Amnesiascope: A Novel Part 1

Amnesiascope.

A Novel.

Steve Erickson.

Trivial or impure dreaming literally rots the fabric of the future.

LAWRENCE DURRELL.

I wish I never wanted then what I want now twice as much.

MOTT THE HOOPLE.

I'M MOVING UP TO the suite at the front of the hotel. Ever since the Quake I've been living in one of the single units, but now I'm making the move up to the suite. Abdul the manager is giving me a deal, sort of hush-hush between us, a.s.suming his bosses don't fire him first and scotch the whole thing. The other day I heard the landlord chewing him out, as he surveyed Abdul's grand plans for upgrading the building. "You're throwing away money, it makes me sick!" I was standing at the top of the stairs, on the third floor, and I could hear the argument down on the first, and I thought, Well, there goes my suite. They're going to fire Abdul.

They're all Palestinian terrorists, the guys who own this building, but Abdul is a smooth Palestinian terrorist. He imagines himself a worldly man, and for all I know he is. He reads books. He's dapper. He hara.s.ses the female tenants but he thinks he does it so smoothly no one notices it's hara.s.sment, dropping by in the morning in his bathrobe with his cup of coffee in one hand and his cigarette in the other, complaining back at them that they complain too much. He finds their complaints-about the cracks in the walls, the plumbing that gushes through the ceiling-petulant and unreasonable, but it isn't that he says he won't do anything about them, he's too smooth for that. Rather he says he'll take care of it and then gets around to it when he d.a.m.ned well feels like-weeks later, months, never ... He makes the rest of the world feel as though it's mired in the impatience and pettiness that he has transcended through a disciplined self-education, faith in Allah, and sheer dapperness.

He saw a picture of me in a magazine, I guess, some review or another of my last book. It impressed him. The fact that it was years ago and a lousy review to boot couldn't mean less to him. He doesn't want me dissatisfied, he wants to keep me happy; he considers me a prestige item, as tenants go. He lets his bosses know I had a picture in a magazine once and now they call me to write resumes for them, business proposals, in terrorist code no doubt because I've seen, in Abdul's closet, the portraits of various Middle Eastern dictators and strongmen he keeps hidden. "There you are," he said triumphantly, when we signed the lease on the suite, "you now have a contract signed by a Palestinian." Well, he's cut me a deal, which is the only way I can afford it, and I waited until I got all moved in before I thought I should let him know I'm not likely to be getting my picture in any more magazines. I let him know his investment in my "fame" maybe wasn't the smoothest move he ever made. He wouldn't hear of it. The smirk on his face in response said, I'm a smooth Palestinian of the world. You can't terrify a terrorist.

Station 3 on the radio. So far to the far end of the dial it's barely on the radio at all. Broadcast from somewhere in the desert, way beyond the farthest backfires. ...

Station 3 only comes in at a certain time of the evening, and when it does it collides with another signal, a channel in Algiers that's broadcasting to an asteroid hurtling out beyond the moon. The Algerian station is owned by a Moroccan religious sect that believes the asteroid is heading straight for earth and carrying with it a message from G.o.d, so the station is sending a message back, only to have it bounce off the asteroid and land here in L.A.-if I understand it right. And mixing with that signal is yet another that was originally broadcast in 1951, from just outside of Las Vegas when they first started testing nuclear bombs; that broadcast was vaporized by the explosion and apparently only now, fifty years later, has rea.s.sembled itself in the stratosphere. So jajouka music from northern Africa floats through Station 3 along with the death-rock anthems of young metallurgic huns from the inner valleys, and Max Steiner conducting the theme of Now, Voyager, all as dreamlike and beautiful as the twilight, which turns a very particular shade of blue outside my windows.

I live in an old art deco hotel on Jacob Hamblin Road, a small concrete avenue that winds and twists so much on its short two-block journey from Sunset to Santa Monica Boulevard that at the beginning you can't see the end. Even in L.A., city of great non-sequitur streets like National Boulevard and San Vicente, streets of absolutely no linear logic whatsoever that disappear on one side of the city only to suddenly reappear on the other, Jacob Hamblin Road has some crazy turns in its short life. Back in the Thirties the Hotel Hamblin was built by the studios to put up young studs and starlets shipped in from all over America for screen tests, which is to say it became a sort of private brothel for producers and casting agents; Abdul's apartment on the ground floor was the lobby, marble and s.p.a.cious. Now, along with the telephonic punctuation of in- and outgoing communiques to and from the hotel's single women, the rooms and nights groan with the sounds of vicious h.o.m.os.e.xual exchanges. In the mornings I wake to someone somewhere in the building crying out "I'm tired of this life!" with so much force it's hard to believe he's really dying, but so much anguish it's harder to believe he's kidding.

Over the years the hotel has succ.u.mbed from its earlier, slightly debauched elegance to Caligari dilapidation. Plaster buckles around archways carved in lightning-bolt zigzags, and a coat of white paint covers doors originally patterned after the portals of Austrian chalets. A gloom has overtaken the Hamblin's dark halls, where images of huge water lilies wave in shades of brown. In front of the hotel, hovering right above Jean Harlow's name scrawled in the sidewalk, is L.A.'s last remaining fire escape, something I took note of not long ago when one of the city's backfires jumped its demarcation line and threatened to slip south of Sunset. My new suite is on the top floor in the southwest corner of the building, with eight huge windows that run to the ceiling, facing every direction but north. At one place in the apartment I can see east, west and south all at the same time. The mists of Santa Monica fill the third window, the first and second contain the looming Hollywood Hills, near the base of which the Hamblin stands; along the upper ridge of the hills tiny barren palms sway in silhouette, and the Strip is visible below them, with the pa.s.sing figures of amazon j.a.panese waitresses drifting in and out of the sushi bars. A clandestine helicopter lands at four o'clock every morning on top of the towering silver-and-gla.s.s old St. James Club, at which time the tower's lights go out ...

In windows number four, five and six is the constant glint of the backfires. In windows seven and eight is the rain of their ash.

