Los Angeles (17 page)

Her nails felt like razor blades against my skin, but her mouth was warm and wet even through the latex of the condom. Her
hair, black and heavy, fell over my lap and divided into mathematical sections on either side of her pointy spine. I noticed
the individual vertebrae standing up through the skin. I thought I’d like to touch each one and reached over to place my ringers
against them, imagining the white skeleton of her body. There were hard muscles there, too, tense and flexing, connected by
visible tendons.

Destiny opened her mouth and dropped her head all the way down, then pressed against me with her lips and pulled up. After
a few repetitions she started making these weird, insincere noises inside her throat, moans and cries that were obviously
only for effect. I let my fingers trace the outline of her spine, reaching almost all the way to her waist. I touched her
head, holding her when she pulled away, and said, “Can you stop, please? Destiny? Can you stop for just a minute?”

It felt like she was going to pull my dick off.

She sat up halfway. “What’s wrong?”

“This isn’t what I wanted.”

She shook her head. “This is what everyone wants, Angel.”

“Not me.”

“Did Angela do this for you?”

“Yes,” I said, “but —”

“I can’t do anything without the condom,” she warned me, shaking a finger. “I won’t.” She had lifted herself up completely
now but still had her other hand on me.

“That’s not — I mean, that’s… I’m not even, not even —” I was stammering. “I don’t think I even want this.”

Destiny looked at my lap, arching an eyebrow. My blue penis was still standing straight up in her hand.

“Do you want to fuck me?” She indicated the bedroom with a quick movement of her eyes.

I
did
want sex, but I wanted it with Angela. I wanted her voice, her warm lips against my ears, the crazy things she told me, all
those weird evasions and equivocations, her eyes, whatever color they might happen to be that night. “Can’t you just talk
to me for a while?” I had been deluding myself again, hadn’t I? Living a fantasy instead of paying attention to what was real.

“Talk dirty?”

“Well,” I said, “no, not dirty.”

“What do you want me to talk about?” She released my blue penis and reached for the drink she had placed on the floor by her
feet.

I thought of something. “The sun,” I said, “where you’re from, the island where you’re from, what is it like? Is it bright?”

“The sun?” She took a swallow, ice cubes rattling. “It’s very strong, extremely… strong.”

“What does it feel like,” I asked, “against your skin?”

Destiny regarded me. “It feels like… like warm honey is being poured over you.”

“Describe it.” I was looking at her, looking directly into her eyes. They were deep brown, with minuscule flecks of greenish
yellow.

“It feels like you are being cooked,” she said, grasping the perversity of my request. “It feels like the air is filled with
heat, and if you are out in the sun in the middle of the day, especially in the summer, it feels like stinging heat, like
it will melt you… like you’re in the fire.” Her voice had become more and more island, curving softly around the vowels.
“Like you’re inside the oven.”

“What color is the sun? I mean, where you’re from. What color is it?”

“Orange.” She looked around, struggling to find the right words. “Bright, bright, bright, like… I don’t know, it’s so bright.”

Red. Orange, I thought. Bright yellow. Burning.

“Do you know what it is?”

“What
what
is?” She had placed her drink on the floor again.

“The sun, what it’s composed of.”

She didn’t answer. She reached for my blue penis again and squeezed it, moving her hand along its length.

“Hydrogen,” I informed her. “It’s hydrogen burning. And the light,” I said, “is a form of electromagnetic radiation. Visible
light, the orange and yellow and white light of the sun… it’s all just part of the same spectrum that contains everything,
even us. We’re made of light,” I went on, “did you know that? And what we are, just depends on the speed at which we’re vibrating.”
I’m not sure where this was coming from, thoughts coursing through my deranged brain and automatically pouring out of my mouth,
memories from textbooks and bits and pieces of information I had gleaned in college and from articles in the science page
of the
L.A. Times.

“You are made of light,” Destiny said, “aren’t you, Angel?”

“Everything in the universe is vibrating,” I told her, and she was standing up, leading me by my blue latex penis into the
bedroom, “at different speeds.” The last time my penis had been blue, I thought, was when I stained myself with the disappearing
ink solution in my parents’ kitchen. Destiny sat down on the bed and pulled me toward her, taking it into her mouth again.
Blue, blue, electric blue. That had been Angela’s color, the color of Angela’s eyes the first time I had seen her, the color
of her aura. “Even matter,” I said, “is vibrating. If you look closely enough, matter itself is only movement through time
and space.”

