Amnesiascope: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  “You’re right. I do.”

  “You’re supposed to. Except that, in this case, my relationships really are easier to understand than yours. Even I think my relationships are easier to understand than yours.” I’m not a man of hidden meanings, he once said to me, there are no hidden meanings in my life. “It’s interesting that the only time there are any hidden meanings in your life,” I say, “is in your relationships with women.” When we’re this confused about women, we turn to the only option left us: we write. We write as though we understand everything and it’s up to us to sort out the world. I only write about movies, but Ventura writes about Life. This morning, still contemplating the Queen of Cups, we head down to the newspaper. I drive because he doesn’t want to take his car, an old sixty-or seventy-something Chevy that he also considers larger than life, even more larger than life than his women. All the way down to the paper he’s in the next seat to me muttering it like a mantra: they’re different, they’re crazy, they’re funny. And then: Shit! he exclaims, they want everything? “Well,” I answer, “to be fair, we do too.” I’ve worked at this newspaper about three years now, ever since things ended with Sally. It’s published once a week out of the hollowed-out cavern of the old Egyptian Theater, not far from the mouth of the sunken L.A. subway. First few months I’d arrive to the theater every day to find that during the night someone had carted away another memento of the theater foyer—a pharaoh s chariot or a slab of fake hieroglyphics, or a mummy and its papier-mâché sarcophagus—until all that was left of the grand entrance was a dirt plot. Inside, amid the decor of tarnished gold that ascends in decay to the ceiling, the advertising department is located up on the stage where the screen used to be, and the editorial staff is strewn among the ripped-out seats of the audience section. The editor-in-chief’s office is in the balcony and the receptionist works behind the snack bar. The publisher took the projectionist’s room, small but offering an obvious vantage point.

  My desk, happily, is near one of the old emergency exits. When I first arrived at the paper no one on the staff talked to me except some of the editors and the art director, a brilliant but tormented homosexual who was always raging at everyone. He admired a book of mine he read back in his more impressionable years and so we struck up a friendship of sorts, and I became the one others recruited to calm him down or negotiate various truces. I like the people at the paper but they tend to complain a lot about jobs I would have killed for when I was as young as they are. The level of envy is superseded only by the level of resentment. There’s all the usual political infighting and turf warfare; gossip pervades everything. At a party not long after I split with Sally, drunk and depressed and an all-around basket case, I wound up going home with one of the advertising reps, a cynical noirish blonde who chain-smoked and told me every last thing there was to know about everyone on the staff. Mid-seduction it occurred to me, in my drunken haze, that tomorrow everyone in turn would know everything there was to know about me, first and foremost that on this particular evening I was less than my most sexually formidable. Certainly enough, as Dr. Billy O’Forte put it to me later, “your wick wasn’t wet twenty-four hours before phones all over L.A. were ringing.” In the years since, every time I’m seen talking to this woman more than five minutes, the flames of rumor flare anew. People on the staff who have fucked everything that moves within the confines of the newspaper’s walls sadly shake their heads and whisper to each other their “disappointment” in me.

  What can I say? I’m a disappointing character. I only began to feel like I actually belonged at the newspaper when, having quickly mastered the art of disappointment, I went on to become completely practiced at the science of disillusionment. By now I’ve totally dismayed anyone still innocent enough to expect I’m capable of anything admirable, let alone heroic. When Ventura and I arrive this morning we immediately run into Freud N. Johnson, the paper’s publisher. Johnson is a five-foot-five failed movie producer who publicly and bitterly mourns the world’s lack of respect for him and deep down inside suspects he’s a homosexual. He often ends arguments by whimpering, “I know you’re right and I’m wrong. But you always get to be right.” He’s been trying to figure out how to fire the editor ever since I first came to this job, though what he’ll actually do once he succeeds is an open question, since he doesn’t appear to know the first thing about putting out a newspaper and all the best writers have said they would quit, something that in one of his stupider miscalculations he may not believe. I’ve made it clear to anyone who cares, for instance, that I would go, if only because the editor in question hired me against what would have been any more reasonable person’s better judgment. In the meantime Freud N. Johnson constantly prowls the bowels of the Egyptian Theater, his entire being broadcasting a variety of messages in the neon of the psyche. “I’m not a homosexual!” howls one. “I’m tall!” squeaks another. “You’re taller than I am and I hate you!” blurts a recurring favorite.

