Elsinore Canyon (13 page)

Dana unlocked a tall wooden door in a Century City office tower and angled her head in. It was an elegant suite in the clouds, her mother’s old office still not cleared out. She lifted a hand in greeting, and we both slipped in. Among the furnishings and family pictures, a barebones production crew was at work with three actors. Big fans around a desk, a smoke machine. I recognized the guy who was directing, Yanghak Park. He had graduated two years earlier from St. Maroveus.

He called “Cut” at the actors, who broke and wandered to some black leather benches.

“You didn’t have to stop for me,” Dana said.

“You changed the light when you opened the door. Hi, Horst.”

“Sorry,” Dana said. “Anyway, we brought refreshments.”

We unloaded the small feast we’d picked up and improvised a crafts table. “You don’t have to make this thing technically perfect, you know,” Dana said as we dished up food.

“I know,” Yanghak said. “But you wanted it moody, right?”

“Yes. Got anything we can see?”

Yanghak showed us some clips on a laptop. It was all action, no dialogue, everything out of sequence, but I had an idea how it would go together. “Wow.”

“Wait’ll the ambient is added,” Dana said.

“I might have to do some slo-mo to stretch it out to three minutes,” Yanghak said.

“Not too heavy on the effects. I want the story to show.”

“The story will show,” Yanghak said with a hint of acid.

“You fed up with producers already?”

“It doesn’t take long.”

“We’ll bug out.”

The two of them discussed payment and delivery, and we bugged out for the mall.

“What’s that all about?” I said the moment we were clear of the building. 

Dana skipped ahead of me and pointed at a movie poster on the side of a theater. It had a picture of a cloak and a dagger. “Want to see
The Mouse Trap?”

“I want to hear about this thing.”

She turned and took one of my hands in both of hers, and drew me gently towards the theater. “In a cool, dark place.”

“I feel like I’m being…”

“It’s okay. Come on.”

We got tickets and entered a dim theater. The show hadn’t started yet, and we had it to ourselves. Dana kicked off her shoes, draped her legs over the side of her seat, and planted her toes in my spokes. “This is the perfect place to think about secrets,” she said. “Think of your biggest one, Horst. Your biggest, darkest, deepest secret.” I thought of it. Not such a dark secret, my high-spirited Dana, but definitely deep. “What would you do,” she said, “if you saw the whole thing enacted right before you on a big screen”—she swept her hand out—“with all your nearest and not-so-dearest in the audience, watching it along with you?”

I’d be spewing out both ends. “Oh boy. So, what are you going to do, show Yanghak’s movie?”

“Yes.”

“Some sort of public punking?”

“It’s not a bad thing, you know.”

“What exactly is going to happen?”

“That Hollywood Nite I e-mailed my dad about. We’re having a little entertainment tomorrow evening at Elsinore Canyon. An intimate-sized crowd, but the right people will be there. We’re going to watch a screener of
Second Generation,
and no one knows it yet, but there’s going to be a short before the main feature. A three-minute murder scene with no dialog, just background music and, you know.”

“Holy shhh. That’s some stunt, Dana.”

“I’m kind of scared, to tell the truth.”

“Your Aunt Claudia will be there?”

“She’ll be the guest of honor.” Her voice grew serious. “I’m going to watch her like a hawk. See how she reacts.”

“How incriminating do you think it could be?”

“I don’t know. I want another pair of eyes. Can you stand to be part of this, Horst?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Watch her, that’s all. Tell me if you see anything, tell me if I’m imagining things.”

“What if you’re right?”

The theater went dark, and Dana shrank into her seat. A trailer for an action thriller came on.

A cliché shot of people huddling under umbrellas at a rainy cemetery. Dana leaned over and caressed the push rim of my chair. “Did you ever not want to live?”

She had asked me lots of questions over the years about my condition, but never that one. “For a while. Maybe a week. I was on autopilot.”

