Amnesiascope Read online

  Next thing I realized I had drifted off awhile. Maybe it was minutes and maybe it was an hour; but the light in the door at the top of the stairs had gone off, and someone had turned off the light of the pool, where the bathysphere floated like a dark tumor. Looking around I was a little surprised to find myself alone in the living room, and I got up and started wandering around, peering into the unlit room where Jasper had shown off to Viv her mementos of the past. I made my way up the stairs. I passed the dark study where Jasper’s father or stepfather or whoever he was had disappeared, and kept moving up the stairs toward the bedroom at the top, just barely conscious that there was no rail to catch me if I misstepped and tumbled down some random shaft that would deposit me God knows where, in a field of flames or off the side of a cliff or somewhere north of San Luis Obispo.

  The bedroom was dark as well. Even at the top of the house, sixty feet above the ground, I could feel the heat of the surrounding moat. Before the windows and the vista of the faraway hills that embraced the city like the ridge of a volcano’s crater, something was happening on the bed. Jasper was lying on her back, no longer wearing the phallus that now lay beside her face; her profile shone in the blue light. Her eyes were open but she was so still and unblinking I thought she could almost be dead except for the sound coming from her, a gorgeous low rattle that was not from her lips but all of her. In the blue light of the room I could see her whole wet body shudder as though she was going to crumble into pieces any minute like a fractured statue. The sight of her brought roaring up from the middle of me this dark scavenger appetite ready to swoop down on the rubble of her; in her hands she clutched something between her legs like a nest, and I half expected a bird to fly out of her. Then I saw it was Viv’s hair in her hands and Viv was drinking her. Her eyes were closed. Jasper tried to pull her up inside her. She began to thrash to the rattle coming out of her, and Viv was holding her down to the bed by her wrists when the rattle burst and I could hear everything inside Jasper wash out in a tide. “My God, stop,” Jasper groaned as Viv continued. Finally Viv stopped. Still nestled in Jasper’s thighs she opened her eyes, staring straight at me. When she pulled back from Jasper I could see, just beyond Jasper’s pubic hair, the swollen glint—from an unaccountable light much brighter than any inside this room or out beyond the windows—of a ring, in the shape of a cat.

  On the way home, the first pink shred of sunrise peering over the canyon, Viv, who was sitting in the front seat for a change, suddenly began to sob. What is it? I said. Suddenly she was crying violently and all I could do was pull the car over to the side of the road. What is it, what is it? I kept saying, trying to clutch her to me as she leaned into the car door. I might have expected her to answer anything else but what she did. “No one will ever love her!” she cried. “The only people she’ll ever know will be the ones who don’t really care about her at all. She’ll just wind up all by herself, all alone.” Come on Viv, I muttered, trying to pry her loose from the door, and she hadn’t been in my arms five seconds before the crying stopped and she was fast asleep.

  It was a few days after Viv’s party, and the night at Jasper’s house, that I saw the Red Angel of Los Angeles in her little red Corvette. It was only for a moment, and she was pulling out of an alley right at the end of Jacob Hamblin Road, which couldn’t have been more incongruous. I was in my own car and for a while I tried to follow her, swerving in and out of traffic to keep up as she headed east toward Hollywood, until she suddenly seemed to disappear into the red air of the backfires. …

  After that, Justine became my quest. I think I knew, somewhere inside me, that it was really a search for something else, though I didn’t know what; for so long I had barely been aware that there was anything I wanted to search for. But lately I had felt the chasm between me and memory closing when it seemed it should have been growing wider, and I figured if anyone had transcended memory it was Justine, who for twenty years had fixed herself to the L.A. moment. I called back the phone number I had called before, when she had actually answered with the most unexpected Hello I ever heard; this time she didn’t answer, this time there was the machine I thought I would get the first time, banally identifying itself as the number for the International Justine Fan Club and inviting me to leave my name, number and purpose for calling. I told the machine I was a newspaper writer looking for an interview, though I could just imagine what Shale would think of that, on the heels of rejected pieces about spiritual strip joints and reviews of movies that didn’t exist. For several nights I went to one club after another on the chance I’d spot her making the scene. But that really didn’t make any sense: Justine didn’t make the scene, she was the scene, and the best that could be hoped for was that she would happen to cruise by in her red Corvette just long enough for those coming out of the clubs to say they had witnessed her, like one witnesses the Miracle of Fatima or the streak across the sky of a UFO.