  Freud N. Johnson regularly confides in Ventura, perhaps because Ventura has been around longer than anyone else. Johnson may think that when he fires the editor he can recruit Ventura into taking the job and pulling the paper together; and Ventura allows Johnson to take him into his confidence, he explains to me, so he can find out what’s really going on. It’s a strategy that seems to me obviously perilous, bolstering Johnsons nerve and implicitly encouraging him to believe he can do something rash and get away with it. Today, however, all that’s neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned. Clearing my desk and tossing all my phone messages in the trash, I’m just waiting for Ventura to finish his intrigues so we can go home, because I had this dream yesterday morning I’ve been waiting to tell him. Lately I’ve begun to dream again, which is to say I’ve been having astonishingly vivid dreams that I remember in detail, when usually they only linger in my mind like smoke in the nostrils from a fire that’s gone out. This one happened yesterday morning around ten-thirty or so. I had awakened briefly to find Viv curled up on her side of the bed rather than between my legs; and I went back to sleep and had this terrible dream—

  We were staying in a casino in Las Vegas and my mother was with us, though in the dream I don’t remember actually seeing her. A strange young woman had lured me from our hotel room to the swimming pool outside, and I was about to take off my clothes and go into the pool with the strange woman when I saw Viv watching from the window. I rushed back to the room where I found her lying on the stairs, sobbing. With great indignation I accused her of being jealous for no reason, and stormed out of the suite and began walking all over subterranean Las Vegas, through tunnels that connected all the casinos, until finally I surfaced on the outskirts of town. It was dusk. The casino where I was staying was not far in the distance. A large sweating man with dark hair and a scraggly beard said, “There’s a Big One coming,” and at that moment dust rose on the faraway hills and birds scattered frantically across the sky. I held onto a stop sign in the middle of the desert while the earth shuddered beneath my feet, and watched the high rise of my casino, which now resembled the Hotel Hamblin, tremble slightly. Then, just as it appeared the tremor and the danger were past, the casino completely collapsed. I was stunned. I ran back to the site, and by the time I reached it the sky had become dark and there was nothing left of the casino at all, no sign anything had ever been there; but even in the dark the sand glowed a dim red and people stood around staring at it, stupefied, until someone said, “We should try and dig.” For a while we dug, pulling up planks of wood from beneath the sand. But soon we stopped because it seemed useless, it was so obvious that everyone who had been in the casino was buried, unreachable, hundreds of feet below us.

  I was devastated. I was thinking what to do. I was thinking I would have to call my mother’s friends and Viv’s family, and I would have to call Ventura to come get me because my car was buried too, along with everything in it, and there was nowhere for me to go. I was very aware in the dream of my entire past being gone, and in
the midst of my devastation there was also a sickening opportunism, that everything was behind me now. Then, in a daze, I was in another casino, stumbling through the halls, when I realized that at the very least I had to call out, to Viv or my mother, on the off-chance they might still be alive and hear me. I opened my mouth and started to call—

  And woke myself up.

  I couldn’t have been more surprised. It never occurred to me I was in a dream, and now it stayed with me with defiant clarity. Viv was still curled up next to me, her back to me. “Oh God,” I sighed, reaching for her.

  She turned. “What is it?” she said, immediately conscious.

  “Oh God. I had a horrible dream.”

  “What was it?”

  I shook my head. “No, I can’t. …”

  “Was I in it?”