She crept her hand over the back of mine and spoke softly into my ear. “Why didn’t you let go?”

“I don’t know. I guess my will to live ran out the clock.”

“You took a risk. Other people don’t. They’re afraid they’ll wind up dead.”

Other people were right, or half-right. Half of me had wound up dead.

On the screen, a woman in black doubled over in tears. “We could escape the whole ordeal courtesy of a ten-cent razor,” Dana said. A man bled horribly and fell out a window. “Is there such a thing as a ten-cent razor?”

“I don’t know. I use a straight-edge.”

“I wax.”

The movie started. On the screen, a jet, tiny as a pin, carved a white vapor trail through a vast night sky. “But what’s over there?” Dana said. “On the other side of the grave. It’s not fricking Costa Rica.”

On the screen, an angelic little girl smiled as she pointed a gun at the camera. Dana whispered. “What if hell is a sea of hatred and spite, and the only relief for the damned is to drag in other souls?”

I kept my head near hers. I was as serious as doomsday. “If that was true, I would be the best boy in the world and I’d fight temptation night and day.”

A firing squad shot a man. Dana whispered. “What if it turns out eternal justice is harsh? What if the only thing that counts is your actions, and it doesn’t matter if you feel penitence or remorse or confusion?”

I looked into her eyes. She wasn’t just confused; she was scared. “Confusion about what, dear?”

“Everything.”

I stroked her arm with the back of my hand. “Tell me what you’re confused about.”

“I just don’t know what’s over there.”

“Mercy, Dana.”

The guy in the blue hat at Wilshire Mac looked at the work order and then at Dana with a trace of impishness. “We saved the stuff on your phone, but your laptop is a different story. We couldn’t transfer all your apps.”

Dana paused as she reached for her pile of devices. “Anything I’m going to miss?”

“Probably not,” he said, “unless you want to be spied on.”

“I don’t—want to be—”

“Strictly speaking, at this exact moment I am your official I-T guy. So I can reveal that you’re being spied on.”

“Did I click on something?”

“You don’t get this by ‘clicking.’ Did you let someone else use your laptop?”

Dana lifted her old laptop between her fingernails. “This one, right?”

The guy in the blue hat nodded.

“No.”

“Did you leave it lying around somewhere?”

“Not that I know of. What’s on it?”

“It’s a legitimate app that companies put on their employees’ devices to make sure they’re not goofing off. You can install it so it’s practically invisible on the client machine—which would be your laptop. No monitors, no icons, no directories, no log files. And the client app is specific to each machine, so…”

“So…”

“So that’s why we’re having this conversation. You wanted to transfer all your apps. But for this one, the admin will have to do a fresh install—if you want to keep putting, I don’t know, all your documents and media and communications on a secret location that you apparently don’t know about.”

“You mean, all my private stuff is out there somewhere?”

“Potentially. As I said, there are no log files on your machine, but someone could have all your e-mails, your messages, maybe your documents, media, internet history, your Skype audio and video are possibly being streamed—”

“To where?”

“We could find it if we did a deep scan, but that would be an overnight in the shop and the place it’s all going to is probably a passworded directory anyways.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“The client was installed on May fifteenth of this year. If you want to know what’s been copied out, your best bet is to find the admin’s machine. It’ll have the full version with all the records. Here’s the app.” He spread her work order in front of her and highlighted a line with a yellow marker.

A minute later, I circled around to the front of the store in my car and Dana ran out from the sidewalk with her bag of devices. I got the impression from her face that our dinner conversation was going to be lively. “I knew it,” she gasped as she jumped into my car. “I found the other spies.”

It was a lively dinner indeed and then another lively hour in Starbucks examining her laptop. She clicked through every file and record, fuming all the way. “It was Polly. May fifteenth, look, I was sick at home that day—you remember, I had the flu?—and my parents were in San Francisco, you must remember that because I told you how my mom didn’t want to go while I was sick. So
they
couldn’t have done it because they weren’t there, and it couldn’t have happened at school because I wasn’t
there.
He snuck around my stuff while I was sleeping, my God! And then he was hunting for my phone in the solarium last night.”

