Los Angeles (14 page)

“You shouldn’t leave him alone.” My father had gotten the anger out of his system, it seemed, and now marveled along with
me at this inverse universe of stars.

I noted the chemicals I had used. They were sitting on the shelf, all grouped together like a bunch of delinquents in a 7-Eleven
parking lot.

My mother looked at my father. “Are you through, Milos?”

“Monique —” He seemed about to say something more but then just turned and walked out.

My mother came over and put her arms around me, saying, “Don’t you worry, little prince.”

______

But in the middle of the night, I crept out of bed and snuck downstairs in my pajamas to wonder once again at the blue dots.

Without thinking, without even considering what I was doing, I quietly collected the chemicals I had used and brought them
into the kitchen. I poured them all in a pan and warmed them over the stove. The smell was sulfuric and bitter, I remember,
like burning plastic. I poured the clear contents of the pan into a large glass bowl and let the solution cool on the counter.
I waited until I could comfortably place a finger in the liquid, then used a dishrag to soak up as much of it as I could.

I must have been half-dreaming.

I took off my pajamas, stripping naked in the middle of the kitchen, and applied the warm, soaked rag to my skin, first to
my chest, then to my legs, then to my arms, even covering my neck and face and hair. I soaked up every last drop of the chemical
solution with the wet rag and smeared it evenly over my white, pigment-free skin. I had the idea that if this solution could
act as an appearing agent for the disappearing ink, it could do the same for the dormant chemicals in my skin. The melanin
in my epidermal tissue would be activated somehow, I thought, brought to life.

It seemed logical at the time.

I stood there, waiting to become normal, waiting to develop skin tone.

______

“It seems he has created a stain of some kind,” the doctor said the next day. My mother had discovered me in bed, wrapped
in blue stained sheets. “It doesn’t seem to be toxic”— he chuckled — “although obviously it’s not washing off.” She had rushed
me to the emergency room.

“Is he going to stay that way?” I remember the warble of panic in her voice.

“It will wear off eventually.” The doctor was smiling, amused. “It might take a week or two, it’s hard to say.”

My mother put her hands on her hips. “He looks like a Smurf.”

I had only wanted my skin to have some color. I had only wanted to activate the melanin that I knew lay hidden inside it.

The doctor, a handsome blond man who looked like a news anchor, pushed himself around the room in an office chair on little
wheels. He had examined me, asking if it hurt anywhere, if it stung. I had told him exactly what chemicals I had used, and
he had decided that none of them were very dangerous. “I think the important thing to find out right now,” the handsome doctor
said, “is why Angel would want to do this.” He looked at me intently, a smile across his movie-star features.

“Why, Angel?” my mother asked.
“Why?”

I couldn’t answer. My embarrassment prevented the use of my voice, and the light of the emergency room was far too bright
to speak in.

My mother always responded to handsome men. “I don’t know what to do with him anymore,” she said in a heavier than usual French
accent, dabbing at her eye with a tissue. “He’s so strange.”

______

She kept me inside more than ever for the rest of that summer, making sure no one saw my insanely blue skin. She confiscated
my chemistry sets and arranged to have a psychiatrist come to the house twice a week.

His name, of course, was Dr. Silowicz.

He wrinkled his brow, I remember, and asked a series of questions aimed at eliciting a particular response, one I felt I never
got right, even though he told me there were no wrong answers. He also told me about the Vancouver School. He described the
classes, the other kids, the snowy Canadian winters, even the private dorm rooms and the teak Scandinavian furniture.

And when I got there, I remember thinking he had described everything so accurately — everything, of course, but the bars
on the windows.

