Miss Wyoming

Chapter Fifteen

John finished dinner with Ivan and Nylla, then went down to the guesthouse. Doris, having declined dinner with crack baby MacKenzie, was asleep. For the first time since his return from his botched walkout he didn't feel cold dark steel down his spine. He thought back to the women he'd been with briefly during that walkout, then he thought of Susan. Turning the front door knob, it came to him that maybe he could sponge away the look of loneliness that he'd seen in Susan's eyes — and John was now pretty sure it was loneliness he'd seen, despite the smiles and the confidences. If he'd learned one thing while he'd been away, it was that loneliness and the open discussion of loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure.Loneliness is what clears out a room. Susan could be more to him than his latest box-office ranking. With Susan he might actually help for once, might actually raise something better out of himself than a hot pitch for a pointless film. Something moral and fine inside each of them might sprout and grow.

He phoned and got her answering machine again. He hung up. He felt sixteen.

When Susan didn't respond within an hour, John found his heart racing, his concentration shot. By midnight he was as buggy as he'd ever been on drugs, but without the distractions. He decided to forward his phone messages to his cell phone, then go rent tapes starring Susan. He wanted to see if the lonely look in her eye had always been there or if it was something new. He also just wanted to see her face.This is how fans feel about stars, he thought.So this is what it's like. To John, stars were just part of the flow of people through the house, like the maids, the agents and the caterers. But tonight he understood the allure of the tabloids and the fanzines.

He drove Ivan's Chrysler sedan down into West Hollywood. Ivan and Nylla preferred the sedan because of its anonymity. It didn't look like a rental car, and it didn't look, as Doris had said, «ethnic or frightened middle class.»

Traffic was tolerable; the night's darkness still felt clean. He found a rental place, West Side Video. On entering he saw it was the kind of shop where the manager asserts personality by laser-printing signs highlightingEVIL MOTHERS ,CUTE & DUMB , and arcane subcategories likeGORE FESTS andLEMONS , where John was genuinely amused to see his old turkeys,The Wild Land and The Other Side of Hate.

He realized he had no idea what movies Susan had been in. He asked the clerk, name-taggedRYAN , if he had anything starring Susan Colgate, and the clerk squeaked with pleasure. «Meese Colllllll gate? I should think so. Right this way.» He led John to an old magazine rack filled with sun-faded tape boxes. Above the rack was a laser-printed sign readingST .SUSAN THE DIVINE . The top of the rack was camped up with altarlike candles and sacrificial offerings — Japanese candy bars, prescription bottles, a model Airbus 340 with a missing wing, and a mosaic of head shots of Susan culled from a wide array of print media. Ryan stood patiently, waiting for John's reaction, but John was silent, the inside of his brain firing Roman candles. He felt a sexual need to own the altar.

«She's something, isn't she?» Ryan asked.

«You did this?» John asked, looking at Ryan, a Gap clone — khakis, white T-shirt with flannel shirt on top. A pleasant Brady Bunch face. Like a gag writer at Fox.

«With tender loving care.»

«I'll give you a hundred bucks for it, right now.»

Ryan was taken aback. «Mr. Johnson — I'm sorry, but I can't pretend I don't know who you are — this is my shrine. It's not like I can just give it away like that.»

«Five hundred, but throw in the movies.»

«Mr.Johnson. I made it. It's not like a joke or something. Well, maybe a bit of a joke. But I've been saving these clippings for years.»

«Nine hundred. Half of what I've got. It's my last money. Everybody knows I'm broke. Even with Mega Force — that's in a trust.»

«Don't tell me this! Too much information, Mr. Johnson!»

«John.»

«Too much information, John.» Ryan put his hands on his hips and watched as John scanned the titles on the boxes' spines. The store was empty. They could speak loudly. «John, I'm a stranger to you, but let me ask you something.»

«Welcome to detox. Ask away.»

«Are you, how shall I say, in love with Miss Colgate?»

«What?» John was shocked, not by Ryan's forthrightness, but by the same sort of ping he used to get when he discovered whodunit in an Agatha Christie mystery. «Love? I — »

«Go no further. It's okay. I work for the forces of good. And it doesn't surprise me, you know.»

«What doesn't? I never said I was in love.»

«Psh. You're like the old RKO Radio tower shooting out bolts of Susan.»

«You're a ballsy little shit.»