Destiny leaned back against the bed and pulled me toward her. I could hear her heels dropping onto the floor. She pulled her
red thong off, slipping it expertly over her legs in one smooth balletic motion. “In Barbados, when the light touches the
waves,” she told me, “it looks like broken glass, it looks like the sea is made of diamonds.”

I crawled forward onto the bed until we were lying against one another. “That’s refraction,” I said, “and reflection.”

She pulled at my body until I moved on top of her. She opened her legs and guided me. “Its okay,” she said. “Just push… just
push it in.” I pressed my eyes closed and pushed my penis into her.

There was resistance at first, a dryness, but then it slid in, all the way inside.

“There was a girl in a restaurant today,” Destiny went on, “who was wearing a necklace, all diamonds. They were probably fake,
you know, but she was sitting at the bar and kept turning her head.” Her voice had become melodic.

“Yes?” I was moving in and out of her to the rhythm of her speech.

“And when she turned her head, the diamonds of her necklace caught the light of the sun.” Destiny was guiding me into her,
holding my waist in her hands. I felt the sharp hardness of her nails on my skin. I felt the soft insides of her, even through
the blue condom, the wet darkness of her body. I kept my eyes closed. I imagined it, the light moving across a necklace, each
stone catching a momentary fire. I felt myself, my own body, glowing white. I pictured Angela with that armful of hyacinths.
She was soaked in a blinding morning radiance, her hair wet. I stiffened my back involuntarily and leaned into it, into Destiny,
but thinking of Angela, only of Angela, pushing my body up on my arms, tilting my face to a brilliant, imaginary sun.

Destiny had a hand on my eyes now, nails touching my eyelids, the skin of my face, my lips. “You can’t go out, Angel,” she
said, “can you?”

“Out?”

“In the light. You can’t go out in the light. You’ll burn.”

“I’ll glow,” I said. “I’ll turn phosphorescent.”

She laughed. “You’re doing that now.”

______

Vapor illumination beamed across Sunset Boulevard from the chemical-yellow street lamps. The temperature had dropped, and
the lights of the city had turned unreal. I waited for the car valet in the cooling air. Upstairs, I had abandoned Destiny
to the white room, the white sheets, the chatter and clink of the B-list partiers at the Sky Bar below, and to her own destiny,
whatever that might be. I felt as if I had stepped out of my body and into another. I was someone else, calm, untroubled,
even tranquil. It was the sex, I knew, and it wouldn’t last.

In the Cadillac, I drove down Sunset, then over to Hollywood Boulevard, where tourists and drug dealers mingled with shoppers
and rock-and-rollers, where kids with rings through their noses and old ladies in oversize sunglasses loitered dementedly
through the neon streets.

I couldn’t bring myself to go home just now, though, so I kept on driving.

Farther over, on the backstreets of West Hollywood, people shopped for groceries and sex, they drank in bars, living out their
Charles Bukowski lives in miniature, everyone a low-level, polite transgressive.

I turned around and drove through Beverly Hills, my old home, where sleek limousines chauffeured hotel guests and movie stars
to the see-and-be-seen restaurants like Chaya, the Ivy, and the Palm, places my mother and father had been going for years.
In these restaurants, I knew, young men paced importantly back and forth with cell phones pressed to their ears while the
starlets who were their dates waited gorgeously, accepting the licentious stares of the less glamorous like nobility receiving
the entreaties of the poor.

I drove through downtown, too, where Angela had taken me swimming on the skyscraper rooftop that night — how long ago had
it been? only a few weeks now — and saw the inevitable empty streets and avenues, where homeless people pushed overloaded
shopping carts through the coarsely shadowed lanes, where gleaming black-and-white police vehicles patrolled ceaselessly,
shining flashlights down desolate alleys. I drove around and around, trying to locate the health club she had taken me to
that night. But I had been blindfolded when she took me there, and for some reason I couldn’t remember leaving.

The sun came up.

