"How many movies are there in Cinerama, anyway?"
"Fewer than ten. Most people know How the West Was Won. Anyhow, Joe asks if I know anyone who'd be interested in his next project, and I thought of you."
"I don't build 'em, I just draw 'em."
"You make my point for me. What he needs is a new design for a very special kind of movie theater. See, the multiplex is dead as a concept. That big ole screen you've got in your living room is proof. People don't want to pay, what, nine-ten bucks to see essentially the same thing with no focus and some guy spitting popcorn in their hair. So Joe wants to tear the guts out of an existing multiplex, and plug in a single theater with one-third the seats. Nice recliners. Beverage service, including champagne. No kids allowed. Legroom. Big screen. Ushers. One projectionist. It's like bumping the ante on a Hollywood screening room, the kind you have to have special invites to go on studio lots to see, only better."
"Any movie house where they serve you champagne is a step up. Most multiplexes look like giant porcelain restrooms."
''Here's the most outrageous part. It costs fifteen bucks to get in."
"I'd pay twenty bucks, for that."
"Joe thinks a lot of people would, because you can have all the movies in the world in your house, but there's still this atavistic need to go out to see a new movie. Or an old movie. As long as it's the right movie."
"Okay… so?"
"So, if the flagship floats, he wants to tear out the rest of the multiplex boxes and retheme the whole place, and he needs someone to come up with a design that's new, because just tearing out seats and tossing in a bigger screen won't excite the backers.''
"Derek, this is dangerously close to a passion of mine.''
"I know. Why do you think I told Joe? Think of it, man-valet parking and appetizers. No more drug dealers with switchblades. Hollywood massacres its own history faster than any other city in the country. They're trying to tear down the Hollywood Bowl right now, and build a venue three times bigger on the same spot, for rock shows, because the L.A. Philharmonic's contract eats shit and dies in 2005. The Bowl is only one of the three most recognizable buildings in Hollywood. I bet cash money you know the other two."
Art thought about it.
"Obvious: Grauman's Chinese Theatre and the Capitol Records Building.''
"They can reinforce the existing structure of the Bowl, but the guys who made billions off the subway project down there are hungry to tear down and throw up. The Chinese wasn't even Grauman's, for more than two decades, and now they're crowing 'anniversary' and not counting the lost years it was called Mann's Chinese. The main house has been rechristened Grauman's now that they added another rat-maze multi. It's happening to all the showoff theaters. The time is ripe for you to strike. You're interested, right?"
"In the theater thing? Sure. But my interest equals exactly zero."
"I just need an excuse to put you two together, and you'll achieve critical mass all on your own. Can you knock out some time to come to L.A.?''
"Right now?"
"Shit yeah, right now. Let's jump in the car and haul ass. It's a rental; it won't matter if we wreck it. We'll be there in seven hours." Probably less, if Derek still drove the way Art remembered.
Adventure beckoned. It frequently did within moments of any appearance by Derek.
"You mean take off with a known felon on a road trip to chase a movie theater?"
"Basically, you got it. If the cops pull us over, just call me Jake and all shall be cool. Pretend I'm somebody else. Crank up the stereo. Catch a little highway air."
"Half the coast road'll be out. There's already flooding, south of here. There's a storm coming."
"We can outrun it.'' Derek's eyes were bright now, full up with mischief. "That's what that pedal on the right is for."
"Neither of us is in what you might call driving trim."
"Fuck that, I'll be sober in an hour. Good to go. Come on, man, get out of this cage. I just got out of mine. Check out something completely mysterious. Who knows? Lots of eligibles in L.A. ''
"I'd love to-"
"But, " Derek interposed. "You're gonna but me, aren't you?"
"Shut up. Listen. This storm coming in is a big deal for this house, the one you're sitting in right now."
"So lock up, drop your shutters, and fly. We'll take the dog with us. You wanna go to L.A., Blitz?"
Blitz stretched and aired out his tongue. Yes, adventure was fine with him, too.