«Now, now.» Ryan could see John didn't mind. In fact, quite the opposite. «I mean, both of you have done disappearing acts. Her after the plane crash three years ago, and you earlier this year.»

John wasn't going to fight it. «Go on. What's your point?»

Ryan rubbed his chin and became professorial. «Well, this would have to be a new thing, wouldn't it? Because if it was even slightly old, you'd already have seen all her old videos by now.»

«Bingo, Dr. Einstein.»

«When did you meet?»

«Today. At lunch. At the Ivy.»

Ryan whistled, then relaxed his posture. «Tell you what, John. Rent all the videos and I'll report them as lost or stolen.»

«Yeah?»

«Yeah. And don't waste your last money. I'll throw in the altar, but there's a catch.»

«It wouldn't be life on earth if there weren't a catch. «Qu'est-ce-que c'est, Ryan?» John found himself greatly liking this strange young man.

«You have to answer a series of skill-testing questions after reading a script I wrote.»

«Fair enough. Deal.»

«Good. I'll lock up and we can scan these tapes out of the system and load this stuff into your car.»

The two men carried the shrine by its ends over to the counter, where Ryan began to laser-scan the tapes' bar codes. John gave Ryan the address of the guesthouse, as well as his phone number. «Give these out to anybody and you're mulch. And let me ask you something, Ryan — why'd you make a shrine? You're not a stalker, because they don't make shrines — they stalk. What's your deal?»

Ryan looked up from the till, was about to say one thing and then visibly stopped and began to say something else. «Oh, you know, we all need an obsession, and mine's La Colgate: 3184 Prestwick Drive, Benedict Canyon, Wyoming driver's license 3352511, phone unlisted but messages can be left with Adam Norwitz, the IPD Agency.»

John stared at Ryan.

«She rents stuff here.»

John looked down at the tapes, some episodes of Meet the Blooms, Dynamite Bay and Thraice's Faces — On Tour with Steel Mountain. Crap. «There's another reason you like Susan Colgate. Mind telling me?»

«Fair enough. An LAPD guy told me I was the last person to ever leave a message on her phone line before her plane crashed — a few years ago. I can't explain it. And now here you are tonight. So I'm bonding with her again.»

The shrine fit neatly in the car's back seat. The air outside was surprisingly cold and John's skin felt clammy. «Here's the script,» said Ryan.

«Yeah, yeah,» said John, grabbing it.

«John — listen to me.» John stopped — he was unused to being addressed like this but didn't mind. «You're going to read this script and then you're going to get back to me right away. But that's not all.»

«It's not, is it?»

«No. You're also going to call me up whenever you need to, and we can talk about Susan.»

«Do you have any idea how fucking psycho that sounds, Ryan?»

«Psycho or not, I mean it. Other people aren't going to understand this when it breaks out. And it will. Not from me, but from you, because you're in love so you have a need to blab everything. Other people won't get it.»

John laughed. «Okay, Ryan, you win. When my heart gets ready to sing, you can be my Yoko Ono.»

«Good luck, Mr. Johnson.»

John gave the thumbs-up and drove immediately to 3184 Prestwick, parked across the street and looked at Susan's small blue Cape Cod house surrounded by overgrown ornamental shrubs. A porch light was on, but otherwise it was dark. An hour crept by, and the only activity John noticed was a dog walker and three cars driving by. He gave up, and late in the night he drove back to the guesthouse. The streets were surprisingly empty, and at Highland and Sunset he noticed a fog, but then realized it couldn't be because Los Angeles almost never had fog. His cell phone rang, but the caller hung up. John conceded that something must be on fire.

That night John didn't sleep. He read Ryan's script and drank raspberry juice cut with stinging nettle and mango. He looked at his cordless phone wondering what might be a remotely plausible time to call Susan. Seven-thirty? Too early. Eight? Yes. No. He'd look desperate. Eight-thirty?Uh, hello, Susan — yes, I know it's kinda early… . Nine? Yes — but how to get there through the ink and murk and smothering slowness of night?

By six o'clock the sky was lightening and a few doves skittered about in the shrubs. He put down Ryan's script, «Tungaska.» It was good. A Texas woman inherits a strange metal hoop from her father, which looks like an unjeweled crown or a creweling hoop. She holds it up to the light from a TV set for a better look and suddenly licorice-whip tornadoes descend from the sky, smashing her Galveston subdivision into a landfill of cracked plywood, broken furniture, branches, toys and cars and clothing. Only the room in which she's sitting is spared. It turns out the hoop is a portal that converts human psychic energy into nuclear energy.

