Amnesiascope: A Novel Part 4

What I find both irresistible and frightening about my correspondence with K is that, inside my secret room, she is the secret, not me. Though I've come to feel I can trust her, I still can't be entirely certain in the dark what weapons she might hold or whether the glint in her eye is desire or murder. So I push her away with one hand and pull her to me with another, as I've done with so many women; in the secret room I want to have my way with K as she's tied and bound. I want to walk away from her after I'm finished until whenever I'm ready to come back, and not have to think about her in between, because if I did my conscience would be tormented, and long ago I became so tired of all the things and people, significant and trivial, that torment my conscience. I am aware, of course, that I created the secret room in the first place so I could pretend its forbidden activities happen not in the real world but rather a dream that has four walls. And I personally know of secrets, not mine but those held by others, that are beyond the pale even as fantasies, secrets that cannot be absolved no matter how large or small is the room of the psyche in which these fantasies find life, no matter how dark the room is or how light. Compared to such secrets my correspondence with K, who I have never met and am not likely to ever meet, is barely worth being a secret at all, for which I may or may not be held accountable any more than the world can hold me accountable for the desires of my dreams. Only moral totalitarianism refuses to make the distinction between a secret that announces the death of the soul-watching a snuff film, for instance, or the defilement of children-and the secret of a one-sided correspondence that does nothing more than suggest an illicit affair of the mind. Still, I'm stirred by my contemplation of just where moral rationalization ends and real d.a.m.nation begins, I'm stirred by how even the imagination is not entirely guiltless. I'm stirred by consideration of just how many layers really lie between the blackest secret and the most harmless, and just how thin they are, and by the membrane between the impulse that only lurks and the impulse that is realized. I can only bring myself to ponder, without ever actually pursuing the answer, whether I would really pursue my darkest impulses if I was sure I could get away with it, or whether my conscience would still know itself, even if the defining lines of civilization were so scrambled as to allow the unallowable. ...

There is a little blonde hooker I see now and then on Sunset Boulevard. She is always there at dusk in Zed Time, on the corner across from the Chateau Marmont: I call her the Princess of Coins, from the American Tarot. She glistens conspicuously. Get close enough to her and she's younger than you thought; the girls on this stretch of the Strip are always either younger or older than you thought, if you ever get that close. At any rate she's young enough to still be on the street, before the law of desire either places her in some guy's penthouse or renders her old, or kills her: she glistens too conspicuously to remain on the street for long. I look for her whenever I drive by this way. I have no serious thought of employing her, but since she's more appealing than most of the hookers I've seen, and since she stands not four blocks from where I live, I find myself wondering what it would be like to buy her and take her home. I can still remember years ago walking down a street in Amsterdam past all the women in the windows, one in particular sitting in her window in black hair and a soft white turtleneck sweater, smiling and saying nothing, knowing I wanted her but had neither the money nor the nerve, and knowing as well that years later I would vividly remember the missed opportunity. But the Princess of Coins, years later on Sunset Strip across from the Chateau Marmont in Zed Time, is too young and unwise to smile like that. Hers are the young smiles that vanish instantly in my rearview mirror when I pa.s.s her by. ...

I was at Viv's one evening and had what I thought was a dream. The sun was going down and I was about to leave, because Viv was expecting some friends over in an hour or so for a Night of Women; but I went up to the overhanging platform and lay down on her bed, and I must have drifted off. I don't remember being so particularly tired. At some point I woke, or I dreamed that I woke, and the women had arrived and were down below the loft, talking; I wasn't conscious enough to make out what they were saying. I don't know if they were indifferent to my being up there or had just forgotten it. But slipping in and out of sleep, I woke again to the flickering of candlelight on the ceiling above me, and turning over I peered over the edge of the bed at all the women below me who, eight or ten of them, were naked. Some of them I recognized. I was pretty sure I saw Veroneek and Lydia and even Amy Brown, along with several of the artists who had been at the ball. They weren't saying much, just whispering among themselves while they shaved each other. Little bowls of soapy water sat between the legs of the four or five women being shaved by the other four or five who very intently dipped the tiny razors into the water and continued until the work was finished. There was nothing especially precious or ritualistic about it; rather the bare, glistening women seemed to be mapping, between the lines of a commonly held secret, their own country that was inviolate to any man, whether or not they knew or cared that he might be up in bed on the platform above them watching. I was lulled by the sight and silence of it; and I can't remember if I just turned away and closed my eyes or kept watching, but I could see emerge through the pubic hair as it was shaved away the tattoos that had been hidden underneath, the Nine of Bridges and the Ace of Rifles, the Six of Stars and the Five of Coins. In the juxtaposition of their bodies I read my fortune-a foggy destiny and newly revealed crossroads, where the name of the bridge before me was written on a sign in an amalgam, and right before waking I almost deciphered the letters long enough to make it out. Later when I woke the women were gone. I went downstairs in the dark and turned on the light, and there was no sign of razors or bowls of soapy water, but looking closely at the floor I ran my finger through the small silky hairs that had slipped by the women's effort to remove all traces of what they had done.

Not long after our night with Jasper, Viv showed me her plans for a new sculpture. She calls it the Memoryscope. It is to be twenty feet long, cylindrical like a telescope and made of steel, and will stand perched in the sky. Lining the inside along the bottom will be a mirrored strip that runs from one end to the other, so that when the sun rises to a certain point, the telescope will flash a blinding light. In this light, Viv explains, one will see the memory he or she has most forgotten. Once she has finished this telescope sh.e.l.l determine the coordinates of its aim, wherever that might be-the Rockies, Chicago, Nova Scotia-and build there another telescope, aimed back at Los Angeles. Obviously it is an impressive, ambitious plan; Viv has spoken to Jasper about erecting it in the moat of fire that surrounds Jaspers house, or maybe the junkyard beyond, within view of one of the garrets. I sense this is Viv's gift to Jasper, to revive Jasper from what she perceives to be the deluded despair of her memories even as it would revive Viv herself from her own doldrums after the Artists Ball and the filming of White Whisper, not to mention a growing ambivalence about the direction of her life, the sense that some thing is slipping through the cracks. ...

