Lost Angels

by David J. Schow

  "Alea served her purpose for you. Are you not now packed for Canada? You're telling yourself that distance is the answer, that escape will win you perspective. What you are not prepared to acknowledge is that now, as a result of your travails, you are girded for the challenge that Objet d'Art will be for you. Alea's work was accomplished." His eyes sought the dancers. "She could not be permitted to last for you, any more than she can be allowed to last for that gentleman over there."

  Peter followed M. Rogoff's gesture past the dancers. "Willard Pell?" He recognized the writer instantly, even from behind. They had been introduced in the ebb tide of business. With the debut of his second novel, Come the Wind, Fear the Storm, Pell had been hailed as "the new Salinger" by Publisher's Weekly. He took seriously the advice to relocate to Hollywood. A dumb movie was produced from the ground up remains of his premiere book, Jackals, and the offers that sprang from his second novel all died in development hell. Pell could thrash out scripts as well as any word-processor chimp doing TV, but had ignored, the movie-biz truism that the execs don't pay you for pretty writing - they pay you for the bullshit you are expected to endure, selling your talent to people who have none of their own. Pell made money. Book Number Three somehow never materialized. He tried not to let the great big cogs of the machine munch him too much. Now he stood at another elite party, being seen, a touch overweight, a touch egg-eyed, one more Hollywood victim in a roomful, disinterestedly watching a teller of party tales struggle his way ineptly through some humorless anecdote.

  In a crowd where blithely bared tits, mooning, and ostentatious gropery formed the behavioral norm, Willard Pell was holding hands with a blonde woman whose back was also turned toward Peter.

  M. Rogoff pretended to hunt for pineapple juice at the bar. "You wanted to see her. There she is."

  "Sexcrime" fired up. From the room beyond, "Addicted to Love."

  Peter pushed off his stool and instantly felt the scotch slugging him. He executed a sort of dreamy beeline for Willard Pell - the only other attendee not in costume. Like Peter, he did not require one. They were both clowns. Fools, but in the medieval sense.

  As he reached to tap the blonde woman's shoulder she spun as though they were waltzing. She held to her face a masque of immaculate blue glass which complimented perfectly the azure of her gown, a floor-length job in drifting gossamer. Cuts of it lagged in the air like Indian veils with each of her motions; they wafted to rest as Peter stood unmoving, trying to see through the masque.

  He saw that the blonde hair was not a wig. Details piled into his toil-worn and prostrate brain: Same height. Same general build. The planes of her face, even concealed by the masque, were different. He knew the lips would be fuller - the upper with more pronounced peaks; the lower more rounded and plumply sensual. The cheekbones would be more Scandinavian. Her hair, her massy handfuls of natural wheat-blonde hair, left her scalp in a different pattern, framed her face in a new way.

  Gone was the tiger-eye; through the cut cyan glass he could not see the amber flecks he'd expected. Peter thought of Tragedy and Comedy with their eyeballs gouged out. Glass could be sharp and sneaky. The eyes, the only humanity the glass masque would permit him, were the amplified blue of the Arctic sky, a color you saw if you held a flawless blue-white diamond to the sun. Peter fancied he saw a borealis in each.

  She removed her masque - it was on a wand - and smiled at him. "Have we met, sir?" It was neutrally pleasant; an open, civil smile for an as-yet-unintroduced friend.

  He tried to say her name and his voice drowned. His hand tried to reach for one of hers but didn't quite make it.

  Willard Pell cast a nervous glance - he had to - toward his clique before cutting in and snatching the hand Peter had missed. He was almost petulant. "Uh - Peter?" He stammered. "Why, Peter Deutsch! I'd ... um ... like you to meet my fiancée, Michelle -"

  Her smile harpooned Peter, and emptied him of hope. It was more notice than he'd given her upon their first meeting, at another party, so far away now, and her smile had not changed in any way. Peter knew its form indelibly. And now, in its depths, he saw nothing of himself, nothing for him, nothing whatsoever.

  "I'm sure you've seen Peter's work, love, he's the one who - ah, directed, right? - Mad Horizon, and -"

  Her teeth are identical. Peter thought through rocking waves of disorientation. The veins in her neck trace exactly the same way. Her smile, her eyes.

