The Hollywood Spiral

by Paul Neilan

  “Fucking Harrigan,” Clyde said, patting my cheek twice with his big hand. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you, kid.”

  He turned to Lorentz. “That fucking screen’s busted again! I thought you fixed it!”

  “Zodiac must’ve sent out another security patch,” Lorentz said. “I can bypass it—”

  “Then fucking bypass it already! I’ve got shit to do!” Clyde said. “Lompoc! Stop bleeding everywhere! You’re making a mess!”

  I turned to go. Evie’s hand brushed mine in the doorway.

  “I’m not done with you yet, Harrigan,” she said.

  I ignored the sidelong look from Eddie Lompoc, followed her outside.

  Back at my place she sat up in bed, lit a cigarette, laid down again with her hair tangled on the pillow.

  “Who did you used to be, Harrigan?” Evie said, exhaling. “Before all this?”

  “I grew up in Jersey,” I said.

  “What was that like?” she said.

  “Every day was You’re dead, you hear me!” I said. “You Irish potato eatin piece a—oh shit. What time is it? I gotta go call my ma! I gotta see what we’re havin for dinner. I hope it’s antipast and manigott. Skoonjeel and gollmod. My uncle’s comin over. My fuckin cousin from Bloomfield! You seen that commercial? You know the one. I got the Motts, what do you got? That’s him. That’s my fucking cousin! Not the main guy, the other one. The one on the phone. You know who I’m talkin about. My fuckin cousin from Bloomfield! Swear to God, I love that kid. All right, don’t go nowhere. You’re fuckin dead when I get back. I gotta go call my ma! You leave you’re a pussy. I’m gonna kill you, you hear me? I gotta go call my ma!”

  “Then what?” she said.

  “The next day was What happened to you yesterday ya little bitch?” I said. “You were gone when I got back. You run home cryin to your mommy? No, I had to go to Bloomfield. Eat some applesauce. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? I don’t know either.”

  She passed me the cigarette. I ashed into an empty glass, drew the smoke in.

  “How about you?” I said.

  “I’ve never been to Bloomfield,” she said.

  “You’re better off,” I said.

  “I was always who I am,” she said. “Even when I was small.”

  “Daddy’s little girl,” I said, passing the cigarette back.

  “Mommy didn’t give me much choice,” she said. “She left without saying goodbye.”

  The tip glowed like a hot coal in the dark.

  “She knew how I was,” she said. “Even then. She knew how it’d go.”

  “You blame yourself?” I said.

  “I blame her,” Evie said, smoke escaping through her tight lips. “I blame Clyde. I blame everybody.”

  “He doesn’t want you in the life,” I said. “Pulling jobs. Running with a crew.”

  “He should’ve thought of that before he raised me in it,” she said. “I could shoot a .32 before I knew how to tie my shoes.”

  “He had nothing else to teach you,” I said. “He showed you what he knew. Can’t fault him for that.”

  “I can fault him all I want,” she said. “The business is changing. He doesn’t want to see it.”

  “Zodiac,” I said.

  “They started crooked, same as anybody else,” she said. “Skimming data feeds, poaching profiles, cornering the market until they snuffed out their competition. Nobody gets that big without breaking a few backs along the way. They don’t just want their own piece. They’re after the whole city.”

  “We’re still getting by,” I said.

  “You heard Kaiserman,” she said. “Zodiac’s moving in. They’re already running downtown. Passing out rings to all the major players. We’re squabbling with other crews for scraps while they’re taking over. It’s long past time to cut bait or pick sides.”

  “Clyde would never go corporate,” I said. “Zodiac’s not his style.”

  “What about you, Harrigan?” she said. “What would you do to survive?”

  I thought about it. “I wouldn’t go against the old man,” I said. “He brought me in when I first came out here, my face full of applesauce.”

  I had nothing when I washed up in the city, stars in my eyes and a hunger in my belly. Until the night I pulled a gun on Clyde Faraday on the street, told him to empty his pockets. Instead of taking it off me, teaching me some manners, he smiled and said, You ever drink champagne? Come with me, kid.