Last week I had dinner with Dr. Billy O'Forte, in a little steak joint near the old pier. "You know," he said of Viv, "she's better for you than anyone you've ever been with," and once I was too young and stupid for that to have meant anything. But then life pa.s.ses by and, almost unnoticed to you, the curve in the hill that has always been upward suddenly turns downward, and what and who are good for you means something. Viv is my Queen of Stars. She's the face of a dream that waits for the flash of sunlight along a strip of mirrors before it explodes into recognition, which may be to say that Viv is not the face of my dream but that my dream is the face of Viv: at any rate she is the face of my reality, which has become a much better thing than my dreams. Part maternal caretaker and part eternal ten-year-old tomboy, part romantic commando and part s.e.xual guerrilla, Viv careens between the extremes of scandal-it's all one can do to hold her back from jumping on the Cathode Flower stage and taking her clothes off with the strippers, and there was one month she seriously considered a job as a go-go dancer in Tokyo-and a kind of saintliness, giving a b.u.m on the street her last twenty because she has nothing smaller. For the first year, we were together only because we couldn't stay apart, our bond made not out of dreams but our irresistible f.u.c.king; s.e.x bound us when everything else, the past and future in particular, tried to break us down. And then not so long ago came the moment when both the past and the future rushed into the present and all the wounds I inflicted on us and all the promises that had been implied between us presented themselves to be answered for. When amnesia broke, through its gate marched every person I ever hurt, one after another, and I broke down one afternoon in a little diner on La Cienega Boulevard, sobbing into my cheeseburger while the other patrons hastily paid up their tabs and bolted, as though fleeing the spectacle of an epileptic fit. I cried from the diner to the parking lot, I cried from that afternoon to that night, all the way home and into the next day. I cried for Viv, I cried for Sally, I cried for the women I hurt before Viv and after Sally, I cried because my father was dead, I cried because someday my mother would be dead, I cried for my conscience and my faith. I cried for my dreams. I was quite a basket case that day, when amnesia broke and I remembered again; I cried for all my failures, and for that moment's failure in particular: the failure to transcend memory.

Sally called last night. Viv was over at my place in a foul mood, wondering why none of her film work was bringing her any real money-and if she wasn't making money, then what was the point, and why wasn't she doing what she really wanted to do, like building her Memoryscope? In the midst of this serious discussion the telephone rang, I answered, and it was Sally. Of course Viv knew immediately. Later she accused me of "practically cooing," though I know from the sound in Sally's voice that to her I seemed as cold as ice; it's funny that two women can hear exactly the same thing at the same time and hear not entirely different words or meanings, which one might expect, but entirely different heartbeats and temperatures. Sally was more right than Viv. I was colder than I was cooing. We hadn't spoken since she got married. Typically, she was in town for only one night and calling at the last minute to say that Polly was with her, and wondering if I wanted to have breakfast with the two of them in the morning. I answered that it wasn't possible. She asked how I was and I answered that I couldn't talk. She rushed to hang up, either right before or after I began to add, "Let me know if-"

Let me know, I began to say, if you ever come back to L.A. Viv, already in the furious throes of a full moon, was on her way out the door before I stopped her. I knew that later she'd regret going, and that I'd regret letting her go. "She couldn't care less whether you see Polly," Viv answered bitterly. Viv thinks the worst of Sally partly because she needs to, because she feels that Sally stole something that was Viv's before Viv and I ever knew each other existed, and because she believes she's worthier of it than Sally ever was. As to whether Sally truly cares or not that I see Polly, I don't know. I believe she does, but it doesn't matter; what matters is that over the weeks and months and years, I haven't been able to get Polly out of my mind. I was a father to her even as I was never the father she wanted. I was the one who bathed and fed and read her stories and put her to bed when her father was off strumming his guitar and listening to people tell him he was a genius and basking in little Polly's distant adoration, and the knowledge that besides being a genius he was the world's best-loved father. And then one day I disappeared. I cut her off as I cut off her mother, as I cut myself off from the past and from my memories one by one, because I wasn't brave or strong or big enough to rise or at least sidestep the pain long enough to see a little four-year-old kid for an hour or two now and then. My pain was pretty petty compared to the confusion she must have felt; and it was my choice, after all, because she was four years old after all, so it couldn't very well have been her choice. Later I told myself I did it because my continued presence in her already confused life could only compound the confusion; and I knew that was a lie as soon as I tried to convince myself I believed it.

Polly isn't all the guilt I have left, just one of the biggest parts of it. It bobs in the arctic stream of my memories like the shard of ice from a much larger block in the far distance, along with smaller receding shards. There is the guilt about my marriage. There is the guilt about Viv and the pain of our first year. There is the guilt about Christina, a low-rider in a black beat-up T-Bird and a lazy Ches.h.i.+re smile and a beauty mark over one eyelid, who I knew after Sally and whose time and faith and warmth I cavalierly used up and wasted; I came to feel a great affection for her even after our pa.s.sion was over, at a time when I could not yet pinpoint any capacity for love I might still have, and even now I still miss that affection. Little pieces floating in the cold current: a string of bedded women who claimed they expected nothing when I knew they expected everything, but I accepted their disclaimers anyway so I could have their bodies for a moment and release into them all the pain that can be released but none of the pain that can't. Farther back is the guilt about my father's death, as ba.n.a.l as it is universal, over things unsaid and gestures unmade: "If you have anything to tell him, tell him soon," my mother, crying, warned me two weeks before he went. Left to my own devices, I can drown in guilt. I wake in the night to a wave of it suspended high above me in the dark. Part of me has been hoping for it; sometimes I wonder if it is less a barometer of my morality than another expression of my ego-vanity disguised as evidence that I still have a conscience. Then I turn on the light. I think about Sally and the wave vanishes, because about Sally of course there is little guilt, which is why she's been such a luxury to me for so long, and why I was so reluctant for so long to give her up. The pain of Sally is cleaner, and there hasn't been that much pain in my life recently in which I could pretend to be so pure. But then Sally calls and I hear her voice full of sadness and trepidation, and the pain isn't quite so clean anymore; and then I remember Polly, and everything else is remembered again too.

