Los Angeles (12 page)

I remembered the morning following the night I had seen her at the Mask. Angela had been standing in my kitchen, naked, her
cinnamon-colored belly pressed against the sink. She lifted the miniblinds, and light streamed in, blisteringly white. Outside,
the six-in-the-morning sunshine filtered through the waxy leaves of the old man’s laurels.

“Can I open this?” she asked.

That cat was mewling out there, too, making those human but inhuman noises.

“No.” I was incredulous.

Angela opened it anyway, and caustic illumination burst into the kitchen and into my overly sensitive brain. She even lifted
the sash, letting in a sigh of coolness and the only fresh air that had entered the apartment since I had moved in, and with
it came the cloying, rich smell of flowers — hyacinths, marigolds, hydrangeas, tulips.

“Do you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

She inhaled. “Flowers.”

“They’re hyacinths,” I said. “The old man is growing them in the next yard.” I had seen him out there a million times, tending
to his garden, an old duffer in blue coveralls, a spade in his hand. The smell was heavy, yeasty, like summer pollen. Through
the leaves of the laurel and the links of a gray metal fence, I could see his whole garden. The old guy spent his days watering
and tending, weeding and replanting. At that moment, in fact, the sprinkler weaved back and forth in the stinging morning
sunshine. He must have been up early to turn it on.

Angela hurried into my bedroom and was pulling on a pair of my cargo pants before I understood what was happening. She slipped
one of my T-shirts over her head, too, pulling it roughly over her fake breasts.

“I want some,” she said.

“Some what?” I followed her into the living room.

“Some of those hyacinths.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

The door closed behind her.

About a minute later, I looked through the kitchen window and watched Angela stepping gingerly across the parking lot in her
bare feet. She reached the fence, which was covered in a tangle of thick green ivy and purple jacarandas, then turned around
to glance back at me. She swung her legs over in one swift acrobatic motion, but then the fabric of her pants caught on a
piece of chain-link and she landed on the ground of the other side,
hard.
I thought she had been knocked out for a few seconds when she didn’t move, and I held my breath until she got up.

She turned back with a flash of bright teeth and a sheepish wave.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, knowing she couldn’t hear me. “Be careful.”

It was difficult to see much after that because I had to make out her form through the dark leaves of the overhanging branches.
She was out of sight for a long time, long enough for me to consider putting on some clothes myself and, as much as I despised
the light, going out after her. How would I explain this? I started to think the old man might have spotted her and that I
would need some kind of justification. She’s been drinking, I imagined telling him. It won’t happen again.

But then the door of the living room opened and Angela came breezing in, her arms full of blue and white blossoms and her
long fake hair plastered to the sides of her head. Somehow she had slipped through the parking lot without my seeing her.

She was drenched from standing under the old man’s sprinkler, and my clothes conformed wetly to her body. She was smiling,
too, arms full of those large petals of white and blue with heavy green stalks.

I don’t know why — I wanted to say something, to tell her how beautiful she was — but I couldn’t speak, and my eyes failed.
Against the full morning brilliance flooding through the kitchen window, I couldn’t see anything at all. I think I had been
staring directly into the sun, and now I saw a migraine aura, vague, cloudy with radiance — gorgeous. Later, I knew, I would
lean over the toilet and discharge the contents of my stomach in a series of chokes and spasms, but right now, this minute,
looking into her face, the only thing I could see for some reason, I felt like I was looking directly into the heart of light.
And that sensation, the one that began when I first opened the door to discover her standing there holding that casserole
of lamb stew, had transformed, morphing from desire to happiness, and now… now this was something else entirely.

______

When I got home, the television was still glowing,
Blade Runner
was still running, Harrison Ford’s beleaguered face was still navigating Ridley Scott’s futuristic L.A. “More human than
human is our motto.” I sat down at my desk and thought for a moment, murmuring along with the dialogue, then went back out
into the hallway and tried Angela’s door again.

It was locked now, for some reason.

But I had to get in there. There had to be something I had missed the last time, some other clue.