I love the ashes. I love the endless smoky twilight of Los Angeles. I love walking along Sunset Boulevard past the bistros where the Hollywood trash have to brush the black soot off their salmon linguini in white wine sauce before they can eat it. I love driving across one black ring after another all the way to the sea, through the charred palisades past abandoned houses, listening through the open windows to the phone machines clicking on and off with messages from somewhere east of the Mojave, out of the American blue. I've been in a state of giddiness ever since the riots of ten years ago, when I would take a break from finishing my last book and go up onto the rooftop, watching surround me the first ring of fire from the looting. I still go up there, and the fires still burn. They burn a dead swath between me and my memories. They burn a swath between me and the future, stranding me in the present, reducing definitions of love to my continuing gaze across the smoldering panorama as Viv, my little carnal ferret, devours me on her knees. I love having nothing to hope for but the cremation of my dreams; when my dreams are dead the rest of me is alive, all cinder and appet.i.te. Don't expect me to feel bad about this. Don't expect my social conscience to be stricken. My conscience may be touched by my personal betrayals but not my social ones: the fires burn swathes between me and guilt as well. In this particular epoch, when s.e.x is the last subversive act, I'm a guerrilla, spending my conscience in a white stream that douses no fires but its own.

Halfway through Sahara's routine, Viv cooks up the kidnap plan. She maps it out for me on the c.o.c.ktail napkin under my shot gla.s.s of Cuervo Gold, a tangle of lines and arrows that bleed into the tequila smudges. She explains it in the din of the music: "Now we'll grab her here," pointing at the napkin, "you throw her in the back seat-" Sahara has dropped her dress at the end of the second part of her act; true to form, once the third song begins she emerges naked from behind the curtain. The third song is the naked part, every dancer, every act. It's clear right away that Sahara's mystique doesn't lie in her body. It's good enough as a body but it's not out of the ordinary: it's Sahara's face I love, and Viv too. Neither of us can get over it. She's some mysterious blend of Persia and Icelandic, perfect and remote; her face says, If you are seduced by me, it's your choice. I don't care. The other people in the Cathode Flower, all men except Viv and the dancers, have no idea what to make of Sahara, that's obvious. But Viv wants her as much as I do, maybe more. ...

"The last time we did this-" I start to say.

"This isn't going to be like the last time," Viv shouts, over the music.

"I'm not throwing anybody in the back seat," I explain. "I'm not good at that part. Besides, I'm driving."

Viv looks at me in total exasperation. She's five foot two, a hundred and six pounds; tonight she's wearing a little white dress with nothing under it but a white garter belt that holds up her white stockings. She's a wicked little angel, and suddenly I can't help myself. I pull her up from the table and into the back of the club, around the corner into the hallway where the bathrooms are, and I pull up her dress. She opens my pants and puts me inside her. f.u.c.king her against the wall I can see Sahara in her eyes like they're little mirrors; she has a perfectly good view of her. Oh ooh, she says, those little sounds she makes when she's not sure whether it feels good or hurts her, a confusion she finds particularly exciting. I stop when I know I'm going to come because I hold back until the evening's over, our little agreement. "The plan!" she suddenly shouts, having left it on the table with our tequila, so we beat it back to our seats. Viv watches the rest of Sahara's act transfixed.

Now all we can do is wait. Sahara won't come out into the club for fifteen or twenty minutes, doing whatever the girls do backstage after they're done. When she finally appears she glides along the back wall. She sits with the other girls in one of the booths, and Viv goes over to ask if she wants to have a drink. Viv is a lot less shy about it than I am and, since she's a woman, less threatening; the dancers always talk to her and usually after a while they come to our table. Sahara strikes me as less approachable, but after she and Viv exchange a few words she joins us, shaking my hand perfunctorily and then the rest of the time talking to Viv.

She orders a Kahlua. In the music I can't hear a thing either of them says to each other, which is exactly the way I like it. Neither of them particularly wants me in the conversation anyway, which is also the way I like it; I just sit and check out the other dancers and drink my tequila and wait for Viv to fill me in later. From what I can tell in the dark Sahara isn't the wildly animated type, as pa.s.sively remote as she appears on stage, hiding the same secret damage all of these women hide. But Viv is undaunted. She has that kind of personality people instinctively trust, and as far as I know that includes Sahara. I just want to run my wet finger around the contour of Sahara's mouth like I would around the rim of a wine gla.s.s trying to make a sound. For a moment I look away, and turn back to the two of them in time to see Viv lowering the top of her dress, and Sahara placing that mouth on her nipple. ...

Outside the club the night sky is red from the backfires. "I didn't know they were burning tonight," I mumble half drunkenly in the car, behind the wheel. Viv is in the back seat like always and says something about how it was scheduled for next week, but the long-range forecast was for high winds so they moved it up. From what I can tell it's either the second ring or third, starting at Beverly Hills to the west and circling around to Silverlake in the east, which means we're pretty much confined to Hollywood unless one of the Black Pa.s.sages is open on Sunset. Sahara has told Viv she gets off at one-thirty and we're waiting in back of the Cathode Flower for her to show, a.s.suming she does, which would make the abduction unnecessary; I don't know that I'm really up to tossing strippers in the trunk tonight. For a while Viv is content to listen to the sky glow. "Maybe we should go watch the fire," she murmurs dreamily.

It becomes obvious Sahara has stood us up. I circle the car around to the front of the club and the sign is off, the lights are off; and so we just start cruising east on the Strip, me behind the wheel and Viv in the back seat where she always rides. A block from the Cathode Flower below the Chateau Marmont, at the corner of Jacob Hamblin Road are the hookers sitting on the low white wall that runs along the parking lot on the north side and hanging out on the south side around the bus stop in front of the deserted sushi palace. We head toward Hollywood until we can see the faint red shine of the eastern backfire, and then turn around and go back.

All the little clubs and bars along Sunset are just about to close when who do we see stumble out of one of them, shaking herself loose of some guy in the process, but Sahara! I pull over and both Viv and I hop out of the car and grab her. It's hard to know with Sahara whether she's just a little blotto or so remote that nothing registers very quickly, but either way she looks at us with more confusion than concern. In the back seat the only thing she says is, They're burning tonight; and then she slips into unconsciousness, right in Viv's arms. Viv whispers sweet nothings to her, trying to get her attention as I head west past the hookers, past the now dark Cathode Flower, down the Strip out the other end into the woods of Beverly Hills. I can distinctly see the flames of what must be the second ring, and sure enough we hit it around Benedict Canyon where the old resort used to be. The Black Pa.s.sage is open so I drive on through, walls of fire lining our way. The heat of the flames revives Sahara somewhat; she stares at them in a daze. In the rearview mirror of my car I can see both her face and Viv's, the bright red firelight flashing across their eyes, Sahara's dull and Viv's alive with antic.i.p.ation. Viv's got that slightly crazy look like she wouldn't particularly mind if I turned the car the fire's direction and just headed right into it.

