Los Angeles (29 page)

“Dr. Silowicz,” I took the opportunity to say, “you can notify my mother. You can tell Mom I’m here. I’d like to see her.
Just not my father, all right?”

“Your father was already here,” Silowicz said. “Don’t you remember?”

“Oh yeah.” I did remember. “I was going to sue you about that.”

______

I lay in bed, attended by a diligent nurse, hardly speaking to anyone, entering a kind of flickering half dream that never
descended into a full-on sleep and never rose to complete wakefulness. My skin was trying to get away from me, I believed.
I had the feeling that if I got out of bed quickly enough, I might slip free of my own body, that I could leave myself lying
there and escape from the hospital through the window.

The iris closed, opened, closed, opened again.

I saw Dr. Silowicz, Melanie, my father, even Frank.

The girl who I had thought was Angela was only a blue-eyed nurse.

At one point, the room had been filled with flowers and balloons, and then they were gone.

I imagined worlds.

I imagined one world in which Angela had been killed, cremated, turned to ash. I imagined another in which she was alive.
They were equally viable, I thought. Particle or wave. I lay in bed and listened to the inhuman hospital noises and imagined
a world in which I had never moved into my West Hollywood apartment, and another one where
Blade Runner
still played endlessly on my TV. I imagined a world in which I had normal skin, a world in which I could walk in the sun,
my eyes open, absorbing the light. I dreamed without sleeping. I imagined worlds multiplying. I envisioned infinitesimal photons
turning from particle to wave, wave to particle, dividing and redividing, worlds mounting one on top of the other, worlds
blossoming into being like the petals of a hyacinth blossom, worlds splitting like atoms inside a hydrogen bomb, the universe
growing heavier with boundless exponential expansion. Is it only random, I wondered, this world, the one I was in? Had I really
chosen it, created it myself? Had I really stepped across? There were infinite worlds, worlds where every possibility was
realized. It was scientific, indisputable. There was a world in which the oceans were made of sand, where hyacinths rained
from the sky. There was a world in which my mother hadn’t succumbed to all that surgery and her face had grown dignified instead
of plasticized. There was a world in which my father had never come to this country, and another one in which I had never
been born. There was a world where I was sane.

Versions and versions of worlds.

Worlds without end.

My skin itched insanely, and I dreamed of these other worlds. I visited so many, my imagination traveling across the expanding
universe like Gulliver, a giant stepping over mountains, sloshing through seas, sidestepping cities. There was a world in
which Angela still lived, I came to believe, a world in which she had not been absorbed by Lester’s red, orange, bright yellow,
burning light.

My imagination itself grew heavy. I think it may even have collapsed.

A
S IF THINKING FOR A MOMENT, AS IF CONSIDERING WHETHER
he should even mention this, Dr. Silowicz said, “Angel, I wanted to ask you about… about your mother.”

“Describe in single words,” Holden says in the first dialogue scene of
Blade Runner,
“only the good things that come to mind… about your mother.”

“My mother?” Leon answers. “Let me tell you about my mother.”

“What do you mean?” I was sitting in a hard chair of molded yellow plastic. I lowered my voice. “What about her?” Behind me
was a window facing a rolling green meadow. Linden trees shuddered in a warm breeze — they didn’t want Silowicz asking questions
about her, either.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” His voice had become almost a hiss, as though the room itself had fallen into shadows.
But it was, as ever, unmercifully bright — the white walls, the white lights, the polished white floors — all gleaming like
the set of a game show. Halogen, fluorescent, tungsten, incandescent, they were using every bulb they had, it seemed, burning
through an entire power plant. I had been brought here straight from the hospital. After my skin had healed, they had delivered
me to Saint Michael’s Psychiatric. I had been residing here for what seemed like years, but Dr. Silowicz told me it had been
only a couple of weeks.

“The headaches, I guess.”

“Can you describe them for me, these headaches your mother was having… everything you remember?”

