keep a few cars behind the Jag. When he rolled the window down, he smelled wood smoke; the dry hills surrounding them going up in flame. Inevitable this time of year. Vale followed through canyons punctuated with gated driveways, flashes of multimillion-dollar homes tucked behind ragged-ass copses of pine. Up in these switchbacks, it was pointless to try to hide his efforts.
Finally, on a stretch of roadside with the promise of dusk just beginning to blue the carved canyon walls around them, Brophy pulled onto the shoulder. Vale pulled up behind him and they sat like that for some time, the night’s first insects starting to bat themselves against his headlights. Brophy’s brake lights in the dark ahead of him like a pair of sentient red eyes. What is this feeling, he thought. Nothing ever happens the way you plan it. He had fantasized about this moment for years and in his mind it was nothing like this. This was hollow, imbibed only with a sense of inevitability. He shut the van off and listened to the ticking engine for a moment before stepping out, the thin scree rasping at his feet.
Brophy the ghoul. Brophy the Halloween mask. His face was sickly and wretched in the green light from the dashboard, gnarled veins bunched at his temples. Skin stretched tight on his face and bunched loose at his throat, like someone had grabbed the flesh and pulled down hard. Vale wordlessly got in the passenger seat, the door thunking behind him, the night sounds outside immediately hushed. Brophy sat rigid with his hands on the wheel. He had a tiny butterfly bandage above his eyebrow from their scuffle.
Finally, he said, “So what’s going to happen now, Mike?” That drowning, rattling quality of his voice was better, but not by much.
Vale looked down at his splinted hand. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t gotten that far.”
“Do you have a gun? Is that what’s next?”
“No.”
Brophy rolled his shoulders. A car filled the inside of the Jag with light, moved on.
“You think I fucked you over, right? This is the big showdown. You’ve had this in mind for years. If it wasn’t for me, everything would’ve been wonderful. Your whole life”—he coughed wetly, curling into the steering wheel before righting himself—“like a goddamned music video. Am I right? Am I in the ballpark?”
Vale didn’t say anything.
“Am I close?”
“Come on, Jared. The coke? The crate of booze? The poor, innocent stripper paying her way through college? All that bullshit? You had that contract ready to go. That shit was prepped. You screwed me over.”
Brophy shook his head. “Right. Paying you a million dollars for your work was screwing you.”
“Two or three paintings go for that much now.”
Brophy turned to him then, wolfish, grinning. “Because of me,” he said. He jammed a thumb against his own chest. “You couldn’t even put your fucking pants on without falling over. Drunk all the time. Blackouts. Screwing around on your wife. Your paintings were turning to shit, Mike.”
The thing about Candice cut. “You know what I was doing last week, Jared? Making hot dogs. I wore a hairnet on my beard. Before that I was at a car wash.”
Brophy shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. What’s your point? You had a boatload of talent, opportunities guys would kill for, and you pissed on it. Pissed it away.”
“You ruined me,” Vale said, and Brophy’s laughter was brittle and clipped, like gravel flung against glass. It turned into another cough and he pulled a handkerchief from his sport coat and put it to his mouth.
“Spare me,” he rasped. “The hell do you want, Mike?” He tucked his handkerchief back in hi
s pocket. “You want me to say I’m sorry? You want closure? I can’t give you that. I don’t traffic in it, I don’t believe in it.”
“I’m trying to remember if you were always this much of a prick.”
“Get out of my car, Mike. We’re done.”
“I want that contract nullified.”
“Done,” Brophy said. He turned the radio on, some teen pop with bass throbbing like an embolism under it all. “Get out.”
Vale looked at him. “Seriously?”
Brophy’s head jittered in exasperation as he shrugged. “What’d I say? If it’ll get you out of my car. Get a lawyer, draft something in writing, send it to me. First rights to your shit from here on out are yours. Starting now. If you ever pull your head out of a bottle and paint again, which by looking at you seems pretty unlikely, you’ll own them. If you want more than that, we can keep it in court for fucking years. Now get out. I’ve got to get home. I’m sick.”
Vale stepped out. The night was warm, crickets doing their thing around them. Brophy took off, the taillights of the Jag painting the canyon wall red until he rounded a turn and everything was full dark.
• • •
In the dream, the van was scorched with smoke, the plastic features of the dashboard melting like taffy from some unknown but terrible heat. It felt like the rendering of his own body, seeing the poor van like that. And when he touched his own body his ribs cracked brittle as pasta—this was a terrible dream—and Vale snapped his whole ribcage, he couldn’t stop, it was like scratching an itch, he wouldn’t stop until his whole body was shattered, and then someone rapped on the window next to his head again and Vale lurched up gasping.
Doused in sweat, the catty stink of himself suffused throughout the van. A cop stood at the window, his flashlight at his shoulder, roving the beam around the interior. Vale had parked across the street from Richard’s house. It was nearly midnight.
He rolled the window down, wincing against the cop’s light. His lips separated with an audible tearing sound.
“Hi there, officer,” he rasped, resisting the urge to cover his face.