Authors: Peter Moore Smith
I couldn’t respond. For some reason, I couldn’t speak at all. I just stared at her, catatonic.
“Are you all right?” She looked around for an adult. “Is he okay?”
I don’t know where my mother was at the moment, but Frank grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the next room. “Listen,
you little ghost,” he whispered, leaning down, “I will tear those pink eyes out of your goddamned face if you don’t go back
in there and act like you’re having fun.” I still remember the grip of his hands on my arms. “Do you realize who that is?”
I shook my head.
“That’s Drew
fucking
Barrymore.”
Apparently, my father was trying to remake a Shirley Temple movie, and they desperately wanted Drew for the starring role.
Frank Heile.
My whole life, he has been taking me aside like that, threatening violence. He always liked to say he’d break every one of
my pale limbs or snap my scrawny pink neck. Honestly, I have never been entirely sure of what he is truly capable of, but
let me put it this way — Frank Heile is the character in the movie you discover is actually an escaped Nazi concentration
camp guard; when Frank dies, I have always thought, the police will discover a shed full of snuff films; I have always imagined
human remains scattered about his lawn, skeletons chained to pipes in his basement, bones poking up through the poured concrete
of his swimming pool. This was the man who did my father’s dirty work, his Robespierre, his Adolf Eichmann. This was the henchman
who protected my father from the lawsuits of the people he stole his ideas from, the man who could destroy a promising acting
career with a single phone call. Even my father used to kid about it. “Everyone should have a sociopath like Frank around,”
he would say. “It’s good for business.”
He never struck me — Frank never laid a hand on me — but even then, at six years old, I knew that if I wasn’t nice to Drew
Barrymore, I was going to get it.
“It’s Angel Veronchek,” I said now. “May I please speak to —”
“One moment, please.”
“What is it, Angel?” His voice was hard, and he handled my name like a dirty towel.
I stood in the kitchen, cradling the phone against my ear, and poured myself a cup of room-temperature coffee. “I need your
help,” I admitted. I didn’t much like asking Frank for anything. I didn’t much like talking to him at all, was the truth,
but I was desperate.
I crushed a number of anti-anxiety pills into the tepid coffee, then drank it down.
“What’s the problem?”
His voice made me nervous, and I fingered a full, uneaten bottle of Reality. “I need you to help me find someone.”
There was a pause, an impatient breath. Frank was writing something down. Then, “Who do you need to find?”
“It’s a girl.”
“A girl.”
“You can’t tell my father about this, all right? If you even mention it —”
“It will be our little secret,” Frank said flatly. “Just tell me what kind of girl you’re looking for.”
“It’s not a
kind
of girl, it’s a particular girl.” I had to breathe deeply to control my temper. Just talking to him made me furious. “A woman.”
“Okay.”
“Her name is Jessica Teagarden.” I had trouble even saying it; her name still sounded so strange to me.
I sensed that he was writing this down, too. “Go on.”
“She lives next door to me. Only… only…”
“Only what?”
“She’s a dancer, a stripper. She works at a place called the Velvet Mask. Do you know it? On Sunset Boule —”
“I’ve driven by it.”
All my life I had overheard Frank and my father discussing women as if they were desserts you could order from room service.
“I know, you must find girls like her for people, so —”
“I get it, Angel,” Frank said with a conspiratorial chuckle. “I just never thought I’d be doing it for you.” I heard something
in the background, some kind of movement, as though someone were asking him a question. Then he said, “A woman will call you.
Her name is Annette. She’s kind of a… casting director. You tell her everything you want, be as explicit as you like, and
she’ll set it up. I’ll contact her directly and take care of the details.”
“How do you know she can find her?”
“Believe me, Angel, Annette will find the girl you’re looking for.”
“Is she an investigator or —”
He laughed. “Don’t worry about what she is, all right? Just trust me.”
“You’ll make sure nothing happens to her, won’t you? I’m afraid she might be in some kind of—”
His impatience was increasing. “Nothing will happen.”