"No, you don't understand. This house is a design that some people have called revolutionary. If there's a big blow coming down, I need to monitor it. See how the structure weathers it. Because if I'm right, then rich people up and down the entire coast will be calling, and I won't have to design a goddamn futuristic food court."
Derek blew out an exasperated breath. "All right. If you're gonna puss on me, then here's what I'll do: I will call you from L.A. with the skinny from Joe. By then the storm'll be done. I will then come back up here and drag your sorry ass back down there, because I want this excursion with you.''
"I can drive down…"
"You're missing the point of the whole trip. We have to stay awake all night, drink road beers, get so punchy that everything we see turns viciously funny. I need it, I want it. But you had to go do what you always do, which is logic me out of it. You didn't give me a bullshit excuse, you gave me a real one, so just say yes to the second part and I'll forgive you for the first. And for being such an anus."
"Am I that much of an anus?''
Blitz barked. Plea. Both humans dissolved into laughter.
"Well, stay the night," said Art. "Take off in the morning."
"Nah," said Derek. "I was listening to the radio, too-what there was of FM. That storm will fuck up the roads soon enough, and I want to get inland."
"Right this instant?"
He rubbed the two-day stubble on his cheeks. "Not if you've got another monster movie. And maybe one more beer."
"Deal." It wasn't until Art stood up again that he realized he was quite drunk already.
***
Art opened his eyes to a vista of blank blue on the big Proton TV screen and a wasteland of beer bottles, congregated on the glass table like innocent bystanders at an accident scene. Pain stabbed up and over from his occipital, like a muscle tension headache. His first impulse was to douse some of the overbearing lights; his second, to gulp a fistful of Excedrin…
… just like the bad old period that followed Lorelle's death,
when he'd been doing that bottomless-pit drinking that frequently brought blackouts, and lost him entire calendar days.
Panicked and unbalanced, he looked for the nearest clock and saw that it was eleven-thirty; the darkness outside would make that P.M. But was it eleven-thirty on the night Derek showed up, or some further date? Art stumbled to his computer, holding his head as though he'd been mugged.
Eleven thirty-two P.M., it advised. Same day.
So you're by yourself
, he thought,
walled up in your own fortress, minimizing human contact, and what happens? A flamboyant character from your past shows up practically unannounced to regale you with catch-up stories. He does most of the talking while you bask in nostalgia.
Art's lungs suddenly felt hot and tender, as if the rattlesnake's maraca tail segments were tickling his chest with dread. He did not like the possibility that was racing toward his conscious mind like an ominous, dark juggernaut.
Derek shows up and is the very embodiment of hearty macho camaraderie. He spins a fanciful story of how he took charge when his lady was cheating on him in some exotic foreign port, blew away her paramour as smooth as a country-and-western song lyric, and wound up in the Gray Bar Hotel. Yet he's a free man scant years later thanks to a Houdini of a lawyer, or a loophole in the law, or… something. Was there a chance in hell of these cards playing in a shooting death? Art didn't know, and the very seductive convenience of Derek's story began to gnaw at his logic.
They had talked the follies of love, drunk beer, and watched monster movies, strictly according to Art's idealized template of their past, when Lorelle was alive. Derek even had "their" rattler tattooed on his arm-how likely was that, in the real world?
His asshole buddy from the bygone had manifested right on his doorstep, and Blitz had accepted him instantly. He unspooled edgy stories of his exciting, tightrope life, and his coming attractions included some dream gig in Hollywood. He had been ruthless and logical about shooting Erica's supposed lover, yet went to a bar and got drunk instead of submerging into a backup identity he had tucked away all along.
Derek's story was beginning to submerge due to its own leaks. It had all the brio of a braggart's tale, made up on the fly to impress distant friends. That was not Art's worry at the moment.
Art's fingertips had grown frigid. Now he was scared. He could smell alcohol metabolizing through his skin; the whole living room was clogged with the reek of beer and cigarettes.