The Vancouver School still seems like a dream, a hallucination that lasted years. It wasn’t a peaceful fantasy, unfortunately.
It was more of a confusing illusion, where classes led to encounter groups and psychological analysis led to calisthenics.
There was art therapy. There was behavioral conditioning. There was psycho-aural stimulation, where we had to wear a blindfold
and headphones for hours and listen to strange atonal symphonies. There was regression therapy, where we were encouraged to
discover in the roots of our psyches the elemental, prehistoric urges inside ourselves. The staff filled our days and evenings
with so much activity that the nights were all we had for privacy. In the late hours, the dorm came to life. There was a secret
communication system that had been developed among the kids, a way to speak in knocks and coughs and whistles and little flashlights
that glimmered Morse code-like under doors and through keyholes. That’s probably how I became nocturnal in the first place.
That’s probably where I learned to appreciate a nighttime existence, lying awake in the small hours, eavesdropping on those
covert conversations. We were allowed a single phone call home every week, which, for even the most stoic among us, was spent
sobbing, pleading with our parents to take us back. The Vancouver School philosophy held that rigorous independence must be
maintained and that too much parental contact was an indulgence that would only hamper our psychosocial development.

Mostly I remember the view from the window, the wintry Canadian landscape, a prospect of ice and snow, the nothing that wasn’t
there and the nothing that was. There were weeks-long stretches of time when no one would go outside at all. And at night
I would kneel on my bed and look out at the barren moonlit meadow that reached all the way to a patch of frozen trees and
an artfully concealed fence. I used to consider schemes of escape, foolproof plans that were always discarded, ultimately,
because, once beyond that outlying meadow, freezing to death, like the rich improvement of our young minds guaranteed in the
brochure, was a certainty.

There were plenty of other students at the Vancouver School, kids from all over the world, the freak children of the superwealthy.
The illusion was that we were crazy geniuses, troubled prodigies who needed a secluded environment to thrive in. The truth
was that we were the neurotic children of rich people, of parents who didn’t want to be bothered and who believed that money
could rescue their kids from whatever blue oblivion they were sliding into.

______

Usually when I visited Dr. Silowicz, I was like a talking machine that couldn’t turn itself off. But today, for some reason,
I was quiet; today I just lay on the Freud couch and stared at the cracks in his plaster ceiling, trying to find the words
to describe what was happening to me, trying but failing.

His office was in the sunroom of his house, an old hacienda-style dwelling on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. When I came
over, he always turned down the blinds to darken the room, leaving a single incandescent lamp glowing over his Eames recliner
so he could see to scratch out his notes. I had been coming once a week for almost as long as I could remember. I saw him
every summer when I came home from the Vancouver School and all through my one and a half years of college, and ever since,
I had been seeing him regularly, sometimes as often as three times a week. “How are you feeling today, Angel?” the old guy
asked after a prolonged silence. “What have you been up to?”

He was an ancient Freudian analyst, a believer in the talking cure and a doctor who had never once, I’m certain, pronounced
a single one of his patients cured. He sat in his modernist leather chair in the corner, his feet propped on the ottoman,
a yellow notepad resting on his tweedy lap. His body appeared crumpled, like a discarded paper bag. Silowicz shaved his face
but always missed a few patches, leaving stubbly white hairs poking out here and there. He had been old when I was in the
fifth grade; he was ancient now.

“I met someone.” I hadn’t told him about Angela. I hadn’t seen him since I’d met her all those weeks ago. I had just kept
canceling, one week after another, unable to make myself go anywhere for fear of missing Angela even for an hour.

Silowicz stiffened, interested. “You met someone, you say?” His voice was crackly, wheezy.

“A few weeks ago.” I was lying on the couch, my head protected from the germs of other patients by a white paper towel. “That’s
why I haven’t been in to see you.”

“What kind of a someone?”

“A woman. She was my neighbor.”

“Tell me about her.” There was excitement in his voice. “I mean, if you don’t mind.” He cleared his throat. He was shocked,
I think, but didn’t want to interrupt me.

“She’s been coming over to my apartment every night.” I touched my face, drawing an imaginary outline across my features,
caressing the bridge of my nose with my fingertips. “And then she called me.”

I let some silence pass so Dr. Silowicz would know it was okay to speak.

“This, uh… this is upsetting you?”

I looked over. “What do you mean?”

“You’re crying.”