“She was getting them every day,” I answered. I remembered this: My mother had tried everything for the migraines, every drug,
all the treatments, so when they started coming every morning, she didn’t bother to go to the doctor, thinking nothing could
help anyway. “The headaches,” I said, remembering poor Monique, her hand flying to her forehead, the ripple of pain flashing
across her brittle, plastic face. “She couldn’t do anything about them.”

“Why was that, Angel?”

I shrugged. “Nothing worked.”

“And then what happened? Do you remember what happened next?”

What came next. I shook my head. But that was a lie. Because I did… I did remember. “Dr. Evanson came next,” I offered.

“That’s right,” Silowicz said in his crackly, hissing voice. “Your mother, she went to see the neurologist.”

Eventually my mother was forced to visit a migraine specialist, a tall, panicky woman with a squeaky voice and fluttery hands.
“Dr. Evanson,” I said again. By the time my mother had been diagnosed with a tumor growing in the right frontal lobe of her
brain, there was virtually nothing that could be done. They had removed what they could, shaving her Farrah Fawcett hair and
cutting into her fragile French-Swiss skull. Then Mom had been forced to undergo radiation, chemotherapy, the usual treatments
…

I thought for a moment longer. I remembered a medical environment like this one, only finer.

“Am I glowing?” I asked.

“What do you mean, Angel?”

“Am I glowing?” my mother would ask from her wheelchair. She was bald, and when her hair started to grow back in, it was gray,
the gray hair of an old gray woman. She looked like a famous movie actress in a dramatic role, I thought, an Academy Award
nominee in her final Oscar bid. Her entire being had been stripped of its glamour but was somehow made even more glamorous
in the process.

“How is she?” I asked Silowicz right now. “Is she all right?”

“Angel,” he said again, as though trying to make me hush.

“I wanted to be an electromagnetic scientist,” I said. “I wanted to be a screenwriter.”

“You still can be those things.” Silowicz leaned forward in his chair. “You still can be anything you want.”

“You can be anything,” my mother said from the bed, “anything, my little prince.”

“This is a mistake,” I said, looking around. “This is all wrong.” I was crying, of course, warm tears falling down my cheeks.
But it was a familiar feeling, crying in a hospital. “I wanted to be a lighting director,” I said absurdly. “I wanted to be
a long-distance runner.” These memories of my mother… it was like I had just discovered them there in my mind, as though
Silowicz himself had reached into my brain and inserted them with some kind of invasive psychiatric device.

“These are all things you can still pursue,” he said evenly. “You’re still a young man, and you’re so lucky that you have
your father and… and Melanie to help you.”

“I’m not that young,” I said, “and I don’t feel so lucky.” Then something occurred to me, something terrible. “Please tell
me,” I whispered. “Dr. Silowicz, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? Am I a replicant? Are these memories real?”

I didn’t need to see the scene. It was there, playing on the movie screen beneath my eyelids.

Rick Deckard leans forward and asks, “How can it not know what it is?”

Tyrell clasps his hands and says, “Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto.”

Deckard doesn’t look up. “Memories,” he says. “You’re talking about memories.”

“You stopped taking your medication.”

“I take tons of it.” I was crying even harder. “I take everything you give me.” I pictured the bottles littering my kitchen
counter, the amber shells containing those powdery prisons, each pill a sentence to reality. Every time I swallowed one, I
was left flopping on the surface of the world, like a gasping fish that had been dragged up onto a dock.

“But not the right ones, Angel. Not the important ones.” He meant Reality, of course, and it was true. I hadn’t been taking
them.

“I take it now,” I said. “I don’t have any choice.” They brought it to me every day, as a matter of fact, twice a day.

“What else, Angel?” he prodded me softly. “What else do you recall?”

These weren’t real memories, I knew, they were implants, but I remembered trying to study on a vinyl couch in the hospice
lobby, listening to the building’s soft noises, the machinery keeping people alive — burping, pumping, gasping, farting —
the hallways flooded with sterile fluorescence. Every now and then I would walk down a long corridor of medical light to my
mother’s room, passing the night nurses, an old nodding orderly, a winking security guard, a somnambulant janitor who buffed
the floor tiles with a whirring machine. I would peek around the door. Her room was private, of course, with furniture that
belonged more in a luxury hotel, and filled with flowers, and I would see her there, her mouth open, a stack of satin pillows
behind her shaved, delicate head. Sometimes, if she was awake, she’d call me over, saying, “Angel, Angel, my sweet Angel.”