With the fire at our back everything feels open to us, every thing is possible. ... Crossing into the Mulholland Time Zone from Zed Time I reset the clock of the car ahead eight minutes. On the radio I can still get the tail-end of Station 3's broadcast, a ghostly Indonesian voice drifting into the car. Sahara, who Viv has now undressed, is in a stupor-alabaster embodiment of all possibilities-and I'm inspired to turn off Sunset and head south past Black Clock Park through the rafters of the old freeway that used to run down the spine of California, from the age-blasted Spanish missions of the north to the Mexican border. As we drive, the frontiers of the west side are dark. In the rearview mirror Sahara's head lies against the back seat, her eyes half closed, staring at the roof of the car while Viv sucks her breast.

Viv's still at it by the time I hit Century Boulevard and the dark abandoned LAX. I steer the car off the boulevard and through a hole in one of the terminals where the sliding gla.s.s doors used to be. I drive through the black gutted airline terminal past the darkened ticket counters and dead metal detectors, along the hallways where pa.s.sengers used to stream back and forth to and from their flights, and every once in a while the high beam on my headlights slashes across the darting figure of someone who lives here. Sahara surfaces just long enough to regard her breast in Viv's mouth and then pa.s.s out again. Over by the arrival gates I see small fires burning and a line of naked women parading up and down the empty motionless baggage carousels. Drive out through the gate toward the runway and I'm following the runway to the ocean where the planes used to fly out over the beach when, in the quiet of the night, under the smoky moon with the fading flare of the backfire to the northeast of me, I hear the sound of both women asleep.

At the end of the runway there's nothing to do but stop the car awhile, unless I want to drive into the sea. I roll down the window and listen to the waves. I push back my seat and forget about the two naked women behind me, watching and listening to the ocean, until Sahara comes to. What is this? she slurs, less fazed by her nakedness than sitting out on the end of an airplane runway with the ocean in front of her. The look on her face says she hasn't the faintest idea how she got here or who I am. Nothing quite registers until she inspects Viv more closely, whose own nakedness throws her until she gets a better look at Viv's face. Let me out of here, she demands, so I get out of the car and go around to the pa.s.senger side and open the door for her; she staggers nude onto the runway under the ashen moon. I get back in the car and watch the ocean some more while Sahara runs off into the dark. ...

Soon I start the car and turn north. I pa.s.s Sahara, stumbling down the airfield naked, and soon I'm leaving the airport behind me and heading up the coast, surprised to see lights in some of the Marina high-rises, since I didn't think there had been any electricity in this part of town for years, when I'm ambushed, as usual, by my arch nemesis, My Conscience. I turn the car around and drive back to LAX, cruising slowly onto the landing field. Soon she's in my headlights. She's crawling around on the ground now in a haze of alcohol and panic; let's just say she's not as ethereal as she was in the footlights of the Cathode Flower. I stop the car. You coming? I call to her, and the bracing ocean breeze at four-thirty in the morning has apparently sobered her enough to convince her it might be a good idea. She scurries back into the car, first into the front seat then changing her mind and climbing into the back, next to Viv who just goes on sleeping through it all like a little white bird.

Slipping from Ocean Time Zone into Oblivion Time, I reset the car's clock back eleven minutes. Sahara grumbles about the situation all the way up Pacific Coast Highway; when her hostility toward me is finally exhausted, she goes into a monologue about her life in general-all the usual stuff about her mother who committed suicide, her h.o.m.os.e.xual brother who died last year, the rock band she's trying to start in Los Angeles. ... Soon Sahara's mystique lies all over the car in tatters. Viv, in her fashion, entirely misses the depressing part of the evening and wakes silently with the first light of sun; one minute I look and she's asleep and the next minute she's awake, sitting up in the seat quietly watching the ocean out the window, still perfectly naked and content to remain that way for a while. "Stop and get some juice" are her first words of greeting, and I pull over to a little market. I get out and peer at them together in the back seat. Would you like something to eat? I ask Sahara.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she mumbles in response, under her breath.

"She'll be OK," Viv coolly explains. "I've a.s.sured her that when the time comes, she and I will have our revenge."

They'll have their revenge! In their eyes I'm responsible for the whole plot. I could point out it was Viv who defiled Sahara all night in the back of the car while I was just the chauffeur; but what's the use? There's no use being reasonable here: "What's reason got to do with it?" Viv would say. It's as useful as arguing about the shape of a circle. "What's round got to do with it?" The thing for me now is to just get them their food, get back in the car, and take them somewhere I can leave them to their unholy alliance. The thing for me now is to just quietly spend the rest of my life watching over my shoulder or out the corner of my eye, on my guard for the inevitable coming vengeance, and not waste two seconds trying to be reasonable about it, since I've finally learned, halfway or so through this life of mine, that with women there's no percentage at all in reasonableness. And ever since I got this through my thick head I've gotten along with them a lot better.

Right now Viv can see all these thoughts flashing behind my eyes and, smiling, she reaches up through the car window and kisses me on the cheek. ... So I'm not so surprised to get back to the car three minutes later, with their juice and an armful of those little processed sweet rolls in plastic packs, and find the back seat empty, and the two of them nowhere to be seen, their clothes still in a pile on the seat as they have been all night. I turn looking up and down the coast highway for a glimpse of them-but nothing; you tell me where a naked stripper and a sculptor dressed only in white garters and white stockings could disappear to, because I'll never know. Later when I find Viv I'll ask her and she'll just give me the same little smile she gave me when she kissed me through the car window. I suppose, all things considered, it was pretty shrewd of me when I went in the market to take along the car keys.

Couple of years ago, the newspaper I work for asked me to write a piece on the city's "spiritual center." I begged them not to make me. But, unavoidably coerced, I finally turned in an essay on another strip joint not far from the Cathode Flower, down on La Cienega Boulevard in the barren stretch where all the little art galleries used to be along with stores that sold Dutch clogs and designer hot dogs. It was across from the theater where Bertolt Brecht wrote plays for Charles Laughton before Brecht was run out of Hollywood in the early Fifties; last time I was there all I saw were the remains of the lingerie shop, lingerie of all colors and configurations blowing along the sidewalk like old newspapers. At this strip joint I had befriended a forlorn blonde stripper named Mona. "Befriended" is a misnomer, of course, since our friendship never existed outside a five-minute conversation now and then in the dark, and of course Mona was not her real name; I never knew her real name. She was from Stockholm and never seemed very happy. I always thought she was beautiful and sweet, but it was dark, after all. One night, as I knew would eventually happen, Mona was gone, as all these girls are eventually gone-and they don't leave forwarding addresses, a rule that used to apply to strippers in particular but has recently come to apply to everyone in Los Angeles. ... Now about an hour past dawn, after Viv has disappeared with Sahara, I turn off Sunset and head east through the Palisades thinking about Mona. The ocean is behind me and I take another turnoff toward this bluff I know where there's a view of the whole bay, from the smoking ruins of Malibu to the paramilitary outposts of Palos Verdes. The sky is filled with the smoke of last night's backfire along the second ring, and from the bluff looking east I can see two or three of the wide scorched concentric gashes that circle Los Angeles, with old Hollywood in the bull's-eye.

