Lost Angels

by David J. Schow

  "And you lost track of her, once she'd made that wrong choice?"

  "Don't misunderstand me; I wasn't exactly gloating. The memories that stayed with me were of her, before all that. She knew how to say amazingly appropriate things; things that had me thinking them over hours later. They amazed me, anyway..."

  "You matured."

  "I saw her face in passing strangers for a long time after that. But that part is a fantasy. It never would have worked out for us, together. It was my idealization ... just like my idealization of you, in the centerfold."

  "Well, congratulations, Brad, because you've just matured again?"

  "By exactly ten years, according to you. And there's no trick to it?"

  She frowned. "Trick?"

  "Yeah. A twist ending. The little unrevealed detail that traps me into a devil's deal, you know - like, I age ten years, but they're dog years, so I actually become 70 years older in the blink of a lash."

  Sela chuckled at that one. It was throaty, full-bodied; to Brad, the sound percolated with honesty. "No. Nothing like that."

  He examined his face in an ornate mirror next to an iron coat rack where most of his humid clothing still hung. "Looks the same. I've never had a smooth complexion."

  "You'll notice little differences, but you can afford most of the hit. You can subtract ten years from most normal people and they'll never notice. Isn't that what some careers do, or parenthood? One day you look in the mirror and realize a big chunk of your life sneaked away. It happens to most everybody."

  "Except you." Brad flashed on the centerfold again; the way her eyes had changed from brown to violet in the middle of the thunderstorm.

  "That's because of you. You made me immortal in one way, in your mind; since you came this far, I decided to let you help me stay as I am in a slightly more practical way."

  "What about McCabe? He said he ... that is, that you and he ..." Brad thought suddenly and uncomfortably how much older McCabe had looked tonight, compared to the last time they'd met.

  "He probably said it to bait you, but I made an arrangement with McCabe a long, long time ago."

  "He's your official photographer. Your only photographer."

  "It's more than that. He had an ache inside he had to evacuate, a lot like you. I needed ten years bad enough that the lack of them forced me to become a recluse for a while. There wasn't anybody like you around then, Brad. And McCabe was messed up over some model he'd fallen in love with and fucked up somehow. He gave me the years I needed and I leached the pain out of him."

  "And you trust him."

  "Yes."

  "What did you do with it, the pain?"

  "It was a pain I could handle. Assimilate. I needed the years more. Now time has done part of my work, and people like you come looking. Not many, but enough. Fewer still are willing to come this far, and indulge me. Now, please let me kiss you goodnight. Get out of here before the day starts."

  She had softly liberated some heartmeat pain from him as well. Brad could feel a buoyancy inside his chest despite her calm announcement that it was time for him to go. She had been kind to him in a way that should not be spoiled by words spoken aloud; that would be as inappropriate as snapping a Polaroid and asking her for an autograph on his way out the big door.

  So she kissed him, and she meant it, and the door closed behind him, and it was over. Back in the car, southbound, he frequently glanced at the magazine there on the seat next to him, but he never opened it to look at the pictures, not once.

  He had told her about those he had met, married and mated, women who had left neither residual flavor nor pang of regret, who had walked out of his life one after another, leaving that life as ordered as Suzanne's closet. There were no crippling lows from which he could not recover because there had been no equivalent highs of passion, save one.

  It would be easy to drive back to the city, to have a quick drink with Philippe and graze Cherique's cheek with a kiss, maybe drop a card in the mail to his ex-wife. None of this would matter because his friends had had no more impact on his life than his lovers; the people of his existence mattered as little as outmoded fashions in a thrift store. He wanted them to mean more, but each of them failed to portray the character parts imposed upon them. Save one.

  His personal affairs were so neat they could he wrapped in a single business day, but what was the point?

  Brad slowed his car into a wide U-turn on the coast highway. It was still early enough that no traffic existed to stop him. Then he headed north to spend the rest of his years, and no one ever saw him again.

  THE FALLING MAN

  In the Major Arcana of the Tarot there exists an almost forgotten twenty-third card.

