Los Angeles (25 page)

Particle or wave?

Red. Orange. Bright yellow. Burning.

They couldn’t have been more than teenagers, these kids, though on their faces, even in this dimly lit park, I could read
a lifetime of experience. I lost my fear, strangely enough, and felt envy instead. Unlike me, these boys were consumed with
purpose, with a clear, attainable mission. They needed money, and they would do whatever they had to do to get it. They would
kill me if necessary.

One of them kicked my feet out from under me, and as I fell to the ground, I felt the knife tip nick the high point of my
cheekbone.

I waited for the blade to come down, like Anthony Perkins’s butcher’s knife in
Psycho,
my hands flying up involuntarily to protect my face.

But when I opened my eyes, the boys were gone.

They had taken all the cash but, thankfully, had left my wallet and its contents on the ground. In their excitement, they
had also failed to notice the ring box I had stashed in my side pocket.

I took it as a sign.

I suddenly developed an animal-like sensitivity to the sounds of traffic and followed my ears to a wider avenue, and then
to the broad street that ran parallel to the beach.

I started walking, which is when I felt something wet and looked down.

Christ. I had pissed in my pants.

I stepped across the street in front of the beach and shuffled into the sand. There were people strolling up and down the
sidewalk, and the lights of high-rise hotels glowed cheerily. I went down to the water and splashed a handful of salt water
against my face. I was bleeding, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get a taxi now that my face was covered with blood.
I wouldn’t have much luck getting one if I smelled like urine, either, so I stepped fully into the water and rinsed myself
off.

I was slipping in and out, I admit, my mind sprinting from one idea to another, my thoughts colliding, the rational with the
irrational, the impossible with the likely. I knew that some of these things were real, that some of them weren’t. I knew
that some of my thinking was based in fact, that some of it was just insane. But I could only move forward. I could only continue
the search. I had to find Angela. I had heard her calling me from the darkness of the concrete room beneath the concert hall,
so I knew she was nearby. I had heard her again, and while a part of me knew that it was only a dream, just a manic hallucination,
I also believed that it meant she was alive somewhere, that Angela was waiting in the darkness for me to rescue her.

“Angel,”
she had said.

I walked along the sandy crescent of beach for an hour or more, letting my clothes dry, until I saw a line of taxis waiting
in front of a hotel.

I slipped into the back before the driver could get a good look at me.

“Copacabana Palace,” I said, thinking I’d have the hotel pay the fare.

We drove through the tropical streets of Rio, and I gingerly touched the fresh cut on my cheekbone. For some reason, it felt
right.

______

“You were wrong again, Frank.” I stepped inside the room and stared straight at him, somehow knowing just where he would be.

“Wrong about what?” My father’s lawyer was stretched out on the bed, a green bottle of mineral water clutched in his age-spotted
hand. His face was drawn, the color of ash; his eyes were deeply bloodshot. His usually robust complexion seemed to have been
drained of its life, and his flesh hung off the points of his skeleton like his own expensive, rumpled suit. Frank reached
for the remote by his side and flicked the television off, leaving a discomforting silence.

“About Angela,” I said. “That wasn’t her.”

I noticed Marcel, too, sitting at the vanity. He wore a tan linen suit and a white shirt. His heavy glasses made shadows over
his eyes, but his skin, unlike Frank’s, was healthy and pink. In fact, Frank’s assistant looked positively refreshed for having
flown down here only to run all over the city chasing me through the alien streets.

“What happened to your face?” Frank’s usually deep voice was thin, crackly.

I removed the contents of my pockets and placed everything, my wallet, the ring box, on the bedside table, then stepped into
the bathroom. “I was mugged.” The cut wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be, just a bruise on my left cheekbone and a
one-inch line that had already begun to scab over. I slipped out of my wet clothes and into the robe, then stepped back into
the room. The red digital clock on the bedside table said it was nine minutes after two. I must have been out for hours. “Sorry
to keep you up,” I said, “but, you know, Frank, I’m thirty-two years old. I don’t exactly need people following me around
like this. I have a right to my own —”

“Angel”— he brought himself up to a sitting position, his voice hardening —“you have a right to nothing. You’ve never had
an actual job. You’ve never paid for a single thing. You’ve never taken care of yourself. Your father gives you complete autonomy,
too much, in my opinion, for what you give back.” He sighed bitterly. “He expects nothing from you. The least you could do
is let him know where in the world you are.” He paused for a moment, inhaling deeply before adding, “And by the way, you’re
thirty-four.”