I wondered if it was all Polly’s idea.

“You mean my parents put him up to it? No, look at this,” Dana said, clicking on one of the e-mails she had sent to none other than me. “‘I’m sick to death of Costa Rica.’ That’s what it says here, I don’t want to go to Costa Rica. You remember that, right? And then my parents bought me a ticket to Costa Rica! Why would they do that if they’d been reading my stuff and they knew I didn’t want to go? Oh my God,” she moaned, “can you imagine if I’d been online that whole time after my mom died? The things I was thinking. The things I might have written down.” She kept clicking. “But he could have read this one. This, this,” she said as she arrowed and clicked away. “I bet he’s spying on Phil, too.” I tried not to look. No use—poetry, songs, “love,” everything I didn’t want to see. I still didn’t know what was going on with her and Phil. She hadn’t said a word about him, and as far as I knew she had barely seen him all summer. They were next-door neighbors in a long-distance relationship.

We finally packed up and went to Yanghak’s apartment, a jungle of wires, racks, and boxes that was almost unnavigable for me. Dana sat back from a monitor saucer-eyed, and watched the last frame fade to black. “Wow. Well, there’s one file the son of a bitch won’t snitch.” A stock clip of jittery letters:
Fin.
“The end, all right,” she said.

It was midnight. Yanghak mushed his lips around distastefully as he ejected the DVD from a laptop and stuffed it into a sleeve. “Another day would have been nice,” he grumbled.

Dana had none of his artistic misgivings, and she transferred the DVD with great care to her purse. She made some online bank transfers while Yanghak burned a copy. Done, done all around.

“Enjoy the rest of the night,” Dana said as she and I headed out.

“Likewise,” Yanghak said with a ragged wave.

We climbed into my car sighing with exhaustion and relief. “Yuck, I’m starting to smell,” Dana said. I inhaled noisily. “What, you like that?” she laughed.

“Like I’d let you diss yourself to me.” I wanted to drive both of us back to Elsinore Canyon—Dana had been up since dawn—but she said she needed her car. I said to leave it in L.A. overnight, but she insisted, so I drove her back to the lot where she was parked. “I’ll be right behind you the entire way,” I said.

“Put your bluetooth in so we can talk.” She waved, then got into her car and pulled out in front of me. We took off for Elsinore Canyon in tandem. My bluetooth buzzed within thirty seconds. “Horst! Are you listening to the news?” Someone had been shot in Century City right after we left, over a fender bender. One guy in critical condition, another guy in custody. No word about the fenders, she said. Her taillights were two mischievous little red eyes meant for me alone, the headlights of my car pouring into her Volvo and revealing her gesturing bare arms.

We talked about our mortally principled namesakes, which we knew about in accordance with the requirements of our education. There was no St. Dana or St. Horst, our parents having dedicated our middle names instead to the Catholic calendar and settled on two martyrs. St. Catherine (of Alexandria) had caught the eye of the Roman emperor; he imprisoned and tortured her, then wooed her for marriage unsuccessfully, sentenced her to death on the breaking wheel which horror she escaped via a certified miracle, and finally beheaded her. St. Nicholas (Pieck) had been captured by Protestant heretics who threw him into a dungeon, botched a hanging attempt that left him unmoving on a stone floor, and stuck a burning torch in his mouth to see if he was alive. He was. When he still refused to make the requisite denials, they hanged him for good. “Horrible times,” I said. “Thank God we’ve progressed.”

“Do you think our saints were such role models?” Dana said. “Not that I’m God, but if you ever have to choose between denouncing me and dying horribly, please denounce me.”

“Bullshit, baby. Bullshit—”

“I’ll understand! It’s only words—”