  Then I returned home one night and there, on my machine, was her voice. She sounded just like she should have, like the very image of herself that was on the billboard. She left an address she said was “in the Hollywood Hills,” but no date or time; as someone with a memory for dates and times, I’m sure of that. I had never heard of this address, so I pulled out a map and started looking. It was nowhere to be found. In the hills I conducted personal reconnaissance missions, driving around figuring I’d stumble on the street sooner or later, but I never did, at least not until the one night several weeks afterward when I was returning from visiting my mother in the Valley and was forced by a backfire to take a detour; and there it was. It was just off Ventura Boulevard, hardly on the glamorous side of the Hollywood Hills, or what anyone really thinks of as the Hollywood Hills.

  I don’t want to get your hopes up, so I guess I better mention right now that I never did see Justine. I know you’re anticipating a big rendezvous, but you might as well forget it. Instead something else happened, not as interesting as Justine, I grant you, but I found the address, an old white Spanish style house; one look at it and it was obvious no one had lived there for years, certainly not for as long as Justine had been popping up on billboards all over L.A. Nonetheless I got out and walked around in the dark peering through broken windows and over the fence that ran alongside the house, when it finally came to me. It came not in a flash or a sudden rush but rather in bits and pieces that gradually arranged themselves in my head—at which point the chasm between me and memory vanished altogether; and I couldn’t have been more shocked.

  It was the Stutter School, or what I used to call the Stutter School when I came twice a week at the age of nine, once in the morning when it was just myself and a counselor, and then once in the evening with the other kids. I had forgotten it completely and now, pulling myself over the fence and wandering around the backyard in the dark, under the overhanging tree where once had been a swing and around the abandoned jungle gyms that now seemed tiny replicas of what I had once climbed on, I wanted to forget it again. Not because it was so bad; actually it wasn’t bad at all. The people who ran the school treated me well and I remember getting along all right with the other kids too, though I never understood why any of them were there, since none of them stuttered as far as I could tell at the time. As far as I could tell at the time they might have all been rounded up just to keep me company. (“He’s coming today! Round up those little kids!”) In the morning sessions with the counselor I don’t remember any serious, wrenching, painful discussions of childhood traumas or torments, I just remember playing in the house or out in the yard, whatever I wanted to do; the only requirement was that I had to talk, about anything, the counselor interjecting himself just enough to keep the monologue going. Soon it was like talking to myself. I don’t remember the subject of stuttering ever coming up, though even then I understood that was why I was there. And it’s because that was why I was there that I allowed it some time ago to recede into the red air of memory as quickly as it wanted to; and now here was the Stutter School at, of all
places, the address Justine had given me. I had been searching for the moment to which Justine fixed herself in defiance of memory, in the same way L.A. itself defies memory, and instead I was confronted by a memory I had long forgotten, and it seemed like quite a trick, like people chattering about a movie they know perfectly well doesn’t exist.

  I didn’t hang around very long. I certainly wasn’t going to get nostalgic about it. I left after awhile, and I didn’t look for Justine anymore.

  I’m sitting in the dark drinking tequila, listening to a Mongolian soprano on Station 3 and what sounds like a dance orchestra from Venus. I am concentrating on the sound of my breath, because when my head is in the future and my body is in the past, my breath is the one thing I know is in the present. My apartment does not exist in the dark; when I turn on the lights the walls appear—the shelves, the furniture, the panes of the window, the metal beams that bolt the walls to the floor so that, when the earth shakes, the two do not become separated—but when the lights are off, the suite takes on its true nature, which is as a chamber of night, the lights and hills of the city rushing in through the windows and the walls blown away by a howling sky no metal beams can stop. …