  “No.” I didn’t really think it was specifically about her anyway, or even us. But what I woke to, what remained with me, was not how my dream had wiped my life of its past, but how I had spared myself in the dream by feigning indignation at Viv’s jealousy and heartbreak, and bursting out of the room and the casino. In other words it was not my dishonesty that had doomed Viv and my mother, it was more complicated than that: honesty would not have saved them, it would only have destroyed me, leaving me entombed with them. Now in bed I took Viv, clutched her by her hair and lowered her to me. I slipped between her lips into that territory where my conscience can’t reach me. I was convinced that if she had been there this morning when I woke, between my legs, her mouth wrapped around me, I never would have had this dream; she would have sucked the bad faith right out of me, it would have rushed out of me with everything else. Now she had to suck all the harder, stroking me as though to set me on fire, and I could still feel the small drop of conscience left inside me afterward, like the errant cell of a cancer left behind after surgery.

  “But you aren’t responsible,” Ventura says this evening when I tell him the dream, “for what you might have done.”

  “I wanted to go swimming with the strange woman,” I argue. “I wanted to take off my clothes and go into the pool with her.”

  “You aren’t responsible for what you wanted. You’re responsible for what you do.” We’re driving down Fountain Avenue through the blue corridor of cypresses that sag with clumps of wet ash, the turrets and towers north of us unlit in the night. The air is filled with this odd smell the city has taken on recently, not the common smell of sandalwood and hashish but a different smell I can’t place, and as we sometimes tend to do we point things out to each other—the sites of famous suicides and old Hollywood love affairs—as though we’re tourists, which, like everyone in L.A., we are. Sometimes we even make things up, though for all we know we’re not making it up; in L.A. you think you’re making something up, but it’s making you up. After a while, looking at the dark towers and thinking about dreams and earthquakes, Ventura adds, “It’s going to be very weird, when we’re all driving around with a dead city in our psyches.”

  “But we’re already driving around with a dead city in our psyches,” I answer. Those of us who are still in Los Angeles know the rest of you out there are laughing at us. Those of us who are still here—a million, half a million, a hundred thousand, no one really knows anymore—are already driving around with dead streets and dead alleys inside us, dead buildings and dead windows and dead gutters, dead intersections and dead shops, not the urban corpse of the present but the dead city of the future. We’ve already seen the end of Los Angeles the way the people of Pompeii watched their end rise in the smoke of Mount Vesuvius years before it actually blew. And walking around with a dead city in you either makes you just as dead or it thrills you, it makes you the most alive you’ve ever been, surrounded as you are by a landscape that’s just choking for the breath of someone or something alive. …

  The days right after the Quake. … Wandering from one dead apartment building to another, slipping past the red X’s that marked the doors of buildings that had been condemned. Down at the beach an old huge aquablue building called the Seacastle greeted the brown waves that rumbled in, the basement long since flooded, the rooms now empty except for the other squatters that strayed from room to room until they found one to claim. From the street below, I could make out through the windows the apartments as they were abandoned: prim apartments, disheveled ones, some trashed when the earth lurched awake from its bad dream, and some unscathed except for the fact that the entire structure could teeter and crash at any moment. I headed for the top floor. People think that’s the place you don’t want to be in a quake but the odds can go either way, really, you can either be buried under the building or ride it on down. Deserted lives as I wandered from one apartment to the next, photos and letters, knickknacks and leftovers in the icebox, the disarray of the sheets that reminded me of Sally, whatever their pattern. From the top of the Seacastle I had quite a view, especially in the apartment that didn’t have a wall, the ramshackle dead pier just a few hundred yards off to the south beyond the dangling dead cables of the now-exposed elevator shaft. Out of the shaft echoed the squawking of gulls.

