Amnesiascope: A Novel Part 3

"I know it's not ideal. ..." Viv agreed.

"It's not ideal?" I said. "Personally, I think it's distinctly less than ideal. That's just my own personal opinion, you understand. No, I would say we're in agreement on this, that a naked man playing the part of a naked woman is not ideal. And somehow-I'll grant you I'm biased on this-somehow the fact that I'm the naked man makes it really not ideal."

"Yes, well," Viv retorted, "I don't have the luxury of ideal right now. You know, it's not like you haven't read with Amy before-you did at the casting session, if you'll remember. She'll be comfortable with you."

"See, at the casting session? I had my clothes on. That was the big difference there. I'll bet Amy is a lot more comfortable with my clothes on than my clothes off. Ask her."

"Amy!" Seconds later Amy was at Viv's side. "He's going to read the lines with you so we can get your close-ups. Given that your character is supposed to be responding to a naked model when you hear these lines, doesn't it make perfect sense that he should take all his clothes off?"

"Absolutely," said Amy.

"I just thought," Viv turned back to me, "you wanted this movie to be good. I thought you cared as much about it as I did. Don't you think I'd be very happy right now to have an actress who could play Jasper without falling apart? Don't you think, at this point, I'd even be happy with Catwoman, for G.o.d's sake? But I don't have a Jasper or a Catwoman, what I have is you. I don't imagine Catwoman would hesitate two seconds to take her clothes off."

"I'm sure Catwoman wouldn't," I said bitterly. "If she had bothered to show up, I mean."

"I have no more time," Viv calmly answered, as though explaining the suns.h.i.+ne to a three-year-old. She spun on her heels again. "Think about it a minute and let me know what you decide, so I can tell everyone whether they should just go home and I can figure out how I'm going to give Veroneek back her money."

That was her crowning blow, because she knew that in the end I was incapable of letting her down. Christ, if the Cabal ever hears about this I'm cooked, was all I could think thirty minutes later on the model's platform. Around me was a great flurry of activity and preparation. The crew bustled with heavily suppressed hilarity; they couldn't wait for me to finish so they could all explode with laughter. Only Amy, focused as ever, never cracked a smile. In my mind I kept going back to the beginning, to the night Viv first proposed this project. I don't think it occurred to me then that I would wind up naked in this movie. In fact, I'm sure I had it in my head that it was other people who would wind up naked in this movie. Action! Viv barked behind the camera and, behind her canvas, Amy asked, "Where does he touch you?"

"Under my breast," I sighed, "below my nipple."

"Which one?" said Amy.

"The left." Out of the corner of my eye I was watching everyone around me. Everyone around me was looking not at me or Amy but the ground and their feet, trying to contain themselves; the only sound I heard was snickering, a solitary chortle from back in the shadows of the set. After a moment I realized it was Niles. It was Niles snickering and a certain peace came over me, because now I knew that in a few seconds I was going to kill him, just as I had been wanting to do, and it would make everything worth it. Thinking about it now I was glad I was naked, because it would just make Niles' demise all that much more humiliating, to be throttled in front of all these people by a naked man. "When his hands are raised to my breast," I went on, "you know ... he's exposed to me. He's disarmed."

"Disarmed?"

"Like in the gangster movies, when the bad guy puts his hands in the air."

"Or the good guy sometimes."

"Or the good guy."

"Is he the good guy or the bad guy?"

"He's the good guy when I'm the bad guy." Later it would occur to me that this was one of those common primal dreams, to be die only one naked in a room full of people. I don't remember what it's supposed to mean, beyond the obvious sense of exposure and vulnerability; and I certainly don't know what it meant that in this dream I was not only naked but in the role of a naked woman, talking to another woman about which breast I preferred having touched. Interestingly, as we did take after take, moving on from one section of dialogue to the next, everyone else on the set fell away from my consciousness and I became lost in what Amy was saying and what I was saying, until I had almost forgotten that my voice would not be on the film at all, that nothing of me would be on the film, that I would have been only the ghost who revealed himself, herself, whatever my self was at this moment, for the sake of the look on the face of that person who witnessed my revelation. At this moment, everything and everyone else was exposed to me. I was free of the threat or possibility of any further exposure, as naked on the outside as I was inside, and everyone cowered before me, prisoners of their pride and secrets.

But later, going over the footage and looking at Jasper's scenes on the monitor, Viv and I both noticed something right off. Mid-air, between her nervous breakdown on the set and the image caught by the camera lens, Jasper transformed into the woman I met at the Feverish-the spellbinding eyes, the vague German accent and strange stillborn smile. ... The effect was electrifying. "Jeez," Viv shook her head, unabashedly infatuated, "she makes the movie." She called Jasper into the network a few days later to overdub some lines, and for the next week Jasper was all Viv could talk about.

I think it was mostly Viv's obsession with Jasper that gave us the idea for the party. In order to coax Jasper into her lair, Viv decided to have a Nude Artists Ball on Halloween at the Bunker. We would invite all of Viv's friends, painters and sculptors and photographers and curators, plus some of my pals and their various women and wives, plus Veroneek and Joe and the crew who worked on White Whisper, and the other actresses and maybe even a select few of the auditioners, the Chinese lesbians perhaps, and perhaps Sahara and some of the girls from the Cathode Flower. h.e.l.l, we might even invite Catwoman and then tie her to the floor and stand around spilling wine and tequila on her and eating hors d'oeuvres off her body. Viv created invitations out of parchment and feathers and foil, drawing an elaborate image of a genie emerging from a pod with stupendous, dripping b.r.e.a.s.t.s like Jasper's, and a p.e.n.i.s I had the funny feeling I'd seen somewhere before, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.n.g. a blue pool that bled around the card's edges. It was left to me to write the announcement. But going over it in my mind it occurred to me I wasn't sure how many of these particular people I really wanted to see nude, even at a Nude Artists Ball; the Cabal, for instance, I felt reasonably certain I didn't want to see any of them nude, whereas I kind of liked the idea of Niles-invited in the first place only out of deference to Lydia, whose bottom was tattooed with his name after all-turning out to be the only person at the ball who was nude. So I made some adjustments in the invitations, customizing them, so to speak.

