Los Angeles (34 page)

“And that’s what you told Jessica?”

He nodded. “And now you know, too.”

“How did you know her?” I asked.

“Jessica Teagarden was an actress.” Frank sighed. “I met her several years ago when she first came to Hollywood. She was just
someone I was sleeping with. She moved in next door to you and tried to … tried to get you to fall in love with her. It worked,
I guess. But there’s a bit of a monster in you, too, Angel, and she found that out.”

That was why she knew about the lamb stew, I realized, and about night swimming. That was why she had known so much about
me. Frank had told her. I had thought it was instinct. I had believed Angela and I possessed some kind of magical, preternatural
link. But now I knew that it had all been constructed. Even the way she had used the name Angela — it had all been calculated
to create a false connection, as though we really had something in common.
What were the chances?
She had asked that very question the day we met. The chances were nonexistent. Nothing had been left to chance. I turned
to look at the glare flashing off the windshields of the cars on Wilshire Boulevard and put the final pieces together. “He’s
yours, isn’t he?” I pictured him, my little brother, a handful of tofu oozing from his fingers, a string of drool dangling
from his chin. This was Frank’s son, his flesh and blood. I almost puked to think of it.

Frank became quiet. I could hear him breathing for a full thirty seconds. Then he said, “She was using you, Angel. She was
just a girl I slept with and told too much to … I thought I could kill two birds. Melanie and your father had been trying”
— he shook his head sadly — “they had been trying …”

The light in the room came from recessed bulbs that buzzed faintly in the ceiling. I looked up, for one quick moment letting
my eyes flicker against the electric light, as if I could find some truth there like Victor, and then looked back at Frank.
“What did you do to her?” I thought I could see the skeleton beneath his skin, the death’s head staring back at me.

“Do to her?”

“Before she disappeared,” I said now, “she called me, she called me from the dark.”

Momentarily, he brought his eyes up to meet mine. “We were in the car, and she was threatening … threatening to tell you if
I didn’t give her what she wanted. She had her cell phone and she dialed your number, and when you answered, she said your
name. That’s when I grabbed the phone … I took it out of her hand. She was about to tell you the truth, and I couldn’t have
that.” He closed his eyes. “I couldn’t live with that.”

______

I remembered, remembered her saying that she adored me, that I was her
Angel to Love.
Whatever she had done, I told myself, it didn’t matter. Whoever she had been would be washed away. My love, my faith in her,
I thought as I boarded the plane, was like the light. It would illuminate her. It would wash away the shadows. It would change
her back.

As the plane took off, I fingered the stack of photographs I had taken of Gabriel, the little boy who had been the cause of
all of this. It had been all she had wanted, just to see him again, to get close to him. She’d made a mistake, that was all.
Frank had convinced her to give up her own son, and afterward she only wanted to be near him.

I held the velvet box in my hand. My palm curled around it.

I pictured light. I pictured a misted sky and multicolored clouds reflecting in the pristine and shining metal of a car. I
pictured the muted sun burning beneath a blanket of white and gray, the yellow of a billion tons of flaming hydrogen blistering
through a cover of vapor, pictured my white hands on the light-absorbing black steering wheel of a beautiful new car, the
recent lines that had formed at the edges of Angela’s sun-damaged face, and her hair, now in a tight black afro cut close
to her perfectly shaped scalp, and her eyes, gorgeous, almond-shaped, long-lashed, and her long, delicate fingers and perfectly
manicured nails, painted green, metallic seafoam. I pictured the photons of energy moving through space toward earth, toward
us, reflecting and refracting off the curves of the car’s metal, flashing off the wet road ahead of us.

I sat on the plane and thought of the light, as always, of what it was truly doing, how it was making its way toward us, particle
and wave.

I imagined that Angela had folded her legs beneath her and put a disc in the stereo. It was ImmanuelKantLern, of course. The
music was dark, solemn, but not so unsmiling as their earlier work, with even a few acoustic touches. And in this daydream,
Angela sang along, already familiar, somehow, with the lyrics, and on her finger was a darkly reflective sapphire, catching
a momentary fire.