I wondered if this Annette woman would really be able to find her so easily. But I knew that Frank’s power crossed all boundaries,
criminal, legal, ethical, personal, that the power of Hollywood is absolute. I decided to trust him. “Thank you, Frank.”
There was a pause, and just as I was about to say good-bye, “Your father…”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh shit.”
This came as a throwaway line, as though it had been over-rehearsed. “He’s concerned about you.”
“There’s nothing to be concerned about.”
“Just go and see him.” Frank sighed a condescending breath, like he was talking to a child. “He’s not a young man anymore.
He’s slowing down. And Gabriel —”
“Why would you bring
him
into this?”
It was so typical of Frank to bring up Gabriel. I could hear his insincerity through the telephone.
“He’s improving, but —”
For some reason, my adopted little brother still wasn’t speaking. I thought it was autism,
everyone
thought it was autism, but no one had the temerity to use the word in a sentence. “I have to go.” I finished my coffee and
meds with a hard swallow and already felt its calming effect. “This Annette person, she’ll call soon?”
“Go see your father. That’s not a request.”
I couldn’t take it anymore, so I hung up.
And just then I noticed a blinking number on the answering machine. One. One. One. One. The phone must have rung while I was
asleep. Jesus Christ. How could I have missed that?
I pressed the button, hoping desperately it was Angela.
“Angel,” a shaky old man’s voice quavered through the little speaker, “this is Dr. Silowicz. You missed your scheduled appointment
again, and I was just wondering if everything’s… well, if everything’s quite all right.”
Silowicz.
I wanted to say that nothing was quite all right, you old fucker. Nothing has ever been quite all right in my entire life,
and now it is much less quite all right than it has ever been.
But I didn’t.
Instead, I called and asked if I could come and see him right away.
______
A relatively simple experiment, one I had even done several times before, it involved mixing two or three chemicals in a solution,
then heating the solution in a test tube over the burner. I had found an old fountain pen in my father’s desk and planned
to fill its bladder with the resulting liquid. The idea was that you could write with it, and the blue, seemingly normal ink
would stay visible for approximately ten minutes before it would fade away, right before your eyes. All you had to do if you
wanted the now-invisible ink to become visible again was soak a ball of cotton in lemon juice and brush it lightly over the
page.
I had the idea that I would write a secret journal, telling the absolute truth in disappearing words.
This was the summer before fifth grade, the year I started going to the Vancouver School. I had already spent all of July
and most of August in the basement of my parents’ house, playing with my Junior Genius chemistry sets. I wore a lab coat and
protective goggles, and painstakingly illustrated my pointless experiments in a spiral notebook. The basement had originally
been intended as a family entertainment area, a rec room with a big console television, stacks of board games, a Ping Pong
table. But since no one ever went down there, I had turned it into my private laboratory, using the Ping Pong table as my
work surface and the Atari game as the only source of light.
A blistering summer day, I remember, poisonously bright, and my father, as always, was shooting something or getting something
into production or meeting with movie stars. Mom was out shopping or doing lunch or having plastic surgery.
As usual, I had been left alone.
I got bored with the disappearing ink experiment, however, and thought it might be interesting to add something unexpected
to the solution. I reached for a random chemical. I had a large collection of plastic bottles assembled from several different
chemistry sets I had received over the years, including a bewildering German set my mother’s brother had sent from Switzerland.
I don’t remember what I put in there exactly, just that it was a crystalline white powder.
The solution, which was light blue, foamed for a moment, then settled, having become clear.
Fascinating.
Now I had to try another one.
This was something I used to do a lot of when I was a kid, adding random chemicals to a solution, heating it up just to see
what would happen, and marking down the results. I don’t think I had grasped the point of science yet, that you have to know
exactly what you’re doing, that you need an
objective.
This time I added something blue — it was cobalt, probably — to see if I could get that inky color to come back. But it wouldn’t
blend, the new chemical just settled on the bottom of the test tube. So I put a little rubber cap on it and held it over the
flame of the burner with a pair of metal clamps, thinking it would melt.