The closer the party got, the more elaborate it became. Viv's loft didn't need a lot of extra ambiance, given the metal coffins and pyramids and mannequins and dead bugs on the walls, but she unpacked an exotic array of artifacts anyway from her various travels: masks and dolls and strange figurines from Africa and South America and the Middle East. Overcoming her dread of even imaginary spiders, she draped makes.h.i.+ft webs from one corner of the ceiling to the next. On the monitor intercut with Network Vs. broadcasts was an ongoing montage of Metropolis and Vampyr and Kiss Me Deadly, Louise Brooks and Val Lewton movies, outtakes from White Whisper and selected blasts from the Cinema of Hysteria; and in the center of the room, on a low gla.s.s table, burned a huge candle, which was actually the once-melted, twisted mutation of many candles. By Halloween night we had turned the whole Bunker into a maze, confiscating the bulbs from the light fixtures and throwing the corridors into blackness, extending the winding pa.s.sages into the loft so that if people took one turn they wound up on the main level and if they took another they wound up on the upper platform looking down. Not intelligent enough to become truly confused, the first person actually to make it all the way through to the end of the maze was the dim little eighteen-year-old half of the Chinese lesbian couple. Three minutes of social intercourse confirmed she had the vocabulary of a parrot and enough brains to fill a shot gla.s.s. The other lesbian was lost somewhere on the Bunker's second floor; all night we heard her distant screams. "You're getting closer!" someone would shout into the pa.s.sage every now and then, just for the sheer h.e.l.l of it.

People arrived in baffled, agitated bursts, spewed from the Bunker's concrete aqueducts in general states of dishevelment. It was hugely entertaining to watch them tumble in on top of each other, snapping and snarling like trapped dogs. The women were in varying degrees of nakedness, costumed as leopards or birds or in nothing more than a striking shade of blue or white champagne and glitter. Some of the more brazen men wore only cod pieces while a few were in evening attire, escorting nymphs on their arms. Viv was resplendent in nothing but white stockings and white shoes; I wore my black boxer shorts with the dancing orange skulls and a green D'Artagnan hat with a purple feather. In his hat and boots the only thing different about Ventura's usual appearance was the look on his face that said, Now will somebody please explain to me what the f.u.c.k I'm doing here? Per my plan, the only completely naked man was Niles, arriving as bare as the day he was born. Dangling obliviously, and eagerly scanning the room for Amy Brown, he didn't have the sense to be mortified; rather he had about him the air of someone who couldn't believe the dumb luck of all these women that there should be one singularly naked man for them and it was him.

One of Jasper's thighs was blurting across the monitor when she arrived in person. Taking her cue from Viv's drawing on the invitation, and perhaps recognizing the inspiration of her own b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she came as the genie herself, completely bare in a deep bronze tint with a huge phallus strapped to her that waved wildly from her pubic hair, which was dyed white like the hair on her head. Her eyes were made up to accentuate their light, and her lips were a metallic blue. Behind her was a guy in a loincloth and turban whose ankles were bound by chains and who lugged behind him, on another chain, a huge papier-mache lamp from which a genie presumably could emerge. I have no idea how they got the lamp up through the Bunker corridors. I couldn't help wondering if this was the guy who wound up bound to his bed the night Jasper went barhopping, a.s.suming Jasper's story at the Feverish was true or that she had ever really been there at all; he had on his face the look of a man who has been down at the bottom of a deep amniotic shaft so long and is so dazed and dithering from the experience that the only thing he can imagine anymore is returning there. At any rate, the entrance made a big impression. Where Jasper stopped in the middle of the room the temperature rocketed twenty degrees, and everyone stared, not knowing whether to swarm over her like Bolivian jungle ants or back away cowering from her as some kind of unholy vision of s.e.x. Instead they rushed to the refrigerator and gulped down the pitchers of tequila I had laced with cognac.

After this the only two things that could happen to the ball was that everyone would clear out altogether or explode in a drunken frenzy, and since people were too transfixed by Jasper to navigate their way back down through the Bunker, and we could still hear the cries and thuds of the other Chinese lesbian trying to grope her way toward us, a drunken frenzy it was. The party became a night-long din of breaking gla.s.s and shattering lights and ripping fabric and bodies hurtling from the overhanging loft. Several times in all the blind inebriated confusion I considered weaving my way over to Niles and giving him a good kick in the nuts. At one point someone got the idea of hauling the huge centerpiece candle up to the rooftop and casting it to the street below, and so the whole party became a caravan staggering its way up through the Bunkers pitch-black arteries to the overhanging night, from where we could see in the distance the freeway bonfires and dark Magritte ocean slowly rolling in toward the city. Off the side of the building went the candle in a streak of fire, its flame flickering valiantly all the way to the bottom, where it smashed and erupted in a white rain of wax.

I turned from the rooftops edge to look right into Jaspers eyes as she stood behind me. In the moonlight her hair and lips and eyes and phallus glimmered, and she took my hand to lead me with the others back down through the Bunker to Viv's loft. When she pulled me past Viv's doorway, deeper into the black halls toward the bottom of the building, I tried to pull back: "Wait," I said, because I didn't want to go without Viv, especially with Jasper. But she fastened her grip on me. I couldn't see her or anyone or anything else before or behind me. At the bottom of the building the door opened and we emerged onto the street where I found, to my mystification, that it was not Jasper attached to my hand but Viv-"What ...?" was all I could start to say; I looked over my shoulder to see that Jasper had somehow wound up behind me. Her slave was nowhere in sight, having tangled his chains on a drainpipe up on the roof. Let's go to my place, Jasper suggested. Let's go, Viv agreed. We could still hear from the third floor of the Bunker the noise of the party along with the stray cries of the lost Chinese lesbian who, on our way up and down, must have pa.s.sed through us like a ghost.

We got in my car. Viv and Jasper sat in back. North of Baghdadville the second ring was burning so I headed out Pico Boulevard and then cut up to Sixth Street, driving east on Sixth through the dark knolls of Hanc.o.c.k Park and slipping through a Black Pa.s.sage just beyond MacArthur Park. On into Downtown we continued past the Glow Lofts to the industrial veldt of the switching yard that lay before the old gothic stone bridges of East Los Angeles. The smell of the ocean fell behind us, the smell of backfires wafted through the window. ... Half a mile from Jasper's house we could see it, growing alone out of the wasteland of the railroad tracks next to a junkyard of twisted metal, disposed concrete beams and the abandoned hulls of tanker trucks, in the middle of a circle of low but constant fire. The fire never rose more than a couple of feet, and never went out. I could feel the heat a couple of hundred yards away and it was blasting in through the body of the car when we pulled to a stop. Jasper got out to voice-activate the huge iron door that let us into a concrete tunnel, which led the remaining fifty feet to the house itself. "We keep the fire burning," she muttered from the back seat of the car, when she got back in, "to discourage the vandals and gangs. ..."

"We?" I said.