With the car parked I run the radio up and down the dial one last time before finally shutting it off. In the distance below me, a last few tiny fire engines make their way back to the fire stations from the charred ring of earth. Out at sea the hundreds of Chinese junks that sail in about this time each month approach the sh.o.r.e with their mystery cargo. My article identifying the spiritual center of Los Angeles, incidentally, was never published, the only story I've written in a long time that was flatly rejected and which I flatly refused to rewrite. The sun has risen just high enough to come crashing through my front windshield when I'm still thinking of Mona who, for all I know, is hanging out at this very moment with Viv and Sahara, or was abducted according to the plan scribbled on a c.o.c.ktail napkin and is now held captive in the Scandinavian fjords, near the top of the world.

I started talking to myself again the other day. I don't think I even realized I was doing it, until I noticed the woman in the next car looking over at me in horror. ... Since the Quake I haven't talked to myself like I used to-in the shower, pacing my apartment, in the car or walking down the street, yakking up a storm in broad daylight and never thinking twice about it. The plain truth is I've never known anyone else I was so confident would be as understanding of what I had to say, or as patient to let me say it; if nothing else I could always be sure I would at least let me finish my sentence, before interrupting. Some years ago I mentioned it to a woman I was seeing at the time. It wasn't so much a confession, since I didn't think it was anything to confess; it just sort of came up in pa.s.sing: "Well, yes, now and then I talk to myself. No, I don't mean in my head, I mean right out loud." We were at the beach, lying on the sand. She grew increasingly sullen the rest of the day and evening, until finally she admitted it seemed to her a pretty distinct sign of instability. In fact she had to admit it seemed to her a pretty distinct sign I was flat-out cracked; and she was right, of course, I've never denied it. I've never denied the deep fault line running from my psyche through my brain out my door and down Jacob Hamblin Road, straight to Melrose Avenue and the feet of Justine.

Actually it was Justine who got me talking in the car in the first place, though I don't remember exactly what I was saying to her. I was driving east on Melrose when I saw her rise before me on the other side of Fairfax, having just appeared a block or two behind me and altogether likely to manifest herself again on some other street several miles from here, some time in the next hour or two, if not sooner. She hovered high above the avenue as she always does. ... Justine is a billboard. She's everywhere lately, an eruption of flesh, sprawled across a silk sheet in barely existent red panties and ta.s.sels that match her red hair, under a scrawl in red lipstick that reads Justine. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, pink luscious bubbles floating over the cityscape, cannot be called merely spectacular, they are supernatural, eternal like the woman herself, who was first revealed some twenty years ago on billboards just like the ones she's on now, in a similar pose, her body slightly less pneumatic as though she was ripening at the speed of her own legend. Ten years later she reappeared up and down the Sunset Strip, Hollywood Boulevard, La Cienega Boulevard ... and now she's reappeared yet again. No one knows exactly what Justine does, or what she's advertising for, I a.s.sume she doesn't actually do anything, though there's a phone number at the bottom of the billboard for anyone interested in finding out. But as the years have gone by, with Justine bursting forth new and better each decade, ever more perfect and ubiquitous, it becomes less and less imperative that she do anything at all but watch over the city as the Red Angel of Los Angeles, from block to block and street to street and billboard to billboard and year to year. Nonetheless, I make note of the phone number anyway.

I don't have to write it down, because in the L.A. of Numbers I am Memory Central, just as in the L.A. of Names I am Memory Void. I seem not to be able to remember any thing or any one anymore, and I guess I've insulted a few people in the process; I run into somebody here or there and he starts jabbering at me and pretty soon I realize I'm supposed to know this person, I've met him before, maybe ten or twenty times, maybe a hundred. And after he goes on awhile I can finally only look him straight in the eye and say, "Excuse me, but who are you?" and then he's not too happy about it. But at the same time that I've cut myself loose of memories of people and events, the memories of dates and times and phone numbers attach themselves to my brain like gnats to fly paper. At the same time that I'm the deep well into which one can drop a bad love affair, a death, a childhood trauma and never see it again, never even hearing it hit bottom, a.s.suming there is a bottom, I remember not only my own dates and times and phone numbers, but yours too. I'm a walking Filofax for everyone's appointments and vital statistics. I remind Viv of her lunch date at this gallery or that studio, I let my friend Ventura know when it's time to pick up his laundry. I'm the man of deadlines and itineraries and bank account codes; even Carl in New York calls in to check his schedule for the afternoon. So remembering Justine's phone number, written so inconspicuously at the bottom of the billboard that I have to figure she would really rather not hear from me at all, is a snap. I don't even have to repeat it to myself out loud. Instead, with the woman in the next car looking aghast that the man in the car next to her is having an unduly animated dialogue with no apparent pa.s.senger, I figure maybe I should put a lid on it again, no more talking to myself. I'm beyond the point anyway where, even to myself, I really have all that much to say. ...

Over the two days I spent moving into my new suite, I panicked. Not about the extra rent but because, situated in this apartment, in the big wide open front room with all the windows, I might be generally expected by others to become more productive, even inspired. I have no intention of becoming either inspired or productive; to the contrary I intend to sit in the dark at night in my big black leather chair staring out at the Hollywood Hills like a man gazing on an approaching tsunami. Here comes the present. On my monitor I run the same movies over and over with the sound off: The Bad and the Beautiful, Out of the Past, Pandora's Box, I Walked with a Zombie. Studying the films on my shelf, Ventura remarks that I don't own any funny ones. "What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" I answer in outrage. "You don't think Scarlet Empress is a funny movie? You don't think Detour is a funny movie?" Last time I was up the hall in Ventura's apartment I took a look at his film shelf, and there's a guy who doesn't own a single funny movie-except Charlie Chaplin, and he and I both know he doesn't watch City Lights because he thinks it's funny, he watches it because he thinks it's profound. The truth is I don't own anything but funny movies. Every one of them is hysterical.