  “I owe him that much,” I said.

  “Loyalty’s not your look,” she said. “You’re going against him now, here with me. What do you think he’d do if he found out?”

  “That’s different,” I said, looking at her in the dark.

  “How?” she said. “Show me.”

  I took the cigarette from between her lips, still smoking. Kissed her. I kept going, up La Brea, a little shaken at the memory. A gray ghost drifted towards me—the same long robe, same hood—dragging a garbage can behind them. I took the same pamphlet as they passed, folded it in my pocket. There was a Wellness clinic on the corner of Santa Monica, people lined up out the door, waiting for their meds. Their psych clearance. Their official pat on the head.

  I kept going, hung a right on Hollywood Boulevard, the stars showing in the sidewalk. The Walk of Fame, Hollywood royalty rolled out like a red carpet to be stepped on and scuffed up by tourists and shit on by stray dogs every day, then hosed down in the morning to do it all over again. I left them to their immortality, moved into the bustle of the bazaar.

  Screens blared from every angle, advertisements and simulations, hawkers pulling at my sleeves.

  Grid. Is. Good. When life gives you lemons, Grid makes you lemonade. Grid bakes you a lemon sponge cake. Grid puts those lemons in the freezer and stuffs them in a tube sock and then beats the shit out of life the next time it tries to pass its half-assed citrus off on you. Don’t take what life gives you. Take what you want. Take what you deserve. Take what’s yours. Grid. Is. Good.

  There were snake charmers and bare-knuckle-fight promoters, fire eaters twirling their batons. Music wound through the narrow walkway, crowded on both sides, sitars and synths and theremins in a spastic quiver of sound beneath the rain hammering on the sheeting strung above.

  Grid. Is. Good. Chase your dreams! That’s what they tell you. Don’t listen. Don’t chase. Never chase. Not liquor. Not love. Definitely not your dreams. What you do is follow them. Find out where they live. Then strangle them in their beds, before they do the same thing to you. Why dream when you can simulate? Dreams are for cowards who aren’t in control. Live awake. Simulate. Grid. Is. Good.

  I found booth #21, a quieter spot dotted with paper lanterns, Japanese characters drawn on the sides. Jade figurines and crystals hung on necklaces from the walls. Rounded idols carved in soapstone squatted on the ramshackle shelves. The guy behind the counter had long oily hair halfway down his back. He was wearing fatigues and an olive overshirt with a tricolor patch sewn on the sleeve.

  “Help you with something?” he said, like he wasn’t much interested.

  “I’m looking for Sloan,” I said.

  He eyed me from behind the counter. “Never heard of her,” he said.

  “No?” I said. “I never said her.”

  “It’s a girl’s name, Sloan,” he said.

  “Could be a last name,” I said.

  “You asking or telling?” he said, pushing his bony shoulders back.

  “Neither,” I said. “I’m saying.”

  He came around the counter, pulled a curtain across the front of the booth, closing us off from the screens.

  “What was that name again?” he said.

  “We’ve been through this already,” I said. “That’s why you closed the drapes, remember?”

  “Who sent you?” he said.

  “Lorentz,” I said.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “Like I told you, I want to see Sloan,” I said. “How long do you want to pl
ay this game?”

  He looked me up and down.

  “That’s just the thing, ese. This ain’t no game,” he said, pulling his hair forward in his hands like he was tugging on a rope. “In the great war, the Navajo Rangers were the best trackers, better even than the Green Berets. When they asked them why, the Rangers said it was because tribal custom told them not to cut their hair. It made them more sensitive to their environment. Their surroundings. Even acted as a lie detector during interrogations, they said.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “What’s your hair telling you about me?”

  “That you’re fucking suspect, that’s what,” he said, going around the counter and ducking through a flap in the sheeting. “Come with me.”

  I followed him down a passageway, through the back side of the bazaar, the thrum of activity pulsing around us. We came onto a backstreet and walked half a block to a run-down building on Hawthorn. He rang the buzzer, stuck his face into the screen.

  “It’s Alvarez,” he said. “I’ve got company.”