At the entryway of the house a small parking foyer opened up. An antique car shone in waiting. "Let's drink something!" Viv chirped, launching herself from the car before it came to a complete stop. Jasper had become much quieter since the house came into view. We followed her in; the front door was small and una.s.suming, like a service entrance. Immediately beyond it rose a concrete stairway to the second level, where the whole house opened up into a skyward-spiraling ma.s.s of turrets and gussets and beams shooting off in diagonals and parabolas, so that you were inside when you thought you were outside and outside when you thought you were inside, except for when you were both at the same time. This level forked off into several other directions, including a kitchen, another set of stairs and an elevated outdoor patio; disappearing another direction out into the open air, from where we could feel the heat of the fire moat, a metal catwalk curled around the outer circ.u.mference of the house. The stairs led up to a study from where came a light, and then the bedroom, and from there another series of stairs again led out into the night and up the side of the house's tower to the top. By my count there were about four levels to the house in all, except for all the half-levels in between, the top two overlooking a huge circular living s.p.a.ce on the second level that was lined by gla.s.s from one end to the next. The gla.s.s alternated between window and mirrors that ran from the ceiling to the floor, each window confronted on the opposite side of the room by a mirror so you could look out on the city and see your own face floating above it. In the middle of the room, where the floor was slightly sunken, a low black sofa and two matching black chairs surrounded a low black table, and the whole room was filled by an icy blue light like the color of Jasper's lip gloss. Shooting up the middle of the house like a metal spine was the disembodied hull of a tanker truck, an open chute that exposed the night far above us.

The house must have been eighty feet high. From the windows of the living room was a panorama of the sc.r.a.pyards, the surrounding hills, the ravine cut through by the black Los Angeles River, the old baseball stadium that had been taken over by coyotes and homeless people and fourth-generation descendants of the blacks and latinos who had been displaced by the stadium in the first place, and just beyond the flames of the house's moat the trains that slithered through the switching yard in the dark, one coiling silently by just at the edge of the fire. We stood over a pool that invaded the living room from the elevated patio outside. This too was made from the tank of a fuel truck, a narrow oblong ca.n.a.l of water leading out to a much larger pool. The pool lights were on and the water was red with the light of the fires; the reflection of the distant city skyline floated on the surface. Hovering just beneath the skyline and the surface of the water, in the middle of the larger pool, was a large module, with aortas and ventricles like a huge mechanical heart, roomy enough from all appearances to hold a couple of people. There appeared to be portholes on all sides. Through the water I could see on top of the module a gla.s.s hatch. "What is that?" I said.

"It's a bathysphere," Jasper answered. She was now distinctly sullen, and made her way straight to the table in the center of the room that held gla.s.ses, several crystal liquor bottles, and an ice bucket full of melted ice. She kept looking over her shoulder at the pool and then up at the stairs toward the study where the light was coming from the doorway. Viv was humming and dancing from window to mirror while Jasper poured her a drink; she handed the drink to Viv and asked if I wanted anything, and I said no. "Where did you find this house?" asked Viv.

After what seemed a long moment Jasper said, "It's my stepfather's. He built it. He's an architect." She added, rather caustically, "His bathysphere, too."

"You mean he built the bathysphere?" I asked. Almost in response a flurry of bubbles exploded on the surface of the pool. The three of us watched from the dark of the house as the bathysphere surfaced in the bubbles' wake, where a motor kicked on and navigated the craft to the side of the pool. The motor shut off and after a minute the gla.s.s door on the top of the bathysphere opened and a distinguished looking man in his early fifties got out, fully dressed. Even in the light of the pool his tawny resemblance to Jasper was unmistakable. Stepfather? I was thinking, watching the two of them, when he looked over to the living room from beyond the gla.s.s and now seemed to notice there was someone in the house. "Jasper," he said, not like a question or even a greeting but a perfunctory accusation, with a demeanor that rendered everything an accusation. He circled the pool, ascended the outer steps and entered the house on the next level up, looking down at us. There was no rail; I had already noticed that none of the landings or stairs had rails, as though rails had been deliberately omitted from the design so no one could ever get completely comfortable or secure. In front of the light from the study, the man's frame was silhouetted. Viv staggered a little but not particularly engaged by the moment; both she and Jasper had been naked enough of the evening to have seemingly forgotten about it. The man on the balcony also appeared not to notice that standing in his living room was a blonde in nothing but slightly askew stockings, wobbling on a pair of high heels, and another blonde, his stepdaughter, saluting him with a plastic p.e.n.i.s, the only thing about the evening that hadn't begun to wilt.

He looked from me to Viv back to me with clear disdain, and then back to Jasper, who returned his look and then turned her back on him, walking around the end of the black sofa and plopping herself down, staring out into the night at the ring of flames in the distance and drinking her drink. From the top of the stairs the man looked at me again, and then vanished back into the study.

"What's happening," Viv slurred vaguely. She was a little pickled.

"Nothing," Jasper answered, and then, after a minute, suddenly brightened, in one of her now familiar psychotic s.h.i.+fts. She leapt up from the sofa so fast her d.i.l.d.o nearly knocked over a bottle of scotch, and grabbing Viv she pulled her giggling toward another room beneath the stairs. For the next half hour I could overhear Jasper showing Viv her life. She was hauling out yearbooks and poetry journals and glossy magazine photo layouts from younger days, and newspaper stories of beauty compet.i.tions where triumph was only a smile away, though it sounded like it usually wound up being some other girl's smile. The recounting had about it the desperate wistfulness of a valediction to a life that was already over. At one point, very clearly and soberly, Viv said, "Jasper, don't do this," and then after a few minutes they returned. I was sitting in one of the chairs and Viv and Jasper were slouching on the sofa.

For a few minutes we were quiet in the dark. Viv sipped another drink and Jasper absently flicked her phallus with her thumb, lost in thought. "My father is not a good person," she finally felt compelled to explain, breaking the silence. "That's why I was rude. I didn't know he would be here tonight, I thought he was out of town."

Neither Viv nor I was sure what to say. "Your stepfather," I finally clarified.

"What?" said Jasper.

"Your stepfather, you mean."

"That's what I said."

Viv turned to me. "That's what she said."