I sat down on the bed next to him and looked at my hands, at that purple spot of cancer forming over my knuckle.

“Did they get your credit cards?”

I shrugged. “They only took the cash.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“I wanted to find her.”

Frank shook his large, fleshy head. “Your dad is extremely worried about you. He was terrified when he found out you were
here. He was ready to send in the fucking marines.” He reached a gray finger to my cheek. “This is a dangerous place, which
you’ve obviously learned the hard way.” Roughly, he touched my cut, and I flinched, backing away. “We contacted the hotel
to make sure you were all right, but he couldn’t stand it anymore.”

I smiled my iciest smile. It was the same look I had given Angela when I answered the door that first day I met her. “You’re
his bitch,” I said. I knew I shouldn’t be saying it, that there would be some horrible retribution for my insolence later,
but I couldn’t help myself.

Frank smiled back, his oiliest, you-can-say-anything-and-still-not-hurt-me smile.

I had to laugh. “And you’re Frank’s bitch,” I offered to Marcel.

My father’s lawyer rubbed his hands over his eyes and looked around as if he had just discovered himself here.

Marcel got up from the chair and grabbed his blazer. “All right if I go?”

Frank made a clicking sound with his tongue and gave Marcel a simultaneous wink.

“Your father asked me,” Frank said after Marcel had left, “not to let you out of my sight. But I’m going to go to my room
now, too, because I’m exhausted, and then… and then we’ll all get on the plane first thing in the morning.” He heaved himself
off the bed, picked up my wallet, and slipped my Visa cards into his hand. He pushed the pieces of gleaming plastic into his
pocket. “The plane leaves at nine, so we have to be at the airport by seven. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll meet
me downstairs at six.”

______

The Schrödinger book was lying on the dresser where I had left it, so I picked it up now, flipping randomly through its pages
and remembering that cat I had buried in the old man’s yard. Just to be absurd, I had already started to think of her as Schrödinger’s
cat. According to the Multiple Worlds Theory, she must be alive in some alternative world, still mewling up at some alternative
kitchen window while some alternative version of me stared down at her. Why not? All worlds are possible, right? If there
are multiple worlds, I reasoned, why shouldn’t I be happy and independent in at least one of them? At the same time, all I
could think about was getting back to L.A., slipping back into my routine of staying up all night with
Blade Runner,
a dollop of bourbon in my coffee, my twice-weekly visits to Silowicz, and his endless supply of merciful, memory-dulling
meds.

My body was still shot through with adrenaline, probably from being mugged, so I took a bath to try and soothe my nerves,
letting my head loll back in the hot water of the luxury tub, listening to those strange, faraway, underwater sounds. Eventually
I got out and watched several hours of
Friends
on the hotel television. There was a channel in Rio that played the show over and over, in English with Portuguese subtitles.
These characters had become so incredibly old, I thought. A bunch of people in their late thirties acting like idiots in their
early twenties, their lives had grown stagnant. But I had stagnated, too, hadn’t I? I had fallen into a deep, pointless dream,
a reverie that Angela had jerked me out of, even if for one brief moment, before she disappeared, leaving me awake at the
wrong hour, the wrong age.

Was I really thirty-four?

I flipped through the Schrödinger book and read more about the Multiple Worlds Theory:

“Faced with a choice on the quantum level, not only the particle itself but the entire universe splits into two versions.
In one universe, the particle goes through hole A, in the other it goes through hole B. In each universe there is an observer
who sees the particle go through just one hole. And forever afterward the two universes are completely separate and non-interacting.”

Forever afterward
… could that really be true?