On the walls of his apartment Ventura tacks little sayings written on paper, maxims he's scribbled from his readings, words of wisdom. He even has up there one or two things I've said. Starting at one end of his apartment and reading to the other, one comes away with a sum total of the Twentieth Century that's rather different from what the century itself might have concluded. Ventura has been having a dispute with the Twentieth Century, and now that it's over he just goes on disputing it, first the century and then the whole millennium. Ventura's whole life is a dispute with the Twentieth Century and I'm the moderator, the referee. I watch for the low blows, the groin kicks, the cheap shots, while trying not to get belted myself in the process. I'm neutral not only on the century and the millennium but on G.o.d himself; let's just say I'm reserving judgment. ... Over the years Ventura and I each move from one apartment to the next in the Hamblin, trying to better situate ourselves, though for what I have no idea. He moves up the hall as I move down; he used to be in a larger apartment and moved to a smaller one, before I moved from my smaller apartment to the larger one. As he moves to smaller s.p.a.ces he acc.u.mulates more and more pearls of wisdom on paper until there's no more room on any more walls, at which point he begins to layer over: he never throws anything out, G.o.d forbid. Just once I'd like to see him throw something out, one of these little pearls of wisdom scribbled on paper, just so I could see which one it was; I wouldn't even mind if it was mine. When the universe stops expanding and starts contracting, Ventura will start eliminating all these revelations until there's only one left-and that's the one I want to read. That's the one I want to take with me to my grave.

As for me, as I move to larger s.p.a.ces I get rid of more things. I lose things as the universe expands; I'll start acc.u.mulating when the universe contracts. There you have it in a cosmic nutsh.e.l.l, the difference between me and Ventura. Soon he'll be living in a closet with more paper than the Library of Congress, and I'll be living on the roof naked in my black leather chair. This morning when I go up the hall to see him he's staring at his tarot, dealt out on the floor in the shape of a cross. He's contemplating the meaning of the Queen of Cups, at the nexus of the cross. On the broken-down table that stands in the middle of his ever-shrinking apartment is the usual volume of mail he receives for the column he writes for the newspaper. Ventura's sense of purpose is such that he will answer all these letters; he's been writing the column since the first issue of the newspaper almost fifteen years ago. But now, between his fan letters and his empty typewriter, sitting in his fedora and his cowboy boots and the same shirt that's always rolled up at the sleeves, he stares at the Queen of Cups. He almost always wears his fedora and cowboy boots, even in his own apartment; only very occasionally does he take off the hat, and every once in a while, if he's feeling really familiar, he may even be seen in his socks. Staring at the Queen of Cups, he's wondering who she is. He's wondering if she's his ex-wife or his current girlfriend or the woman who was his last girlfriend and may be his next. One of the most enduring and gratifying things about my friendship with Ventura is that when it comes to women, he's even more screwed up than I am, the best and most compelling evidence of which is that he actually thinks I'm more screwed up than he is. "I'm not going to ask," he says, "what it is they want. You haven't heard me ask that."

"No."

"I wouldn't dream of asking."

"Oh, go ahead," I say.

"No," he shakes his head, "I wouldn't think of it. It wouldn't even occur to me."

"Actually, it's easy."

"What?"

"It's easy. What they want. It's the easiest question in the world."

"It is?" For a moment he's alarmed. "All right, so ... tell me."

"Everything."

"What?"

"They want everything."

An ashen look comes over his face. "Then we're f.u.c.ked," he says hopelessly. Ventura is so confused about women that when I explain to him my Three Laws of Women, he actually writes them down. "One," I count off, "they're different."

"One, they're different," he repeats, jotting it down in his little notebook. He always carries a little notebook where he jots things down, so he can write about them in his column or tack them up on his wall.

"Two, they're crazy."

"Two, they're crazy." Scribble scribble.

"Three, they're funny."

"Three, they're funny." He reads it over. Ventura is convinced every woman is irresistibly attracted to him. "That woman's looking at me," he moans in a restaurant, "I wish she would stop. I have too many women in my life right now." Every woman in every restaurant, every woman on the street, every woman who exchanges two syllables or a burp with him, wants him. It's his burden in life to disappoint all of them. The ones he doesn't disappoint sooner, he'll have to disappoint later. Those are the ones he becomes involved with, the ones he casts in the movie he thinks he's living in; like him, they're larger than life. Each affair is a singular turbulent drama. "You two don't have a relationship," Viv said to Ventura one night at Musso and Franks, about one girlfriend or another, "you have a weather report." Lately I've been noticing something. Every woman in Ventura's life gets larger and more mythic than the last, until the new one is the most remarkable of all, the smartest and most beautiful, the one who in another world was a movie star and is now reincarnated as a Sufi G.o.ddess-and then he breaks up with her, as always, for no reason I can fathom. He just broke up with one recently for the simple reason that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her; she was a woman with no vices whatsoever. "How was I supposed to be involved," he asks plaintively, "with a woman who has no vices?"

"You don't understand," I tell him. "You were her vice."

"That's it! That's it exactly! I was her vice. How was I supposed to be involved with a woman whose only vice was me?" Weeks from now, of course, if not days, he'll regret it. "I was driving out of the desert," he'll explain, pacing his apartment in a frenzy, "when it hit me like a lightning bolt," and he'll hit the back of his head, nearly knocking off his hat, to show me what it was like to be struck by this epiphany: "I should have married the Sufi G.o.ddess."

"Do you know," I finally confess to him, "that in all the years I've known you, I've never understood a single thing about any of your relationships with any of your women? That in fact I understand your relationships with women even less than I understand mine? That's not the way it's supposed to work. Other people's f.u.c.ked-up relationships are supposed to be easier to understand than your own. I'll bet," I pointed out, "that you think my relationships are easier to understand than yours."

"You're right. I do."