Here, in the Last City of the Last Millennium, I have meant to defeat guilt and memory once and for all, though I know the effort is doomed. It isn't an amnesia of the mind I pursue, or an amnesia of the heart; it is rather an amnesia of the psyche that sets me free. I've been working on my stutter. I almost lost it for a while but I've gotten it back, better than ever. I open my window and lean out into the street and stutter at the world, frightening animals and alarming somnambulists and causing cars to swerve. Every word ricochets in the back of my throat until I achieve true senselessness, until not a line of communication with anyone else is left, until every exchange is irrevocably rude. Standing in the shadows of street corners I open my mouth and let go at the pa.s.sersby. It's more than a hesitancy, it's more than a slight tension in the larynx, it's a full a.s.sault. In the movies the stutterer is always the one unhinged, the one so pathetically weak he winds up hanging himself, once he has fulfilled his function of giving the audience a good belly laugh. My stutter is different. Mine is a stutter, refined by the day, perfected by the minute, that will drive everyone else to hang themselves. People clear a path at my approach; they hear it coming, like a siren or an alarm. Every memory I have left tangles on the inane bursts from my lips like the words tangling on my tongue. The only sound I don't stammer is the moan of my o.r.g.a.s.m. But I'm working on it.

In the Stutter was born the Dream. I don't remember my first word, I don't remember my first stutter, but I'm told they were not the same, that my first word was stammer-free; thus, the moment of my truest eloquence was the moment of my earliest communication, back before the beginning of memory. Did I best know myself then, before the stutter, or have I come to know myself best since, when who I am has been defined by the stutter? I don't have an answer. The stutterer is both the person I really am, and someone I am not. He is the intermediary through which I've been forced, by the impairment of my speech, to reveal myself to the world. But whatever pa.s.sed through my mind the first time I stuttered, at the age of four or five, whatever awful virgin humiliation was breached, only to be compounded over the years, then the decades, through childhood and adolescence into youthful manhood to the sh.o.r.es of middle age, I've forgotten. I've wiped it away. Everything about me has felt fundamentally flawed since, in the way I suppose everyone feels a fundamental flaw. But my flaw is only a secret from everyone else as long as I keep my mouth shut. Beginning with the simplest introduction-"My name is ..."-my secret is revealed, since my own name has always been one of the most impossible words to express fluidly.

Here are the rules: I can talk about this, you can't. The most casual reference to it by another person still humiliates me. That I might make it a matter of public record does not mean I'm open to discussion on the subject. I will fool you from time to time; sometimes I won't do it at all. Some years back, giving a reading in a book store, I was asked about it afterward. "But you haven't stuttered once," someone piped up from the crowd of listeners, expecting I'd find the observation rea.s.suring. "Oh," I said, "you wanted the stuttering version? I didn't know that. I only do that when I want to amuse people. No, this was the Top Forty version-the stuttering version is the dance mix. Less melody and more percussion, and it goes on all night. ..." No one ingratiates him or herself, no one worms his or her way into my confidence, by initiating a discussion on stuttering. I remember a counselor, later in life, long after the Stutter School, advising that a stutterer "must face his stuttering," as though the stutterer is not confronted by his stuttering every moment. As though every moment of the most perfunctory social intercourse does not involve the choice to speak or not, does not involve a hundred rapid-fire decisions having to do with word selection, phrasing, the mad dash or the clandestine tiptoe across the minefield of semantic bombs, verbal spasms, rhetorical tics waiting to detonate on the end of one's tongue. And between the utterance of the sound, and the act of violation by which the stutterer listens to himself, the minefield is crossed back, the return journey made to some private painful a.s.sessment by which he concludes: "It didn't sound so bad, did it? It was almost sonorous, wouldn't you say?" It may be that the stuttering of the past wasn't as bad as I remember, but only in the same way the stuttering of the present is always worse than I hear it, until I play my voice back, on a tape perhaps, to my own appalled realization.

Listen. I don't know another way of talking about it that doesn't skirt some sordid spectacle of self-pity, self-absorption, self-loathing. And rather than risk any of those, I'd as soon take everything back, and forget about it, and pretend, as I've always pretended, that the man who writes these words on paper is the true one, rather than the one who spits them out fitfully. I come from a long line of stoics: Scandinavian, Celt, American Indian. Blabbermouths these people are not. It's possible that if I'd never stuttered, I never would have become a writer, though we'll never know. But whatever imagination I was born to proved to be, from the beginning, the only safe haven when the stuttering began; and whatever grand vanity I might have begun to form was cut off at the knees or, more precisely, the throat. In the interior of my imagination, my words always belonged to me, I did not belong to them. In this interior as well, only I could know my own integrity when I was seven years old and the teacher called my mother to complain I must have plagiarized the short story we were a.s.signed to write, since my strangled speech offered no convincing evidence I could even read, let alone write. It was ten years before anyone was truly convinced. By then, if teachers and principles were ready to concede I could indeed write the things I claimed to have written, they argued nonetheless that these were not the sort of things I should be writing. It was too late. Having a.s.serted my imagination and won my voice, I would not give them back.

