Still Holding

The Morning After

“I CANNOT BELIEVE they discharged him,” said the lawyer.

Counsel, agent, managers, and publicist converged on Cedars (Alf too — he hadn’t left since the early A.M. return) while friend and client underwent emergency surgery to relieve pressure in his skull.

The surrealistic events had left the whole team powerless, breathless, and aghast.

Marooned.

“He signed a release?” asked the agent.

“Yeah,” said Alf, boyishly vacant. The handsome, uncombed head hung low. Semidirty fingernails scratched reflexively at grizzled jaw. “He was pretty adamant about it. There was no way he was going to check himself in. He seemed OK — while they had him here. And he was OK at home. I mean, last night.”

“He was not OK!” shouted the lawyer.

“Whatever,” said Alf, shocky and depressed. Not up for chastisement. The agent shot the lawyer dead eyes, on the kid’s behalf. “All I’m saying is, he was totally lucid. He was worried about Viv finding out before he got a chance to call.” He huffed and snorted, congested by mucus and inchoate tears. “I tried to tell him that going home was a shitty idea — that he should just stay overnight and be observed.” He cleared his throat. “He said that his mom died here—”

“That’s true,” said the agent, grateful to be able to glom on to some other tragic factoid, one at least that had resolution. “That’s absolutely right.” She began a series of short, nervously rhythmical nods, telegraphing historical longevity and the pedigree of her special relationship with the concussed superstar, a tenured, privileged intimacy with his life that naturally included an acquaintance with R.J., and charnel knowledge of that awful, protracted womb cancer. “That is completely correct. It was horrible for him. Horrible for him. Horrible.”

“—that’s why he wanted to go home. Hey,” said Alf, resigned. “I can’t go up against Kit. Never could. He’s like a big brother.”

“I don’t give a shit what he signed,” said the attorney, mostly to himself. Alf should have called someone right when it happened, but he was a dumbo — an actor. Not the target. Counsel’s wrath became focused: rustle of lawsuits, hubbub of press conferences, briefs to be filed. “It is completely negligent, completely irresponsible. This is a major fucking personage here! Would they have let Spielberg discharge himself against medical judgment? Just stroll on out with a buddy? What on God’s earth were they thinking?”

“It’s just so insane,” said one of the traumatized managers, staring into space. “It’s just… so wrong. Everything is wrong.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said the lawyer, in high dudgeon. “When I am through, Kit Lightfoot is going to own this fucking hospital and the ground it sits on.”

“Did someone finally call Viv?” asked the other manager.

Alf nodded, snapping gum long bled of flavor. “A few hours ago, after we got here. She’s on her way back.”

“That couldn’t have been an easy call to make,” said the agent. She touched Alf’s arm as a mother would.

“I hope you didn’t tell her right before she went on Letterman,” said the publicist.

“He said a few hours ago,” said a manager, testily. “Jesus!”

“After,” said Alf, by rote.

“My poor attempt at black humor,” said the publicist, contritely.

“She’s flying back with Sherry on the Paramount jet,” said Alf.

“What are we doing about crowd control?” said the lawyer to the publicist. “It’s Day of the Locust out there.”

Just then, Darren Aronofsky was led in by a hospital guard.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“He’s still in surgery,” said the agent.

“Jesus.” He turned to Alf. “Was it a fight?”

“No. This guy just… blindsided him. He was hassling us before at the bar. He was pissed because Kit wouldn’t sign his girlfriend’s left tit or whatever.”

“Jesus. Jesus.” Darren shook his head, sucking in air. “Are you OK?”

“Under the circumstances,” nodded Alf. “Yeah. I’m cool.”

“Where’s Viv?” said Darren, turning to the others.

“On her way back from New York,” said the publicist.

“Have they said anything?” asked Darren. “I mean, the doctors?”

The agent began to cry. A manager put his arm around her.

“Oh my God,” she said. “What if he’s really, really hurt and can’t get better? This is so horrible! The world is such a horrible place!”

“There’s a lot of people who love him, Kiki,” said the other manager, forlornly. “A lot of people who care.”

The comanager said hollowly, “We’ll see him through.”

“He’s a stubborn motherfucker,” said Alf, cocking his head — smiling, as they say, through the tears.

“That’s for damn sure,” said Darren. “He’s a survivor.”

“Plus it’d kill him not to do your movie,” said Alf, wryly.

“Oh, he’ll do the movie,” said Darren, with that unsinkable old-fashioned brio only a film director can muster. The agent found his remarks vastly comforting.

“I have never seen him more passionate about a project,” she said. “I mean, it’s amazing.”

“And he’ll be amazing in it,” said Darren. “We’ll push the start date, that’s all.”

“It’s a wonderful thing,” said a manager, “for him to know — even if he doesn’t know today—that the project’s waiting for him.”

An uncomfortable pause in the wake of those absurd, well-meaning sentiments; the agent began to cry again.

“It’s just so… weird. Darren! — your film — I mean, that’s what it’s about—in a sense. No? Special Needs? I mean, has anyone even thought about how weird that is? That the story line mirrors—”

“That’s where the press is going to go,” said the publicist. “Just a heads-up: that’s straight where they’re going to go. You know, ‘Life imitates art.’”

“All we can focus on now,” said Darren, keeping it real, “is Kit getting on his feet, ASAP.”

“I know. I know. I know,” said the agent, centering up. Regrouping. Steeling herself. Blotting her eyes.

“He’ll kick ass,” said Alf, rallying the troops.

“Oh, absolutely,” said a manager.

“It’s going to be a battle,” said the attorney re the epic, looming litigations. “But let me tell you something. There will be serious casualties on the other side.”

“Jesus,” said a manager, with sudden emotion. “Has anything like this even ever happened before? Has a major film star ever been attacked?”

“Sharon Tate,” said the publicist.

“I’m sorry, but Sharon Tate was not a major star!”

Vigil

LISANNE WAS AT the Coffee Bean when she heard. The washroom was occupied, so she dashed to the parking lot and threw up. She got in her car and went to the hospital.

Barricades held a crowd of fans and bystanders at bay. Media vans sprouted tall white antennae. Nasty policemen banished drive-through traffic. She valet-parked at Jerry’s Deli and crossed the street.

She scanned the upper floors of the building, wondering if he was out of surgery. Her eyes wandered back to Beverly Boulevard, in vague lookout for Tiff Loewenstein’s Bentley. Too soon, she thought. A visit from Tiff would come later in the week, if at all.

She felt like she might faint. She called the office to say she had the flu. She was talking to one of the girls when Reggie jumped on. He asked if she’d heard what happened, and Lisanne pretended that she was too sick to talk.

On impulse, she drove to the Loewensteins’.

