“I’ll bear that in mind.”
Adam stood in the bathroom and recited the incantation from the napkin, half expecting to see some leering apparition take his place in the mirror as the last syllable escaped his lips. But there was just a gentle pop as the panel on his neck flexed and came loose. He caught it before it fell to the floor and placed it on a clean square of paper towel.
It was hard to see inside the opening he’d made, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to, but he found the port easily by touch alone. He walked into the bedroom, took the memory stick from the side table, then lay down and dimmed the lights. A part of him felt like an ungrateful son, trespassing on the old man’s privacy, but if he’d wanted to take his secrets to the grave then he should have taken all of his other shit with them.
Adam pushed the memory stick into place.
Nothing seemed to have happened, but when he closed his eyes he saw himself kneeling at the edge of the bed in the room down the hall, weeping inconsolably, holding the bedspread to his face. Adam shuddered; it was like being back in the servers, back in the interminable side-loading dream. He followed the thread out into the darkness, for a long time finding nothing but grief, but then he turned and stumbled upon Carlos’s funeral, riotous in its celebration, packed with gray-haired friends from New York and a dozen of Carlos’s relatives, raucously drowning out the studio executives and sync-flashing the paparazzi.
Adam walked over to the casket and found himself standing beside a hospital bed, clasping just one of those rough, familiar hands in both of his own.
“It’s all right,” Carlos insisted. There wasn’t a trace of fear in his eyes. “All I need is for you to stay strong.”
“I’ll try.”
Adam backed away into the darkness and landed on set. He’d thought it was a risky indulgence to put an amateur in even this tiny part, but Carlos had sworn that he wouldn’t take offense if his one and only performance ended up on the cutting room floor. He just wanted a chance to know if it was possible, one way or the other.
Detective Number Two said, “You’ll need to come with us, ma’am,” then took Gemma Freeman’s trembling arm in his hand as he led her away.
In the editing suite, Adam addressed Cynthia bluntly. “Tell me if I’m making a fool of myself.”
“You’re not,” she said. “He’s got a real presence. He’s not going to do Lear, but if he can hit his marks and learn his lines …”
Adam felt a twinge of disquiet, as if they were tempting fate by asking too much. But maybe it was apt. They’d propelled themselves into this orbit together; neither could have gotten here alone.
On the day they arrived, they’d talked a total stranger into breaking through a fence and hiking up Mount Lee with them so they could take each other’s photographs beneath the Hollywood sign. Adam could smell the sap from broken foliage on his scratched forearms.
“Remember this guy,” Carlos told their accomplice proudly. “He’s going to be the next big thing. They already bought his script.”
“For a pilot,” Adam clarified. “Only for a pilot.”
He rose up over the hills, watching day turn to night, waiting for an incriminating flicker of déjà vu to prove that he’d been in this city before. But the memories that came to him were all from the movies: L.A. Confidential, Mulholland Drive.
He flew east, soaring over city lights and blackened deserts, alighting back in their New York apartment, hunched over his computer, pungent with sweat, trying to block out the sound of Carlos haggling with the woman who’d come to buy their air conditioner. He stared at the screen unhappily, and started removing dialogue, shifting as much as he could into stage directions instead.
She takes his bloodied fist in both hands, shocked and sickened by what he’s done, but she understands—
The screen went blank. The laptop should have kept working in the blackout, but the battery had been useless for months. Adam picked up a pen and started writing on a sheet of paper: She understands that she pushed him into it—unwittingly, but she still shares the blame.
He stopped and crumpled the sheet into a ball. Flecks of red light streamed across his vision; he felt as if he’d caught himself trying to leap onto a moving train. But what choice did he have? There was no stopping it, no turning it back, no setting it right. He had to find a way to ride it, or it would destroy them.
Carlos called out to Adam to come and help carry the air conditioner down the stairs. Every time they stopped to rest on a darkened landing, the three of them burst out laughing.
When the woman drove away they stood on the street, waiting for a breeze to shift the humid air. Carlos placed a hand on the back of Adam’s neck. “Are you going to be all right?”
“We don’t need that heap of junk,” Adam replied.
Carlos was silent for a while, then he said, “I just wanted to give you some peace.”
When he’d taken out the memory stick and closed his wound, Adam went into the old man’s room and lay on his bed in the dark. The mattress beneath him felt utterly familiar, and the gray outlines of the room seemed exactly as they ought to be, as if he’d lain here a thousand times. This was the bed he’d been struggling to wake in from the start.
What they’d done, they’d done for each other. He didn’t have to excuse it