Well, I couldn't give them back, could I? What of me would have been left? A stutter or silence. I had been a little seven-year-old kid, after all, with everything I was and everything I dreamed of being shrouded by the static of my own mouth; until I broke through. And then I had gone too far to surrender the word, and the more forbidden it was, the more irrevocable was my claim to it. Much later, buried under all the unpublished ma.n.u.scripts and all the years piling up right behind them, I might very well have surrendered the word if it would have left me anything but faceless, voiceless, beingless. By the end of those fifteen years that stretched from twenty to thirty-five, when I had so futilely tried to become a published novelist, I had long since crossed the terrain of dejection to despair: but in the Stutter was born the Dream, and it pushed me from one effort to another across so much defeat that when the breakthrough finally came, modest as it was, it commanded that I destroy everything that had come before, including the pile of unpublished ma.n.u.scripts. And because that small breakthrough had seemed so elusive, such a monstrous mountain to scale, I had this idea that once having scaled it, everything else about the Dream would finally lie at my fingertips. Having caught the tip of the Dream, I a.s.sumed the rest of it was simply to be taken. I don't know why, five novels later, it didn't happen. Any conjecture would only sound graceless, bitter, self-justifying. I've seriously considered the most obvious answer, that I was never as good as I hoped or wanted to believe. That the Dream was fantastic relative to what my talent really was. Looking back I can't help seeing the worst: my insights as trite, my imagination as second-rate, my facility for words only as glib as I always wished my talk could be. More than that, I see my faith in myself as most counterfeit of all. Looking back, I'm not sure now I ever believed the Dream was really possible. Because if in the Stutter was born the Dream, in the Doubt was born the Stutter, and so the Dream was always infected by Doubt. I've thrust myself forward not out of faith or even will but the sort of primal force of habit that moves an animal to the place that nature commands it, to graze or mate or die; and somewhere past the rubicon of inspiration's replenishment, where I was emptying myself more than I was refilling, and even though I didn't really believe the harshest words of my harshest review, which suggested, like the second-grade teacher, that I was really nothing more than a glorified plagiarist, the Doubt could not help but still a.s.sume it was one more thing I was guilty of.

And then I was exhausted. Now, like a once devout man who comes to doubt G.o.d, I have no more vision, no more ideas, no more nerve. In the name of growing older, growing wiser, I find myself pulled toward the vortex of a capitulation that, as a younger man, I despised in others. It confuses me. I want to be wise-and then I wonder, in that desire, whether wisdom is the enemy of pa.s.sion, or whether believing that wisdom is the enemy of pa.s.sion is only the sign that I'm neither wise nor pa.s.sionate. I only hope that I'm left with more than rage or the cheap cynicism of everyone who fails his or her dream, and can only therefore scorn the dreams of others; G.o.d knows the world is full enough of such people. My ever-growing inconsequentiality seeps in beneath the door of one room after another, the public and then the literary, the private and finally the secret. I got a call the other day from the head of a stutterer's "support group," if you can believe such a thing, wondering if I would be a part of it: "But what is it you do in this group anyway?" I wanted to know. "Spend all night just trying to get through the minutes of the last meeting? Do you protest stuttering comedians, movies that laugh at us? Do you make the world sensitive to our plight? Are you going to make my stuttering inconsequential, is that the idea? Are you going to collectivize my stutter, so it's not my burden alone to bear? You st-st-stay away from my stutter," and I slammed the phone down, and was struck by the silence around me.

One night, a few months ago, I woke in a fit of absurd inspiration. I got out of bed and went into the other room, and pulled from the shelves the books I'd written, and began tearing them apart, ripping them down their spines and casting away the covers, spreading all the pages on the floor around me. This went on all night until I looked up not only to see dawn but Ventura in my doorway. He had been up early to work, had gone down to the corner cafe to get some coffee, came back and saw the light beneath my door and knocked; and when I didn't answer, and all he heard inside was the ripping of pages, he came in. Now he stood looking at me surrounded by a thousand disembodied pages on the floor. Excitedly I explained to him my brainstorm. I told him I was going to rewrite all my books into one huge book except with the stutter-from beginning to end one colossal, sprawling, staggering epic of manic stammering, stunned gasping, throttled gulping and violent hiccupping that would sum up all of our lives, the times in which we live, the age behind us and the one to come. After this, not only would no one ever write another book, no one would want to, all eloquence exposed for the bankrupt rhetorical currency it is. By the time I finished Ventura had turned the oddest pallor I've ever seen, gray around the eyes and white at the edges of his hair. He looked at me as though he was uncertain whether to lock me in the room and take all the sharp objects on his way out, or say and do nothing, with blind faith that my seizure would pa.s.s and I would return to normal. He chose the latter, nodding silently and backing slowly out into the hallway. When he was gone I just sat there for a while and, just as silently as he had gone, got myself a forty-pound trash bag and scooped up the pages and filled the bag up. Then I lowered the window shades, turned off the telephone and went back to bed.

Christ, I wanted to be a hero once. I wanted to be something so much larger than I am that I might be out of earshot of my own voice. I wanted to save someone or something, to redeem some ideal, to find and live in that moment between utter desperation and the exhilaration of desperation, when the only recourse left is to burst free of oneself. Now I've forgotten that as well. Now my stutter is all that's left of that attempt, and it survives only because it's ridiculous enough to survive and to remind me, every time I open my mouth, that the only courage left is to try and forget the unforgettable.

I wake up in Viv's bed, but when I reach for her I find my wrists are bound to the bedposts. I can't help giving my arms a good tug to see if they come free, to make sure I haven't just tangled myself up in the sheets. For a while I lie there staring up into the blackness of whatever is across my eyes, and for what seems like a long time nothing happens at all. In the night air I'm a little cold, since I don't have anything covering me: "I'm cold," I finally break down; there's no response. After a minute or so I'm suddenly certain Viv isn't in bed at all. After another minute I'm certain Viv isn't even in the apartment. Then I remember, dimly echoing out of the last moments of whatever dream I was having before I woke, the sound of a door opening and closing. I cannot be sure, there in the dark, whether I'm actually afraid. In my mind I begin to see, more vividly than I've ever seen before, Viv's loft, all her mannequins and steel sculptures, the towers and obelisks and pyramids with their exotic feathers and little windows that peer in at pods and pearls. Naked and bound to Viv's bed I see them surrounding me in the dark; and as more time pa.s.ses I become more acutely aware of the waves of the ocean in the distance, the m.u.f.fled wet whir of helicopters in the fog overhead and, far away, gunshots.