Art was scared that he had imagined the entire evening with Derek. That he had fabricated his friend's visit as an excuse to get drunk. That he was so lonely and disconnected that he was beginning to hallucinate old buddies, full of piss and vinaigrette. That he had sat and watched a monster movie by himself, talking to dead air and confusing his dog.
Nothing in Derek's backstory held a drop of plausibility. It was like something Art himself would confect, given what he knew about prisons and statutes and what kind of laws swung in Hawaii, for god's sake.
Art's heartbeat had doubled. He looked around for evidence of Derek's passage, and the primal fear quadrants of his primitive hindbrain freaked even more when he couldn't find any.
The bottles-Art could have killed all those soldiers himself. The smokes, ditto. His throat felt raw and shitty. His metabolism flashed back to his smoking days.
In the kitchen-remnants of dinner for two, but Art could recall no particular about the meal that would confirm he had not eaten it himself. There was a sodden paper grocery bag in the garbage bearing a receipt for the stuff Derek had brought. Seemingly brought. The receipt was local; Art could have scored it all himself, then blocked it out. One of his own business cards sat on the glass with a beer-bottle ring soaking it.
Blitz offered no clues or advice.
Wet footprints on the threshold-dry now, but still visible on the carefully laid flagstone. One set. Art's shoes.
The bathroom-nothing. Either Derek had been fastidious, or he hadn't actually been here at all.
Art looked for a stray hair on the couch. Apparently Derek didn't shed the way normal humans did.
Derek had sung the praises of an attorney too good to be true… because he probably did not exist at all.
The postcard was still at Art's workstation, have a beer, you fuck. It now seemed like a telegram from a madhouse, addressed to Art personally, inviting him to an alumni reunion.
Christ,
he thought.
Did I even write the card myself? Mail it to myself?
If Derek's surreal job offer had anything to do with the actual world, Art would be getting a phone call, not quickly enough to allay his new fears, but soon. Hang on to that.
This little ember of hope stabilized him a bit. Then Art's reality vertigo took an even deeper plunge, so hard it forced him to sit down with a heavy woof of breath.
If the story about Derek wasn't true…
… how true was the story about Lorelle?
Had he done something bad to his own wife?
The words of the castaway note in the sea bottle might almost have been from Lorelle, chiding him about whatever bad, unaccept able thing he had done, before his swan dive into some psychotic fugue of a far-too-ordered, imaginary life of grief.
It pains me to witness your own pain…
Gentle castigation from the dead.
I don't want sympathy or pity: no one to mourn me.
In that context, the bone Blitz had retrieved was too gruesome to consider.
Was it possible Art had harmed her?
Pain divided his brain like a cadmium shaft. He leaned forward, pinching the bridge of his nose. One gasp escaped him, then he vomited on the living-room floor. The puke punched out of him all liquid and beery.
Blitz was looking at him as though Art had just morphed into a tentacled alien. Getting ready to be a Monster Fighter.
Art looked up into the poisonously rich blue of the TV screen. It made his skull throb even worse. The satellite dish was out; no signal. If he'd fallen asleep watching the system, he should have awakened to a scrolling menu.
"Sit down!'' he yelled at the dog, who was making motions that suggested he wanted to trot over to lap up the puke on the floor. Blitz flinched and sat, his tail unmoving.
Art's muscles screamed. It felt like a randy soccer team had used him for fuck practice and left him ass-up in a Dumpster. His head swarmed with toxic fog. His vision jarred in and out of focus as he lumbered for the front door like a drunk. When he jerked the door open, the house's alarm system went off, another napalm attack on his senses.
If Derek had really been here, would the alarm have been set? That didn't make any sense, either.
Art punched in the key code and the shrill air-horn noise ceased. Wind lashed rain over the threshold and stung his face with cold. He tilted against the blow and fought his way to the highway turnoff. The five-minute stroll became a ten-minute slog. En route he saw that there were no fresh tire tracks. The wind had already erased them… if they had ever been there.