Los Angeles (30 page)

I followed her into the parking lot, all the way to her car, and watched her drive away.

That night, I scoured the course catalog, and the next afternoon, I waited for her to emerge from a physics lab and followed
her in my own car. She visited the mall, going from store to store, and I tried to locate a pattern in the shops she chose
— Book Star, Banana Republic, Patagonia. I found it especially interesting when she bought a large 7 UP at the food court
and sat at a table all by herself, sipping it over a
National Geographic.

I remembered reading an article about albinos all over the world in a
National Geographic
once.

Obviously, this was another message. She was aware that I was observing her.

I kept going over my notes. There in the hospice waiting room, down the hall from my mother, I found layers of meaning, veils
of significance, signs and secrets. Professor Lem was sending me clues, I was certain. I had come to the conclusion that she
was in love with me but was unable to say anything about it — publicly, anyway. The university would fire her if they found
out; an affair between a professor and student would result in my expulsion and her dismissal at the very least, if not her
outright criminal prosecution. She had to be more than circumspect: Our relationship had to be completely covert. I looked
for patterns in her lectures, circling every fourth word, for instance, and piecing them together to form new sentences, searching
for symbolic significance in particular passages in the accompanying texts. This is where I first learned about the uncertainty
principle, not coincidentally, and I believed Professor Lem was asking me to make a choice of my own.

The outcome depends on the observer,
she had said in her lecture.

And I had been observing.

I had been observing for some time, and she knew it. I followed her every day, taking photographs as she went about the business
of her life. I even followed her home one afternoon, to a small boxlike house in the Valley.

She was the cat, and I was the scientist, and this — this little house — this was the box.

I drove back to my mother’s hospice that evening and I was shaking. Professor Lem was asking me to enter her house, I thought,
to follow her inside. I was shaking with the knowledge of what she wanted me to do, that everything would be revealed.

I sat awake all night, there in the luxurious medical room with my mother, staring at my notes.

“Angel,” she said, “little prince…”

“What is it, Mom?”

She would wake up bewildered sometimes, panicking to know where she was… where
I
was…

“Angel?”

“I’m right here.” I grabbed her hand.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she said.

“How are you, Mom? Is there anything I can get you? Some ice water?”

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

I wanted to tell her about Professor Lem. “I fell in love, Mom.”

“— 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.

“Would you like to go to your grandmothers?” 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.”

“Go back to sleep,” I said.

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

______

“Do you remember the rest?” Dr. Silowicz asked. This was another day entirely. He was sitting across from me in his plastic
chair, legs crossed, still whispering.

“The rest of what?”

“You do remember, don’t you, Angel?” He cleared his throat. “You just don’t want to.”

I looked down at my hands. “I remember.”

“The funeral?” he said softly.

“The funeral,” I repeated.

The funeral. The casket. The ceremony.

The cremation.

They burned her — I remembered that. The ashes.

Red. Orange. Bright yellow.

Burning.

They burned my mother’s body, then shipped her ashes back to Switzerland to rest on a shelf in the family mausoleum.

“No,” I said. “I don’t remember. Not really.”

These memories, I thought, they couldn’t be real. These were implants. They had to be.

I lifted my head so I could see my psychiatrist across the white room. He wasn’t looking at me; his eyes were directed somewhere
beyond. I wanted to scream like I had that day when I was just a kid, standing there in the kitchen, covered in Annabelle’s
butter, my mother’s hummingbird hands fluttering all around me.

But I remembered: Monique was dead, cremated. She was ashes. I thought of her face, of my face, the face we had shared. I
thought of my mother’s skin, the way it had been pulled so tightly across her bones by the plastic surgeon. I remembered her
funeral, remembered the parade of half-assed celebrities. I remembered the obituary my father had shown me in
Variety,
a “socialite,” it had called her, “wife of a well-known director/producer,” “a staple of the Hollywood scene...” When my mother
died, it was like she had turned to wax. Her skin, even when it was alive, had developed a taut, gummy sheen from all those
operations, and in death her flesh seemed as though it had been cured like expensive leather over her fine, pointy bones.
Her eyes were half open, just as they had often been in sleep. I remember staring into her face and watching the migraine
aura form in front of my eyes. It was just daybreak, and in the mild confusion that accompanied the change of shift, no one
came to check on her.

But it didn’t matter. I just wanted to let her sleep. I just wanted the pain to be gone.

No more headaches.

It’s funny, but when I was a kid, staying in all those hotels, when Mom had a migraine, I would call housekeeping and ask
if they could please be extra quiet in the hallways.

I felt that way then. Every noise was a potential disturbance.

Please, everyone, I wanted to say, please be quiet.

Stop the buffer. Silence the intercom. Lower the blinds. Draw the curtains over the windows. Dim the lights.

Don’t disturb her now. Don’t make a noise.

Don’t even breathe.

Death to a quantum physicist means entropy, inertia, means the ultimate result of bodies coming to rest and remaining at rest.
There will come a time in the universe when every atom will be equally distant from every other atom, and this will be the
end of things, the very last moment of the universe as we imagine it. The long, slow pull back toward infinite density will
begin, and another universe will get its chance.

I sat in the hospice with my mother and lost my eyesight that day, an amoeba of watery gray forming in my line of vision,
and I haven’t seen clearly since.