"You're supposed to. Except that, in this case, my relationships really are easier to understand than yours. Even I think my relationships are easier to understand than yours." I'm not a man of hidden meanings, he once said to me, there are no hidden meanings in my life. "It's interesting that the only time there are any hidden meanings in your life," I say, "is in your relationships with women." When we're this confused about women, we turn to the only option left us: we write. We write as though we understand everything and it's up to us to sort out the world. I only write about movies, but Ventura writes about Life. This morning, still contemplating the Queen of Cups, we head down to the newspaper. I drive because he doesn't want to take his car, an old sixty- or seventy-something Chevy that he also considers larger than life, even more larger than life than his women. All the way down to the paper he's in the next seat to me muttering it like a mantra: they're different, they're crazy, they're funny. And then: s.h.i.t! he exclaims, they want everything? "Well," I answer, "to be fair, we do too." I've worked at this newspaper about three years now, ever since things ended with Sally. It's published once a week out of the hollowed-out cavern of the old Egyptian Theater, not far from the mouth of the sunken L.A. subway. First few months I'd arrive to the theater every day to find that during the night someone had carted away another memento of the theater foyer-a pharaoh s chariot or a slab of fake hieroglyphics, or a mummy and its papier-mache sarcophagus-until all that was left of the grand entrance was a dirt plot. Inside, amid the decor of tarnished gold that ascends in decay to the ceiling, the advertising department is located up on the stage where the screen used to be, and the editorial staff is strewn among the ripped-out seats of the audience section. The editor-in-chief's office is in the balcony and the receptionist works behind the snack bar. The publisher took the projectionist's room, small but offering an obvious vantage point.

My desk, happily, is near one of the old emergency exits. When I first arrived at the paper no one on the staff talked to me except some of the editors and the art director, a brilliant but tormented h.o.m.os.e.xual who was always raging at everyone. He admired a book of mine he read back in his more impressionable years and so we struck up a friendship of sorts, and I became the one others recruited to calm him down or negotiate various truces. I like the people at the paper but they tend to complain a lot about jobs I would have killed for when I was as young as they are. The level of envy is superseded only by the level of resentment. There's all the usual political infighting and turf warfare; gossip pervades everything. At a party not long after I split with Sally, drunk and depressed and an all-around basket case, I wound up going home with one of the advertising reps, a cynical noirish blonde who chain-smoked and told me every last thing there was to know about everyone on the staff. Mid-seduction it occurred to me, in my drunken haze, that tomorrow everyone in turn would know everything there was to know about me, first and foremost that on this particular evening I was less than my most s.e.xually formidable. Certainly enough, as Dr. Billy O'Forte put it to me later, "your wick wasn't wet twenty-four hours before phones all over L.A. were ringing." In the years since, every time I'm seen talking to this woman more than five minutes, the flames of rumor flare anew. People on the staff who have f.u.c.ked everything that moves within the confines of the newspaper's walls sadly shake their heads and whisper to each other their "disappointment" in me.

What can I say? I'm a disappointing character. I only began to feel like I actually belonged at the newspaper when, having quickly mastered the art of disappointment, I went on to become completely practiced at the science of disillusionment. By now I've totally dismayed anyone still innocent enough to expect I'm capable of anything admirable, let alone heroic. When Ventura and I arrive this morning we immediately run into Freud N. Johnson, the paper's publisher. Johnson is a five-foot-five failed movie producer who publicly and bitterly mourns the world's lack of respect for him and deep down inside suspects he's a h.o.m.os.e.xual. He often ends arguments by whimpering, "I know you're right and I'm wrong. But you always get to be right." He's been trying to figure out how to fire the editor ever since I first came to this job, though what he'll actually do once he succeeds is an open question, since he doesn't appear to know the first thing about putting out a newspaper and all the best writers have said they would quit, something that in one of his stupider miscalculations he may not believe. I've made it clear to anyone who cares, for instance, that I would go, if only because the editor in question hired me against what would have been any more reasonable person's better judgment. In the meantime Freud N. Johnson constantly prowls the bowels of the Egyptian Theater, his entire being broadcasting a variety of messages in the neon of the psyche. "I'm not a h.o.m.os.e.xual!" howls one. "I'm tall!" squeaks another. "You're taller than I am and I hate you!" blurts a recurring favorite.

Freud N. Johnson regularly confides in Ventura, perhaps because Ventura has been around longer than anyone else. Johnson may think that when he fires the editor he can recruit Ventura into taking the job and pulling the paper together; and Ventura allows Johnson to take him into his confidence, he explains to me, so he can find out what's really going on. It's a strategy that seems to me obviously perilous, bolstering Johnsons nerve and implicitly encouraging him to believe he can do something rash and get away with it. Today, however, all that's neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. Clearing my desk and tossing all my phone messages in the trash, I'm just waiting for Ventura to finish his intrigues so we can go home, because I had this dream yesterday morning I've been waiting to tell him. Lately I've begun to dream again, which is to say I've been having astonishingly vivid dreams that I remember in detail, when usually they only linger in my mind like smoke in the nostrils from a fire that's gone out. This one happened yesterday morning around ten-thirty or so. I had awakened briefly to find Viv curled up on her side of the bed rather than between my legs; and I went back to sleep and had this terrible dream- We were staying in a casino in Las Vegas and my mother was with us, though in the dream I don't remember actually seeing her. A strange young woman had lured me from our hotel room to the swimming pool outside, and I was about to take off my clothes and go into the pool with the strange woman when I saw Viv watching from the window. I rushed back to the room where I found her lying on the stairs, sobbing. With great indignation I accused her of being jealous for no reason, and stormed out of the suite and began walking all over subterranean Las Vegas, through tunnels that connected all the casinos, until finally I surfaced on the outskirts of town. It was dusk. The casino where I was staying was not far in the distance. A large sweating man with dark hair and a scraggly beard said, "There's a Big One coming," and at that moment dust rose on the faraway hills and birds scattered frantically across the sky. I held onto a stop sign in the middle of the desert while the earth shuddered beneath my feet, and watched the high rise of my casino, which now resembled the Hotel Hamblin, tremble slightly. Then, just as it appeared the tremor and the danger were past, the casino completely collapsed. I was stunned. I ran back to the site, and by the time I reached it the sky had become dark and there was nothing left of the casino at all, no sign anything had ever been there; but even in the dark the sand glowed a dim red and people stood around staring at it, stupefied, until someone said, "We should try and dig." For a while we dug, pulling up planks of wood from beneath the sand. But soon we stopped because it seemed useless, it was so obvious that everyone who had been in the casino was buried, unreachable, hundreds of feet below us.

I was devastated. I was thinking what to do. I was thinking I would have to call my mother's friends and Viv's family, and I would have to call Ventura to come get me because my car was buried too, along with everything in it, and there was nowhere for me to go. I was very aware in the dream of my entire past being gone, and in the midst of my devastation there was also a sickening opportunism, that everything was behind me now. Then, in a daze, I was in another casino, stumbling through the halls, when I realized that at the very least I had to call out, to Viv or my mother, on the off-chance they might still be alive and hear me. I opened my mouth and started to call- And woke myself up.

I couldn't have been more surprised. It never occurred to me I was in a dream, and now it stayed with me with defiant clarity. Viv was still curled up next to me, her back to me. "Oh G.o.d," I sighed, reaching for her.