I touched my cheeks and felt something wet.
“Shit,”
I said.
“Fuck.”
I reached behind my head for the paper towel and wiped my eyes with it.

Dr. Silowicz handed me a box of Kleenex.

It wasn’t the first time I had cried in his office. I had shed enough tears in here to irrigate the Valley.

“Continue,” he said, “if you don’t mind. What happened when she called you?”

“She called from the dark,” I went on. “I could hear it in her voice. She was inside the trunk of a car, or a closet, or some
kind of box, maybe a Dumpster. Or maybe something worse. I could hear it. I could hear the darkness in her voice.” I turned
to look at him, but he gave me nothing. This thought suddenly jumped into my head. “Or maybe a cage.”

“What did she say?” He cleared his throat. “When she called, what did she —”

“She said my name.”

“Your name?”

“Yes.”

“Your full name?”

“My first name.”

“I see.” He cleared his throat. “She said ‘Angel.’ What else?”

“Nothing else,” I said. “There was nothing else.”

“She hung up?”

“The connection was lost. There was a click.”

“A click. I understand.”

“So I called the police.”

“The police?” I could hear the leather of the Eames chair squeaking as he leaned forward. “You called the police?”

I took as much air into my lungs as I could and then, as I exhaled, said, “I’ll be needing something powerful for this, Dr.
Silowicz. I think I’ll be needing something —”

“Can you describe her?”

“Describe her?”

I described Angela as precisely as possible: the way her eyes kept changing colors, the long, thin limbs, the color of her
skin, the way it glowed from all that sparkly lotion. I tried to press into words what Angela was like, trying to make Dr.
Silowicz see her image, her presence in a room, the way she smelled like cigarettes and flowers and spices and sweat. I wanted
him to understand the way her focus centered on an object, wanting it but not caring, desiring it and then giving it away
in the very same instant. I even showed him the picture, the blurry photograph I had taken of Angela making that obscene gesture
with her middle finger. I kept trying to press her into words, but the whole description was interrupted by wheezing, tubercular
sobs.

“Her name,” he said after a while. “Angela. It’s the female version of your name, isn’t it?”

“Her real name is Jessica,” I said, “Jessica Teagarden.” I had been about to tell him about the letter and the ten thousand
dollars, but then I decided against it, thinking it would only confuse things.

“You say she’s a dancer?”

“Just for a while,” I said defensively. “Just until she gets it together. She has a lot of other prospects, a lot of other
…”

“Go on.”

“I asked Frank to help me find her,” I said. “He’s got a casting director on it.”

“I’m sure she’ll turn up,” Silowicz said. “If anyone can find her, Frank can.”

“I’m going to marry her,” I blurted. “When I find her, I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

There was a pause as my psychiatrist considered this new chapter in my mental disintegration. I could hear his pen scratching
something on his yellow pad — he was trying desperately to get it all down. He usually wrote nothing, but today Silowicz was
transcribing every word. “What would you think,” he said cautiously, “about spending some time… about taking a break?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Going somewhere, you know, where you can get some rest?”

“Why the hell would I want to rest? Rest from what?”

“It’s just an idea.”

I blew my nose.

“Do you think you might want to talk about your mother today?”

“No.”

“What about… what about the monster?”

I sighed.

The monster. This was something Silowicz and I had spent hours discussing. When I was a little kid, I must have been around
four or five years old, I used to have these nightmares. All kids have nightmares, I know, but mine, I think, were particularly
vivid, probably because of all the sci-fi horror movies I had been subjected to at such an early age. Anyway, I used to dream
about this monster. Fangs, blood-red devil eyes, lizardy skin, a long tendril of a tail that dragged and flicked whiplike
behind him, the monster was something between a demon and a space alien. At night I would lie in bed and listen to him thrashing
through the other rooms, making his way through the house. I could hear him destroying the furniture, crashing through the
walls and doors. I could hear my mother screaming as he viciously ripped out her throat. Four, five years old, and I was certain
there was a bloody crime scene down the hall, my mother’s mangled body in shreds on her seafoam carpet, her neck torn open
and her mouth agape.