• • •

WITH GREAT KINDNESS, the housekeeper led the ravaged woman in. She knew why Lisanne was crying.

Tiff was talking loudly on the phone, in a faraway room. Roslynn appeared on the stairs in her robe, looking so frail and everyday that suddenly Lisanne thought she’d made a grievous error by coming and burst into tears.

“Roslynn, I’m so sorry!” she said, face distorted. “I went to the hospital — I thought you might be there…”

They embraced and Roslynn asked the housekeeper to please bring them some tea. She led Lisanne to the living room and sat her on the divan.

“Darling, you look awful!”

“It’s just so terrible—”

“I know.” She put her arms around her, gently rocking as Lisanne wept. “We’ve been watching CNN all morning. We know a muck-a-muck at Cedars, Mo Biring. Mo says Kit’s still being operated on — could be hours. Our spies are working on it. We know lots of people at Cedars.”

Tea was served. Tiff came in, completely dressed, and regarded Lisanne oddly — again, she felt a trespasser’s twinge. When he tenderly touched her head, Lisanne sobbed anew, throwing herself on the mercy of the cruel cosmos.

“He’s out,” said Tiff. Lisanne didn’t know what he meant. “Of surgery.”

“Is that what Mo said?” asked Roslynn.

“I just talked to him.”

“Is he all right?”

“They don’t know— won’t know — not for a while. They think there may be some damage.” He hesitated to say it but thought he’d better. “Brain damage.”

Lisanne seized up and stopped her crying as if doused with cold water.

“My God!” said Roslynn, hand rushing to mouth. “My God.”

“They still can’t find the sonofabitch who clobbered him,” said Tiff. This time, it was his wife’s head he caressed. He nodded at Lisanne and said, “Got the fantods, huh.” He said to Roslynn of their guest, “This one’s got the fantods.”

“He was just so wonderful when I brought him your gift,” said Lisanne, from the heart. “So smart and so sweet.”

“I had her bring him the Sotheby’s Buddha,” Tiff explained. “To the set.”

“He’s so young and so talented and it’s—just — so — unfair and so terrible!” The Loewensteins drooped their heads in sorrowful affirmation. “So kind, so unaffected.” She fought for breath. Roslynn touched her arm. “I just had the feeling — I mean it was so obvious—that he was such a warm and generous person.”

“That he was,” said Tiff absentmindedly, as if in eulogy.

“For someone to just do that to him—”

Annoyed with himself, Tiff quickly amended: “That he is.” Thinking aloud, the executive said, “We’ve already wrapped, but that’s a ninety-million-dollar summer movie. We’ll need someone to loop his voice — that’s done a helluva lot more often than people imagine.” He scratched his ear and stared through the Cézanne, cogitating arcane postproduction stratagems. “You two should play hooky today,” he said, trying to lighten the mood. “Go see a movie at the Grove. Go to the beach house. Hey, we heard you had a few dates with Phil Muskingham.”

“He’s sweet.”

“He’s really smitten with you,” said Roslynn.

“You could do worse than marry that one. I’ll be working for you one day.”

“Are you going to see Kit?” asked Lisanne.

“No,” he said adamantly. “No point in sitting vigil. It’s gonna be a circus over there. I’ll wait till he wakes up.”

“Do you think we should bring him the Buddha?”

“What?” said Tiff, nonplussed.

“Maybe it would be something he… his assistant could bring it from the house. He’s a Buddhist and maybe—”

“Let me ask you something, Lisanne. Where was the Buddha when he got whacked on the head? The Buddha didn’t help then, and I sure as hell don’t think it’s gonna to help now.” Roslynn gave him a look. “Roll your eyes, Roz, but that’s why I’m agnostic. Besides,” he added. “Too expensive to have laying around a hospital room. It’d be gone within the hour.”

“What about the Courage Awards?” Roslynn called after, as her husband turned to leave.

“Sunday,” said Tiff. “What about ‘em?”

“Are we still going?”

“I’m not understanding you,” he said combatively. “Of course we’re still going. Why wouldn’t we be still going?” She regretted her remark. “You mean, because of the bad thing that happened to Kit Lightfoot? Who are they going to give the award to if I’m not there, Roslynn?”

“I don’t know, Tiff,” she said, turning inward.

“To one of the waiters? To Suzanne Pleshette? Or how ‘bout ‘Frasier’? I’m getting the Courage Award, right? There’s a shitload of people who worked their asses off organizing that — months and months of hard work. They’re gonna raise three million dollars. That’s their goal. And you know how? From the people who are in business with me who buy the fucking tables and spend money at the fucking silent auction. So I don’t understand you, Roslynn. You think they’re gonna not raise three million dollars because of what happened to Kit Lightfoot? It’s a terrible thing, kids, but it ain’t the Twin Towers.”

“Enough, Tiff,” she said.

Lisanne instinctively moved closer and held the older woman’s hand. Roslynn was gratified to have a witness to her husband’s noxiousness.

“Burt Bacharach’s presenting. Did I tell you?”

“No.”

“I guess you didn’t know. I thought I told you. I thought I told you four times. Burt may do a thing with Elvis Costello, and I think he asked Paul McCartney, as a surprise. If Paul’s in town, which I think he is. And I just happened to have given money to his one-legged cunt of a wife for the land mines. So voilà: the stars are all in alignment. So what, dear Roslynn, are you saying? That you don’t want to go?”

“Nothing,” said Roslynn, con brio. “I’m saying nothing.”

“Of course we’re going,” said Tiff. He turned back to Lisanne as he left the room. “And you and Phil should come too.”

Hot Property

THE L.A. TIMES real estate section showcased homes that were bought, sold, and leased by celebrities, and sometimes Becca clipped and mailed the features to her mom. Annie said that a lot of the brokers were former actresses, and Becca could understand why. She admired them — it took guts for a girl to look in the mirror at twenty-eight or twenty-nine and say, “It’s over. I’ll never be famous.” But it took real smarts for that same girl to take the bull by the horns and go into a field that one day, if she were creative and industrious enough, might allow her the trappings of celebdom that would otherwise have been beyond her reach: say, a hillside manse. Because that’s what a Realtor could have for herself if she put in enough blood, sweat, and tears. Realtors learned all the tricky ins and outs of buying and selling, and Annie said they were in a great position to join that exclusive club of people whose passion is to buy homes and do makeovers, then sell them at tidy profits (Courteney Cox and Diane Keaton were masters of the art). Becca thought the best thing about being a Realtor was that you got to dress up for work, sometimes to the nines, and you drove around all day in one of those cute little Mercedes with the saucy butt-trunk. (Though when she occasionally saw middle-aged brokers, thick in face and gut, carting for sale signs around on sky blue Sundays, it scared her in terms of thinking, Ohmygod, could that happen to me?) Becoming a Realtor was the kind of thing her mom might do; she was pragmatic that way. In fact, the next time Dixie started leaning on her to come home, Becca thought a viable thing would be to say that she was considering becoming a real estate agent and that she needed to stay and study for the test. Call the dogs off for a while.