  The known cards are called "keys," and are said to correspond with each of the Paths of Life, or to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Fool has no number; it is the card that melds the ends of the circle of twenty-one. The Fool is generally depicted as an inexperienced youth about to step off the edge of a precipice, denoting the passage into maturity and the need to choose a philosophy — to gain wisdom or embrace the bliss of ignorance.

  The forgotten card is The Falling Man. It stands outside the unending circle formed by the cards of the Major Arcana. It is a wild card, a skeleton "key." Its subject is the victim of irresistible forces of chaos, caprice, or circumstance. Reversed, it denotes concealed manipulation and too much control.

  Catching The Falling Man in your Tarot throw is like having your car totaled by an uninsured illegal alien. It is the one card that forces readers to dissemble, and soften their evaluations. Their eyes avert, because the eyes cannot lie and make things better.

  So, as with all unresolvable irritants, The Falling Man has been swept under the rug. But it is as unfailing a force as the gravity it depicts, and its influence persists in defiance of historical subterfuge, touching each of us to this day.

  The Rolodex card was yellow at the borders with age, and the little man thumbed it up just as the grandfather clock in his office bonged out midnight in sour brass tones.

  He released a tiny pah noise of disgust and hoisted himself from his desk chair, which creaked as his spatted high-button shoes slapped the floor. Standing, he was no taller than he had been while sitting. He fought his way over to the clock, battling the sheer clutter of the claustrophobic aerie in which he had secreted himself. Old habits of residence were difficult to change. His progress across the rat-hole cubicle kicked up a wake of dust, and made a legion of tiny insects interrupt their literary dining to scatter. Antiques and geegaws packed the room, and the grandfather clock presided over the darkest corner like an ancient idol. Both the clock and the railroad watch the little man wore on a fob read nine-thirty.

  He dealt the side of the clock a savage kick that made the chimes within clatter rudely. Loose gears rattled and a terrified mouse fled the premises. Then the mid-range tubular gong sounded once - the half-hour toll.

  The little man wore a gray pinstriped suit with tails, a silken vest, and an ascot. His brushed top hat hung on a peg overlooking the desk, and was the sole part of the ensemble not spattered in white plaster dust. The Reverend Charles Dodgson might have asked the little man to pose on the spot.

  Along the obstacle course leading back to the desk, the little man paused to peer out a congested, porthole-like window. The entire city of Los Angeles stretched away below, a quilt of light chasing the horizon in every direction. The view was one of the reasons he had maintained this office, away from the eyes of the world, for so long.

  "M-hm. Yes, indeed." The little man had developed the habit of cataloging things to himself in a mumbled undertone. It was a personal monologue with an audience of one. "Aahh." The urban view replenished him. Perhaps it was the thought of all those electric lights, and all the lives upon which they shone.

  Back at the desk, he glanced at the foxed Rolodex card, then let it drop to the blotter. He wrested open a persistently sticking drawer and rummaged. To the light he lifted
a delicate masque of blue glass. Attached near the right eye was a slender, wand-like stick, for holding the masque to one's face. Its features were feminine; its eyes, blank holes deftly cut in the glass.

  "Very good" the little man said to himself.

  As he sat to resume work, he switched on a refrigerator-sized Victrola and hummed along with Bruce Springsteen. Because he was doing what he was best at, he smiled pleasantly as he worked.

  At the last possible moment, Peter Deutsch stepped back from the waiting elevator doors and let the car go up empty. He took the stairs. His entire day had been spent in boxes just like the elevator of his apartment building; chrome and glass cells that hummed and conveyed him from one meeting to the next, with black commas of ground-out cigarette butts punctuating the utility tile of their floors. It was seven floors up and he was wrung out, but Peter wanted to walk.