  Under a moon the color of flesh, that shines behind the smoke and a cloud that appears about to explode, L.A. surrounds me in amnesiascope. It stretches from the quays of the L.A. River to the holographic pissoirs of Burton Way, from the eucalyptuses of Jacob Hamblin Road etched so sharp before the streetlamps they look like smashed glass to the domed mosques of Baghdadville, shimmering in the light of the stars. Gazing due west from my apartment window, about halfway between me and the sea, I can actually see the spires of Black Clock Park, the time capsule cemetery that lies just beyond the rafters of the old freeway. There aren’t many visitors to the park anymore. I don’t even remember the last time I was there. People used to wander the knolls from one stainless steel tombstone to the next reading the dates when each cylinder had been buried and was scheduled to be unearthed, in fifty or a hundred years or, among the more optimistic, a thousand. But now only the fallen white leaves of the barren white trees blow along the rows of the graves, and birds peck at the earth in pursuit of a mystery memento within: an interred photo or scrapbook, a diary or confession, a newspaper clipping or the ring of a broken engagement or the tape of a favorite song played on a night of sex.

  I live in the Border Time Zone of Los Angeles, which is more commonly called Zed Time, because on a map the zone is shaped somewhat like a Z. It runs in a long strip along the southern edge of Sunset Boulevard from Bel Air out to Crescent Heights, where it slashes down all the way to Venice Boulevard and then cuts east again to Downtown. At one point or another it borders Mulholland Time in the Hollywood Hills, Hollywood Time in the east, and Ocean Time in the west and Compton Time in the south. Out beyond the Glow Lofts and the Los Angeles River and the Downtown Time Zone is Daybreak Time, and out beyond the Ocean Time Zone, running up from Baghdadville to Zuma, is Oblivion Time. After you’ve lived in L.A. long enough you learn to work the zones so as to keep yourself in net plus time; if you hit all the green lights driving out on San Vicente Boulevard, for instance, you can arrive where you’re going twenty-three minutes before you left. In our early days Viv and I always arranged our various rendezvous and assignations in whatever zone would get us a few extra minutes together, and up on Sunset near the corner of Jacob Hamblin Road, in front of the Chateau Marmont where the hookers flag down traffic, a girl can walk across the street to Mulholland Time if she wants to move the night along a little faster, or cross back to Zed Time if she wants eke out a few extra minutes for a few extra dollars. …

  Tonight Carl calls from New York. Lately he’s been calling every week or so. Carl is some kind of computer traffic guru in Manhattan, mandating and eliminating roads and bridges with the snap of his fingers. I imagine him in a huge war room of sorts, surrounded by four towering wall-size flashing grids of streets and bus routes and subway tracks. Carl is the brother I never had, which somehow makes it appropriate that he is so far away and that the distance matters so little; for twenty years the life of our brotherhood has been formed of conversations every two or three weeks or months, two or three letters a year, visits every year or two when we simply pick up wherever we last left off. We met in Europe where I was always bumping into him on trains—trains to Toulouse, trains to Venice and Vienna and Brussels—and we wandered the streets of Paris ridiculously fashioning ourselves as romantic figures, unwrapping sugar cubes in cafes and wishing they were women. We are the opposite poles of our dialectic brotherhood, East Coast-worldly-bon-vivant-doubting-Jew and West Coast-antisocial-misfit-deist-by-default, and since we met he’s been waiting for me to write a novel about a subject truly worthy of my time and energy; giving it a great deal of thought he’s even come up with a title: Carl’s Story. These days Carl calls with news of Los Angeles. It’s the nature of L.A. that the local news is broadcast to observers three thousand miles away who then report it back to us. It was Carl who informed me when the city was under martial law, which accounted for all those tanks and Jeeps I saw on the streets the night I was late for Dr. Billy O’Forte’s wedding. Thus only those outside of Los Angeles know what’s going on here, while only those inside know what’s really happening. Carl beseeches me to get the hell out. “Are you still there?” he says frantically, each time I answer the phone. L.A. is all that’s left of America the Delirious. Long ago, in the movie theaters of the land, L.A. collectivized the American dark; it cleaned up the depraved whispers and messier impulses of America’s deeper recesses and reduced them to archetypes or, even better, commodities. L.A. insisted that the subconscious didn’t own us but we owned it; a more American aspiration is hard to imagine. Now east of L.A. rolls America the Mean. The thin membrane between the delirious and the mean, between L.A. and the rest of the country, is an America of the mind that will explode any moment, if it has any life left in it at all, or will expire with a hush, if we should be so lucky. Beyond L.A. is the new America that got sick of being America, and of its own sentimental promise; for years you could feel every passion slipping away except rage, you could hear every conversation about the meaning of America framed by the decadent on the one hand and the repressed on the other who shared the same common belief that sensuality was meaningless beyond mere sensation or sheer procreation. This was the new America that came to feel more beset by freedom than invigorated by it, that was ready to hand everything over to anyone who would just fucking take charge. Now in L.A., street by street, block by block, step by step, door by door, all that’s left of the old America is under siege. I catch sight of it from time to time: a fleeting glimpse at the top of the stairs, or outside rustling in the bushes. This is the old America of legend and distant memory, that invested no faith in the wisdom of history and no hope in the sham of the future, the old America that invented itself all over from the ground up every single day. It is the brazen America, the reckless one, the one with the lit fuse, the America that ejaculates not by habit but for the intoxicating pleasure of it, the America where no precaution is sufficient and nothing will protect you, no passport or traveling papers, no opportune crucifix or gas soaked torch, no sunglasses or decoder box or cyanide capsule, no ejector seat or live wire or secret identity or reconstructed tissues or unmarked grave or faked death. It’s the America that was originally made for those who believed in nothing else, not because they believed there was nothing else but because for them, without America, nothing else was worth believing.

