Los Angeles (15 page)

I never saw the monster directly, but sometimes he would come into my room at night and stand over me, drooling and respiring.
I was never able to open my eyes and would lie there trying not to breathe, listening to him hover at the threshold of the
door.

Later, when I got older, I asked my mother. “I thought there was a monster,” I said. “What was it?”

“You used to call me in the middle of the night and say it was in your room.” She laughed. “I told you he wasn’t real, that
you were only imagining, having bad dreams.” She brushed the hair away from my face. “You argued with me.”

Dr. Silowicz had been trying for the past several sessions to get me to recover this memory. He thought the monster represented
something important. The idea of an intruder, he told me, was indicative.

“Indicative of what?” I had asked.

“Of a feeling of being violated perhaps.” Silowicz always had everything all figured out. “Of insecurity. Perhaps if we locate
the true source of this insecurity, you may learn to feel more confident now, at this stage in your life.” Whenever he made
a point, he readjusted his skinny old-man legs on his swiveling ottoman. “What else do you remember of this…of this monster?”

Just the way he would destroy the house, coming up the stairs after Mom, his claws scratching on the walls.”

“And what would he do to her?”

“He destroyed her, too. He mangled her.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I could hear it. I could hear him tearing her face apart. I always imagined he was at her throat with his claws
and his fangs.”

“At her throat? Like a werewolf?”

“I guess so.”

“He tore her face apart, you say?”

“Yes.”

“It was around this time that she had her first plastic surgery, isn’t that true?”

It was. “I guess so.”

“And when he came into your room?”

“He would stand in the door and watch me.”

“Why do you think he spared you?”

“Because I didn’t move.”

“You believed that if you didn’t move, he wouldn’t eat you?”

“I guess maybe I thought he couldn’t see me.” I shrugged. “Fuck. I don’t know. I was just a little kid.”

“And where was your father when this monster came?”

“A good question.”

“A monster,” I remember telling my mother. “Standing there.” I pointed to the corner of the room. “And he tore your face off. He went into your room, and…”

“A dream,” my mother said through her newly taut skin, her cool hand on my forehead. “A bad dream, my little prince.”

______

But today I didn’t feel like talking about that stupid monster. Today I wanted to sit there and cry pathetically about Angela.
I had the idea that if I cried enough, I might eventually get it all out.

“You really felt something for her,” Dr. Silowicz whispered after a while, “for this…Angela.”

“She might be dead,” I told him. “It’s like you’re not even listening. It’s like you’re—”

“I’m going to give you something.”

“For you not listening to me?”

He cleared his dry old-man throat. It sounded like someone crushing a handful of dry leaves. “For grief.”

______

If I had ever taken Hapistat before, I couldn’t remember, though it seems that over the years, I’ve taken pretty much everything
at one time or another. Right now I sat in my mother’s Cadillac in the parking lot of the pharmacy and examined the bottle.
“Common side effects,” it said, “include dry mouth, constipation, blurry vision, difficulty urinating, increased sensitivity
to the sun, dizziness after standing up quickly, weight gain, sleepiness, increased sweating, confusion, agitation, and nausea.”

I read a particular phrase again: “increased sensitivity to the sun.”

Fucking terrific.

But as long as it didn’t impair my memory, it was fine with me.

It indicated one every eight hours.

Naturally, I took four. I had decided that Frank would find Angela, anyway, so I was free to overmedicate again.

They were dry, bitter, round pills that dragged slowly down my throat, getting caught against the sides of my dehydrated esophagus.

But I drove home feeling the immediate effects of the drug like a vine of relief creeping through my body, the tendrils of
emotional redress threading themselves around my veins and weaving their way through my circulatory system.

The closest thing in memory to this sensation was the moment I saw Angela in the Velvet Mask.

Hapistat.

Happy, happy Hapistat.