  "Geez, what was the name of that miniseries you did for Daystar last year?"

  It was bullshit, pungent, Hollywood's finest kind, and Peter was expected to spoon it up like everybody else. It was why the pay scale was so high. "Dead Steady," he said, empty of inflection.

  The woman smiled at him diplomatically, from a vast distance, as Pell leaned forward. "Peter," he whispered, "What in hell is the matter, man? You look like a sack full of curb scoopings." The writer's face was a runny amalgam of mild shock, slight embarrassment, fair-weather brotherhood, light revulsion.

  You deserve everything good in the world.

  From the stool, M. Rogoff nodded, a buoy in a typhoon. Already Pell's group sought some detour from Peter. It's okay - he's been drinking. Peter backed off with a choked-off utterance he hoped sounded apologetic. I heard he actually signed to do that garbage script for SINNER. He had to get back to M. Rogoff. He hasn't been the same since his second wife dumped him, I heard.

  His mouth was amazingly dry. M. Rogoff handed him a delicate stem goblet of amber wine.

  "You see?"

  Peter gulped the wine, then pinched the bridge of his nose hard enough to whiten flesh against bone. He renewed his long-distance overview of the woman in the blue gown. "It is. Christ. It's her." His face was contorted by a soft wonder. It was nearly awe. Beneath it, the anger remained, on hold. "What have you done to her? I don't understand how this can happen. Who - ?"

  He was cut off by M. Rogoff. "Ask me just who I think I am; that's next." He patted Peter's shoulder. Good puppy. "Now we can go talk a bit in a more salubrious atmosphere. And eat. I'm famished, young man. These cocktail calories just won't suffice."

  Peter tried to stop the little man as he gave up the barstool. "No. We can't. Can't go. I can't just leave her. Here. Like this."

  M. Rogoff took his hand again. Frankenstein leading his feckless creation. "Dear Peter. My friend. She is not yours to leave, or take. Can't you understand?"

  Peter did not understand.

  Peter. Get out of here.

  The party sloshed noisily into the hole left by their departure. Five minutes later, it was as if the director and his eccentric little companion had never been there at all.

  In the elevator, M. Rogoff tapped the panel for the sub-basement and the doors knifed back to frame the chintzless underpinnings of the Tower - concrete corridors, stacked cardboard boxes, cold fluorescent tubes; workers' restrooms, dead inventory.

  Peter remembered the tunnels. Universities had them, government buildings had them, Disneyland had them, and the Tower, that maze of shape-shifting modular offices and incredible shrinking tenures, had them in spider-web profusion. They were the secret panels that the veepees and attorneys used to shuttle script revisions, executive edicts, and angst from one soundstage to another. They accommodated electric golf carts. M. Rogoff and Peter hoofed it.

  The tunnel into which M. Rogoff led him was damp and poorly lit; Stage 13 was gloomy and oppressive.

  "Where are we now?"

  "Safest place in the world," said M. Rogoff, his voice booming in the stage's cathedral acoustics. Light bled into the vast and empty blankness, then gushed, and Peter's pupils shied from the brightness as he saw a bank of lighting rheostats with M. Rogoff's white-gloved hands on the levers.

  They were standing in a graveyard. The little man's eyes sparkled with their own interior current.

  It was a movie sham-Necropolis, larger than death, an exaggeration. Studding a carpet of gray moss were chipped and canted monuments, custom-eroded to highlight their uniform age and
decay. They were boxy and massive; the names emblazoned upon them, ostentatious. Lost memories that had never existed. Tombstones of this ilk were illegal now in sunny Southern Cal. Ordinances demanded that grave markers lie flush with the turf to facilitate grounds keeping.

  This was not real. Peter's eye shifted to director mode. The set was huge and visually contiguous; shots could be effected from almost any angle. Tinder-dead prop trees leaned upward without off-camera support. No visible wires. A forced-perspective crypt stood in arrogant shadow against what he assumed to be a large sky cyclorama, shaded for twilight. It would dissolve to an impressionistic limbo once the smoke hoses were turned on. The whole gag was a monster movie; vintage 1940s.

  They were beyond backstage, two paces deeper than behind the scenes, alone in the dark heart of the cinema beast.