It begins to rain.

After a while I lose sense of time. I'm not sure if I've laid there thirty minutes or an hour, or three. Then I hear steps outside the door, and the door opens, and then I hear steps coming up the stairs of the overhanging platform, and it doesn't take long to figure out they are the steps of more than one person. I can't tell if she has turned on the light. The only thing I'm certain of is that someone is with her, and for some time there's no sound at all, as though they are standing by the bed looking down at me. Nothing is said. After a few moments they go back downstairs and there is the clinking of gla.s.ses and the sound of something poured, and then I hear them walking around below. Whoever is with her expresses no surprise at the situation. Flas.h.i.+ng through my mind is the morning out on Pacific Coast Highway in my car with Sahara from the Cathode Flower, and Viv declaring they would have their revenge; but I really have no idea whether it's Sahara. It could be anyone. It could be Sahara or one of Viv's friends or a woman she just picked up in a bar: "h.e.l.lo, my name is Viv and I have a naked man at home tied to my bed." I'm still trying to decide if I'm afraid, when the warm mouth I feel almost makes me jump out of my skin, because I hadn't heard them come back up to the bed. I a.s.sume it's Viv's mouth but I can't be sure. It takes in so much of me it alarms me. My erection feels like a betrayal, a sign of how easily my psyche will sell me out for a rush. And then I feel both of them and there's no knowing which is Viv, who I still trust, and which is the other one, who I have no reason to trust, and what is the alchemic confusion of both of them intertwined, least trustworthy of all. I'm vaguely aware of being inside one and then maybe the other, or maybe it's the same, each of them climbing on top of me and having their turn, and then one of them putting me inside her and the other straddling my face and putting herself in my mouth. I think I recognize the taste of Viv; I'm almost sure it's Viv's hand stroking me when I come. She knows what it's like for me to come this way, not inside her but out in the open, with her watching, except now there is someone else watching too, a stranger I will never know, or someone I may know but who will always have been a stranger to me in this moment. At the moment of o.r.g.a.s.m Viv knows I want to hide; but there's nowhere to hide now, with my wrists and ankles bound. My exposure is excruciating.

"Everything you are," someone whispers in my ear, "is in my head." Someone else kisses my mouth, and then the other one kisses my mouth, and I think to myself, They're both Viv: there are two of her now. I fall back to sleep.

When I wake, I'm untied. The blindfold is gone. The gray light of either morning or afternoon, I'm not sure which, fills Viv's loft; it's still raining. Viv is not next to me in bed but naked on the couch downstairs. No one else is there, but two half-drunk gla.s.ses of wine sit on the cabinet next to the refrigerator. My legs and my c.o.c.k are streaked with lipstick; I go into the bathroom and wash, and then, still wet, kneel by the couch and kiss Viv the way she kissed me hours ago. She clutches my hair in her sleep.

Not far from the newspaper's office you can grab a boat down the sunken subway. The city keeps trying to board up the old Metro entrances, but people just come along and rip the boards down. Ever since the tunnels flooded years back after the subway was first built, sidewalks have rumbled like they would to a train, except it's the sound of the underground ca.n.a.ls rus.h.i.+ng from the Valley through Laurel Canyon to the Fairfax Corridor, then branching east to Hollywood and Silverlake beyond that, or south to Baldwin Hills. There the tunnels fork again: one winds toward the ghost marina and the other picks up the L.A. River and continues on toward San Pedro and the harbor. Sailing down the southward ca.n.a.ls from any of the makes.h.i.+ft docks that riddle the underground, you pa.s.s transients living in catacombs and old abandoned subway cars floating in the grottos. Siamese-twin lizards skitter across the tunnel ceiling, and the deep white bleached roots of the trees that line Crescent Heights and Sixth Street crack through the subway walls. If you take the boat all the way out to Santa Monica the subterranean river deposits you out into the steaming bay, where a cobalt sky explodes above you and the city looms up in back, wreathed by a mane of smoke. Over the years, through the millions of fractures in the walls that line the sunken tunnels, ca.n.a.l water has seeped into the ground until the whole city stands in a big black lagoon of quicksand ...

Viv tells me about a dream she had. In this dream her father has been murdered; in retaliation she sets the killer on fire in the middle of her loft. As he burns, with the light of the fire was.h.i.+ng the walls until they run like the colors of a painting, the killer turns into me, though it's not at all clear whether I was the killer in the first place. Viv is very disturbed by this dream; I think I'm most surprised that she feels compelled to tell me about it, as though it's a confession, or something I'm obligated to explain or account for. "But it was a very pretty fire," she a.s.sures me.

We decided to leave L.A. for a few days. We drove out of the rain that began falling the night I was tied to her bed, and left it behind us in the Cajon Pa.s.s, hitting Las Vegas that evening where we got a room high in one of the casino towers. From the back seat of the car Viv declared she had no interest in gambling whatsoever, but two days and a couple of dozen Bombay Sapphires later I had to pry loose her death-grip on a slot machine finger by finger. Nights we spent at an old strip joint in Downtown called the Golden Garter; the girls weren't bad, not emaciated California blondes but dark Nevadan Rubenesques. I was not lured by any strange women into the casino swimming pool, and we were not buried under the rubble of an earthquake; but I did have a bizarre dream of my own one night, if not as incendiary as Viv's. I dreamed I was trapped in a long dark room. Making my way to the end of the room I was desperately trying to open a door which was outlined by light from the other side, when I heard someone call me. Over and over someone called as I pounded on the door, until the sound of my name became so persistent that I woke up. Barely conscious, I realized I was standing at the window of our room and Viv was talking to me. She had gotten up to go to the bathroom and then in the bathroom heard sounds in the front room and rushed out to find I was standing at the window pounding on it, trying to get out. Since our room was eleven floors up, it was just as well I didn't. Befuddled, like an old man losing his mind, I just stood there in the dark until Viv took me by the hand and coaxed me back to bed. ...