“Is there anything I can get you, Mom? Some water?”

She would take my hand and gaze at me.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m on drugs,” I remember her saying. “I feel wonderful. I’ve never felt better in my life.”

I could see every vein in her glasslike face. I could see straight through her eyes into her butchered brain.

“Try not to be alone all the time,” she said one night. And then her face shattered like a mirror. “Oh, Angel, such a good
boy you were.”

I had a lot of migraines there, too, and if they had an empty bed somewhere, the nurses would let me lie down. The truth is,
I never felt so at home.

These artificial memories drifted in front of my eyes like motes of light on a bright day in a dusty room.

Silowicz encouraged me, pushed me along, asking just the right questions to jar them loose, saying just the right things to
make me remember. He had inserted these memories, I assumed, and wanted to make sure they had taken root, and now they blossomed
like those hyacinths in the old man’s garden.

______

When my mother fell sick, I was in college. I used to sit at the back of all my classes, trying to hide in a patch of shadow
in the brightly lit lecture halls. If anyone even glanced in my direction, I averted my eyes, careful to avoid contact, living
in mortal fear of speaking aloud. One class in particular was called Concepts in Modern Physics. It was extremely popular,
with almost every seat occupied at the beginning of the semester. I remained in the back, my head down, scribbling my notes
onto my colored sheets of paper. I made an attempt to record every word the professor said, and later, in the dim light of
my mothers room, I would scour those handwritten sentences for meaning.

The professor’s name was Dr. Natalie Lem, a petite woman with limp brown hair, long in the back, and soft bangs that she perpetually
brushed out of her own evasive eyes. She wore jeans and a beige linen jacket, a crisp pink shirt, the same clothes every day.
Her voice was soft, the voice of a person speaking in a dimly lit room. She carried a heavy tote bag filled with notebooks
— notebooks illuminated with thoughts, I was certain, of endless depth and dimension. Inside that bag, I believed, were the
very secrets of the universe. And in her lectures she explained them, unveiling the mysteries I had been waiting a lifetime
to understand. She defined the properties and behavior of light, the particle/wave duality, the discovery that if you look
deeply into the very heart of matter itself, into reality, you discover uncertainty,
unreality
… you discover your own imagination staring back at you, a mischievous smile on its scientific lips.

One night I was going over my notes from Dr. Lem’s class — the topic was Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle — and I came across
something significant. During the lecture, I hadn’t thought it contained any particular meaning, but there in my mothers room,
it leapt out at me, frighteningly crucial. “Many physicists at the time,” Professor Lem had said, “felt that the debate that
resulted in Heisenberg’s theory was the same kind of blather that had led medieval clerics to question if an angel can dance
on the head of a pin.”

In class, I had simply written it down, but now I stared at it.

Why had she chosen to use that particular phrase? It couldn’t have been coincidental. Professor Lem had used my name —
Angel
— for a very specific purpose. She must have known I was sitting in the back of the lecture hall and wanted to send me a
message.

… if an angel can dance on the head of a pin.

What did she mean?

I went back over my notes more carefully this time, looking for deeper significance in every phrase. There were clues everywhere,
bits and pieces of meaning that, added together, revealed a covert system of communication.

I simply hadn’t decoded it yet.

In class, I sat a few rows closer, braving the intruding eyes of other students so I’d be sure not to miss a single word.

I decided to follow her, bringing my Leica along one day and waiting in the corridor until Professor Lem stepped out. She
walked down the hallway alone, the tote bag weighing down her shoulder. Surreptitiously, I took my first picture. I had forgotten
to turn off the flash, so it surprised a few nearby students.

“Sorry,” I murmured.

Luckily, she didn’t turn around.