  I stayed at the Seacastle for a while, partly for the view and partly for the song of a parakeet still in its cage, until the feed ran out and I let him go. He flew directly into the shaft and never came out. But mostly I stayed for the disarray of the sheets, drawn not to the large king-size beds but the singles, where there was little chance that two people had ever slept together or had ever been there longer than the expanse of their ecstasy. …

  The third night I woke with a start. At first I thought it was a tremor, or that an unusually large wave had rolled in; one of the reasons I liked the Seacastle was you couldn’t tell the difference. In the western sky a huge moon hung level with my bed. I turned to the doorway and saw her form, glowing in the moon small and feral, nothing like Sally at all who the darkness always hid—and then the next minute she was gone. In that moment’s recognition I realized I’d been seeing her ever since I got here, just out of the corner of my eye. I got up and searched the top floor of the Seacastle in the dark until I nearly tumbled over the edge of a jagged gash that ran down one of the hallways. When I went back to bed I lay there disgruntled, the moon way too big and the sea way too loud.

  The next day I left the Seacastle for the afternoon. I stood in line over at Main and Ocean Park Boulevard where they were handing out sandwiches and fruit juice and vitamin packets. When I got back to the Seacastle I found the pattern of my bed sheets disrupted. That night the same thing happened as before: I woke and there she was lingering in the doorway. Come here, I said, before she disappeared.

  After that I saw her in the afternoon, in another room on the other side of the building. When she caught me looking at her, she didn’t disappear or look away. Then I tried to ignore her awhile; a night or two passed and a day or two when I didn’t see her; and I thought she was gone, thought she had moved on to another empty hotel up the coast, when I woke one night and found her kneeling next to my bed, her face inches from mine. “Jesus!” I cried, because she scared the hell out of me. She smiled at this, before she got up and walked out. Even in the dark it was obvious her eyes were green.

  “Come here,” I said, when I saw her again the next day. The sun was falling in the evening fog, a wet red blotch; she was in the room diagonally across from mine, facing the city rather than the sea. I moved toward her and she casually drifted into the next room. We kept moving in circles around each other. For a few minutes I couldn’t find her, and then there she was on the northwest balcony, looking out away from the pier: she was leaning against the balcony watching the waves. I thought, You lean too hard it will break; but I didn’t say anything. Let it break. Let her tumble into the water. I came up behind her and she turned her head slightly to register my approach, but didn’t say anything, showed nothing on her face in exactly that way I would come to love. I hadn’t been planning anything at all. Until I took off my clothes I really had no idea in my head what I was
going to do. I reached around the front of her and unsnapped her jeans and she said, “What if I said no.”

  “I would anyway.”

  “No.” I opened her up, standing there on the balcony, and she continued purring various refusals, No you can’t, no I don’t want you to, uh uh, mmmmm mmmmm, and the startled sound of her gasp when I came into her became the sound I always listened for whenever I fucked her, that little surprise I never understood that she expressed so inarticulately. So I never had an answer for her, from that first time until I could finally say, a year later, that I loved her, having decided love could be as different from what it had been before as Viv was different from Sally. Standing there on the balcony, naked from the waist down and staring at the charred cliffs of Malibu with me inside her, she seemed to drift out to sea on her little black Nos, dissolving into a stream of dreamy demurs. From the highest floor of the Seacastle, in the light of the sun setting into the ocean, with Viv in my arms, I could see the dead city to the east before it lapsed into the final darkness of night. But it’s at night, on the other hand, that my Los Angeles, the dead city inside me, is especially beautiful in the light of the moon.

  She was gone the next morning, and when she didn’t reappear over the next few days I left the Seacastle, not wanting to live anymore amid its memories. It was one thing when all the memories belonged to others, another now that I had one of my own. For a few nights I slept with hundreds of others in the circus tent that had been pitched on the beach for all the Quake nomads. I kept my eyes peeled for Viv. Then for a week or so I stayed with Veroneek, who had a pet wolf named Joe and looked like a beautiful wolf herself, with short black hair and deep-set eyes that fixed on you without inhibition, and a low, resonant voice that so impressed the emergency officials they recruited her to read over the microphone. Inside the tent she sat behind a table calling the names of people who had frantic messages from friends and family out of town trying to find out who was alive.