I went back into my apartment and opened the cabinet beneath my kitchen sink, finding a hammer and a flat-head screwdriver.

Back in the hallway, I jammed the screwdriver against the lock on Angela’s door, then slammed the hammer against it.

The flimsy lock broke easily, and the door popped open with a loud crack.

Quickly, I slipped next door and closed my own apartment door behind me, stashing the tools out of sight.

If anyone came up here, I’d play dumb and pretend I’d heard a mysterious noise.

Gosh, what the heck was that?

But of course no one came. I waited a few more minutes, then went back and entered Angela’s living room, flicking on the overhead.
It was the same as before: the same blue love seat, the same white rattan chair, the cookbook, gravy stained, resting on the
kitchen counter. I went through the apartment methodically this time, trying to find anything, any evidence that might provide
an indication of Angela’s current whereabouts or the identity of whoever had written that creepy letter.

But I found only meaningless slips of paper, supermarket and drugstore receipts, un-filled-out magazine subscription cards.
I searched through the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen, even looking inside that orange casserole dish, now scrubbed and
resting in the sink. I lifted the cushions on the blue love seat and slid my hands beneath the upholstery. The couch was brand-new.
There was nothing in it, not even dust.

In the bedroom, inside one of those Samsonites, I found a pair of jeans with shiny silver studs around the cuffs. I reached
into the pocket and discovered a one-hundred-dollar bill inside it, still crisp. I wondered jealously what Angela had done
for this money, then punished myself for being such a judgmental jerk. Or perhaps her stalker had given it to her, the white
man in the gray suit. Perhaps there had been other envelopes full of other hundred-dollar bills.

I opened the closet and looked at those three dresses, one black, one green, one peach. They hung there like ghosts of Angela,
and for a moment, I imagined taking her out in one of them, going to one of the restaurants my parents used to go to. Then
I imagined the looks I would receive, all those eyes on me.

I don’t know why, but since I was standing just inside the closet door anyway, I stepped farther in. I used to sit in closets
a lot when I was a kid, hiding from the daylight, so maybe it was force of habit, or maybe I was regressing. In any case,
the closet was nearly empty, and I simply pulled the door closed behind me.

A sliver of light issued from beneath it, a penetrating band of illumination.

I let my eyes adjust.

Is this what it was like when she called me? I tried to remember her voice. I said my own name,
“Angel?”
whispering it just the way Angela had, paying close attention to the hushed acoustics.

Could she have been in here?

After a few minutes I stepped out of the closet into the light of the bedroom, and as my eyes slowly readjusted to the ceiling
fixtures, I saw through into the living room.

At first I couldn’t believe it.

There was a man standing in the threshold of the front door. A tentative hand was touching the shattered lock. He wore a gray
business suit with a dark tie and white shirt. His face was in shadow, but I could see that he wore glasses.

Glasses.

A white guy in a gray suit.

“Hey,” I said, stepping fully out into the light.

Seeing me, the man in gray started, turned around, then slipped back into the hallway.

“Hey!” I shouted after him.

I didn’t quite get his face. I had taken too long to react.

I could hear his footsteps, the hard slap of his shoes on the concrete steps.

This was the man Angela left with that night. It had to be. He must have come here and found that the door had been broken,
then stepped inside.

“Wait!” I ran into the hall and jumped down entire flights, following the man in gray out to the parking lot. He jumped into
an out-of-date white Honda and sped onto San Raphael Crescent, almost knocking over a trash can on the curb. His tires actually
squealed on the pavement, leaving parallel smears of black rubber on the pale concrete. I remembered at the last second to
look at his license plate, but it was too late, the man in gray was gone.