Dr. Silowicz and I have spent hours discussing my lifelong interest in science. He always says it represents my desire for
control. I’ve always held that it has to do with my fascination with the mysterious. Anyway, I kept the test tube over the
burner too long, watching the solution inside it boil and rise, and I shouldn’t have put the rubber cap on it, either, because
the gas created by the heat of the flame expanded and the hot chemical solution exploded.
There was a huge noise, of course, a terrific
pop,
and then the sound of shattering, minuscule shards of glass and disappearing ink flying all over the rec room.
Luckily, I had been wearing my protective goggles and long-sleeved lab coat, like a responsible junior laboratory technician.
“Angel!”
It was Annabelle again. Our housekeeper came rushing downstairs and pulled me away from the flame of the burner. After the
tanning incident, the poor thing lived in dire fear of my burning myself. She was examining me all over, pulling off my lenses
and brushing the tiny particles of glass from my lab coat and hair.
But I was laughing. “I’m fine, Annabelle. I’m all right. It’s all right.”
I looked around, expecting to see splatters of blue ink on the walls and ceiling and furniture.
But there was nothing, not a speck. Only tiny pieces of glass scattered across the Ping Pong table and the floor.
“I will clean,” Annabelle said, turning around.
“No, no,” I told her. “Annabelle, please, it was my fault. I’ll clean up, okay?”
She eyed me for a moment, looking at me in a way that was both wary and affectionate, then left me alone.
I went around collecting the tiny shards of glass, scooping the minute particles into my hands. I cut myself, I remember,
closing my fist too hard on a handful of slivers, and the chemicals stung the wound.
Then I blew out the burner and took a last look around.
Amazingly, there were no blue dots on the walls or furniture. Whatever I had added to the solution must have diluted whatever
had made the ink blue to begin with, I thought. I put the chemicals aside and spent the rest of the afternoon in my bedroom,
hoping Annabelle wouldn’t mention the incident to my parents.
The evening passed. Night came.
I was nearly asleep when I heard my father’s voice. Something shrill was forming there, something angry and foreign. My father’s
voice cuts through walls. It also cuts through skin, through human beings, through souls. I could also tell by its direction
that he was in the rec room.
I heard my mother try to calm him down.
“Angel, goddamn it,
” my father bellowed,
“get down here!”
I pretended that I didn’t hear him, that I was asleep.
Then I heard him coming up the stairs, heavy-footed. I thought I could even hear his nostrils flaring.
The door burst open. The harsh hallway light gushed into the room like blood from a wound.
“Get the hell down in that basement and explain this.”
I sat up, rubbing my eyes, pretending not to know what was going on.
“Now, Angel!”
My mother appeared behind him, saying, “Stop yelling.” She came to the edge of my bed and sat down, putting a cool hand on
my forehead. “What happened, sweetheart?” she asked. “Can you tell us what happened downstairs?”
This is the way it usually was with my parents: Milos yelling, Monique defending.
I looked at them both, one after the other. I was just about to say something, when Dad walked over to the bed, grabbed me
by the collar of my pajamas, and dragged me out of the room.
“Milos,” my mother said, “you’re hurting him.”
He dragged me all the way down the stairs, where I looked around, astonished.
Cobalt, and azure, and cerulean, and sapphire. And turquoise, teal, aquamarine, indigo, midnight. And peacock, robin’s egg,
steel, beryl, cyan… blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue… blue like Angela’s eyes were the first time I had seen her… blue
dots everywhere… on the walls, the ceiling, the furniture, the floor.
The entire room had been polka-dotted, stippled, dabbed, speckled, and dappled… vivid blue dots covering everything.
“They appeared,” I said, amazed. “The color… it finally appeared.”
Blue, blue, blue, blue, and blue.
Blue.
“Out of nowhere?”
“There was an explosion,” I confessed. “Only they weren’t here before. These dots… they were invisible.”
“We’ll repaint it,” my mother was saying. “What is the big problem?”