  The door opened and I followed him inside. We went up two flights of stairs, into a hallway with threadbare carpeting and a broken light overhead. He stopped at the last door on the left, knocked three times, then twice, then once, then once more before opening the door.

  “After you,” Alvarez said.

  I went through, into a room with fluorescent lights in horizontal bars along one wall, a dark screen on the other, reflecting the glare. There was an open doorway opposite, a black fiberglass isolation tank set against the farther wall in the other room. A low-slung chair sat in the middle of the floor like it was waiting for me.

  She stepped out from behind the door as Alvarez closed it, put the thin barrel of a silencer to my temple.

  “Fucking shoot him, Sloan,” Alvarez said, behind me. “He’s got it coming.”

  “I think I’d like that,” Sloan said, twisting the barrel like a screw. “It’s been too long.”

  She had her hair tied back in a bandanna, her harsh mouth lipsticked red and set like she was grinding her back teeth. Her movements were controlled, but there was a frenzy behind them, barely constrained, a lunatic in thin chains. It wouldn’t take much to set her off. Maybe nothing at all.

  A lithe figure stepped into the open doorway, long hair spilling out from beneath a black beret.

  “Let’s hear what he has to say first,” Aoki said.

  They sat me in the chair, facing the lights, Sloan holding the gun on me.

  “What are you doing here, Harrigan?” Aoki said, looking down at me.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” I said.

  Sloan showed me her gun again, let me look down the barrel.

  “Answer her question,” Sloan said.

  “I came to see you,” I said. “I heard you were a broker. Our friend Anna might be looking to off-load some tech. Isn’t that why you gave me her address, Aoki, hoping I’d track her down? Drive her this way?”

  “We ask. You tell,” Sloan said. “What’s the tech?”

  “It’s called Mirror Mirror,” I said. “New immersive out of the Zodiac Accelerator. A guy by the name of Stan Volga helped develop it, then stole it, and Anna swiped it from him. Aoki tried to steer it to you, but it didn’t play. You already know all this.”

  “He’s useless to us,” Alvarez said. “Shoot him.”

  “I might,” Sloan said. “Or maybe I’ll put him in the tank, let him sit in the dark for a while.”

  She held the gun under my nose, made me smell the barrel. It hadn’t been fired in a while, but she liked handling it. Liked it a little too much.

  “Tell me, Harrigan,” she said. “Do you have any idea who we are?”

  “Sloan, Aoki. Rapunzel back there goes by Alvarez,” I said.

  “Give me the gun,” Alvarez said. “I’ll shoot him myself.”

  “You’ve heard of the Parallax Liberation Faction,” Sloan said, setting the gun against my forehead.

  “The Fraction,” I said.

  They were a guerilla group who’d blown up a Zodiac building downtown to kick off the last crackdown. The displaced and the disillusioned, the outcasts who didn’t bend to Zodiac’s directives, wouldn’t roll over, resistance to the system. They used drive-by tactics, mostly Grid hacks and petty vandalism, with the occasional explosion thrown in. After their last attack Zodiac crushed the rackets and tightened their grip and the Parallax Liberation Faction went underground. They’d been quiet ever since.

  “That’s what they call us. The Fraction,” Sloan said, pulling the gun from my head. “As if it’s an insult. Like we’re less than whole. They have no idea how numbers work.”

  “We may be a fraction,” Alvarez said. “But we’re rounding up.”

  “Put him in some pigtails and his hair will conquer the world,” I said.

  “Give me the fucking gun,” Alvarez said.

  “Parallax is a way of seeing the stars from different positions,” Sloan said. “From divergent points in orbit. That’s what we’re able to do.”

  “Whatever you’re seeing up there, Zodiac already owns it,” I said.

  “They own nothing,” Sloan said. “They’ve stolen what is rightfully ours.”

  The fluorescent lights behind her gave her an electric glow. Aoki stood to the side in her beret, saying nothing.

  “It used to mean something more,” Sloan said. “Parallax was the fact of seeing wrongly, in centuries past. The archaic definitions hold the older truths. Zodiac sees this world wrongly. And we will correct it.”