  This evening Peter had been shown what he'd asked to see ... and the sight had ruptured a valve in him, greedily suctioning out the dregs of his emotional pain. He'd been left giddy and reeling. He felt just like Wile E. Coyote on the downside, snoot bashed crooked and eyes crossed, just as the cliff ledge shears away an inch past his clutching toes. The plunge into the bottomless blue of Alea's new eyes had rendered him vacant even of pain, and everything might somehow come out all right - if only he did not look down.

  "Peter?"

  Chemical mist seemed to follow M. Rogoff down into the middle of the cemetery. "Don't gawk back at the reality we just left. Do come forward, into this one." He resumed his window shopping amongst the tombstones. "That Forest Lawn. Pah! A disaster area. Immortality of a most repugnant sort. Ah. Right here, I should think." Peter waded in and caught up with the little man at a stone oblong like a tipped-over refrigerator. The name etched into each face in florid Gothic characters was DEUTSCH.

  M. Rogoff cracked his Gladstone bag. With a magician's flourish he shook out a checked tablecloth, spreading out the creases atop the gravestone, which rose to waist height. "Voila!" Next came neat plastic cases containing summer sausage, a wedge of white cheddar, a cluster of green seedless grapes. A skinny loaf of sourdough bread followed. No preservatives. A pair of matching goblets in hand-blown green glass. A knife. A flagon of wine with a crooked cork.

  "Good heavens!" Peter said. "You forgot the candies."

  "Tut, tut." M. Rogoff withdrew a pair of thin tapers. They were wilted into bow shapes. "Light these, please, while I eat. I'll try to be satiated by the time you arrive at the next of the questions burning into your soul." He set about slicing precisely into his viands. "Isn't it intriguing?"

  Peter balanced the first lit taper into a puddle of melted wax. It froze and held. The candles smelled of jasmine. This time he spoke his line on cue: "Isn't what intriguing?"

  "Two hours ago, all you could think of was seeing her again." M. Rogoff chewed and swallowed a mouthful of bread and sausage. "You'll notice she wasn't on your mind again until I mentioned it. Have some more wine?'

  The bottle unstoppered musically, and Rogoff poured more of the mystic yellow wine Peter had already sampled at the party. They watched as amber liquid met green glass and produced a mellow blue light. Its taste made Peter hungry. He filched a disk of sausage and reluctantly let it bring his appetite back. He had tried to run too far powered by alcohol and stubbornness alone.

  "What is the next question burning in my ... you know."

  "You wish to know - why you? Why all this pain for you."

  Almost everything M. Rogoff said hurt. This did not. Instead of feeling exhausted, Peter was beginning to feel tired, yet capable. "Isn't there enough pain for everyone? Did I get a double share or something?"

  "Yes to the first question, no to the second. You were specially chosen. I never choose frivolously. Ah. See? You can hold the steamroller impulses of youth in check. That's refreshing. It allows an old man like me to indulge his sense of the dramatic. Some of us can't help viewing life from the proscenium arch, don't you know." He popped grapes into his mouth as conversational punctuation.

  "I noticed," Peter said. "Presto change-o." The scalpel jabbed his soul; took a biopsy.

  "Pah! Even our dear Mr. Pell shall derive ultimate benefit from his private pain. But only for his art, and thus, for himself. There is another great novel in his future."

  "He loses a blonde and gains a magnum opus by suffering? Terrific formula for success you've worked up, there. Maybe you could bottle it. How are you at suicides?"

  "No need to get caustic, Mr. Deutsch. Hear me out. You have much more to accomplish than does Mr. Pell. That woman will serve the purpose for him the way her Alea incarnation did for you. But you are not merely going to make an artful film. I would not have selected and cultivated your emotions and brought you here if that were all. I need you to do still more. For me. Permit me a touch of uncertainty as I search for the correct words... you are very special and I've never tried to present a case like this before."

  "Hm. I owe you so much."

  "You shall. What do you think of what you saw upstairs tonight?" M. Rogoff's voice notched down into dead seriousness.

  Peter had devoted some meditation to that one. "It implies processes I don't even want to consider.

  "Au. But regardless, you still love her boundlessly, and would do nearly anything to win her back, correct? You see the path as insane. The destination to which it leads is quite rational. That's not linear thinking." He speared a shard of cheese with the knife, using it to point at Peter. "You, sir, are a true romantic."