I didn't argue with them. I waited for Jasper to go on but instead, after several more minutes, she started to talk about when she had lived in Berlin with a man named Rudi, during the time when all the animals from the Berlin Zoo were running wild in the streets. One night, when Rudi was out, she had picked up the phone and started dialing numbers at random. She kept dialing until she reached someone who didn't hang up on her; they had s.e.x on the phone and a couple of nights later she called another number and did it again, and went on doing this for weeks until finally she got an American who lived in a nearby hotel. As with all the other numbers, she had just pulled this one out of the air, and then pulled out of the air a room number when the concierge answered. The American was shy, not at all sure what to say when she told him she wanted to take him in her mouth. He asked if she would wait while he closed the window shutters. On the phone his o.r.g.a.s.m was frightening and, for the sound of that frightening o.r.g.a.s.m, she called him back, always around the same time of the evening until, finally, he insisted he would no longer do it on the telephone. There and then, by sheer impulse, she agreed to meet him in the most anonymous of circ.u.mstances: she would go to a hotel the next night and take a room, and call him from the room with the name of the hotel and the room number, and leave the door unlocked for him, with all the lights off. They would say nothing to each other. He would f.u.c.k her and then they would leave, first one, then the other. And that, Jasper said, is exactly what happened. When she called him the next night, from a hotel not far from his, he answered the phone without saying a word; a little less than an hour later, waiting for him in the dark naked on the hotel bed, she heard the door open and shut, followed by his approach. Never saying a word, nothing but a dark form, he waited by the side of the bed as she unbuckled his pants and slipped him into her mouth, and just when she could feel he was about to come, she turned on her hands and knees and knelt before him, and reached behind her and put him inside her. As he was f.u.c.king her, she realized she was going to leave Rudi. "There was no doubt in my mind," Jasper said, "that I would rather feel the hands and c.o.c.k of a complete stranger than Rudi's dead heart for another single minute. When I cried out I could feel his excitement. He was a beast, of course-I could have told that from the wound in his voice on the phone. But you know, when the heart is broken and the dream is gone, annihilation is delicious. All I really wanted was to feel whether his o.r.g.a.s.m was as frightening as it sounded on the telephone."

"Was it?" Viv said.

"No."

"How do you know," I said, swallowing hard, "that it was the same man?"

For the first time since I had known her, Jasper seemed profoundly bewildered. "What?"

"The same man as the one you talked to on the phone."

"What do you mean?" she said. Viv looked confused too.

"How do you know the man in the room was the same as the man on the phone-?"

"How do I know it was the same man?" The question almost incensed her.

"Forget it."

"It's a very strange question," she said, upset.

"Yes," Viv said, looking at me, "it is a very strange question."

"Why wouldn't it have been the same man?" Jasper asked. Both she and Viv were looking at me, waiting for an answer that made sense.

"Well ... it was dark," was the best I could offer.

Viv said to Jasper, "But he must have said something. Afterward."

"He never said anything," Jasper answered, disoriented. "He finished and I got up and dressed in the dark, and left him there."

"So you never saw him at all," Viv said.

"No. I tried to call the next night, and ... no one answered. And then I called the night after that, and the night after that. And I never talked to him again."

After that, none of us said anything. We all sat in the dark staring out the windows where the flames in the distance had begun to smear in the dark fog that blows in from the sea every night and turns the sky red. The blue light of the room and the pool outside where the abandoned bathysphere now bobbed mixed with the red to turn the night to wine; from the house, sitting in this low chair in the middle of the sunken floor, there was no sense, gazing at the windows and mirrors, of any city out there whatsoever. Closing my eyes I thought of Berlin. I hadn't thought about Berlin for a long time, and now I was trying to remember exactly how long it had been since I was there: was it right before my father died, or right after my marriage? Was it right after the end with Sally, or right before I went to work for the newspaper? I had lived in a little hotel in Savignyplatz where every night I waited in my room for the ring of the telephone, which had so shocked me the first time, since I didn't know anyone in the city and no one in the city knew me. Lying on the couch in Jasper's house now, I was trying to remember why I had gone to Berlin in the first place, and all I could think of was that I had gone for the very thing that happened there, so that the part of me I couldn't live with anymore could die there, without witnesses. I had gone to Berlin because it was as far east of L.A. as I could get before the millennium came roaring down the autobahn. ...

Next thing I realized I had drifted off awhile. Maybe it was minutes and maybe it was an hour; but the light in the door at the top of the stairs had gone off, and someone had turned off the light of the pool, where the bathysphere floated like a dark tumor. Looking around I was a little surprised to find myself alone in the living room, and I got up and started wandering around, peering into the unlit room where Jasper had shown off to Viv her mementos of the past. I made my way up the stairs. I pa.s.sed the dark study where Jasper's father or stepfather or whoever he was had disappeared, and kept moving up the stairs toward the bedroom at the top, just barely conscious that there was no rail to catch me if I misstepped and tumbled down some random shaft that would deposit me G.o.d knows where, in a field of flames or off the side of a cliff or somewhere north of San Luis Obispo.

The bedroom was dark as well. Even at the top of the house, sixty feet above the ground, I could feel the heat of the surrounding moat. Before the windows and the vista of the faraway hills that embraced the city like the ridge of a volcano's crater, something was happening on the bed. Jasper was lying on her back, no longer wearing the phallus that now lay beside her face; her profile shone in the blue light. Her eyes were open but she was so still and unblinking I thought she could almost be dead except for the sound coming from her, a gorgeous low rattle that was not from her lips but all of her. In the blue light of the room I could see her whole wet body shudder as though she was going to crumble into pieces any minute like a fractured statue. The sight of her brought roaring up from the middle of me this dark scavenger appet.i.te ready to swoop down on the rubble of her; in her hands she clutched something between her legs like a nest, and I half expected a bird to fly out of her. Then I saw it was Viv's hair in her hands and Viv was drinking her. Her eyes were closed. Jasper tried to pull her up inside her. She began to thrash to the rattle coming out of her, and Viv was holding her down to the bed by her wrists when the rattle burst and I could hear everything inside Jasper wash out in a tide. "My G.o.d, stop," Jasper groaned as Viv continued. Finally Viv stopped. Still nestled in Jasper's thighs she opened her eyes, staring straight at me. When she pulled back from Jasper I could see, just beyond Jasper's pubic hair, the swollen glint-from an unaccountable light much brighter than any inside this room or out beyond the windows-of a ring, in the shape of a cat.

On the way home, the first pink shred of sunrise peering over the canyon, Viv, who was sitting in the front seat for a change, suddenly began to sob. What is it? I said. Suddenly she was crying violently and all I could do was pull the car over to the side of the road. What is it, what is it? I kept saying, trying to clutch her to me as she leaned into the car door. I might have expected her to answer anything else but what she did. "No one will ever love her!" she cried. "The only people she'll ever know will be the ones who don't really care about her at all. She'll just wind up all by herself, all alone." Come on Viv, I muttered, trying to pry her loose from the door, and she hadn't been in my arms five seconds before the crying stopped and she was fast asleep.

It was a few days after Viv's party, and the night at Jasper's house, that I saw the Red Angel of Los Angeles in her little red Corvette. It was only for a moment, and she was pulling out of an alley right at the end of Jacob Hamblin Road, which couldn't have been more incongruous. I was in my own car and for a while I tried to follow her, swerving in and out of traffic to keep up as she headed east toward Hollywood, until she suddenly seemed to disappear into the red air of the backfires. ...