______

Chicken noodle soup and a bologna sandwich. A glass of orange juice. Green Jell-O for dessert. I sat by the window and watched
the clouds moving like cataracts across the giant iris of a sky. Every night, in the entertainment lounge, they played another
movie. I would sit at a safe distance from the rest of the patients and watch. I remembered more, of course. I remembered
that when my mother died, I turned to watch the sun rising beyond the window blinds. I remembered all of this, these images
and sensations just there, placed there, as though sitting on a shelf in my memory. I remembered seeing a white glow emanating
from the parking lot outside. I remembered slipping out of the room and into my car, driving in the early morning traffic
to the small, boxlike house in the Valley. I remembered waiting on the street, watching the door while the newspaper delivery
boy dropped a copy of the
Los Angeles Times
in front of it and pedaled away. I remembered how a few minutes later, a slender female arm reached out and pulled the newspaper
inside.

It was another message, I believed. Professor Lem, she was beckoning me.

Open the box, she was saying.

Look inside.

I got out of the car and stepped across the dry lawn. I went to the door and placed my hand on the knob. It turned easily,
opening into a sparse living room. A radio was on somewhere, the scratchy sound of the news announcer reciting the morning’s
disasters. I smelled coffee. There was a blue love seat. There was a white rattan rocking chair. There was a matching kitchen
table with a glass top, also made of white rattan, and two aluminum folding chairs. Everything was brand-new. Everything appeared
to have been bought yesterday. The walls were white, entirely absent of pictures.

Slowly, I stepped around the corner and peered into the kitchen. Professor Lem was sitting on a high stool near the counter.
Coffee was dripping into a pot like medication dripping into my mother’s veins. She hovered over the newspaper, absently licking
a finger as she turned each page.

I was opening my mouth to speak when she turned her face toward me.

We didn’t move, neither one of us moved, for one long, unendurable moment.

I felt my whiteness so sharply. I felt the stark pinkness of my eyes, the aluminum blue of my lips. I was so suddenly
me.

“You’re a student,” she said finally, and her voice was even and clear.

I don’t even know if I moved.

“You’re in my Concepts class.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did you… did you follow me?”

I didn’t know how to respond. I was waiting for something, for some important revelation. But I was beginning to realize that
it was not forthcoming, that all of this had been a mistake.

I was overwhelmed by self-consciousness.

My name is Angel Jean-Pierre Veronchek,
I wanted to say.
I am an albino, son of the famous movie producer Milos Veronchek, son of the recently deceased Monique Veronchek, former French
movie actress and runway model. I will die of skin cancer one day. One day I will be crucified by the light.

“Would you like something?” Professor Lem asked. “Would you like to sit down?” She came toward me, a look of worry in her
intelligent, feline eyes. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

I was shaking. I remember shaking, my whole body, my whole soul, my whole being, trembling. “In your lecture,” I managed to
get out, “you said… you said, ‘Angel.’”

“Angel,” she repeated.

“You said my name.”

“Your name is Angel?”

I lifted my pink eyes to see her.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Angel?” She was leading me into the living room, guiding me to the couch.

I sat with my hands on my legs and looked up at her. “I am the observer,” I said. “This morning I observed my mother’s death.”

“It’s okay,” Professor Lem said gently, her voice soothing, “it’s going to be all right, Angel. Can you wait here? I’m going
to get you a cup of coffee, and then I’ll be right back.”

“I am the observer,” I said again, listening to her dial the phone, those three numbers.

______

At night, in the clinic, I lay in bed, overcome by a strange combination of memory and forgetfulness, my past and present
blurring together like the hues of a poorly painted watercolor. Sometimes I would rise and walk to the window and listen to
the rustle of the trees outside.

One night, an orderly walked by, saying, “What are you doing up now? Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”

“I’m Angel,” I tried to tell him.

He smiled, not understanding. “Of course you’re an angel,” he said, leading me back to my bed. “And I’m Jimmy Stewart.”

______

“You’ve made such excellent progress.” Silowicz clasped his hands together. This was a few months later, enough time to let
the antipsychotics take hold, enough time for Reality, the drug, and reality itself, to take over again. I had spent time
at Saint Michael’s before, of course, had spent two whole years here after my mother died, after the incident with Professor
Lem, two years that I had folded like clean sheets and placed on a shelf.

My mind, though far from normal, was operating in that permanent present tense again.

“I know you don’t like compliments, Angel,” he added, “but…”

“It has only been with your help.” I offered as sincere a smile as I could manage and hoped it was at least mildly convincing.

“I’m only guiding you,” Silowicz said. “You’re doing all the work.”

I looked at my shoes. At some point, someone — Melanie, I think — had brought me these Nikes. They had coils inside the heels.
They were like bouncing machines on my feet. I was actually worried that I would be ejected into the ceiling. Over the course
of the past several sessions, I had been forced to confront the traumatic fact of my mother’s death and had been convinced
that I was just an ordinary human albino and not a
Blade Runner
replicant. It was even funny now.

“I think you’re finally ready for us to talk about the rest,” Silowicz said now.

“The rest of what?” I was still looking down at my spring-loaded sneakers, waiting for my feet to jump up on their own.

“Of what happened.”

I looked up. “Something happened?”

Silowicz cleared his phlegmy throat.
“Angel,”
he said disapprovingly.

I waited. I knew what he was getting at.

“She contacted us.”

“Who?”

“Miss Teagarden,” Silowicz said. “She contacted Frank.”

I could feel the blood coursing through my colorless veins.

“You frightened her,” Silowicz said, a sympathetic tone lodged in his voice. “Apparently, you —”

“What did I do?”

“She said you nearly killed her.”

“Killed her?”

“You went swimming one night, and you… and you tried to drown her.”

The pool, I remembered the pool.

But I had rescued her, hadn’t I?— scooping her body into my arms. She had been coughing, choking. No, I thought. She had
pretended
to drown, and I had saved her. It had all been make-believe, a game. “That’s not what happened,” I told Silowicz, shaking
my head. “That’s not the way it —”