  I’ve tried to leave L.A. before. Tried in Paris, tried in Amsterdam and Berlin; even lived in New York years ago for about six months, until I woke one morning to the sound of a strange hiss in my head and realized it was my imagination turning to dry ice. But L.A. has always pulled me back, and it wasn’t until I saw it dying, wasn’t until I saw it in its last throes and its last exhilarating thrash for life, wasn’t until my eyes were flush with the glow of its overripeness and my lungs were filled with th
e perfume of its rot, that I loved it. Now when I leave L.A., it’s only for the sensation of returning. Now I’ve become a very bad traveler, nervous on the road and out of sorts with myself, when I’m gone from L.A. too long. Now when I return, as soon as I cross the city line, I know I’m back in L.A. because I recognize it by its women; they’re not like the women of anywhere else, they rampage in a way that’s endemic to Los Angeles, wild like the animals that flee a fire in the hills. They emerge from out of the city’s cinder heaps glistening with menstrual smoke, and recently Viv and I have noticed that every single one of them looks familiar. We’ve racked our brains trying to place them, before realizing they all auditioned for us: the hostess in the restaurant is the one who just arrived from Maryland, the woman at the next table is the one who wouldn’t take off her clothes. And the one laughing at the bar, wasn’t she the one who …? That they’re all beautiful, these women, means nothing. They’re auditioning, that’s what makes them Los Angeles women, and they’re auditioning for more than a movie, for more than fame or success. In L.A. famous people are a dime a dozen and beautiful people a nickel a dozen, which makes people famous for being beautiful barely worth a red cent; in L.A. both the awe of and contempt for beauty have been raised to an art form. The contempt is for a gift that time and experience detract from rather than enhance, a gift that reaches its zenith in a single dazzling moment, a day or an hour or a minute when a woman blossoms to her most impossibly beautiful, whereupon the autumn of age begins, instantly and indiscernibly, to weather the petals. The awe is far more complicated. Of course it goes without saying that this awe has a distinctly male gasp to it. It goes without saying that it’s men who get particularly silly about beauty—to which I offer this familiar, pathetic male whine: we can’t help it. As Ventura puts it, a beautiful woman is the face of our dreams. Those dreams may span the psychic spectrum from primal to infantile to transcendent but they’re our dreams nonetheless, and down in the ego-muck of the barbaric male that dream is likelier to be embodied by a beautiful face than any other vision. And as Viv puts it, Los Angeles is the Ellis Island of beauty, not just because beauty crosses its borders on a regular basis but because, like those who once came to Ellis Island not just for a new home but to be part of the American dream, beauty immigrates to Los Angeles not just to trade on its surface allure but to become the face of people’s dreams. Manhattan and Paris and Milan may teem with beautiful women who are also in the business of beauty, but in Los Angeles that business is more than selling merchandise. L.A. is where the objectification of beauty is tethered directly to the subconscious.