After that, Justine became my quest. I think I knew, somewhere inside me, that it was really a search for something else, though I didn't know what; for so long I had barely been aware that there was anything I wanted to search for. But lately I had felt the chasm between me and memory closing when it seemed it should have been growing wider, and I figured if anyone had transcended memory it was Justine, who for twenty years had fixed herself to the L.A. moment. I called back the phone number I had called before, when she had actually answered with the most unexpected h.e.l.lo I ever heard; this time she didn't answer, this time there was the machine I thought I would get the first time, ba.n.a.lly identifying itself as the number for the International Justine Fan Club and inviting me to leave my name, number and purpose for calling. I told the machine I was a newspaper writer looking for an interview, though I could just imagine what Shale would think of that, on the heels of rejected pieces about spiritual strip joints and reviews of movies that didn't exist. For several nights I went to one club after another on the chance I'd spot her making the scene. But that really didn't make any sense: Justine didn't make the scene, she was the scene, and the best that could be hoped for was that she would happen to cruise by in her red Corvette just long enough for those coming out of the clubs to say they had witnessed her, like one witnesses the Miracle of Fatima or the streak across the sky of a UFO.

Then I returned home one night and there, on my machine, was her voice. She sounded just like she should have, like the very image of herself that was on the billboard. She left an address she said was "in the Hollywood Hills," but no date or time; as someone with a memory for dates and times, I'm sure of that. I had never heard of this address, so I pulled out a map and started looking. It was nowhere to be found. In the hills I conducted personal reconnaissance missions, driving around figuring I'd stumble on the street sooner or later, but I never did, at least not until the one night several weeks afterward when I was returning from visiting my mother in the Valley and was forced by a backfire to take a detour; and there it was. It was just off Ventura Boulevard, hardly on the glamorous side of the Hollywood Hills, or what anyone really thinks of as the Hollywood Hills.

I don't want to get your hopes up, so I guess I better mention right now that I never did see Justine. I know you're antic.i.p.ating a big rendezvous, but you might as well forget it. Instead something else happened, not as interesting as Justine, I grant you, but I found the address, an old white Spanish style house; one look at it and it was obvious no one had lived there for years, certainly not for as long as Justine had been popping up on billboards all over L.A. Nonetheless I got out and walked around in the dark peering through broken windows and over the fence that ran alongside the house, when it finally came to me. It came not in a flash or a sudden rush but rather in bits and pieces that gradually arranged themselves in my head-at which point the chasm between me and memory vanished altogether; and I couldn't have been more shocked.

It was the Stutter School, or what I used to call the Stutter School when I came twice a week at the age of nine, once in the morning when it was just myself and a counselor, and then once in the evening with the other kids. I had forgotten it completely and now, pulling myself over the fence and wandering around the backyard in the dark, under the overhanging tree where once had been a swing and around the abandoned jungle gyms that now seemed tiny replicas of what I had once climbed on, I wanted to forget it again. Not because it was so bad; actually it wasn't bad at all. The people who ran the school treated me well and I remember getting along all right with the other kids too, though I never understood why any of them were there, since none of them stuttered as far as I could tell at the time. As far as I could tell at the time they might have all been rounded up just to keep me company. ("He's coming today! Round up those little kids!") In the morning sessions with the counselor I don't remember any serious, wrenching, painful discussions of childhood traumas or torments, I just remember playing in the house or out in the yard, whatever I wanted to do; the only requirement was that I had to talk, about anything, the counselor interjecting himself just enough to keep the monologue going. Soon it was like talking to myself. I don't remember the subject of stuttering ever coming up, though even then I understood that was why I was there. And it's because that was why I was there that I allowed it some time ago to recede into the red air of memory as quickly as it wanted to; and now here was the Stutter School at, of all places, the address Justine had given me. I had been searching for the moment to which Justine fixed herself in defiance of memory, in the same way L.A. itself defies memory, and instead I was confronted by a memory I had long forgotten, and it seemed like quite a trick, like people chattering about a movie they know perfectly well doesn't exist.

I didn't hang around very long. I certainly wasn't going to get nostalgic about it. I left after awhile, and I didn't look for Justine anymore.

I'm sitting in the dark drinking tequila, listening to a Mongolian soprano on Station 3 and what sounds like a dance orchestra from Venus. I am concentrating on the sound of my breath, because when my head is in the future and my body is in the past, my breath is the one thing I know is in the present. My apartment does not exist in the dark; when I turn on the lights the walls appear-the shelves, the furniture, the panes of the window, the metal beams that bolt the walls to the floor so that, when the earth shakes, the two do not become separated-but when the lights are off, the suite takes on its true nature, which is as a chamber of night, the lights and hills of the city rus.h.i.+ng in through the windows and the walls blown away by a howling sky no metal beams can stop. ...

Under a moon the color of flesh, that s.h.i.+nes behind the smoke and a cloud that appears about to explode, L.A. surrounds me in amnesiascope. It stretches from the quays of the L.A. River to the holographic p.i.s.soirs of Burton Way, from the eucalyptuses of Jacob Hamblin Road etched so sharp before the streetlamps they look like smashed gla.s.s to the domed mosques of Baghdadville, s.h.i.+mmering in the light of the stars. Gazing due west from my apartment window, about halfway between me and the sea, I can actually see the spires of Black Clock Park, the time capsule cemetery that lies just beyond the rafters of the old freeway. There aren't many visitors to the park anymore. I don't even remember the last time I was there. People used to wander the knolls from one stainless steel tombstone to the next reading the dates when each cylinder had been buried and was scheduled to be unearthed, in fifty or a hundred years or, among the more optimistic, a thousand. But now only the fallen white leaves of the barren white trees blow along the rows of the graves, and birds peck at the earth in pursuit of a mystery memento within: an interred photo or sc.r.a.pbook, a diary or confession, a newspaper clipping or the ring of a broken engagement or the tape of a favorite song played on a night of s.e.x.