John heard a hum up the hill — Ivan's treadmill buzzing to life at its usual six-thirty time slot. Company! He walked up to Ivan, who was also watching the morning news on an ancient 14-inch TV placed on its usual perch on a lawn chair. «John-O.»

«Ivan.»

«You look like shit. Up all night?» Ivan's treadmill was on 3 out of a possible 10.

«Yeah.» This was not uncommon.

«Watch anything good?»

«Actually, no. I read something.»

«You read ?»

«A script, actually.»

«My,my. High School Graduates Eat Steak. When was the last time you even touched a script?»

John had to think. «Yeah, yeah. Whenever.»

«Something we can use?»

«I think so. It's okay.»

«Okay good, or okay crap?»

«Okay good. Okay great, actually.»

«Spiel forth, pardner.»

John started to describe the film.

«What happens after the Galveston blowup?» Ivan was hooked.

«We go back in time — to the famous Tungaska “meteor explosion” of 1909.»

«Isn't that the one where half the trees in Siberia got knocked down?»

«That's it — except it turns out it wasn't a meteorite explosion. It was this hoop thing.»

«Not aliens, I hope. The market's supersaturated with alien shit.» Ivan timed some sort of pulse or throbbing in his body with his stopwatch.

«Not aliens. The hoop is from Switzerland. From Bern, Switzerland. It's from 1905, and it was made by a voluptuous Russian Jew down the hall from Einstein's apartment. That was the year he discovered the Theory of Relativity.»

«Vol up tuous? What kind of word is that? Where are we, John-O — 1962?»

«Okay okay. But she's hot.»

«She's hot ? Are we in 1988 now?»

«God, Ivan. She's hot in a cold kind of way. Her parents died and she had to go back to Siberia from Bern. But when she's there, there's the accident — the Tungaska explosion.»

«What kind of psychic energy creates an explosion that levels half of Siberia?»

«The woman's first orgasm accidentally funneled through an amplifier ring within the hoop.»

«Jawohl.»

«Anyhow, she's at the center of the explosion, so she's safe. That's part of the deal. Imagine the special effects on this one, Ivan. Anyhow, by now the bad guys know all about this hoop.»

«Who are the bad guys?»

«A Swiss banking consortium just before WWII. The guys who were about to rake gold fillings out of the death camps.»

«Go on.»

«These banking guys want it. All of the governments want it, but she keeps both herself and her hoop hidden until 1939 and the war. She's sent to a death camp and the Nazis get the hoop. Then the Americans steal it from the Germans, and the Americans use it to nuke Japan. And after that the hoop moves to Nevada, where they suck in the gambling energy and the desperation energy from Las Vegas to do their nuclear tests. But then the woman's son, a ballistics scientist working there at the Nevada test site, makes these connections and realizes what the hoop is really about — and also that it belongs to him.

«So he manages to swipe it — that's when the nuclear testing stops — in the eighties — and he smuggles himself and the hoop down to Galveston. But he has a stroke. His daughter, played by the same actress, puts the hoop into a luggage closet. It's when she's cleaning out the closet that she has the accident with the hoop up against the TV set. The tornado alerts the bad guys, and so there's this chase and it ends with a hurricane of blood. Fish turn inside out. Roses bloom at midnight. It's Revelations. At the end the woman takes the hoop to Hawaii and throws it into one of the live volcanoes on Oahu. Whaddya think?»

Ivan was measuring his breath as his treadmill kicked into a hill simulation. «Sounds to me like there's lots of debris flying around in it.»

«Debris? What? Yeah — I guess so.»

«I was meeting with these nerds at ILM and SGI up in San Francisco before I went to Scotland. Their computers can do perfect flying debris and litter now. They're looking for a showcase for their new techniques and this sounds like just the thing. Story needs some work, though. Who's the writer?»

«One of these young turks — Ryan Something. He's boiling hot right now.»

«I haven't heard his name. Is there an auction on it?»

«We have the option to make a preemptive bid.»

«How much you think?»

«Five hundred.»

«Make it three. You feel good about this?»

«First script in years to give my brain a hard-on.»

«It's the first script you've read in years.»