When we drove back to Los Angeles, the same rain was still falling. It was the kind of rain L.A. never has, one storm after another sweeping up from Mexico and in from the sea, dousing all the backfires. Now the whole city bulged, pocked by footprints full of water and rumbling with the sound of surging ca.n.a.ls below; between storms the air filled with a hiss from the steam rising off the rings, and when the sun broke, a shroud of golden light hovered over the city. The houses on the distant hillsides above the steam looked like small white villages floating in the sky, and then the hillsides gave way from the rain and slid to earth, and the floating villages vanished into the air. The rain was a lucky break for Viv, who found the moat of fire surrounding Jasper's house conveniently extinguished just in time for the erection of her Memoryscope, which she brought to the outskirts of the city by truck and hired hands. Jasper was nowhere to be seen, but her stepfather watched from the house tower; he shook his fist at her, yelling something that couldn't be heard. The Memoryscope stands ten yards from the house and ten yards above the ground, pointed east to a morning sun that never s.h.i.+nes anymore, waiting to reveal its first memory in the rip of a sunlit dawn. Almost immediately after putting up her Memoryscope, Viv developed a burning in the pit of her, above the belly and below the rib cage-not far, I suppose, from her heart. It was as though, in a dream, she had set the center of herself on fire.

There's no getting away from a sense of things breaking down. ... Around the same time Viv started getting sick I woke one morning to find that not only was L.A. raining but the Hotel Hamblin as well. The entryway in my suite was leaking and the woman next door was virtually washed out, her mattress floating around her apartment like a soggy raft. Of course there was nothing to do about this, since anarchy now reigned in the building along with the rain, what with Abdul hiding from the posse of women that stalked the premises searching for him-not that Abdul was in charge anymore anyway, nor that it ever mattered when he was. "It's raining in the hotel," I informed Ventura in his doorway, which answered with a p.r.o.nounced drip on the top of my head. Ventura was sitting in the same chair he always sat in, in the same hat and cowboy boots; it was clear he couldn't care less about the rain. In a minute he would explain how the aberrational proximity of Antarctica to one of the moons of Jupiter had tossed the hemisphere's whole weather system off kilter, and we could expect relentless, Biblical rain for seven years. But he didn't go into all that; he had a couple of more important announcements. The first and least interesting was that he was dying.

He's made a number of declarations of this sort in the time I've known him; I think he's barely escaped death on thirty or forty occasions. If it's not creeping stomach rot or a cancer n.o.body's heard of, it's his heart beating in an unduly eccentric fas.h.i.+on. I've come to take news of Ventura's pending demise metaphorically: one of his most famous pieces for the newspaper began on the front page in big black letters, YOU, NO MATTER HOW HEALTHY OR RICH OR SMART OR BEAUTIFUL, ARE GOING TO DIE, followed by a six- or seven-thousand-word elaboration for whatever local narcissists were still under the illusion they were immortal. This isn't to say I don't take dying seriously myself. It isn't to say I don't think about it all the time, or that a day has pa.s.sed since I was about eight when it hasn't crossed my mind. At this particular moment, for instance, I was trying to decide if drowning in my own apartment was, as deaths go, more ridiculous than it was exotic, or more exotic than it was ridiculous, with the drip drip drip on my head in Venturas doorway persuasively making the case for ridiculous. I could tell, though, that Ventura didn't think he was going to drown in his apartment; he was contemplating the prospect of going sooner than that. It was the blood this time. The doctor, Ventura explained, had informed him he had blood "the consistency of cream." He said this again, and noticeably brightened; the writer in him couldn't resist the poetry of it. "Blood the consistency of cream," he said for the third time, lowering his cowboy boots to the floor. He was smiling now. He was happy. The romantic doom of it. He was a walking cholesterol time bomb, a ticking b.u.t.terball; he started working it over in his mind, pacing the room, giving it a little extra Sicilian flourish each time. "Blood the consistency of cream." He loved it! His face was a grimace of ecstasy.

He was less ecstatic about the second bit of news, and that was what worried me. It is when things are breaking down in the abstract that Ventura is most sanguine, so when he said without any real joy in his voice that something was up at the newspaper, I had a bad feeling this wasn't just one of Ventura's run-of-the-mill apocalypses. Ventura couldn't quite put his finger on it, but Freud N. Johnson appeared to be agitating himself into a final psychotic a.s.sault on Shale's job, eyes peeled and fingers twitching for the hair-trigger excuse. "This would not be a good time for me to have to quit," was all I could say, contemplating my state of affairs at the moment. "Doesn't Johnson know what would happen if he fired Shale?"

"He's moved way beyond that kind of rationality," Ventura answered. "Firing Shale has become an impulse he has to satisfy, like the impulse to walk into a post office and start shooting people. If anything, he's convinced himself that nothing will happen, that writers threaten to quit all the time in these situations and then never do. Which of course he's right about." I couldn't say I knew for sure what Ventura would do if Shale were fired; I'm not even sure he knew, and that was what was really throwing him. For Ventura, quitting the newspaper might be a kind of death altogether more serious and real than blood the consistency of cream. Soon he was trying to talk himself out of his pessimism-"Well, nothing's probably going to happen for a while"-which was so out of character as to be really ominous.

A sense of general crisis approached on the horizon. Over the next couple of days I realized I was inhaling without fully exhaling, and in the meantime the rain didn't stop. It was raining in the halls of the Hamblin, the stairs became creeks; driving across the city I skidded and swerved around one disaster after another: flooded intersections, broken water mains, cresting sewers, streets buried under mud slides, springs bubbling up from the subway rivers underground. One afternoon during a brief lull I was heading home, pa.s.sing Sunset and Laurel not far from where Scott Fitzgerald lived when he wrote for the movies, past the Chateau Marmont and the Cathode Flower and, standing on the northern side of the boulevard, the little Princess of Coins. I guess she was trying to drum up business while there was a break in the weather. She was typically fetching in a little black skirt and tight silver sweater, gazing eagerly up and down the Strip.