  The stairwell was another box, an enclosure of steel and stone, a clean, well-lighted place. Thank you, Papa Hemingway. A box just like all the conference rooms in the Studio City bowl, where it was rumored the majors constructed their monoliths with movable walls, so that hapless employees could discover their need for fresh jobs by clocking in to offices that had become blank walls. They did not just change the names on the doors; they dispensed with entire rooms, as easily as twisting a new face onto a Rubik's Cube. Peter had not lost his job, but his patience was waving good-bye. He had spent - no, invested - a shitter of a day batting his skull against the concrete stupidity of TV moguls and their yes-persons. Preproduction arguments over the TV-movie Sinner had been raging for eight weeks; the script was in its ninth rewrite. Peter could only compare the erosion of his soul to spending a year in court. His sanity was being swiped a chip at a time. His creativity had retreated, shrieking, behind a massive writer's block. Today Sinner had been passed on to the fifth in a series of pinch hitters, not counting the husband-and-wife team who had conceived the original script and would now get a "story by" credit. Peter was still to direct. Wasn't that what everyone in Hollywood supposedly really wanted - to direct?

  Like everyone else embroiled in Sinner from the publicity flacks on UP, Peter was trapped, hemmed in by contract boilerplate, committed to work in which he had, today, lost the last vestiges of interest. "A sizzling look at the real power plays in the boardrooms and bedrooms of high finance," Sinner was glitz-encrusted bullshit from head to toe. All jiggle and soap and lies, with all the right advertisers to buttress that all-important American consumer ethic. Sinner perpetuated the dumb myth that if you weren't wealthy and wasteful and wanton, you were just nobody, dahling.

  Peter had spent the day being poisoned by that mind-set, and no purgatives offered themselves as he plodded upward. The climb was the only way he could ascend on a day like this. He pushed out self-pity and began brewing a full pot of anger. He should have taken the goddamned elevator.

  Thirteen steps. Turn. Thirteen more. Tucked into his armpit was the junk mail he had pried from the gangbox downstairs. On the fourth-floor landing he let his leather brief drop to the waffled metal and paused to squint at what the stack had to offer. The stairwell floods afforded harsh light. The abundance of trash - YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON $50,000!! - was balanced by the sinking certainty that another twenty-four hours had just passed without a peep from Damon about the independent-feature backing he was busy scaring up in Vancouver. Another day without the Mailgram or phone call that would permit Peter to chuck Sinner with what the good old Romans termed the digitus obscenus. On Damon Fletcher's say-so Peter would be packed and northbound to "do us some art." It was a joke. Objet d'Art was the title of the project; the screenplay collaboration that had wrapped both men up in the embrace of true love. If the money came through and the picture got made, there was no doubt that a distributor would rail at the fartsy title and change it to Art Object, or maybe Lewd Mating Positions. The magic word was saleable. Just now, the challenge was creating the film, not what to call it when it was whole.

  But the wonderful world of directors' hats held no laughter for Peter today. He thumbed desultorily through the balance of the mail stack.

  He would have ignored the folded page as a shopping center flyer if he hadn't spied the red wax seal holding the page ends together in an envelope shape. Then he registered the weight, the quality of the thick, linen-grain stationery. There was no Addressograph label, no stamp. It had been inserted into the box apart from the mail delivery. Peter gave it his full attention for another thirteen steps.

  The icon embossed into the cold wax was unfamiliar to Peter. At a glance it appeared to be a woodcut outline of a human figure, arms extended, apparently in flight. He used his thumbnail to pry the seal away without breaking it. He shifted the briefcase to his other hand and halted on the stairs in order to tilt the page to the light to read the precise black script.

  It was a poem, to him.

  He recognized the paraph of Alea's signature before he was a third of the way through the verse, and his heart began revving. She had come back. Serious adrenaline began to punch through his system, making him giddy in a hurry. He smiled, and then bounded up the remaining tiers of metal stairs, his chance at fifty thousand dollars fluttering into the narrow, dark abyss between the flights.

  As he opened the door his eyes were stung. So was his mind. She knew of his fondness for candles. At least a hundred were very carefully burning in his living room. Still buzzing from the stairway fluorescents, his eyes took in meager golden light. There was just enough to see his way by; no more.

  He knew better than to call out her name. A trail had been left.