She turned. "What is it?" she said, immediately conscious.

"Oh G.o.d. I had a horrible dream."

"What was it?"

I shook my head. "No, I can't. ..."

"Was I in it?"

"No." I didn't really think it was specifically about her anyway, or even us. But what I woke to, what remained with me, was not how my dream had wiped my life of its past, but how I had spared myself in the dream by feigning indignation at Viv's jealousy and heartbreak, and bursting out of the room and the casino. In other words it was not my dishonesty that had doomed Viv and my mother, it was more complicated than that: honesty would not have saved them, it would only have destroyed me, leaving me entombed with them. Now in bed I took Viv, clutched her by her hair and lowered her to me. I slipped between her lips into that territory where my conscience can't reach me. I was convinced that if she had been there this morning when I woke, between my legs, her mouth wrapped around me, I never would have had this dream; she would have sucked the bad faith right out of me, it would have rushed out of me with everything else. Now she had to suck all the harder, stroking me as though to set me on fire, and I could still feel the small drop of conscience left inside me afterward, like the errant cell of a cancer left behind after surgery.

"But you aren't responsible," Ventura says this evening when I tell him the dream, "for what you might have done."

"I wanted to go swimming with the strange woman," I argue. "I wanted to take off my clothes and go into the pool with her."

"You aren't responsible for what you wanted. You're responsible for what you do." We're driving down Fountain Avenue through the blue corridor of cypresses that sag with clumps of wet ash, the turrets and towers north of us unlit in the night. The air is filled with this odd smell the city has taken on recently, not the common smell of sandalwood and hashish but a different smell I can't place, and as we sometimes tend to do we point things out to each other-the sites of famous suicides and old Hollywood love affairs-as though we're tourists, which, like everyone in L.A., we are. Sometimes we even make things up, though for all we know we're not making it up; in L.A. you think you're making something up, but it's making you up. After a while, looking at the dark towers and thinking about dreams and earthquakes, Ventura adds, "It's going to be very weird, when we're all driving around with a dead city in our psyches."

"But we're already driving around with a dead city in our psyches," I answer. Those of us who are still in Los Angeles know the rest of you out there are laughing at us. Those of us who are still here-a million, half a million, a hundred thousand, no one really knows anymore-are already driving around with dead streets and dead alleys inside us, dead buildings and dead windows and dead gutters, dead intersections and dead shops, not the urban corpse of the present but the dead city of the future. We've already seen the end of Los Angeles the way the people of Pompeii watched their end rise in the smoke of Mount Vesuvius years before it actually blew. And walking around with a dead city in you either makes you just as dead or it thrills you, it makes you the most alive you've ever been, surrounded as you are by a landscape that's just choking for the breath of someone or something alive. ...

The days right after the Quake. ... Wandering from one dead apartment building to another, slipping past the red X's that marked the doors of buildings that had been condemned. Down at the beach an old huge aquablue building called the Seacastle greeted the brown waves that rumbled in, the bas.e.m.e.nt long since flooded, the rooms now empty except for the other squatters that strayed from room to room until they found one to claim. From the street below, I could make out through the windows the apartments as they were abandoned: prim apartments, disheveled ones, some trashed when the earth lurched awake from its bad dream, and some unscathed except for the fact that the entire structure could teeter and crash at any moment. I headed for the top floor. People think that's the place you don't want to be in a quake but the odds can go either way, really, you can either be buried under the building or ride it on down. Deserted lives as I wandered from one apartment to the next, photos and letters, knickknacks and leftovers in the icebox, the disarray of the sheets that reminded me of Sally, whatever their pattern. From the top of the Seacastle I had quite a view, especially in the apartment that didn't have a wall, the ramshackle dead pier just a few hundred yards off to the south beyond the dangling dead cables of the now-exposed elevator shaft. Out of the shaft echoed the squawking of gulls.

I stayed at the Seacastle for a while, partly for the view and partly for the song of a parakeet still in its cage, until the feed ran out and I let him go. He flew directly into the shaft and never came out. But mostly I stayed for the disarray of the sheets, drawn not to the large king-size beds but the singles, where there was little chance that two people had ever slept together or had ever been there longer than the expanse of their ecstasy. ...

The third night I woke with a start. At first I thought it was a tremor, or that an unusually large wave had rolled in; one of the reasons I liked the Seacastle was you couldn't tell the difference. In the western sky a huge moon hung level with my bed. I turned to the doorway and saw her form, glowing in the moon small and feral, nothing like Sally at all who the darkness always hid-and then the next minute she was gone. In that moment's recognition I realized I'd been seeing her ever since I got here, just out of the corner of my eye. I got up and searched the top floor of the Seacastle in the dark until I nearly tumbled over the edge of a jagged gash that ran down one of the hallways. When I went back to bed I lay there disgruntled, the moon way too big and the sea way too loud.

The next day I left the Seacastle for the afternoon. I stood in line over at Main and Ocean Park Boulevard where they were handing out sandwiches and fruit juice and vitamin packets. When I got back to the Seacastle I found the pattern of my bed sheets disrupted. That night the same thing happened as before: I woke and there she was lingering in the doorway. Come here, I said, before she disappeared.

After that I saw her in the afternoon, in another room on the other side of the building. When she caught me looking at her, she didn't disappear or look away. Then I tried to ignore her awhile; a night or two pa.s.sed and a day or two when I didn't see her; and I thought she was gone, thought she had moved on to another empty hotel up the coast, when I woke one night and found her kneeling next to my bed, her face inches from mine. "Jesus!" I cried, because she scared the h.e.l.l out of me. She smiled at this, before she got up and walked out. Even in the dark it was obvious her eyes were green.

"Come here," I said, when I saw her again the next day. The sun was falling in the evening fog, a wet red blotch; she was in the room diagonally across from mine, facing the city rather than the sea. I moved toward her and she casually drifted into the next room. We kept moving in circles around each other. For a few minutes I couldn't find her, and then there she was on the northwest balcony, looking out away from the pier: she was leaning against the balcony watching the waves. I thought, You lean too hard it will break; but I didn't say anything. Let it break. Let her tumble into the water. I came up behind her and she turned her head slightly to register my approach, but didn't say anything, showed nothing on her face in exactly that way I would come to love. I hadn't been planning anything at all. Until I took off my clothes I really had no idea in my head what I was going to do. I reached around the front of her and unsnapped her jeans and she said, "What if I said no."

"I would anyway."