I was just gliding by when, first like a small leak the earth had sprung, and then in a stream, the base of the hillside behind her suddenly exploded in a torrent of water and mud. The underground Laurel Canyon subway channel had broken through, and in seconds the Princess was completely washed away, like she was never there at all; horrified, I still couldn't help bursting out laughing. Mud splattered my winds.h.i.+eld and the water that crashed out into the street carried my car a few feet before I got some traction back-and then, not three feet beyond my headlights, her head bobbed up out of the water in the middle of Sunset Boulevard, the look on her face completely dazed, too shocked to really register what had happened. I opened the car door and grabbed her by anything I could get my hands on, her arms, her sweater, her hair. Along the Strip in the windows of shops and small office buildings, people watched amazed. The surge of the water slowed but my car still felt like it was trying to float away, and as I pulled her into the car the Princess, a tangle of wet hair and clothes, was spitting up brown water, gasping and coughing. For all I knew she was drowning. As soon as I had her in the car all I wanted to do was get off the Strip and down the hill to where I lived, just hoping that if she was going to choke to death she would at least do it before we got to the Hamblin so I could dump her by the side of the road.

But she wasn't dead when I parked the car in the garage. For several seconds I sat in the driver's seat trying to get my bearings, while in the back seat she continued gasping and sputtering and blowing water out her nose. Between hysteria and asphyxiation, she was regaining her breath before her senses. After ten minutes of listening to her coughs and sobs and wheezes and curses I got her out of the car, where she went hysterical again at the sight of all the water in the flooded garage from the backed-up drain pipes. I got her up to my place where she barely had the presence of mind to know she needed to go to the bathroom; she was in the bathroom a long time. After a while I knocked on the door. When she didn't answer, and I had knocked again and she still didn't answer, I finally said, "You have to tell me you're all right so I don't break the door down."

"I'm all right," I heard her voice from the other side. Finally she came out. She was still wet and her hair was still a tangle, and she was still coughing and trying to get water out of her lungs. She had taken off her wet clothes and wrapped herself in a towel. I got her my bathrobe. She took it and went back into the bathroom and came back out with the robe on. She stood lost in my gray bathrobe in the middle of the apartment. "Do you want to lie down?" I said.

She nodded.

"Well you can go in there," I said, pointing to the bedroom. Without looking at me, she went back into the bedroom. "You can close the door if you like," I called after her; she didn't close the door so, a while later when I heard her sleeping, I closed it myself. I gathered up her wet clothes from the bathroom floor and took them to the cleaners down at the end of the street, and when I returned the bedroom door was still closed. A few hours later, when it was beginning to get dark, she emerged long enough to go to the bathroom again and into the kitchen to get a gla.s.s of water, and then disappeared back into the bedroom; around midnight I pulled some blankets out of the closet and made myself a place to sleep on the floor in the front room.

I called Viv. She was tired, in more pain from the burning in her stomach, and I made a mistake: I didn't tell her about the Princess. "You sound finny," she concluded, and as we continued talking about nothing particularly important except how she was feeling, I don't think I stopped sounding funny. In the middle of the night, in my sleep, I thought I heard the telephone; but when I woke the ringing was gone, and I wasn't sure whether it had been a dream or not, and looking out the tall windows at the night and the clouds and the moon overhead I thought for a moment that I was back in the Seacastle, right after the Quake. I sat up to look for a small feral blonde in the doorway who I would come to know as Viv, before I realized I was on the floor of my apartment. It took a second to remember what I was doing there. It was a while before I went back to sleep; the next time I woke it was early morning and the Princess was sitting in my big black chair, still wearing my gray bathrobe, staring out the windows.

I sat up from the floor. "Are you all right?" I said. She stared fearfully out the windows at the clouds, as though dreading a downpour that seemed only moments away. Finally she acknowledged me with a quick look, pulling the bathrobe tighter to her before returning her gaze to the sky. "I wish it would stop," she said, though not really to me; she glanced over at the entryway, which certainly hadn't stopped dripping, and where I had covered the wet carpet with rags and a couple of buckets. I got up off the floor and pulled on my clothes, and gathered up the sheets and blankets where I had slept. "Do you want anything?" I asked.

After a moment she said, "I had some cereal."

"What's your name?"

"Why?" she blurted. She fully intended to sound hostile. Instead she couldn't help sounding afraid and confused, as though the experience of the previous afternoon was not only still sinking in but had so fundamentally rattled her she wasn't sure how to answer the question even if she wanted to. Exactly which name did I mean? Her working name? The name she would take when she became a movie star? Her real name, a.s.suming she could remember it? I took a shower and dressed and washed the dishes, emptied the buckets and changed the rags in the entryway, all while she sat in the chair looking out the window. "I'm going down to the cleaners to get your clothes," I told her, to no answer, and headed out so I could get back before the rain started, walking down the street and picking up her skirt and sweater and stockings and underwear. I was now eagerly antic.i.p.ating getting the Princess out of my apartment. When I got back twenty minutes later, she was not in the black chair anymore or the bathroom; I was a little dismayed to find her back in bed, lying on her side staring at the walls. She very much appeared as though she had no plans to go anywhere any time soon. I stood at the side of the bed looking down at her with her clothes in my arms. "I don't like the dripping," she said.

I cleared my throat. "Your clothes are clean now. I can take you anywhere you need to go."

"I don't need to go anywhere," she answered, staring at the wall.

Reluctantly I hung the clothes in the closet. "There's a telephone," I pointed at what was pretty obviously a telephone sitting on a low gla.s.s shelf right next to the bed, "if you need to call anyone to come get you."