If there were multiple cats in multiple worlds, I thought, why shouldn’t there be multiple Angelas? Why not even multiple
Angels? Perhaps there was another me in another world, an Angel with normal, melanin-rich skin, walking around in the sun,
or a world where I didn’t need Silowicz’s meds, or one where I had even finished writing my stupid screenplay.

There must be some way to get there, I thought, to cross over to one of those other worlds.

My unmedicated mind spun in a million directions, each one an alternative universe all its own.

Then, at around five-thirty
A.M.
, having been able to close my eyes for only a few troubled moments, I got out of bed and dressed in my sour, still damp clothes.

A few minutes later, there was a knock.

On the other side of the door, I discovered Franks assistant, a serene look on his junior executive face. “Frank’s downstairs
getting a car,” Marcel informed me. “He said to be ready in five minutes.”

I considered slipping out the back, finding the rear exit and disappearing, just as Angela had disappeared on me, searching
for her in every one of those alternative worlds if I had to.

But I didn’t. Instead, I grabbed my stuff and took the elevator downstairs. Besides, I thought, Frank still had my credit
cards, and I’d need money in any world.

He was sitting on a pink-and-gold couch in the lobby with his head hanging down, a hand on his drab forehead. He stared at
his tasseled loafers, the expensive red-brown leather shining bleakly in the incandescent hotel lobby light.

I took a seat next to him. “Good morning, Frank.”

Without looking up, he asked, “Did you sleep well?”

“No.”

“Neither did I.” His face had grown so old. The lines around his eyes had become cracks; his once-bright irises had gone dull,
and his sockets had sunk deep into his skull.

Looking at Frank made me feel old myself.

Thirty-four. How was it possible that I had become thirty-four without even noticing?

At that moment, a man in a red jacket stepped briskly into the lobby. “Sir,” he said, aiming his hotel-employee smile at Frank,
“your car is waiting.”

We stepped out onto the sidewalk. The rising sun had airbrushed a soft, glowing pink across the surface of the sky. This was
even more beautiful than the smog-filtered sunrises I had grown accustomed to watching through the miniblinds on San Raphael
Crescent.

“Look at that,” I couldn’t help but say as we got in. “Holy shit, will you look at that, Frank?”

I know that a lot of people have described the sky, the light, the sun rising over an alien horizon, but I felt, I even believed,
that I had never seen one this gorgeous before. It must have been the pollution, the impure atmosphere, the permanent haze
that hung in filmy sheers over the city, worse, even, than in Los Angeles. Pink, blue, orange, all of these hues harmonized
one with the others like the voices of a divine choir. The white flecks of clouds in the sky were like paint strokes left
on a canvas by an abstract expressionist, a color-field artist with a sentimental streak. Then it occurred to me that it might
have been the work of the same lighting department that had been following me everywhere lately, setting up scenes. The assistant
camera operator was in the background, I realized, holding a light meter to the sky. The line producer kept asking if they
were ready yet. The whole effect had probably been created by Industrial Light and Magic, and this was all a movie. That’s
why everything was so beautiful, I thought. That’s why all the people I met were stock characters and why the central participants
in my life seemed to have been sent down from central casting.

This was a movie, and I was just a character. I could even feel the pages of the script unfolding.

Frank nodded, waving a dismissive hand in the air. “They have no emissions standards down here. All the crap in the air…”
He never finished his sentence, however, because we took off, moving away from the hotel like the
Millennium Falcon
from the Death Star.

______

An hour later, Frank’s assistant was somewhere in the back, flying coach. I had a window seat in first class again, and Frank
sat next to me, as if on guard, as if I might try to sneak out of the plane when he wasn’t looking. I spent the morning watching
the bright light of the sun reflecting off the sparkling clouds. Even through the lenses of my asshole glasses it stung, but
for some reason I wanted to watch, for some reason I wanted to see everything as clearly as possible. Eventually, a stewardess
asked if I would mind lowering the shade, saying the bright light was bothering the other passengers. I made a personal note
of the irony and sat in the darkness of the cabin, letting my consciousness drift and fingering the protruding shape of the
velvet box in my pocket.