Her heart raced as she folded the paper back to the front page and read the banner.

HOT PROPERTY

HER EXTRA TERRITORY

BY RUTH RYON, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Actress Drew Barrymore has purchased a Hollywood Hills home on nearly 1.5 acres for about $4.5 million.

Barrymore had been leasing since her former Beverly Hills — area home sustained fire damage in February 2001. She subsequently sold that property.

Described as a “two-story mid-century ranch with a long private drive,” the compound she bought includes a four-bedroom main house with a two-story living room, a guesthouse, and a guardhouse that is staffed full-time. The estate, estimated to have about 9,000 square feet of living space, also has a gym, five fireplaces, and a billiard room with a bar. The grounds, behind gates, have a motor court, views from downtown L.A. to the ocean, a pool, and a yard with pathways and gardens.

Barrymore, 28, who starred opposite Ben Stiller in Duplex, also has a leading role in Look-Alike, to be written and directed by Spike Jonze and released in 2004.

She costarred with Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu in the movie versions of the 1970s TV series Charlie’s Angels, which she also produced. Barrymore also appeared at age seven in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, rereleased in 2002.

Brett Lawyer and Ed Fitz of Nourmand & Associates, Beverly Hills, represented Barrymore in buying, according to sources not involved with the deal.

She hadn’t thought about the fire in a while, but now she remembered news footage of the bantering couple climbing into their BMW in the middle of the night to good-humoredly flee the flames — there was something about them that was a little too manic and Becca knew their marriage was already in trouble. Just thinking about that homely idiot Tom Green pissed her off. He is so majorly fucked up! Drew gave him everything: her house, her heart, her invaluable connections… stood by him for his lame-o ball cancer (Annie wondered if it was a stunt but even Becca thought that was going too far because she knew the comedian had truly suffered), and never wavered! Tom Green could have learned so much from Drew the producer, Drew the businesswoman, Drew the icon and showbiz vet. But in the end, all Tom Green wanted was to be in shitty, shitty movies, party with whorey-looking supermodel rejects, and host a fifth-rate Conan loserfest. In the end, all Tom Green wanted was to whine about how you should be careful never to marry someone who had a team of publicists. Oh! How galling! Tom Green should be so lucky! And like it’s Drew’s fault to be the legend she is! It’s Drew’s fault that Steven Spielberg is her godfather and that she was in E.T. when she was a baby and that for a hundred years her family was theatrical and cinematic royalty! But the worst of it was, they were married—they exchanged sacred vows—and now that it was over, Tom Green didn’t even have the decency or common sense to keep his chinless cancer mouth shut. People were like that. People were ungrateful, fickle, boring, greedy, vindictive, and morally bankrupt. All anyone ever did was cover their own ass and Tom Green was covering his, busily rewriting history. Not Drew—Drew let everything hang for the world to see. She had her weaknesses, but you could never say she wasn’t a stand-up person, that was Drew to the max, and when Green got that final (spread-to-the-brain) tumor Becca was certain Ms. Barrymore would be there for him 1000 percent. She wasn’t one to hold a grudge at death’s door.

Becca sipped at her latte and savored the description: “two-story mid-century ranch with a long private drive.” It was like the beginning of a novel! Four bedrooms seemed cozy — just right. A guesthouse was always nice for friends or relatives (that was the kind of arrangement she dreamed of for Dixie), but if she so desired, on nights when Drew had the compound to herself, it also gave her the luxury of crashing elsewhere on the property, like a gamboling gypsy, for the fun of it — the wherewithal to mix it up, if she felt moody or devil-may-care. “A guardhouse, staffed full-time…” probably a necessity, because of stalkers — still, Becca couldn’t imagine what that would be like. You could wake up at three in the morning freaked out from a bad dream and wouldn’t even have to call 911—all you’d have to do was shout for your private live-in police! Annie would die when she told her. Becca reread “gym, five fireplaces,” and suddenly the house didn’t sound so snug anymore, though she was pretty sure it would feel snug because Drew probably did it up in the Topanga — Beverly Glen — Laurel Canyon hippie style, all dark wood and stone, dog-friendly Shabby Chic couches and worn, deceptively expensive Native American rugs. “A yard with pathways and gardens…,” pathways leading God knew where. I would give anything, Becca thought, to pitch a tent at the end of one of those trails, if only as an in-residence Pilates teacher or masseuse.

But this was the part that stirred her most:

Barrymore, 28, who starred opposite Ben Stiller in Duplex, also has a leading role in Look-Alike, to be written and directed by Spike Jonze and released in 2004.

Becca’s movie! Just that morning, Sharon phoned to say that Spike Jonze had been charmed at the table-read and wanted to put her on tape. She told Becca not to say anything to Rusty yet, and Becca read between the lines that Sharon didn’t want to get burned again. But it came to mind there was the possibility — Rusty seemingly so close to Spike, having coffees at the Rose and whatnot — that maybe he already did know and would be punishing if Becca failed to mention. No need to get paranoid; she decided to think happy thoughts. She still had the fantasy of both of them getting cast and becoming stars. The whole fame scenario flitted through her head again, this time with the capper that she became the proud new owner of the “two-story mid-century ranch” when Ms. Barrymore got the urge to relocate. One thing Becca knew she wouldn’t need was a private mod squad. Though it’d be fun to put a mannequin in there — a mannequin and a big dusty bunch of artificial flowers in the guardhouse might be memorable.

A young man interrupted her thoughts, asking if he could share the table. She blinked.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you look really familiar.”

They made a few guesses as to where they might have met before. He said, “Do you ever go to the Coffee Bean, up on Sunset?”

“Sure.”

“I used to work there.” She squinted at him. “I looked a little different. My hair was shorter. And I”—he smiled sheepishly—“I was ‘impaired.’”

He slurred his words, refreshing her memory.

“Ohmygod, yes! But — I don’t understand.”

“Research — for a film role. The Kit Lightfoot movie. I was going to play a retard. If I may be so politically incorrect.”

He reached out a hand, and Becca shook it, though she wasn’t sure how to respond. Something about him was so refined yet flamboyant that she couldn’t stop smiling.

“I’m Larry Levine. And if you’re not Drew Barrymore, you’ve got some serious explaining to do.”

Postsurgical

VIV WEMBLEY STEPS from a Suburban, deep inside the hospital garage. She wears large Fendi shades and scuffed Dries boots — straight from the airport in Van Nuys, with minimal freshening up on the plane as it landed. Sherry offered to go with her, but Viv graciously, gratefully declined. She smells her own breath as she walks, fetid and stagnant. Grief-breath.