A bell rang, announcing somebody at the front gate. Ivan switched off the treadmill. «Come on, John-O, let's see who's here.» They walked around the patio, which was dripping with flowers and lush branches. Out front a police car was at the gate, one officer standing beside the car manning the intercom, another in the passenger seat. Ivan buzzed them in with a remote. The four of them formed a congress on the front steps.

«Officers?» Ivan said.

«Hello, Mr. McClintock,» the tall one said. «And you, too, Mr. Johnson. Do you have a moment, Mr. McClintock?»

«Call me Ivan. Of course. What's this regarding?»

«Doing a check. Do you own a white Chrysler sedan, license number 2LM 3496T?»

«Yes.»

«Were you driving the car last night around twoA.M . in Benedict Canyon?»

«That was me,» John said.

«Could you tell us where you were last night, Mr. Johnson?»

«Easy. I was getting tapes at West — West — West Side Video on Santa Monica.»

«What tapes?»

«About ten of them. Susan Colgate stuff — Meet the Blooms, and some cheesy B flick.»

The policeman shared a flickering meaningful glance. «What time would that have been, Mr. Johnson?»

«The guy was just closing the shop. Around oneA.M ., I guess.»

«What then?»

«Then I — went and parked in front of Susan Colgate's house. For about an hour.»

«Why was that, Mr. Johnson?»

«Is something wrong? What's going on here?» John was getting edgy.

«It's a routine check, sir. Why were you parked outside her house?»

«John-O,» said Ivan. «Just talk, okay? We're not cutting a distribution deal here.»

«She didn't answer my phone message. Susan Colgate. I thought she might be coming home late.»

«You live here, Mr. Johnson?» asked the shorter officer.

«In the house down there. With my mother.» The police looked down at the guesthouse, almost unchanged since the day John first saw it. «I lost my old Bel-Air tree-fort last year. You probably read about that in People. »

«You didn't lose it, John,» said Ivan, «you gave it away. »

«To the IRS. That's not me giving. That's them taking.»

«Is that the Chrysler down there?» asked the tall cop.

«That's it,» John said, his stomach turning to slime as he remembered the shrine still in the back seat. «There's a — oh fuck. You'll see.»

The four walked down the hill, the police clicking into almost paramilitary action as they discovered the shrine in the back. One called HQ requesting something technical immediately. The other blocked John from the car.

«Am I under arrest? Do you have a warrant?» John asked.

«No. And we don't have to go through that if you agree.»

«John, it's my property,» said Ivan. «Go right ahead, guys.» He looked in the back seat. The white towel around his neck dropped onto the gravel driveway and he didn't pick it up. «John-O, there's a goddam Susan Colgate parade float in the back seat of the car — you made this?»

«Did you make the shrine in the back seat?» the cop asked.

«No. I bought it from the kid at West Side Video. I think it's one of those campy queer things.»

At this point Doris came out of the house, cloaked in shawls, her bunned gray hair a porcupine of flyaway hairs. «Oh Christ — it's my mother.»

«Morning, darlings. Oh my — the fuzz.»

«The fuzz ?» said John.

«I'm merely trying to be contemporary, darling. Officers — has there been a crime?»

There was mild confusion. A police photographer and forensics expert went over to the car. Ivan went back up to his treadmill and John phoned Adam Norwitz. «What the fuck is going on, Adam?»

«Susan's gone AWOL. She had a sixA .M. makeup call for a Showtime Channel kiddy movie and she didn't show up. So the producer phones and screams at me, and I go racing from my gym straight to her house and the doors are all open. There's nobody there, but her car's still out front. The coffeepot was still on, but the coffee was like tar, like it'd been on for twenty-four hours. So I called the cops.You tell me what's going on. I nearly had to donate my left nut to science to get her that stupid part on Showtime, and she fucks it up.»

«Compassion, Adam.»

«Yeah, right. Is she doing a project with you? Is she jumping into a bigger pond now — no more time for the little fish?»

«How can you make this woman's disappearance about you, Adam?»

«Spare me the melodrama.»

«Did you call the hospitals or anything?»

«That's the cops' job.»

Adam knew nothing. The police knew next to nothing. John refused to panic. Susan could be out on a tequila jag or maybe she was whipping one of those creepy Brit directors with birch fronds.She's not that type, he thought. He sucked in a breath, then phoned Ryan to buy the script.