I live in the Border Time Zone of Los Angeles, which is more commonly called Zed Time, because on a map the zone is shaped somewhat like a Z. It runs in a long strip along the southern edge of Sunset Boulevard from Bel Air out to Crescent Heights, where it slashes down all the way to Venice Boulevard and then cuts east again to Downtown. At one point or another it borders Mulholland Time in the Hollywood Hills, Hollywood Time in the east, and Ocean Time in the west and Compton Time in the south. Out beyond the Glow Lofts and the Los Angeles River and the Downtown Time Zone is Daybreak Time, and out beyond the Ocean Time Zone, running up from Baghdadville to Zuma, is Oblivion Time. After you've lived in L.A. long enough you learn to work the zones so as to keep yourself in net plus time; if you hit all the green lights driving out on San Vicente Boulevard, for instance, you can arrive where you're going twenty-three minutes before you left. In our early days Viv and I always arranged our various rendezvous and a.s.signations in whatever zone would get us a few extra minutes together, and up on Sunset near the corner of Jacob Hamblin Road, in front of the Chateau Marmont where the hookers flag down traffic, a girl can walk across the street to Mulholland Time if she wants to move the night along a little faster, or cross back to Zed Time if she wants eke out a few extra minutes for a few extra dollars. ...

Tonight Carl calls from New York. Lately he's been calling every week or so. Carl is some kind of computer traffic guru in Manhattan, mandating and eliminating roads and bridges with the snap of his fingers. I imagine him in a huge war room of sorts, surrounded by four towering wall-size flas.h.i.+ng grids of streets and bus routes and subway tracks. Carl is the brother I never had, which somehow makes it appropriate that he is so far away and that the distance matters so little; for twenty years the life of our brotherhood has been formed of conversations every two or three weeks or months, two or three letters a year, visits every year or two when we simply pick up wherever we last left off. We met in Europe where I was always b.u.mping into him on trains-trains to Toulouse, trains to Venice and Vienna and Brussels-and we wandered the streets of Paris ridiculously fas.h.i.+oning ourselves as romantic figures, unwrapping sugar cubes in cafes and wis.h.i.+ng they were women. We are the opposite poles of our dialectic brotherhood, East Coast-worldly-bon-vivant-doubting-Jew and West Coast-antisocial-misfit-deist-by-default, and since we met he's been waiting for me to write a novel about a subject truly worthy of my time and energy; giving it a great deal of thought he's even come up with a t.i.tle: Carl's Story. These days Carl calls with news of Los Angeles. It's the nature of L.A. that the local news is broadcast to observers three thousand miles away who then report it back to us. It was Carl who informed me when the city was under martial law, which accounted for all those tanks and Jeeps I saw on the streets the night I was late for Dr. Billy O'Forte's wedding. Thus only those outside of Los Angeles know what's going on here, while only those inside know what's really happening. Carl beseeches me to get the h.e.l.l out. "Are you still there?" he says frantically, each time I answer the phone. L.A. is all that's left of America the Delirious. Long ago, in the movie theaters of the land, L.A. collectivized the American dark; it cleaned up the depraved whispers and messier impulses of America's deeper recesses and reduced them to archetypes or, even better, commodities. L.A. insisted that the subconscious didn't own us but we owned it; a more American aspiration is hard to imagine. Now east of L.A. rolls America the Mean. The thin membrane between the delirious and the mean, between L.A. and the rest of the country, is an America of the mind that will explode any moment, if it has any life left in it at all, or will expire with a hush, if we should be so lucky. Beyond L.A. is the new America that got sick of being America, and of its own sentimental promise; for years you could feel every pa.s.sion slipping away except rage, you could hear every conversation about the meaning of America framed by the decadent on the one hand and the repressed on the other who shared the same common belief that sensuality was meaningless beyond mere sensation or sheer procreation. This was the new America that came to feel more beset by freedom than invigorated by it, that was ready to hand everything over to anyone who would just f.u.c.king take charge. Now in L.A., street by street, block by block, step by step, door by door, all that's left of the old America is under siege. I catch sight of it from time to time: a fleeting glimpse at the top of the stairs, or outside rustling in the bushes. This is the old America of legend and distant memory, that invested no faith in the wisdom of history and no hope in the sham of the future, the old America that invented itself all over from the ground up every single day. It is the brazen America, the reckless one, the one with the lit fuse, the America that e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es not by habit but for the intoxicating pleasure of it, the America where no precaution is sufficient and nothing will protect you, no pa.s.sport or traveling papers, no opportune crucifix or gas soaked torch, no sungla.s.ses or decoder box or cyanide capsule, no ejector seat or live wire or secret ident.i.ty or reconstructed tissues or unmarked grave or faked death. It's the America that was originally made for those who believed in nothing else, not because they believed there was nothing else but because for them, without America, nothing else was worth believing.

I've tried to leave L.A. before. Tried in Paris, tried in Amsterdam and Berlin; even lived in New York years ago for about six months, until I woke one morning to the sound of a strange hiss in my head and realized it was my imagination turning to dry ice. But L.A. has always pulled me back, and it wasn't until I saw it dying, wasn't until I saw it in its last throes and its last exhilarating thrash for life, wasn't until my eyes were flush with the glow of its overripeness and my lungs were filled with the perfume of its rot, that I loved it. Now when I leave L.A., it's only for the sensation of returning. Now I've become a very bad traveler, nervous on the road and out of sorts with myself, when I'm gone from L.A. too long. Now when I return, as soon as I cross the city line, I know I'm back in L.A. because I recognize it by its women; they're not like the women of anywhere else, they rampage in a way that's endemic to Los Angeles, wild like the animals that flee a fire in the hills. They emerge from out of the city's cinder heaps glistening with menstrual smoke, and recently Viv and I have noticed that every single one of them looks familiar. We've racked our brains trying to place them, before realizing they all auditioned for us: the hostess in the restaurant is the one who just arrived from Maryland, the woman at the next table is the one who wouldn't take off her clothes. And the one laughing at the bar, wasn't she the one who ...? That they're all beautiful, these women, means nothing. They're auditioning, that's what makes them Los Angeles women, and they're auditioning for more than a movie, for more than fame or success. In L.A. famous people are a dime a dozen and beautiful people a nickel a dozen, which makes people famous for being beautiful barely worth a red cent; in L.A. both the awe of and contempt for beauty have been raised to an art form. The contempt is for a gift that time and experience detract from rather than enhance, a gift that reaches its zenith in a single dazzling moment, a day or an hour or a minute when a woman blossoms to her most impossibly beautiful, whereupon the autumn of age begins, instantly and indiscernibly, to weather the petals. The awe is far more complicated. Of course it goes without saying that this awe has a distinctly male gasp to it. It goes without saying that it's men who get particularly silly about beauty-to which I offer this familiar, pathetic male whine: we can't help it. As Ventura puts it, a beautiful woman is the face of our dreams. Those dreams may span the psychic spectrum from primal to infantile to transcendent but they're our dreams nonetheless, and down in the ego-muck of the barbaric male that dream is likelier to be embodied by a beautiful face than any other vision. And as Viv puts it, Los Angeles is the Ellis Island of beauty, not just because beauty crosses its borders on a regular basis but because, like those who once came to Ellis Island not just for a new home but to be part of the American dream, beauty immigrates to Los Angeles not just to trade on its surface allure but to become the face of people's dreams. Manhattan and Paris and Milan may teem with beautiful women who are also in the business of beauty, but in Los Angeles that business is more than selling merchandise. L.A. is where the objectification of beauty is tethered directly to the subconscious.