She is ushered through the bowels, as they say, to a white room where doctors prepare her for what she will see.

A friend who is also her yoga teacher has come. The logistics of that rendezvous were a security hassle, and there’s some delay — Viv will not go in to see Kit without her — finally the two meet and embrace.

They go in a room by themselves, and the teacher engages Viv in deep yoga breaths.

They ride the elevator up.

Outside the guarded room: Prana, prana, prana.

Viv enters, the way first-timers jump from planes.

The private nurse nods, smiles, and leaves. The yoga friend stays in the room, just inside the door, now closed behind them. Respectful. Moved. There for her friend. There for Kit too.

Viv stands beside him, holding his hand. Her awkwardness melts away at the humanity of it. The reduction of love, horror, and agony. The sheer bizarre unlikelihood…

Head shaved, face twice its normal size.

“Honey?” she says, choking up. She casts a look to her friend, who quickly looks away from Kit then to Viv’s eyes, but Viv has already turned her gaze back to her fiancé so that her friend and yoga teacher missed the exchange.

“Bumpkin?”

He does not see: eyes swollen shut.

Two incisions in skull.

Tubes in nose, throat, cock.

“Baby, I’m here. It’s Viv. It’s Cherry Girl. She’s here.”

Stifles tears, certain that if she breaks down he will know. Will hear. Her yoga friend said, “Remember, he is aware.” She doesn’t want to put out any kind of fucked-up energy. No fear energy. Her yoga friend said how important it was to be calm, still, centered, comforting.

• • •

CORRESPONDENTS, IN FRONT of hospital, talk to cameras. Local news and foreign too — England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan. A distraught fan is interviewed.

• • •

A FOX NEWS lightweight talks to camera in front of the Bar Marmont. Ambitious, cadenced, sexed up by celeb tragedy. A run in her stocking the audience will never see. Camera follows as she walks to liquor store, reenacting Kit Lightfoot’s ill-fated path. Interviews clerk who ID’d plate.

• • •

SPECIAL EDITION electronic newsmagazines on the topics of Celebrity Stalking, Celebrity Worship, Celebrity Murder.

Also, special subedition electronic minimagazines on Nightclub Security, Celebrity Bodyguards, Violence Prediction.

Also, on Head Injuries, Stroke Rehab.

Also, on film insurance and bonding, and what happens when a star dies in the middle of a shoot — Natalie Wood, Brainstorm, Oliver Reed, Gladiator—even though the movie Kit Lightfoot shot has already wrapped and he is not dead.

• • •

SHE CRIES AND cries and cries. She doesn’t leave her bedroom for three days. A clot of yoginis come and go. Friends and professionals and gentle folk she doesn’t know all that well (from Kit’s sangha) stop by to cook and be of service. Her agents come. Her publicists come. Her manager and even her accountant. Finally — finally — she laughs. Then she cries like a thunderstorm and everyone cries along. There is some hilarity too, that very special kind of hilarity in extremis, and she drinks her favorite margaritas and mixes them with Vicodin and some Co-Proxamol she got in London. She takes big messy bubble baths with girlfriends. Everyone gets massages. It’s Massage Central. Sheryl Crow, Darren Aronofsky, Joely Fisher, Renée Zellweger, Helen Fielding, Paula Abdul, and naturally, Alf Lanier drop by — at overlapping times — and of course all of the Together costars. Then a parade of industry demigods until she says, Enough. (She joked that Dr. Phil would walk in next.) She has Gingher shut it down except for the inner circle. Her crew. She dances alone in her room to the Stones and Freddy Mercury, Nirvana and White Stripes. She pulls her friends in one by one, then slams the door, and they dance with her, one by one, as a goof, a poignant goof. Everybody’s sweating and crying and singing Dusty Springfield songs. She sobers up. Everybody does yoga together. Sometimes she cries in the middle of a pose. Sometimes when that happens she laughs, and then everyone laughs and then everyone cries too. When the teacher inadvertently says “corpse pose,” Viv loses it. Everyone eats pizza and Häagen-Dazs and sushi and takeout from Trader Vic’s, and they watch nothing but AMC — Bette Davis and Maureen O’Hara and Montgomery Clift and Jeff Chandler and Jennifer Jones. Then they smoke weed and watch a Britney concert and a Bangles concert and a Cher concert on DVD and then some PPV porno. What a hoot. Periodic solo retreats to the darkened bedroom, where she tries and fails at masturbation. Dares to watch CNN, awaiting taboo redundant reports of her fiancé’s relentless nonprogress. Perversely cadges on-air quasi-eulogies and career summing-ups. Alf goes to Kit’s house and finds the ring that he bought at Fred Joaillier. He brings it over. Horror.

• • •

ALF, PUFFY-EYED and disconsolate, at Kit’s bedside.

An RN empties a catheter bag.

He smirks, then hangs his head low. Aggressively mutters, “Fuck this shit,” and bolts.

Darkness. He is met by a frenzy of paparazzi shouting his name. Across the street, behind barricades, fifty die-hard fans — bundled up in the cold dead of night — gather with signs, candles, flowers. Calling, “Alf! Alf! How is he? How’s Kit? Is he talking? Have you talked to him?”

Alf smiles tight-lipped. Gives a thumbs-up. Some applaud.

The lesser outcry, jokey, not really meant to be heard, of a prankster cuts through: “Hey, Alfie, did Cameron dump you?”

Paparazzo with an old grudge.

The others shout the insensitive shutterbug down, officially registering their distaste.

Alf ducks into the waiting Town Car.

• • •

A SPECIAL CREW obliterates all traces of biological debris from Kit’s bathroom. (A CSI producer had referred them to Kit’s agent, Kiki, who insisted on handling that sort of detail.) She told Alf that, supposedly, the company was profiled on the Discovery Channel. The LAPD hires them for crime scene scrubs — they restore rooms to their original pristine state. Kiki said they use chemicals that eat “smell” molecules.

• • •

HE EMERGES FROM coma, pulling the feed tube from his throat. Gagging. One eye won’t open — the muscle controlling the lid is damaged. A rakish pirate patch is provided, but he keeps tearing it off.

Viv and Alf rejoice in his feistiness.

Lightfoot Senior revels in his boy’s stubborn, genetic heroism. Headstrong.

There is some cause for celebration among Kit’s management posse, though Kiki still can’t see the light. She thinks people are grasping at straws.

Doctors are cautiously optimistic. In a press conference, they guardedly announce that the actor is no longer comatose. Condition upgraded to serious. They refuse to talk details of status or prognosis.