  He dropped his jacket into the darkness where he knew a table to be; he grimaced as he heard it slide off and meet the floor. A marble pedestal had been deprived of its Kleinst nude sculpture and repositioned in the front door's sightline, halfway across the sunken circle of the living room. On it were a tall yellow taper, burning in a pewter holder, a crystal flute of what he took to be Mumms 1979 Rene Lalou from past experience, and a note, on the same linen paper, folded into a pup-tent shape. Peter became aware from the pain in his cheeks that he was grinning like a fool.

  Finish Glass before leaving Table.

  Remove coat, shoes, socks, Tie optional.

  Proceed to Kitchen.

  On the butcher block table in the kitchen were an identical candle, glass, and note. He felt less nervous about all the burning candles when he saw, close up, the care that had been taken to cup them and provide for wax drainage. All his tinfoil had been used up. While the first glassful of bubbly fizzed coldly away in his stomach, he lifted and sipped the second. By the time the second was down, the first was speeding to his head. No dinner. Too late now, and who cared? He unfolded the next note.

  Bring uncracked Bottles from Fridge.

  Proceed to Hall.

  By now Peter's fear of hidden fire inspectors had mysteriously evaporated. His coat-rack had been moved to the hallway, and on it hung his chocolate-colored bathrobe. His fingers tingled when he tipped the third glass to his mouth. A very pointed trail of evenly spaced candles lit the path to his bedroom.

  If you are still wearing Clothes,

  please discard them on the Rack provided.

  Finish Glass and proceed

  at once to the Final Room.

  The door lay ajar by three tantalizing inches. His glass in one hand and the two champagne bottles in the other, he nudged the door open with his knee. The bed was a gigantic four-poster job in waxed ebony. Dark sheets. No silk or satin crap; that was strictly for the oilier passion-pit mentality. The corners of the room were unfathomably dark. Several strategic candles threw almost imperceptible highlights.

  The big bed was empty.

  He was two paces into the room when she pounced from behind, whirling him around into a kiss so thorough that both the bottles and the empty flute hit the carpet. She gathered him into her arms, working at him, wanting him so hard that she had to hold him in place to keep him from falling. They stayed that way for
a long time. Then she broke away and pulled back just far enough to let him see her hold a finger to her lips before she retrieved the wine and drew him closer to the bed. Talk, its questions and details and problems, was for later.

  Tired? He could feel electricity crackling from the tips of his fingers, his toes

  They did not hurry, like eager but inept children. They had time, and their hunger did the rest. Elsewhere, beyond their hearing, was the studied chuckle of a little old man.

  "I think I'm falling in love with you."

  That was the last thing she had said to him, the last time they had made love, five months ago, the night before she had vanished with no preamble and no heartrending but oh-so-predictable note. Once he had tried to nail her down on who she really was, what she really did for her living, she evanesced out of his life. The days had elapsed one slow century of hurt at a time, long enough for Peter to conclude that the dormant emotions she had kicked back to life in him were just the usual Peter Deutsch overreaction. Hollywood hyperbole. That decided, he had to then deny the rightness of the things she had told him, the unspoken validity of the small, telling things she did for him. He had to abort the changes and resonances begun within himself. Opening up - to anybody - was contrary to his will, and when he noticed his own willing vulnerability, he resisted.

  His ex-wife Kathryn had cared not at all for such subtleties of temperament; to him, it was a costly emotional effort; to her, it was too little too goddamned late. She did not wish to entertain Peter's feeble tries at dropping his shields. Alea honestly wanted to help. She nurtured, never coaxing. It was proof that she was different, and this scared him. To Peter it was a natural fear, and she had anticipated this, and come prepared to defang it. Peter would have dismissed such reassurances from anyone else, including Kathryn, as saccharine. In the real world no one bothered to help the way Alea did. That final night, Peter had told her he loved her; the words were a giant step for him. Hours later she was gone, and he reminded himself of another of his old personal rules: You only sabotage the relationships that are the most important to you. Then came the day sunk in poisonous meditation, the mental scourging. The bitterness returned and settled in for a long stay. His insectile plates of emotional armor began their inevitable recrystallization. Then came Sinner.