I’ve always liked to watch the morning light drape over the slanted roofs of the ersatz châteaus and phony Tudors of Los Angeles,
have always loved the way it falls evenly across the red-tiled verandas of the imitation villas and throws into brilliance
the low, boxy structures that are the only honest examples of architecture here and look like nothing at all.

In Beverly Hills, palm trees spear the sidewalks like great cocktail toothpicks, their height exceeded only by the smog-blackened
telephone poles and brown, terraced hills in the filmy distance.

Here, even the shadows are pale.

An ostentatious, tacky glow reveals the city’s daylight colors of asphalt, tar, desiccated green, and pale, fleshy gray. The
streets are wide, but never wide enough. Cars clog the avenues and boulevards. Lights change, but no one moves.

During the early hours, the audacious L.A. sun advances imperceptibly, but still progressing faster than the traffic.

Downtown, the smog is absolute. In the morning a rich gray-brown mist settles thickly at the base of the perpendicular cityscape,
thinning gradually as the eye rises skyward. Orange light filters through the desert dust, the exhaust fumes of a million
engines rising, the diesel and high-octane vapors expanding through an atmosphere that almost never breathes. Toward the airport,
the oil derricks pump the liquid earth, their great heads rising and dropping back to the ground like giant mechanical birds.
A blazing disk behind them threatens to send the whole city up in flames.

The freeways twist, curling one under the other.

Off-ramps, merging lanes, and cloverleafs spiral outward and in, doubling back on themselves like Möbius strips. In an all
too apt metaphor for my life, a portion of highway soars over a patch of dry grass and suddenly dead-ends over nothing at
all.

I kept driving, creeping my way through the morning traffic, going all the way out to the water, turning down Ocean until
I arrived in Venice. I parked the car, then walked down to the beach. I slipped off my sandals, rolled up my trousers, and
let the entire Pacific crash against my legs.

I dreamed, as I have dreamed all my life, of standing on the beach in the full daylight sun. I imagined myself with normal
skin and dark, light-absorbing eyes. I stood just far enough away from the Santa Monica Pier to watch the silhouette of the
roller coaster reveal itself against the horizon while the disk of the sun ascended over the brown mountains of Malibu.

I would never find her, I thought. She was slipping farther and farther away. Angela had left the Velvet Mask with a white
man in a gray suit, and the following morning, she had called me, desperation shot through her voice, hoping to be rescued.

Victor’s mom hadn’t been able to help me, and Destiny turned out to be the wrong girl entirely.

I had failed.

Even Frank had failed.

And I didn’t have anything left to go on but that twisted note.

I had read it over so many times by now that it was practically committed to memory.
I wake up thinking of you / Go to bed dreaming of you.
Whoever had written it had clearly developed an obsession with Angela and had imagined a real relationship existed between
them.
When you’re gone I disappear / When I see you I am resurrected.
There was an implied closeness, an understanding, however misbegotten, that she was in love with him, too. But how would
I find the author? Was there any clue in the handwriting on the envelope? It was just blocky letters in dark ink, a style
anyone can write in. And what about the paper itself? A medium blue, cheap stuff, and available pretty much anywhere, it was
actually quite similar to some of the paper I had used a few months before for a recently completed draft of
Los Angeles.

I tried to remember Angela. I tried to remember more than just her voice on the phone. I pictured her eyes. I imagined the
feeling of her nails on my skin. But it was growing faint, the memory itself. Already the memory of Angela was fading.

“Memories,” Rick Deckard says in
Blade Runner.
“You’re talking about memories.”

We never actually forget something, I once read; it just becomes increasingly difficult to find it in our disordered brains.
Once a piece of information enters the human mind, it is simply a matter of locating it, a process of retrieval achieved by
either
recall
or
recognition.
In recall, events and information are simply reproduced. Try it. Consider the newspaper article you read yesterday, its beginning,
middle, and end. Remember fifth grade? The first day, the middle of the year, Christmas break? Recognition, on the other hand,
is a matter of seeing something you’ve already seen before. Oh yeah, you say, I remember that. Go through your high school
yearbook and look at the pictures. Remember her? And him? It all comes back. She was nice to you. He broke his arm playing
soccer. That’s what I needed, I thought:
recognition.
I needed to hear her voice.