Kit makes sounds — gibberish. Sings in his sleep. Jerks awake, as if he was falling. Gains weight. Likes to spit. As long as he holds on to something, he can stand by himself and try to whistle or make barking noises. His face still looks like a Francis Bacon. He cries. He laughs. He is diapered.

• • •

HE STANDS AT bedside, dazed. Combative.

Flails at his caretakers and finally connects, punching an older female nurse, who reels and falls, abrading herself. Burke holds him tight to his chest, to restore calm — he scuffs at the floor and tries to break free. Finally submits to his father’s ministrations.

Burke is the only one who can soothe him.

• • •

VIV SITS IN a chair, facing him (Kit in a chair too, but seat-belted in).

She takes his hand and traces it over her cheek. Flashes on Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker. Sometimes he looks at her and seems to smile. She calls a nurse when she smells feces.

• • •

VIV AND ALF, in a dark back booth at Chianti.

They commune in relative silence and eat their comfort food: red wine, bread, and bouillabaisse.

Occasionally, Alf says something to cheer her — crazy gossip about some actor they know or the beggar he saw on the median with a cardboard sign that said, I LEFT HOME WITHOUT IT. She says she saw one on San Vicente with a sign that said, START AGAIN.

She takes his hand and traces on her cheek to show how things went with Kit.

Nothing sexual about it.

Just sorrow and fatigue.

As always, she begins to cry. He is helpless to comfort her.

• • •

KIT RAISES UP as the RN removes the bedpan.

An LVN enters and hands a little camera to the RN, who tells him to shut the door.

They wiggle him into a shirt before posing with the superstar.

They take turns.

The poses are wholesome, not scurrilous.

Mother and Child Reunion

LISANNE WAS BESIDE herself, thinking that any moment she would learn that Kit was dead. She couldn’t rely on the media for updates, and whatever leaked from Tiff Loewenstein was invariably grim. It was like a bad dream. She couldn’t sleep anymore and watched Lord of the Rings DVDs nonstop. She was afraid to take pills because of the baby.

She went back to the Bodhi Tree in desperation and bought the Bardo Guidebook, which delineated the Buddhist experience of dying and being dead. Much of it frightened and overwhelmed. The bardo was described as a kind of twilight zone or in-between state. (When Lisanne looked the word up on the Internet, she got cross-referenced to Robert Bardo, the stalker who murdered the television actress Rebecca Schaeffer. That creeped her out further.) There were actually five or six different bardos, but the easiest one to understand was called the “natural bardo of this life.” Apparently a human life span was merely an “in-between” to the states that came before and after. The guidebook said that what followed life was “the painful bardo of dying.” (Whoopee.) It said how, at the time of death, the white essence of the father descended from the head like a moon sinking in the sky, while at the same time the red essence of the mother ascended from below the navel like a rising sun. The essences merged in the middle of the heart.

What really interested Lisanne was the book’s assertion that, after death, those who had meditated a lot in life — people like Kit — still had a window of opportunity to be “realized” or liberated. The guidebook said that when consciousness left the body, a person became confused and disoriented. “Karmic winds” blew around and made a person wonder where his body was. At the coming of the winds, it was especially important to keep your wits and realize that whatever you saw or heard (say, the blinding of 100,000 suns or the clapping of 100,000 thunderclouds), no matter how wrathful, peaceful, or seductive, was the demons that befell you, it was essential to realize that all those things were just a manifestation of your ego. They represented the part of you still clinging to something called samsara. If you could just see that those visions, those hideous or beautiful sounds, feelings, and experiences were only projections of the self, then you could escape the cycle of rebirth, or the Wheel of Becoming. You would then be totally realized. That was the state they called enlightenment or nirvana.

If you got stuck on the wheel, the next bardo lasted forty-nine days and seemingly offered a little more time to achieve buddhahood. But even if you panicked and failed to “recognize the essence of your own mind,” you still had the chance to steer yourself toward a human rebirth, which the Buddhists said was a rare and privileged thing; that was why it was important not to squander one’s limited term in the so-called natural bardo of the living. Meditation and devotion to the path resulted in liberation. Animals couldn’t meditate — they were trapped in the animal bardo and could be liberated only by those who had escaped the Wheel of Becoming.

It was fascinating to her and a welcome distraction from the self-imposed deathwatch. Lisanne read pages of the guidebook aloud when she couldn’t sleep. She was amazed by something called phowa, an ancient technique in which a person literally shot his consciousness into space at the time of death, like an arrow. Mind mingled with prana (“life-wind”), ejecting itself through the central channel and out the top of one’s skull into infinity. Lisanne thought that was intriguing because supposedly an experienced phowa practitioner could actually liberate someone else’s consciousness upon that person’s death — meaning that if you weren’t the world’s greatest meditator (she’d bought some instructional tapes but wasn’t really into it), then fortunately a qualified guru or high lama or whatever could come along and give you that final shove.

There was something called the ground luminosity and the path luminosity. At death they merged — in Buddhism, there was lots of merging and lots of death—“like a child jumping onto his mother’s lap.” She thought it achingly beautiful, and her respect for Kit and his years of dedication “to the cause” grew. How admirable it was that in the midst of Hollywood shallowness he would have been drawn to such a world! But she wondered… Was the Buddhism of the guidebook the particular form that he practiced? So much of the teachings seemed morbid and impossibly esoteric. It was one thing to have a book lay everything out in concise, no-nonsense terms. But if a person meditated, did he, at least over time, become privy to all of the rules? Did he get rewired? Was the educational material sort of magically downloaded as a consequence of incredible discipline? Lisanne wondered if the experience would be like living among a foreign people then one day waking up to speak the language, or at least realize one was dreaming in it. How many years did that take — two, five, twenty, fifty? And if a person finally did understand, by some kind of osmosis, was his knowledge something he was allowed to share with others if he was even able? Lisanne was possessed by the thought that Kit was nearly liberated but hadn’t, say, fully mastered a way of ejecting his consciousness, and was terrified that he would be trapped in some miserable bardo. Did he apprise Viv Wembley of his progress or lack of, before he got hurt? If Lisanne could learn something from the actress that was pertinent, it might give her comfort. Though it could be that Buddhism was like Scientology and you weren’t allowed to tell anyone about anything. Or did that apply only to outsiders? (Which maybe Viv technically was, not being, as far as Lisanne knew, a practicing Buddhist.) Not that she knew anything about Scientology, but you never heard Tom Cruise or Jenna Elfman or Lisa Marie Presley sharing their personal experiences. Lisanne thought that if she wanted to find out anything about Kit’s proficiency in terms of his struggle to be liberated, she would probably have to approach other Buddhists who knew him well. But why should they tell her anything?