  The draughts of amber wine were buffering Peter's adrenaline and calming his raging stomach. His head stopped hurting. He felt extraordinarily lucid. "And you - sir - have never been in love. Of course. Have never made such an ass of yourself."

  "Au contraire, dear Peter - how do you think I got this job?" That was good for one more near-overload of Peter's circuits. His eyes flashed up to meet the little man's. Trauma lurked in there, laying ambush.

  "Oh, I know what you're going through about now," M. Rogoff proceeded. "And I'm very good at what I do. You are proof?'

  "Great. I feel like shit. Which, according to Willard Pell, I also look like. Doggy doo, to be specific."

  "Normally, I would have been finished with you the other night," M. Rogoff elucidated. "And now you would be in Vancouver, morbidly filming a depressing box office failure. Naturally, you'd continue to work. But you'd never get better than average. Better than 'cute.’"

  Again the scalpel, poking minute holes, starting leaks. "But I had to go and get chosen by you," said Peter. He toasted the little man with a smirk and found his glass empty. "Wonderful. But what for?" The pallid cemetery fog stank of CO2, and dry ice. "Now what?"

  "Now your career will regain lost ground and sail into the black." M. Rogoff was still eating. "I tell you now that this shall be a project that shall dwarf all your previous achievements - ahem! - drawing its inspiration from the most unusual of biographies." One gloved finger jutted skyward as he struck a declamatory pose. "My own!"

  Incredibly pleased with himself, he held the pose and watched Peter's awareness dawn by degrees. Peter's glass drifted down. He shook his head, then spoke, to the gravestones. "Son of a bitch. It really is true. Every single person in this goddamn town WANTS TO GET INTO THE FUCKING MOVIES - !"

  The little man recoiled a half step, hat tottering, his chin pulled in at Peter's outburst. "I was hoping you would accept your good fortune with a bit more, ah, decorum. Peter, I was expecting a tot more gratitude."

  "Gratitude - !" Peter had quickly learned he could discomfit his opponent by screaming. He enjoyed watching the little man flinch. In fact, this felt pretty goddamned good.

  "What has happened to manners, respect?" M. Rogoff was running on, like a dribbling faucet, back in monologue-land. "That is what one reaps from tilling a solitary field, I venture. Hm! No sense of peers, of community! One loses touch, I suppose, eh? Well! I am not accustomed to such ... extreme and -"

  "Stop prattling or I'll yell again" Peter overrode flatly. He sensed l
everage. Maybe now was the time to haggle.

  "Young man, as of this moment you know more about me and my work than any mortal. I've outlived generations of my ... well, my subjects."

  "Your victims."

  "Mine is a story that needs to be told, and by someone of your fine sensibilities," he continued, suddenly seeming no more confident than the hungry independents and self-conscious on-spec writers Peter routinely fielded as a necessary evil.

  "You're not kidding?" He felt groggy. "You actually believe I'd do something like that for you?"

  "I'm not a child, Peter?" M. Rogoff turned his tone cold and pragmatic. He was quite adept at speed-shifting. "You would do anything for even the slimmest chance at getting Alea back, if only for a moment, so you could tell her the lines you so need to tell her."

  A shudder squeezed its chilly egress up Peter's backbone. He had dismissed Alea from this weird equation, concentrating on how best to blot out the dull ache of loss. Now the boneyard made hideously logical sense. This was the ultimate Hollywood pitch: the deal making over comestibles, complete with clandestine bribery and the ceremonial proffering of perks. Have your girl's machine call mine; we'll do lunch. Sometimes such words were the invitation to one's own execution. Now Peter perceived the proposition, and it provoked a shiver in him despite the warm glow of the booze.

  M. Rogoff gave the nail one more good whack before Peter could react. "Now - given that you must learn literally everything about me in order to faithfully represent me in a script, why not then take the next step and do it? Take my actual place in the world. My inheritance is yours."

  "Wow. Such a deal." Peter was hanging tough.

  "I am a durable old wretch but I shan't last forever. Maurice, as you've seen, would make a lamentable replacement. This art form demands so much more - excellent taste, finesse, a stringent sense of proportion, stylish choice-making, and, most critically, timing. That last, I think, is a specialty of yours?"