______

Jesus Christ, it was cold. The last time I had experienced weather like this was at the Vancouver School, staring out at that
icy Canadian meadow. But now I was somewhere on Madison Avenue, New York City, experiencing a wind that blew through my bones
and chilled my flesh like fear itself. Stupidly, I had gotten out of the taxi too soon. Waiting in traffic had been making
me impatient, and since I had noticed that we were already on the right street, I went ahead and paid the driver, then stepped
out onto the sidewalk, not realizing that I still had a million blocks to go. I should mention that albinos who live in Los
Angeles do not think to bring an overcoat when they visit New York City.

Albinos who live in Los Angeles do not own overcoats.

I walked through the slickly shadowed Manhattan streets with my hands jammed in my pockets and my teeth chattering and noticed
that almost no one looked at me except to glance up quickly and then get the hell out of the way. I had never seen more purposeful
human beings in my life. These people moved down the sidewalk like the citizens of Tokyo scurrying away from Godzilla, weaving
and sidestepping and sweeping past my shoulders in what appeared to be only a barely controlled panic. It was just past six
in the evening, and the sun already was completely down. An East Coast bleakness pervaded the atmosphere, a cold northern
gloom that was more visceral than visual.

I wondered for a moment what it would be like to live here, thinking of the anonymous streets, the anxious urbanites too caught
up in their own neuroses to notice the ultrawhite man in their midst.

But the thought, like these people, passed quickly. I could never leave my Los Angeles.

After several shivering blocks, and after having to double back twice, I finally located the right building. It featured a
marble-floored lobby with brass fixtures and a uniformed doorman standing at military attention.

I told him who I was here to see.

“Your name, sir?”

“Angel.”

“One moment, please.” He picked up the phone and pressed a single number. I couldn’t help but picture Angela on the other
end of the line, those eyes, the tapered fingers. “An Angel is here to see you,” he said into the phone, tapping his fingers
on the surface of his counter. Then he looked up at me and sighed. “Angel who?”

“Angel Veronchek,” I offered. “From Los Angeles.”

He spoke into the phone again. “Says he’s from L.A.…Veronchek…” The doorman waited a few slight seconds, then gently placed
the phone back in its cradle, shaking his head. He made his eyes go hard. “Wait at the diner across the street. She’ll meet
you in five minutes.”

“Across the street?”

“Straight across,” the doorman said, pointing toward the entrance. “It’s called the Cosmos. You can’t miss it.”

“Okay.”

Out on the frozen sidewalk again, I looked across the street at the Cosmos Diner, a fluorescent jumble of lights and darks
behind a glistening window. I made my way across Madison and stepped inside, asking the waiter for a booth by the window.
I wanted to see her when she emerged from her building. I wanted to watch her walk toward me. I wanted to see Angela as soon
as possible.

The waiter led me to the table, and I ordered a coffee and a glass of water. There were pills I had to take — Reality, of
course — and I thought I might as well do it now. I focused on the street, the quick-passing, confident striders, these aliens
in their black leather jackets and black-rimmed glasses.

“Angel.”

I looked up.

“What are you doing here?” Jessica — her name was
Jessica
— must have come across the street without my noticing. I must have watched her without even realizing it was her. That was
probably because her hair was so different now. It was bright red, like the red hair of an Irish person, and as straight as
a movie star’s. Her makeup was elegant, her lips a faint shade of glistening beige. She wore a blond leather coat with a shearling
collar.

“I won’t —” I started. I had actually come with the conscious intention of apologizing, of setting things right. “I’m better
now. I promise I won’t do anything…”

But suddenly I realized there was another intention, too, one I hadn’t even admitted to myself.

Jessica smiled thinly. “That’s nice to know.”

I looked around the diner at all the strange people. “You moved to New York.”

“I got engaged, Angel. I met someone.”

“He lives here?”

As though talking to a child, she said, “This is where
I
live now.”

“Oh, but I thought —” I stopped myself.

“What is it?”

“I wanted to …” I could hardly speak. “I wanted to say that I was … wanted to say how sorry…” I couldn’t stop staring at her
face, at her eyes — they were so blue. Blue, blue, electromagnetic blue. I tried to separate in my memory the girl who had
come to my door that night with the lamb stew from all the others, the girl from the Mask, Cassandra, all those escorts…I
had more distinct memories of them now, at least of some of them, but they still blurred together in my mind, still spoke
in a single voice.