The guidebook said that near the end of the forty-nine days, if you were destined to take a human rebirth, you began looking around for couples who were engaged in intercourse. The rule of thumb was that swarms of lost souls were always hovering around the entrance of a woman’s womb as she made love, “like flies on a piece of meat.” The book was scandalous! Maybe Buddhism was just an elaborately kinky sham.

There were so many questions. Did the fact that doctors had drilled into the skull to relieve pressure, bored into and broken bone in the crown chakra, from where consciousness waited to launch — did the surgical holes make “ejection” easier or, instead, somehow traumatically seal his fate and his doom? Anyway, the classical texts declared that a person had to be dead in order for phowa to occur. What if Kit didn’t die but remained imprisoned in his body, conscious but unable to move or speak? He could stay like that for years. What then?

There were evidently three different ways of dying (there always seemed to be three ways of doing this and three ways of doing that) — like a child, like a beggar, or like a lion. To die like a child meant to have no concept of dying or not-dying. Dying like a beggar meant not to care about the circumstances of one’s death. Dying like a lion meant to die in solitude. It was lovely, but what did any of it mean? She imagined that Kit would prefer to die like a lion, but with all those doctors and nurses injecting, monitoring, and restraining, how could he possibly have the chance?

She lay prone on the couch and closed her eyes. Phil’s gift, the Amazing Technicolor Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Buddha, was close at hand. An ashtray overflowed. Lisanne shifted onto her side, drifting. Her nose pressed against the cushion, and she smelled the musty imprint of her heavy body. In conscious imitation of the Bliss-Wheel’s counterpart — the Sotheby’s gift — she let her left hand lay atop the gravid belly while the right dangled down to touch the carpeted floor. In her mind, the cautionary words from the guidebook regarding the afterlife struggle absurdly merged with sorcerers’ voices from The Lord of the Rings.

Like the confusion in the dreams of one’s sleep last night, later on it will be difficult to practice in the bardo.

If he could not die as a lion, she mused, it would be better to leave the world as a child than as a beggar.

Ladies Who Lunch

BECCA, ANNIE, LARRY, and Gingher had lunch at Swingers in Santa Monica.

Becca and Larry had met a few times for coffee since first sharing a table at Peet’s. Whenever they were together, she felt like the ingenue of a novel about the early days of a group of starving actors and artists, some destined for fame, others for tragic obscurity. When she finally made a date to introduce him to Annie, Larry brought along his chubby friend.

“Tell them how she shits in front of you,” said Larry.

Gingher laughed, jiggling all over.

“Oh no!” said Annie. “I really like her show— please don’t tell me she’s one of those people who get off on that.”

“Let us just say,” said Gingher affectedly, “that the lady tends to be rather unself-conscious in the washroom.”

“What do you mean?” asked Becca, wide-eyed.

Larry was smitten. “Girl, you are so Southern — très naïve et gentille. Or should I say gentile. You are so Virginia.”

“That when she goes to the bathroom, she…”

“We have meetings every morning,” said Gingher, “where she like gives me the list of stuff to do for the day?”

“You meet in the toilet?” said Becca.

“You betcha,” said Larry. “That’s when she’s apt to pinch off a large one.”

“Oh my God!” said Annie, laughing. “That is so gross.”

“The mirrors steam up like a jungle. Jungle fever. No: jungle feces!”

“Larry, you are crazy!” said Becca.

“Would I shit you, honeybear?” asked Larry. “Does a Viv shit in the woods? Who’s shittin who? Horton shits a Who. Tell it, girl.”

“I think it’s like some kind of power trip,” said Gingher. “But, you guys, you cannot tell anyone. She’d fucking sue me.”

“You’d never shit in this town again,” said Larry gleefully. “You’d be blacklisted — you’d be shitlisted!”

“I don’t even care. I’m walking. She is such a cunt.”

“You will never leave that job.”

“Watch me.”

“How did you even start working for her?” asked Annie.

“Doing craft service on her show. Actually my friend was doing craft service and I was helping him out. And Viv was really, really nice to me — this was before they were making like a million dollars an episode. Viv had this really horrible relationship with her mother, so she does this maternal thing where she likes to take in sick puppies. I was puppy-of-the-week. But she really did do all these nice things for me.”

“You ungrateful whore.”

“She paid for me to have my tattoos removed at UCLA. They were really gnarly. She has this whole side of her that’s really sweet and nonjudgmental. She just started asking me to do stuff for her. Errands and shit. She liked having me around, I guess. Like while she was getting ready for big auditions or premieres. She’d like ask my opinion on her clothes or her makeup. Even though most of the time she totally had stylists and makeup people come in and do her. I never even really said anything except that she looked really good but I guess I calmed her nerves.”

“She is really beautiful,” said Annie.

“And when this other person she had working for her quit? Honey-chile, I moved right in. That girl was so fucked up. Chartrain.”

“Chartrain?” said Larry.

“Chartrain, Soul Train, whatever. Viv helped get me a car, and she was cool. But then I, like, saw this whole other side to her.”

“How’s she dealing with what happened?” asked Becca, in hushed tones. “Weren’t they engaged?”

“That’s actually really sad,” said Gingher. “Because Kit is very cool. Very sweet and down-to-earth. We always got along. I’ve, like, almost gone to see him at the hospital a bunch of times. But I heard the security was so intense.”

“Does she visit him?” asked Annie.

Gingher nodded. “She did at first, but now it’s like a lot less. A lot less. She never asked me to go with. But he’s really doing better from what I understand. I mean, they don’t know what’s going to happen — with his mind — but he’s supposedly doing a lot better.”

“A mind is a terrible thing to baste,” intoned Larry.

The girls ignored him. “I don’t know why they hooked up,” said Gingher. “Well, I guess I know why she hooked up with him. She’s got that TV-inferiority thing. Kit gave her street cred.”

“A mind is a terrible thing to taste, said Hannibal Lecter.”

“He wouldn’t even say that! Would you shut up? God, you are so annoying!” She turned back to Becca and Annie. “I guess it’s just a stone sex trip. Or was. I know they’re kind of out there.”

“Our Lady of the Perpetual Potty certainly is.”

“But he’s like — intellectually and just as a person — Kit’s like, her total opposite.”

“Really?” said Larry. “When I met him he acted like a total prick.”

“You bring it out!” said Gingher.

“You met him through Gingher?” asked Annie.

“I told you,” said Becca, reminding her. “They met while Larry was working at the Coffee Bean.”

“I was going to do that movie,” he said, filling Annie in. He loved telling the story. “The Aronofsky thing—Special Needs. But I got fucked by Mr. Brain Dead.”

“That’s not nice,” said Becca.

“Sorry, Virginia.”

“You don’t know that you didn’t get the part because of Kit,” said Gingher. “He’s not vindictive like that. Maybe Aronofsky thought you couldn’t act.”