______

Any movie about serious subject matter is “dark.” Any book in which someone dies is “dark.” People are said to have “dark”
sides. It is always the “dark” underworld. People descend into the “darkness” of depression. Everyone is always going on and
on about being afraid of the dark, and darkness itself has become a kind of cultural metaphor for anything frightening or
psychologically disturbing or even mildly unpleasant. But I have always found the darkness so much more welcoming than the
light. The darkness doesn’t burn; it doesn’t sting your eyes; it doesn’t require special lenses or shades. No one builds a
shelter to shield himself from the dark. And while we need a certain amount of light to see, we sleep in the comforting dark;
most people have sex in the dark; we like to eat in dark restaurants, watch movies in the darkness of the theater. Darkness
is more calming, consoling, and much more soothing than the light. When we are truly afraid, we hide our eyes, seeking the
protection of darkness. The safest way to hide from an enemy is under cover of darkness. We are born in the darkness of the
womb and return at the end of our lives to the darkness of the grave.

For me, the best place to think has never been in the harsh light of day, but in the soothing dark of night.

All of which is to explain why I went back to sit in Angela’s closet again.

I needed that darkness, that private muffled feeling of quiet, to experience just a little of what she must have felt when
she called.

Whatever Angela had been terrified of, I thought, it wasn’t the darkness, it was the menace of some other fear.

In other words, it isn’t the darkness we fear — fear is the reason we seek the darkness.

The man in gray.

If that guy really was the man she left the Velvet Mask with, I asked myself, why was he looking for her now? Wouldn’t he
know where she is? Wouldn’t he have been the one who put her in the trunk of his car or stuffed her under his bed?

But perhaps Angela had escaped and now she was hiding from him. Maybe she had hidden herself in a small dark place. I could
feel the concatenations of my imagination beginning to overtake my sense of reason. Maybe she was hiding somewhere. I pictured
a laundry closet in a hotel, the airless gap between a wall and a curtain, the filthy crawl space beneath a house. Or maybe
he had never gotten ahold of her in the first place. Maybe she knew he was after her because of the letters and now she had
disappeared, gone into hiding. Bewildering thoughts, glittering ideas, and lunatic theories slashed across my mind’s movie
screen like the coming attractions before a feature presentation, fragments of scenes, detached lines of dialog, the most
unsubstantial suggestions of plotlines, which were portentous, I knew, of so much more than what was real. There in the darkness
of her closet, my eyes began to pick up more and more detail. The blade of dim light that came from the crack beneath the
door seemed to fan out like the spray of paint from an airbrush.

I forced myself to get out of Angela’s closet and step through the chilly fluorescence of the hallway into my own apartment.
I went to the kitchen to make myself a pot of coffee, slipping my sandals off and pressing the soles of my feet against the
cool linoleum.

Through the slats of the miniblinds I searched around for that cat.

She was gone… still gone…

Like Angela, that cat was still missing. The sun was rising. The blue numbers on the coffeemaker told me it was half past
five in the morning. I knew I couldn’t sleep, but I didn’t much feel like taking any meds.

I dialed Angela’s cell number again, listening to her recorded message. “Hi, it’s me,” she said happily. “Leave a message,
I’ll call you back.”

“It’s me,” I said into the phone. “It’s Angel.” I wanted to tell her that I would find her, that she didn’t need to worry,
that everything would be all right, but my voice got caught in my throat, and I couldn’t make myself say anything else. Finally,
I took a mug of black coffee over to my desk and sat down at my computer. I thought it might help to put down the bifurcated
tree branches of possibilities, to plot out the potential scenarios using screenwriting software and to determine the best
course of action. I must have fallen asleep, though, because several hours later, I found myself in my squeaky chair with
my head resting on my arm and my hand prickly with pins and needles. My spine felt like it was made of lead.

Awake, I came to a conclusion.

______

When I was a little kid, my parents arranged to have a birthday party for me at the Four Seasons Hotel. There was a magician,
a French clown, an enormous cake in the shape of a
Star Wars
battle cruiser. Practically every movie star’s kid in Hollywood was there. This was before anyone knew how shy I could be,
before my fears had developed into phobias and I had become a complete embarrassment. Anyway, I had known the party was coming,
had even been excited about it, but the day it arrived, I felt only skin-crawling, teeth-chattering terror. I remember freezing
up when a little girl walked up to me. She was holding a brightly wrapped package and offering an already famous smile. “Happy
birthday, Angel,” she said sweetly.