"There's no one to call," she said. She looked up at me for really the first time. She brushed her hair from her face and, slowly and casually, moved the sheets of the bed off of her. She was naked. She looked impossibly young. "You can, if you want," she said.

"It's all right," I shook my head.

"Are you a f.a.g?"

"No."

"Don't you like me?"

"Yes."

"Don't you think I'm pretty?"

"Yes, I think you're pretty."

"Then why not?"

"It's all right, I said."

"But why not?" She said, "I'm not sick, if that's what you're afraid of. I don't have anything."

"That's not it." I was getting angry.

"So why not?"

I was getting angry and I wasn't even sure why. "Because," I sputtered, "it's all right for a guy to treat you decently every once in a while without you having to f.u.c.k him for it." She appeared completely confounded by this. "Do you want to sleep some more?" I sighed.

"I just want to lie here," she answered, pulling the sheets back over her. For the rest of the day she didn't come out of the bedroom. Later that night, finally showing signs of life, sitting at the table inhaling some scrambled eggs and a plate of toast, she began to talk a little, though it was the usual talk I had no use for-about a brother in jail, a sister hooked on junk. ... The last thing I wanted to hear about was her young depressing life. Studying her, I couldn't tell if she was sixteen or twenty-two or anywhere in between. "Don't you work or anything?" she said between toast, as though wondering what the h.e.l.l I was hanging around all the time for. "I'll have a c.o.ke."

I got her a c.o.ke from the refrigerator. "I work for a newspaper."

"Doing what?"

"I'm a writer."

"What do you write about?"

"Movies, mostly."

"You write about movies?" she said.

"Yes."

"I'm going to be in the movies someday."

"No kidding."

"What do you write about the movies?"

"I write about whether I like them."

Her fork was poised in mid-air, and she peered up at me through her blonde hair. "You write about whether you like them? You mean, you go to movies, and then you write about whether you like them."

"Yes."

She started to say something but stopped, certain she couldn't have possibly heard right.

I took the bull by the horns. "Tomorrow we'll take you wherever you need to go."

"I don't need to go anywhere," she said.

"There must be somebody worrying about you."

"There's n.o.body worrying about me."

"Where do you live?"

"I don't live anywhere."

"Where do you stay?"

"I stay wherever I am." She brushed her hair from her face. "Whoever I'm with."

"We can take you to a counseling center or something. Where they can help you with your problems."

"I don't have any problems."

"There might be someone who can make some arrangements for you, so you don't have to do this."

"Do what?" Narrowing her eyes she said, "What do you mean, so I don't have to do this? What's wrong with what I do? You know," she managed her most insinuating tone, "I'll bet you've driven by my corner before, haven't you? I'll bet you've driven by a lot, checking me out. As a matter of fact, didn't I do you in the car a couple of months ago?"

"You see," I explained, "I'm a lot older than you, so you can spare me the shocking streetwise philosophy. I'm not talking about whether it's wrong in general, I'm talking about whether it's wrong for you. And you never did me in the car. The only thing you ever did in my car was get your little a.s.s pulled out of the water yesterday when you were about to wash down Sunset Boulevard."

"I already said thanks," she muttered petulantly, though she hadn't said any such thing. She got up from the table, standing in the kitchen. "I don't have anywhere to go," she said, suddenly sounding like she could get loony again, like when she first got here. "I stay with a guy until he's done with me and then he pays me so I can get a room somewhere, in a motel or something, if I don't get another john right away. There's no point having my own place because I'd never sleep there anyway."

I didn't want her to get loony again. "OK."

"I don't have any money-I've lost two days' work being here."

"Oh, well, gee, I'm really sorry about the lost work."

"If you gave me the money for two days' work, maybe I could go."

"How much?"

"Five hundred dollars."

"What?"

"All right, all right," she said. "It's not my fault you won't f.u.c.k me for it."

"I thought that was for saving your life, and letting you stay here."

She looked down and started picking at the ends of her hair. "It was," she said in a little voice. She looked up and stared bleakly out the window. "I can't leave yet."

"When can you?" I snapped.

"When it stops raining," she wailed. And there it was: she was the rain's hostage and I was hers. I let her stand there in the kitchen crying a good half-minute before I got up from the table and handed her a napkin to wipe her face. Let's talk about it tomorrow, I told her as gently as possible. I kept thinking maybe the rain would break and then she would want to leave. As she headed off to the bedroom and I once again hauled the sheets and blankets out onto the floor of the front room, she looked at them once before disappearing and said, "It's not my fault you sleep on the floor."

The next day it was raining harder than ever. The Princess, however, wasn't paying quite as much attention to the rain anymore. She wasn't regarding it with quite the same wide-eyed terror. Thumbing nonchalantly through one magazine after another, she seemed to have almost forgotten about the rain, which I took to mean she felt securely enough ensconced under my roof that the rain rather bored her now. The day pa.s.sed: she slept, she ate, she read magazines, she took a bath, she read more magazines, she slept some more. She brushed her hair, she did her nails while draped across my big black chair, she turned the radio up one end of the dial and down the other and over and over to whatever station happened to suit her, which none ever did for more than five minutes. She soon seemed quite comfortable with the whole set-up, and the more at home she got, the farther my gray bathrobe slipped from her body until, by the end of the second day, she was casually walking around wearing nothing at all.

On the phone, meanwhile, Viv sounded worse. Her stomach was on fire as doctors subjected her to a battery of tests and found nothing. "Viv is sick," I told Ventura, back in his dripping doorway. "She's dying," he answered, not looking up. "I'm dying, you're dying." He was sitting at the table in his apartment intently sorting out old papers and letters; he actually had off both his hat and boots, taking care of his final affairs in his socks. Along with the papers and letters the table, which was usually piled with books and articles, was now covered with lettuce and carrots and tomatoes and zero-fat salad dressing, as well as a baguette from the corner bakery. Sitting among the roughage was a very legal looking doc.u.ment; it was his will, which he had already begun to write. "Are you leaving me anything?" I asked.