“Well fuck Mr. Requiem for an Avant-Garde Blow Job too, honey-child, cause my audition was kick-ass. I was on my second callback when Mr. Lightfoot and I had our little run-in, and I got axed the next day.”

“I will always love you for working at the Coffee Bean as a retard!” said Gingher.

“He went off on me, and I just looked at him and said, ‘I’m sorry. I mean, you’re only like making twenty-five million a picture, or whatever, and I’m out there doing what I have to do so I can pay my fucking phone bill—”

“You didn’t say that,” said Gingher, agog.

“Under my breath.”

Gingher guffawed.

“And how do you guys know each other?” asked Annie.

“We met at the Grove,” said Larry.

“We were by ourselves,” said Gingher. “We’d just broken up with our boyfriends.”

“We were crying.”

“It was so pathetic! We were sitting an aisle away from each other at E.T.”

“The rerelease.”

“E.T. is the perfect movie,” said Annie.

“Gertie!” exulted Gingher. “How cute is Gertie?” She addressed the last to Becca, whom she deemed to be ambassador to the land of Drew.

“What was that, like four years ago?” said Larry. “I’d never even seen it.”

“Can you believe that?” said Annie to the others, outraged.

“I saw Close Encounters,” he said, “but I never saw E.T.”

“You know how the Grove — I love the Grove! — has those armrests you can lift up?”

“Lovebird seats,” said Annie.

“So Larry and I see each other crying. And we like started whispering to each other, really loud. Then Larry changes seats—”

“I thought you were Julia Sweeney.”

“—and we sobbed through the whole movie!”

“People were telling us to shut up.”

“Larry told this one person that he was really sorry he was crying but he just found out he had tuberculosis and AIDS. After the movie, we went to the Farmers Market and ran our stories.”

“About the mutual breakups.”

“Who were you going out with?” asked Becca.

“Some pimply-faced Puerto Rican trash,” said Larry. “I think he was, like, twelve.”

“Research for yet another amazing movie role,” said Gingher, with a wink. “And speaking of E.T., ohmygod, you do look so much like Drew!”

“Thank you,” said Becca, as if in rehearsal for when she would finally come into her own.

“Larry said you might be doing that Spike Jonze movie.”

“I hope so,” said Becca. “Because the look-alike stuff doesn’t pay the rent. Not this month anyway.”

Larry was saying how he read somewhere that look-alikes were always being flown to Japan for private parties, when Gingher gaped at a pregnant woman passing by their table. She took one look and blurted out, “Ohmygod, I can’t even believe I, like, forgot — Viv miscarried.” She clapped an embarrassed hand over her mouth, in exaggerated fear that the woman had overheard.

“No!” said Annie.

“When?” asked Larry, eyes agleam.

“You guys so totally have to swear you won’t tell anyone.”

“I didn’t even know she was pregnant,” said Becca.

“No one did,” said Gingher. “I mean, probably not even Kit.”

“Wouldn’t it have been weird,” said Larry, “if they had a kid and it turned out to be retarded?”

“That’s so sad,” said Becca. “I mean, she probably lost the baby because of what happened. The stress.”

“Ohmygod, that is so sad,” echoed Annie.

“But you guys have to swear you won’t talk about it until, like, after it’s in the tabloids. I signed a confidentiality agreement and could really get in trouble. Will you so totally swear?”

Transmigration of Souls

LISANNE’S WATER BROKE in the Century Plaza ballroom, at Tiff’s Heart Giver Courage tribute.

When she stood from her seat, she felt a pang and told Phil she was having a “bladder problem.” By the time they got to the dance floor, everything was soaked. She collapsed in a chair at a table of old people who went on picking at their veal. She was shaking and crying. When the Loewensteins rushed over, Lisanne said she was pregnant and that her water must have broken. Tiff kind of took over. There were five top OB-GYN guys in the house, and all of them kept wanting her to agree that maybe she’d only peed her pants. Just when Lisanne thought it had ebbed, she got flooded anew. They plunked her in a wheelchair and laid her out in the stretch limo. Phil was white as a sheet. One of the OB-GYNs went ahead to Saint John’s.

The nurse told her she was having contractions every five minutes, but she couldn’t feel them. They gave her something to stop the labor, though the discharge was continuous. Phil was so shell-shocked that Tiff, who had already received his crystal figurine and was exhausted as well, announced he would escort the scion home. Roslynn stayed on. She was a great comfort, kind and discreet. She left around midnight without ever broaching the issue of paternity.

• • •

LISANNE LAY THERE and assessed. She thought of calling Robbie — but why? Her boss would be shocked when he learned, though in a way, she was relieved. Her secret was out, or nearly so. Earlier in the day she had taken the deepest, most restful nap of her life, awakening at peace. Her concern for Kit was still there, but the agonized worries over his health and well-being had evaporated. She knew he would be OK. The water had broken and a rainbow now shone.

At 3:30 A.M. the nurse said the tests showed the baby’s lungs to be “mature.” The doctor wanted to deliver right away. The C-section took forever, and at delivery, the bloody boy screamed with elemental force — healthy, at thirty weeks.

They fed him through his nose because the suckle reflex hadn’t yet developed. Lisanne used a breast pump for milk, but it was hard to be productive. She was still able to make small quantities of what the RNs called “liquid gold,” which they added to the feeding tube. The hotel sent a basket of fruit and cookies. No one ever had her water break in the ballroom before.

• • •

THE SOUND WAS off while she watched Larry King.

“Do you know she here?” said a Mexican nurse who came in for the dinner tray.

“Who?”

“Viv Wembley. The girl from the show who go with Kit Lightfoot. The show Together.”

“What do you mean?”

“She miscarry.”

“She—”

“She miscarry. Ectopic — very dangerous. She right here! Same floor.”

“In the hospital?” The woman was confusing her.

“Right now! But I no tell you — is secret. Is terrible what happened to her fiancé. Handsome! Now no big fat Greek wedding. No baby. Is terrible. Is terrible.”

• • •

THAT EVENING, Lisanne saw her.

She went for a walk and saw Cameron Diaz and a woman with a turban on her head leave one of the rooms. Against their tender protests, Viv shakily emerged to escort them to the elevator. That was when the weakened actress looked at Lisanne and smiled. (She remembered the time Kit made eye contact after yoga.) She thought how pretty Viv was without makeup, how vulnerable looking. Lisanne looped back toward her own room so they wouldn’t have the same trajectory.

The moment they exchanged glances, she knew.

She felt the same peace she’d experienced after her amazing nap. They looked into each other’s eyes and Lisanne knew, was certain.

The Bardo of Becoming

BUT HOW IS HE?

He farts, grunts, giggles, howls.