There are so many beautiful people in L.A. that no one becomes famous just for being beautiful. L.A. is the city where, if it's to mean anything, mere beauty must transcend itself. Ten years ago I met a photographer who told me a startling story. It was about a young woman he knew who had just arrived in Los Angeles from South America; not long after, he began taking pictures of her, which he distributed to various agencies and magazines. Because the young woman was very beautiful, the pictures were well received. But the woman began to come unraveled by the sight of her own face, first in the photos, then in the mirror; she wound up inst.i.tutionalized in a mental hospital near Ojai, where the photographer was still visiting her weekly. She had literally been driven crazy by her beauty, which had so little resonance in her South American village, and so much in Los Angeles. The streets of L.A. abound with women and men who are clearly mad from their beauty. They're clearly mad from the burden of becoming the face of our dreams, and from their compulsion to carry this burden. They invest everything in this mission that money can buy and technology can achieve, until they're plastic from top to bottom, bone and cartilage and fat carved away to make way for more plastic-until there isn't any more plastic left. When the plastic is gone, the doctors fill them up with whatever's handy. Open up any one of these beautiful people that you see on the street, any one of these people whose life is an audition, and inside you'll find anything you could want or need for modern existence: lighter fluid, dish soap, cognac snifters, bookends, collapsible umbrellas, matching monogrammed bath towels, dog biscuits, remote control, margarita mix, the Sunday comics, the collected recordings of Bessie Smith. Almost everyone in L.A. positively glows with the bric-a-brac and spare parts of the millennium. In the city where there is no time, the most transient of gifts-beauty-strives to be endless, added to or subtracted from not by time but at will. One invents one's beauty as one invents one's name or destiny or dream; and a thousand exchanges transpire between the dreamers: I will be the face of your dream, if you will be the dream to which I can give a face.

Beauty no longer drives the stake through my heart it did once. I've become inoculated to beauty; I got a good dose of it, and came out of the fever still alive. The Hotel Hamblin that has Jean Harlow's name scrawled in the sidewalk in front teems with beauties. They lurk in the hallway shadows hunting for a dream to which they can attach themselves: some are sweet and some are neurotic, some are nervous and some are melancholy; some are frivolous, most seem intelligent, a few may even be deep. They eye me warily at certain times, hopefully at others, perhaps because I'm one of the few men in the hotel who doesn't appear to be a h.o.m.os.e.xual, and perhaps because they sense the inoculation and recoil from it. I don't know whether to feel badly for these dream-forsaken women or terrified of them, afraid that if I so much as meet their ravenous gaze, I'll find them in the morning sleeping at the foot of my door, their nails wedged into the wood.

At any rate I don't really think the women in the Hamblin are much interested in me. What they're interested in, from what I can tell, is their pound of flesh, and that flesh, I'm happy to say, is not mine. Unhappily for him, it's Abdul's. Since he lost his job as the manager of the building, there's nothing to protect him from the wrath of women who got sick of him showing up in their apartments in the middle of the night in his smoking jacket with a cigarette in one hand and a gla.s.s of champagne in the other. Now they want him out of the hotel altogether, and maybe in jail at that, for breaking into their apartments and going through their underwear when they weren't there, or greeting them in the shower when they were. Abdul denies all of it. One day he pulls me aside in the hall and asks if we can talk; in a shaken voice, with a face full of hurt, he recounts the rumors about him. "Can you believe this terrible s.h.i.+t?" he says, outraged. In the meantime he's moved out of the palatial penthouse on the first floor and in with the girl from Indiana-the one whose apartment he graced with a new hardwood floor. Following a minimum of dallying and a maximum of dalliance, she is now pregnant. "You see," he smirks when confiding the news, "even the sour fruit has a sweet bite," or some f.u.c.king idiotic Arab proverb, meaning I suppose that the sour fruit is the situation with the Hamblin in general and the sweet bite is the one he gets on what are now his very own hardwood floors. The mother-to-be is inscrutable; it's hard to know what she thinks of all this, maybe because she doesn't know herself. But as all the drama swirls around, her eyes take on the strange haunted look of a woman for whom everything depends on believing the best, even as thirty women are circulating a pet.i.tion that charges the worst. Soon enough the pet.i.tion comes my way. "No," I tell Dory, who presents it for my signature.

"Why?"

"Because he's not the manager anymore, and kicking him out of the building is just vindictive."

"The man has been hara.s.sing every woman here for the last two years," Dory answers angrily. "There are women who felt compelled to move out of the hotel because of him-because in a sense he drove them out."

"That may be," I answer. "It's also true they had other reasons for moving. I know, because I talked to some of them. They didn't like the rent or they didn't like the problems with the plumbing or the elevator or they were leaving L.A. like everyone else. So maybe he drove them out and maybe he didn't."

"It doesn't bother you that he was breaking into women's apartments?"

"It bothers me if it's true. But I don't know for myself that it is true. I never heard it firsthand from anyone who knew for a fact that he had been in her apartment, other than a feeling she had about it. I also don't know that it's not true. To be honest, it wouldn't surprise me if it were."

"So what are you saying?"

"Has he ever come into your apartment?"

"No."

"So."

"So what are you saying? Because he didn't come into my apartment and accost me when I was coming out of the shower, I shouldn't do anything?"

"Yes, that's what I'm saying. Let the women he did it to make the accusation. Let them get him thrown out of the hotel or worse. Until then he's just another tenant living with his pregnant girlfriend on his hardwood floors."

"You men all stick together," Dory viciously concludes.

"Someday someone will say something unpleasant about you. If it's a rumor, I'll be on your side. If it's a fact, you'll be on your own."

"Oh thank you Abraham f.u.c.king Lincoln," she sneers, stomping off. "What a bunch of sanctimonious c.r.a.p," Viv agrees with Dory, expressing that dead-on sureness of hers I can only envy: "He's guilty and you know it." Soon I have the same problem from the other side; Abdul comes around wondering if there's any time we can "get together and talk." I hedge and dodge; I can hear this conversation coming a mile away. He'll want me as some kind of character witness for him, in whatever forum this is going to be thrashed out: "Abdul, the smooth Palestinian, breaking into women's apartments?" with the proper tone of astonishment and indignation. So now I keep my eyes constantly peeled-for the women, for Abdul. Soon I'm hiding out from everyone, the women and Abdul and the fact-checkers at the newspaper who would confront my fraudulent movie reviews, the zombie America that stalks my streets. Only in the windows of my suite thirty feet up do I put myself on complete display to the world; and Carl still phones with bulletins, and warnings: "For G.o.d's sake, get out of there."