  “The three of you?” I said. “Best of luck. I hope you pull it off before my Assessment comes through.”

  “We are three among many,” Alvarez said. “With Brahe’s Reckoning above there will be liberation below!”

  “Alvarez,” Aoki said, quieting him.

  “You’re counting on the comet?” I said. “Seems like a long bet.”

  “Longer than you know,” Sloan said. “Years in the making. But we know the odds better than Zodiac. Better than you.”

  “And they’d improve with Mirror Mirror,” I said.

  “This is true,” Sloan said. “It maps its own reality, an immersive breakthrough. Zodiac doesn’t know what it can do. Not yet. Time is with us, and against us.”

  “So Aoki threw me the lead on Anna’s apartment,” I said. “I’ve been your bloodhound.”

  “And you’ve led us nowhere,” Sloan said. “Bad dog.”

  She tapped me on the head with the silencer, kept her finger on the trigger.

  “What now, doggie?” Sloan said. “Do we play fetch once more or do we put you down?”

  “I say we shoot him,” Alvarez said.

  “Aoki?” Sloan said.

  Aoki stood against the wall, arms folded, a reluctant revolutionary.

  “All he asked me for was information,” she said. “That’s rare at Fatales.”

  I gave her my champagne smile.

  “Harrigan,” she said, shaking her head. “What are we going to do with you?”

  * * *

  Aoki convinced them to turn me loose. I bought a bottle on my way home, sat at my table, watched the bubbles rise as I turned it over in my head. The Parallax Liberation Faction was going up against Zodiac, whatever that meant. Anna was caught in the middle. That’s usually how it goes. I still had no idea where Stan Volga was, how to reach him, what good it would do if I did. I was back at the beginning, where I never should have started.

  I was pouring myself another glass when the door rattled. I opened it halfway.

  “You Harrigan?” he said.

  He had a thick neck and a brown hat, bags under his eyes. Cops can’t help it. They always look like themselves.

  I nodded.

  “Detective Sidowsky,” he said, flashing a badge. “Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “What about?” I said.

  “The rain, mostly,” he said, as it poured off the brim of his hat. “How it feels when it soaks through y
our shoes. How much you like standing in it like an asshole instead of being asked inside like a human being. That sort of thing.”

  I stood out of his way as he came in.

  His shoes squeaked on the floorboards. He took off his hat, a few strands of hair pasted over his bald spot like party streamers strewn over a lampshade. He looked like the morning after, like he hadn’t enjoyed himself the night before and never would.

  “Drink?” I said.

  “No,” he said.

  He looked around the room, took it in with that sweeping, suspicious cop glance.

  “You live alone,” he said, not asking.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Where were you last night, Harrigan?” he said.

  “Around,” I said.

  “Around Maxwells on Sunset?” he said, tossing it out offhand.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I could pull your file,” Sidowsky said, waving his hat. “Location data. Pinpoints. Everything they’ve got downtown.”

  “You need a warrant for that,” I said, taking a seat.

  “All I need is a reason,” he said, looking at me level. “You giving me one?”

  “Far as I can tell, I haven’t given you anything, Detective,” I said.

  “Eddie Lompoc,” he said. “Go.”

  “Who?” I said, smiled as his jaw tightened. “Big mouth, small time. He’s harmless. Why? What’d he do?”

  “He fucking died, that’s what he did,” Sidowsky said, studying me. “You don’t look surprised.”

  “I’ve got that kind of face,” I said.

  “You certainly do,” he said. He sat down across the table from me, stretched his legs. “You know something, Harrigan? I will take that drink after all.”

  I’d had just about enough of people drinking my bubbles. I poured him one anyway.

  “To Eddie,” I said.

  Sidowsky lifted his glass, smiled over the lip.

  “You boys used to run together,” he said. “Clyde Faraday’s crew. How is old Clyde anyway?”

  “You already pulled my file,” I said.

  “Look who got smart all of a sudden,” Sidowsky said. “Tell me about Maxwells. Then tell me about The Lonesome Palm.”

  “Maxwells is off Grid,” I said. “They run an open mic.”