There must have been something in my face, because hers softened with that look of understanding, the same one I had seen
that first day I met her. It was nice to know that some things hadn’t been scripted, that some things had been brought over
from the other universe. “It’s okay, Angel,” she said and slid into the booth, facing me.

“And I was hoping to find out what happened,” I went on. “Why you —” But I couldn’t finish.

This was all wrong. This wasn’t the way I had imagined it at all. I had imagined a tearful reunion. I had imagined an embrace,
the events of the past dissolving like sugar in hot tea. I wanted to go back. I wanted to wake up in the hospital.
We ran a tox screen,
I wanted to hear,
and found just about everything
…But I was still here, still in the Cosmos Diner on Madison Avenue in New York City. Jessica still wore her shearling coat,
obviously prepared to leave at any second.

“What happened.” It was a statement. She was expressing her own stupefaction, as if I were supposed to know, as if everyone
in the entire world knew.

She shook her head and smiled. “You’re so fucking crazy, you know that, Angel?”

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I wasn’t… myself.” I think I started hyperventilating again. A blind spot was forming on my
field of vision, a blur of shine that had situated itself right in front of Jessica’s face.

I tried to see her eyes, to apprehend that shade of blue again, but they were occluded.

“Your family,” she said, “those people, your doctor…they just lie to you, Angel. They think they’re protecting you, but they’re
not.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the photographs, pictures I had taken of Gabriel. “I thought you…” I couldn’t even
get it out. I could hardly even see her now. Another migraine was forming. It was the same sensation I’d had after Lester
hit me at the crematorium. It was the same feeling I’d had that day on the highway, driving toward Orange Blossom Boulevard.
It was the same feeling I’d had that day on the beach when I stepped into the light.

Red. Orange. Bright yellow. Burning.

She picked up the pictures and sifted through them. “I can’t,” she said. Jessica’s auburn hair shimmered in the warm incandescence
of the diner. She looked through the window at her building across the street. “My fiancé is going to be home soon, anyway.”
She pushed the photos back toward me. “And he doesn’t know.”

I reached into my side pocket and pulled out the velvet box. I opened it and pushed it toward her. “I got this for you,” I
said. “I was in Rio, and I —”

“Rio?”

I shrugged. “It’s a long story.”

She leaned forward, eyeing the glistening sapphire. “What do you want?”

I shook my head. “I want…I only wanted…”

She got up abruptly. “Do you want to
marry
me?”

“I don’t—” I stammered. “I just —”

“You practically killed me,” she said. “Don’t you remember that? You tried to drown me.”

“I’m sorry,” I answered. “I just don’t remember it that way. From my point of view, it didn’t happen that way.”

“Your point of view?” She made an incredulous face. “Listen,” she said. “Why don’t you take your ring and go back to Los Angeles
where you belong?”

“You weren’t like this,” I managed to choke out, “in the other world.”

“The other—”

“You loved me.”

“— world? Christ,” she said, “you’re fucking delusional, you know that?”

“You don’t even want the pictures?”

I looked up at the lamp hanging above our booth, staring, for some reason, straight into the bulb, as if I might find some
answer there. This is the world, I realized, that I had crossed over to. This was the actual world, and in this world, Angela
lived but didn’t love me.

I let that light burn my eyes for a few more painful seconds, and then I closed them, and when I opened them again, she was
gone.

______

There is only one kind of object that can exhibit the properties of both particles and waves, and that is the string. It’s
simple, really. When looked at from the front, a string looks and acts like a particle. From the side it looks and acts like
a wave. I know you’ve heard of it, too. String Theory is apparently prevailing as the great Unified Field Theory that physicists
have been searching for for so long. It is opening up entire branches of science. There was even an article about it in the
science section of the
New York Times,
which I read on the plane on the way back to L.A. I won’t pretend I understand it, and I suspect that Professor Lem may even
have gotten around to explaining String Theory in her lectures after I left her class. But the theory includes a way of describing
both the particle properties and the wave properties of light without having to resort to complex, multidimensional geometries.
Or even multiple worlds.