"No." I opened her up, standing there on the balcony, and she continued purring various refusals, No you can't, no I don't want you to, uh uh, mmmmm mmmmm, and the startled sound of her gasp when I came into her became the sound I always listened for whenever I f.u.c.ked her, that little surprise I never understood that she expressed so inarticulately. So I never had an answer for her, from that first time until I could finally say, a year later, that I loved her, having decided love could be as different from what it had been before as Viv was different from Sally. Standing there on the balcony, naked from the waist down and staring at the charred cliffs of Malibu with me inside her, she seemed to drift out to sea on her little black Nos, dissolving into a stream of dreamy demurs. From the highest floor of the Seacastle, in the light of the sun setting into the ocean, with Viv in my arms, I could see the dead city to the east before it lapsed into the final darkness of night. But it's at night, on the other hand, that my Los Angeles, the dead city inside me, is especially beautiful in the light of the moon.

She was gone the next morning, and when she didn't reappear over the next few days I left the Seacastle, not wanting to live anymore amid its memories. It was one thing when all the memories belonged to others, another now that I had one of my own. For a few nights I slept with hundreds of others in the circus tent that had been pitched on the beach for all the Quake nomads. I kept my eyes peeled for Viv. Then for a week or so I stayed with Veroneek, who had a pet wolf named Joe and looked like a beautiful wolf herself, with short black hair and deep-set eyes that fixed on you without inhibition, and a low, resonant voice that so impressed the emergency officials they recruited her to read over the microphone. Inside the tent she sat behind a table calling the names of people who had frantic messages from friends and family out of town trying to find out who was alive.

Everything was haywire. A man who had been in jail on a rape charge was recaptured when he rescued an old woman from a collapsed building. A woman who had worked tirelessly on the relief lines threw her bound two-year-old daughter into the sea from the rubble of the pier; by the time the mother was apprehended, the little girl had washed away. It was not as if time had never before been populated with good people doing evil things or evil people doing good things, but that in the weird silver light expelled by the earth when it ripped open, the switch of the soul was flipped, autistic teenagers suddenly taking cool command of crises as corporation presidents and retired Marine colonels went completely mute with paralysis. I went mute myself, though by choice. I had lost my stutter, and had nothing to say until I found it again. I was a looter, not of stores or businesses but my memory: I rushed into its shadows and stripped it bare, leaving nothing but vandalism and random destruction behind me, until I was finished and light-headed. But now the words trickled out in an ooze I didn't trust, the fluid speech of someone just a single step in the past or a single step in the future, skipping or pausing to catch up with the staccato of the present.

Veroneek lived in an old wooden red house in Ocean Park. It survived the Quake while all the newer buildings around it crumbled. I slept in the bas.e.m.e.nt, to the wolf's irritation, although eventually we had a meeting of the minds. Veroneek had a deep dark secret about a terminally ill friend who died under mysterious circ.u.mstances, and when she told me about it she looked right at Joe as though her late friend was riding inside the wolf; every once in a while she would pry open his jaws with her bare hands and bellow into his mouth, "Joe, are you in there?" When we slept together I was the first man she had been with in a long time, after affairs with women. When I kissed her between her legs it was the first man's mouth that had ever been there; it may be I was nearly as good for her as a woman was. Veroneek was trying to start a broadcasting station in L.A. and saw the Quake not as a setback but a golden opportunity, as though it had brought the airwaves crashing to earth along with everything else and now she could gather them up and launch them back into the sky on her own terms. She stared mesmerized at my laundered white shirt as it hung from a ceiling lamp in the front room of her house, turning in the breeze and glittering in the sun. Finally one afternoon she asked me whose message I was waiting for her to call in the tent down on the beach, and I told her about Sally; I just sort of a.s.sumed that, though we weren't together anymore, Sally would try and get in touch. Though it had been some time, I a.s.sumed she would just want to know I was all right, or would want me to know that she wanted to know. But as the days had pa.s.sed and neither my name nor Sally's flickered across the monitor in the tent, my mild surprise had slowly transformed to relief: "So I guess," I told Veroneek, "it really is over then. So I guess I'm not really waiting to hear from her after all."

"Ah," Veroneek smiled, with that intense stare, "but now there's another."

And that was when I skipped into the present. I don't think it even occurred to me she might mean herself; I just a.s.sumed she meant Viv, and for all I know, she did. I went on waiting in the tent, watching the ocean waves through the flap and listening for my name over the speakers, and when it wasn't called I stood for hours before the monitors looking for my name anyway. Others waited too, with no reason to stare up at the monitor but to try and will into being a communication from beyond the wreckage. Finally, to no one in particular, I said, "I'm l-l-leaving," and was on my way out the tent heading down toward the waves when I heard Veroneek's voice over the speakers. The message wasn't for me specifically but rather any party that answered to the name Seacastle, signed by an anonymous party that answered to the name Bunker. Wh-Wh-Where is the Bunker, I asked everyone I met, and it was nearly midnight when I tracked it down, a huge white concrete conglomeration of artists' s.p.a.ces on the edge of Baghdadville. I took the freight elevator up from the loading docks to the first level and walked down each hall in the dark, trying each door. None opened, nor any on the second level, and it wasn't until I reached the fourth door on the third level that one gave way. I had decided I would take whoever was behind any door that wasn't locked to me.

The loft inside was dark. Through a window on the other side I could see the glow of the distant bonfires on the freeway. Groping around in the dark I found a circular staircase and made my way up to a smaller loft that overhung the larger one. She said nothing from the bed and I said nothing back. She didn't stir at all. It was only later, twenty minutes, maybe thirty, looking up from her thighs, that I was sure I identified the gold of her hair in the bonfire light from the window behind me. Up inside her, my tongue touched the tip of the long thin web of her climax. I saw her o.r.g.a.s.m in the distance, somewhere beyond her shoulders; I inhaled it. She groaned and lurched. Her v.u.l.v.a burst with the last No left from the Seacastle, and I swallowed it. I still carry it inside me, like the note in a bottle.

For a long time we didn't say a word. That No from her v.u.l.v.a was the last sound between us except our moans. We rode in taxis down Crescent Heights, the sound of shakuhachi flutes drifting in through the open window. Headlights severed the trunks of the arching white trees and siamese-twin lizards joined at the head slithered up into the street from the sunken subways. Over the black sh.o.r.es of Wilshire Boulevard the caged nudes of the La Brea Tar Pits dangled in the wind; they watched from behind their wooden bars as we watched back. Viv and I had a silent agreement each of us would take of the other whatever we wanted whenever we wanted it. ...