My vision became blurry, and by the time I arrived at my apartment building, I was pretty sure I shouldn’t be driving anymore.
Truthfully, I even had trouble removing the key from the ignition. For some reason—I guess because I was under the influence—I
started looking around for that stupid cat. Where the fuck had she gone? I tried to remember the last time I had heard her
mewling out here. It was strange, but Angela and the cat had disappeared around the same time, maybe even at the same moment.
I hadn’t seen the old man out here in quite a while, either, come to think of it. I leaned over the back fence, the one Angela
had climbed over to steal the hyacinths, and tried to see if I could find her in the flower beds.

Marigolds, tulips, gardenias, pansies.

But no cat.

I knelt down on the pavement and looked under all the SUVs and sedans. Far away, under a beat-up old Mustang convertible that
never seemed to move from the same spot, was a cat-size lump.

Maybe that was her.

I got up and walked over to it, thinking she might be sleeping.

I knelt down on the rough, oil-stained concrete and lowered my head.

It was the cat, all right. Her body had been mangled, and her rear legs were twisted into an impossible position, even for
a quadruped. She had been hit by a car coming through the lot, obviously, and had dragged herself under this old Mustang to
die.

I think I would have cried again if it weren’t for the Hapistat.

Anyway, I couldn’t just leave her lying on the pavement.

I scrounged around for an empty plastic bag in a garbage can and then went back to the Mustang, dragging the cat out from
under it by the tail. I didn’t much like touching her. She was probably covered in fleas and currently, I imagined, insects
of a more macabre variety. I slid her broken remains into the plastic Vons bag and, standing, wondered what the hell I should
do with her. I couldn’t just throw her in the garbage. I looked across the chain-link fence of the parking lot to the old
man’s yard next door. It had become overgrown in recent weeks, the flowers and grass a rich profusion. The old man had gone
away, it seemed. Or maybe he had died. Or perhaps he had just lost interest and was sitting inside watching TV.

It must have been the Hapistat, because I found myself a few seconds later flinging the supermarket bag with the dead cat
inside it over the fence and following it myself, climbing as quickly as possible, where I found myself in a universe of magic
and wonder, with pixies flying through the air and fairies dancing a joyous welcome about my ankles…

Not really.

Really I found myself digging a shallow grave for a dead cat with a spade I had found leaning against the shed. I slipped
her out of the plastic bag so she would properly decompose, covered her remains with dirt, and tried to make the surface look
the same way it had before. I was like a character in a bad mystery movie burying a body in a shallow grave.

Finished, I placed the spade against the wall where I had found it and slipped back over the fence into the parking lot.

Thankfully, no one noticed me.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, I thought.

I am the resurrection and the life.

Upstairs, I poured myself a ridiculously deep mug of bourbon and started off with one long swallow, hoping to dissolve any
of the remaining Hapistat from the sides of my throat and any remaining memories of that cat from my brain. I washed my hands
thoroughly in scalding water, scrubbing my fingers like a surgeon, then slipped out of my clothes and into my ratty old bathrobe.

I sat on the floor in front of
Blade Runner,
catching the opening. The darks and lights of Ridley Scott’s futuristic vision glowed through a brown smear of murky smog.
It was a vision that had grown outmoded, amazingly, one of those cases where the actual reality had surpassed the prediction.
Onscreen, fireworks exploded sadly in the faraway distance. A floating electronic banner advertised life on the off-world
colonies. I must have been hungry, because I suddenly remembered that lamb stew. I thought of the Stouffer’s chicken with
mushroom gravy and wild rice dinner entrée Angela had eaten that first night she was here and of how we had talked for hours.

“Mom?” I said.

“Angel?”

I had called her, I guess, and was now lying on the fuzzy black wool of the flokati with the telephone pressed to my ear.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said, “what’s wrong?” I hadn’t heard her voice in so long.

“How are you, Mom? How have you been?”

“I bought the most beautiful things,” she said. “Margaret and I went to Fred Segal, and they have the most beautiful —”

“I fell in love, Mom.” I was just trying it, just saying it to see if it registered.

“—dresses, and they have the most exquisite set of luggage, with pony hair and apricot-colored handles, tortoiseshell, I think—”

“I fell in love with a girl,” I said. “But then she left me.”

“Sweetheart?” she said. My mother had the thrilling, musical voice of an old movie star. “Darling? My little prince?”