My Cinema of Hysteria grows. I've cleared my shelves of everything else, with the sweep of my arm. All the "masterpieces," all the "landmarks," all the films good for one's edification, tossed them out and replaced them with nothing but my deeply hysterical movies. The Big Combo, Phantom Lady, Humoresque, Leave Her to Heaven, Autumn Leaves, Duel in the Sun, The Curse of the Cat People, Land of the Pharaohs, Some Came Running, Written on the Wind, Kitten With a Whip, When Worlds Collide. I run them on the monitor all the time twenty-four hours a day, with the sound off, even when I'm not here.

For a while, amid Carl's warnings and the pleas of auditioners, I heard other voices. I heard them everywhere, in bars and cafes and theaters, in the aisles of bookshops and the checkout lines of grocery stores and up and down the street, people talking about my movie, and I don't mean the one I made with Viv. Everywhere I went I heard it until I thought I was going to go nuts, endless discussions of spectacular tracking shots and the revolutionary triptych effects and the exciting montage and what a wonderful performance Adolphe Sarre had gotten from the lead actress, the "fabulous" lighting and the "authentic" costumes and the "stunning" set design, blah blah blah. It was bad enough everyone was a film critic now; worse that they were critiquing a film entirely written, directed, acted, photographed and produced in my head.

I'm sure everyone thought it was pretty d.a.m.ned funny. I'm sure it was all quite amusing to everyone. Every once in a while, sitting in a theater listening to a conversation about The Death of Marat in the row behind me, I was tempted to turn in my seat and confront the matter head-on. I was tempted to say, to whomever was prattling on about it at the moment, "You really thought the costumes were that good? The editing's a little slack in the middle, wouldn't you say?" And if they tried to argue with me I would yell back, "Yeah, well, I'm the guy who made up the movie in the first place! So don't give me a lot of c.r.a.p about costumes!" One night I was about to do just that when the woman who was discussing the film with her boyfriend or husband or whoever said, "Did you read that piece about it in the newspaper? I thought the reviewer really missed the point." I was so dumbfounded all I could do was sink into my seat: I had missed the point of a movie I invented. After that the voices just got louder; I woke to them in the morning as though they were in the next room, having a party. ...

Tonight Network Vs. is showing White Whisper. As it happens Viv is on the set of another shoot, and I choose not to watch the movie without her. I go to sleep with the movie on the airwaves, floating above me in the skies of Los Angeles. It snags on my dream and catches in a dream-loop, playing over and over just beyond my windows, where I sit hovering in the sky naked on a model's platform as Amy paints away and asks if I'm the good guy or if I'm the bad guy. Just as I'm about to answer, and before I know for sure what my answer is, the dream begins all over again.

Lately I've been getting letters from a woman in Virginia who I'll call K. Actually it is one letter, written on the backs of postcards, all of them numbered and sent one by one though, given the vagaries of the postal system in L.A. or what's left of it, I receive the cards in random order. Number five arrives before number three, followed by thirteen, nine, seven, twenty-one. For some reason there are no even-numbered cards, just odd ones. As K writes these cards each breaks off mid-sentence, which is completed on the next card that begins mid-sentence. She's writing because she's read a couple of my books, one several times, each time from the point of view, she explains, of a friend or acquaintance to whom she recommended the book but who didn't have the time or inclination to take her recommendation. When I first began receiving these cards I answered with my usual perfunctory response, thanking her for her comments; but then I became almost inexplicably intrigued by her questions, about art, life, love, s.e.x, what food I like to eat, what movies I like to watch, my favorite color.

Now I try to answer more regularly, though there's no way to keep up with the stream of cards that keep coming. I got forty last month; in the last twenty-four hours I've received nineteen. She's literally writing them faster than I can read them, and I'm running out of s.p.a.ce to put them. The drawers of my desk are crammed, the closet is full, I'm boxing them up and renting storage bins. I'm s.h.i.+pping them off to far lands because L.A. can't hold all of them. On the front of the cards are pictures of cats, elephants, trains, boats built in the shape of guitars, punk riots in London, a river that cuts through a valley like sulfur, a woman in a black dress clutching her child watching a s.h.i.+p on the ocean in the distance, a man on fire plummeting to earth, two apparently naked bodies folded into each other beneath a bed sheet, and a gallery of familiar icons, Billie Holiday, Tom Mix, Marcel Duchamp, Miles Davis, Cab Calloway, Greta Garbo, Albert Einstein, Bob Marley. "How do you define culture?" she asked early on. "Appealing to the intellect is always a selective process, isn't it?" Lately, however, the tone has changed. "I'm twenty-five, long-legged, large-breasted, golden-haired, green-eyed," she taunts. "I've got a Ph.D. in American literature, I act and model part-time. I'm a photographer and filmmaker and I've got my pilot's license and fly cross-country solo. I've never been married, hence never divorced, never had either a child or an abortion, never been engaged. I've never made love. I'm a virgin two times."

I've gotten the order of K's cards hopelessly mixed up. I warned K that our correspondence is bound to be one-sided; nonetheless she has seduced me somehow, even as the continually arriving cards raise certain questions in my mind. Is she obsessed? Is she insane? Is she homicidal? Will she appear any moment at my door? Nonetheless from the distance of Virginia she has found the secret pa.s.sage into the secret room of my life. My life's secret room has been empty for some time, like my life's literary room. From time to time I pa.s.s through the public room, but over the last several years, since the Quake and the backfires and meeting Viv, I've lived almost wholly in the private room, with communications issued from wherever it is I write the movie reviews. Since the secret room has been empty my life has been much calmer, but it's also true I've come to miss it; and I've come to realize that it's only when I'm either in the secret room, or when the secret room is completely empty not only of myself but guests, that I'm entirely in the present. Now I think that maybe I hear sounds coming from the secret room. I wonder if they're K's. I wonder if K has invaded the secret room and that unsettles me, not only because I have no idea what she's really like-I'm skeptical of the leggy, large-breasted, green-eyed description-but because I have no idea what pa.s.sword she used to get in, among all the words scribbled in tiny writing on the back of countless postcards. She's becoming a figment of my imagination, like The Death of Marat, and as a result of her invasion I've been thrown a step back into the future. Our correspondence, one-sided or not, has both the utter innocence and profound danger of secret life.