“Yes?”

“Will you come see me?”

I pictured her face the last time I had seen her. My mother had undergone so much plastic surgery over the years that I believed
she might actually have become a replicant. Onscreen, Rick Deckard floated through the futuristic Los Angeles in his hover
car. I lay among the dead and drying stalks of hyacinths Angela had strewn everywhere and put the phone on my chest and felt
my mother’s voice speaking into my body.

“Would you like to go to your grandmother’s?” she was saying. “To Switzerland?”

“Mom?”

“We could stay for as long as you want. Zurich is so beautiful this time of year. There’s no snow at all.”

“Come on, Mom.”

“We could go shopping. You could help me find a necklace, Angel, my Angel, my sweet, sweet Angel…”

“I told you I was in love, Mom.”

“I know. An Angel to Love, you’re my—”

“But then she disappeared,” I said. “She said my name and then she disappeared…”

I don’t remember how our conversation ended, or even saying good-bye, only that I slipped into a dream. I was living on one
of the off-world colonies from
Blade Runner
. There was an open desert in a vast, permanently lit landscape and a sky in which twin suns whirled slowly in elegant figure
eights. I encountered thousands of people like me, beings with skin so white they looked like marble statues. Moving stiffly,
rigidly, as though in a trance, their white, naked bodies glided past in elegant columns. I approached one of those beings
and lifted my hand to touch its mouth. And when I did, his face fell open, revealing the diodes and wires and servos beneath.

And I woke up coughing, imagining a mouthful of orange dust.

I rose from the floor slowly, like one of the marble characters from my nightmare, went to the bathroom for a shower, then
brushed my teeth until I spat blood.

My skin felt sensitive and rough. I went back to the kitchen and made myself a pot of coffee and an English muffin. I had
to take the muffin out of the freezer, so naturally it didn’t cook evenly in the toaster oven. I ate one bite, then threw
it into the trash. Disgusting. Something was wrong with the butter, too—it was rancid, having gone bad like everything else
in my life. I looked through the miniblinds into the parking lot and remembered Angela stealing those hyacinths. She had left
them on the rug, all over the living room floor. They were dead now, had gone bad, too.

Standing at the window…this was exactly what I had been doing when the phone rang, I remembered, when she said my name, when
she disappeared…

In the parking lot below were the usual cars. The afternoon light illuminated the dull asphalt, and the sky, though blue,
appeared empty and far away.

The phone rang.

Holy fuck, I thought. It was happening again.

It was happening exactly the same way it had the last time. “Yes?”

“Angel?”

“Speaking.”

“Angel…this is Annette.” A pause. “Frank asked me to call you?”

I breathed. “Oh, Jesus. Did you find her?”

“Of course I found her, dear.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“I don’t talk to the girls. That’s up to you.”

“But how…how did you—”

“How we find the girls is our business,” she sang.

I don’t think I have ever felt greater relief.

So I had been wrong, I thought. Angela was fine after all. It had all simply been exaggerated in my overactive imagination;
as usual, it had been blown grotesquely out of proportion. Maybe she had been busy, I started to think, and hadn’t been able
to return my calls. Maybe she had broken her cell phone, which would explain why she wasn’t answering it when I called. Maybe
she had dropped it the moment she called me. She said my name and the phone slipped out of her hands onto the floor and shattered,
and she had meant to call me back to tell me where she had gone but couldn’t because my number was programmed into it and
she didn’t know any other way to reach me.

Crazy, I know—I even knew at the time—lunatic theories.

And the note…perhaps she had moved to get away from whoever had written it…a stalker, maybe even the man in gray. She was
hiding somewhere until the whole thing blew over.

“Here’s what you need to do,” Annette was saying. I heard the telltale sound of a cigarette being inhaled, something I remember
my mother doing on the phone before she quit. It made me think of Angela, too. There was still a half-empty pack of Marlboros
on the counter. There were still crushed cigarettes of every kind all over the place—Kools, Salems, Merit Ultra Lights. “I
want you to check into the Mondrian no later than seven o’clock. Do you know where that is?”