Words remain in throat, stillborn. Incipient thoughts — autochthonous ideation — aborted.

He is in love with his body, its pain, pleasure, and rapturous stink. Becomes fixated on arbitrary landscapes of skin — hair, follicle, pigment. Flake and fingernail.

A stage actor warming up, he spends hours fogging a hand mirror, watching himself gesticulate, crease, pucker, twitch, startle, suspirate, belch, yawn, coo, whisper. Therapists stretch muscle and rub ointment; he submits like a dog, belly up, with unannounced pleasure. He takes businesslike joy in their grooming and bodywork, as if thespian instinct has informed that the vessel is preeminent and must be maintained at all costs.

Sometimes his head is stabby and migrainous. He presses, imploring the scarified points of incision, feeling the heat beneath sutures, vents to a still-active furnace, mistakenly — catastrophically — soldered shut.

Boosters and cheerleaders are certain he’s more “present” than he appears to be, the gray matter busily rerouting and reknitting “as we speak.” But he has trouble standing, and, once standing, has trouble standing still. Trouble walking too, the gait ticcy and belabored.

Sometimes he awakens bellowing. High-priced nurses, privately hired, burly, stalwart, do their best to soothe without injections. Sometimes he surfaces from REM sleep cackling, knee-slapping, with attendant nefarious dysphonic outbursts. Sometimes he weeps, soft and plaintive like a child — or ragged, seizured, ugly.

Always heartbreaking.

He seems to know Alf but doesn’t recognize his bride to be — or at least won’t let on. Boosters and cheerleaders (led by Kiki) fantasize his indifference to be a shuck, a heroic way of letting the actress off the hook, nobly allowing her to break the engagement. No fault, no contest, nolo contendere, gentleman to the end, even in debilitation. Dad agrees, up to a point. The dad says Kit knows damn well who she is but “just doesn’t want to go there.”

Viv fears his eventual acknowledgment of her, no matter how gradual, will cause great suffering. Stops visiting. Wants her man to focus his energies on recovery. She martyrs herself, shamefully hating her secret involuntary mantra: “I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.”

Alf disappears. He’s doing a film that, mercifully, is on location, out of the country. He was going to stop coming, anyway. In a fit of tiredness that he regretted, he told Burke it was just too depressing. Mr. Lightfoot said, as a lawyer would to a prospective juror whom he was about to dismiss, “Thank you for your candor.” Go recharge, Burke added expansively. Stop guilt-tripping. You’ll reconnect down the line. (You piece of Hollywood shit.)

Kiki still comes. A tough broad, said Burke. He tells the Buddhists she’s one hell of an agent.

• • •

HE WISELY LIMITS access for those who would see his son. But the Buddhists are allowed to come and go as they please — all Kit’s friends and practitioners from the sangha. Burke calls them the sanghanistas and knows they want nothing from Kit. They’re not morbidly curious. Their religion demands they act in the most ethical, dignified, compassionate, “mindful” of ways. They are patient and generous with their time. Burke respects them and is comforted by their inconspicuous, warmly obeisant spirituality.

He feels his son to be comforted too.

• • •

OLD FRIENDS ARE pleased the father kept open this vital aspect of his son’s life. They’re happy not to be banished and glad he didn’t trash Kit’s beliefs because they know it is the foundation that will heal him. They had heard stories of the tyranny of this man — some from Kit himself — but in this terrible time Burke Lightfoot had, for whatever reason, opened the door, and for that, they are profoundly grateful. So they honor him. They see the Buddha in his gesture and honor Burke Lightfoot’s heart.

The sangha visit at all hours, even meditating at bedside while Kit sleeps. They serve him while he is awake. They bring cooked food and read scriptures and sutras out loud. They massage him with emollients and encourage him to stretch. They do baby yoga. They even teach the nurses — child’s pose, downward dog, easy twisting warrior, spinal twist, neck release. They are courteous and helpful to staff, dependable, soon indispensable. Many have worked in hospices, and the nurses let them do funky, menial things. Bedpan and hygiene. Stripping the sheets and making the bed.

Burke watches the Meditators come and go, fingering their beads, reading texts aloud, intoning lengthy prayers, sometimes in English, sometimes in Japanese or Tibetan or Whatever. They wear civilian clothes and close-cropped hair, but now and then smiling monks, bald men or women in saffron robes, come to sit. They do not speak.

Tara Guber even brought Penor Rinpoche, the lama from Mysore.

• • •

NOW IT IS TIME for him to leave.

The hospital is happy to see him go — he is just too big a celebrity, and difficult to accommodate. An unruly tabloidal pall had wrapped the complex in gauze. So much to contend with: the twenty-four-hour media presence, the police and additional security, the concrete barriers and parking disruptions, the predatory paparazzi eyes invading other patients’ and their families’ privacy. Donors and in-house benefactors were becoming restive.

At four in the morning, he emerges from the elevator and is rolled into the garage by wheelchair, flanked by doctors, nurses, and a half dozen private guards. (One has the sense the doctors are there so they can eventually boast that yes, they were present for that strange and historic release.) Burke engaged Gavin de Becker, the man who oversaw the details of George Harrison’s last days, to facilitate his son’s relocation. An armored van with blacked-out windows awaits, plus two dark Buick sedans with three men apiece.

Suddenly Kit becomes agitated.

His father, already inside the van, emerges to calm him. It takes but a few minutes. The dad gives a thumbs-up to the others and says, “Good to go.” Whatever feelings anyone has about Burke Lightfoot and his questionable motives, it is clear the man has worked hard to establish an effective, easy kinship with his volatile, traumatized son. Things would have gone a lot rougher without him.

With media none the wiser, the convoy makes the forty-minute trip to Valencia.

The facility awaits. An entire wing has been cleared.

• • •

MR. DE BECKER HAS PROVIDED round-the-clock guards on-site. Rehab employees have been screened and Tyrone Lamott, among others, duly briefed. Those immediately under him were seriously cautioned — warned — by Mr. Lamott himself that any breach of the celebrity client’s confidentiality would be harshly dealt with.

(Tabloid stories and their sources will be tracked. Photographs taken and sold will be tracked.)

Tyrone’s heart sinks when he sees Kit lifted from the truck and set in the wheelchair. He puts on that pixillated smile.

“Well hello, Mr. Lightfoot. We meet again!”

Kit says nothing. A promising laugh — then sudden Stygian hollowness of features.

“Hello, Tyrone,” says Burke, generating a kilowatt smile and a firm handshake, even in the chill of near-dawn. They’ve already met. The search for the right rehab was undertaken with the secrecy and precision of an Olympics hunt; once selected, there were many details to personally attend to.

“Hey, Mr. B — well, you made it.”

“We made it. We sure did. He made it. He’s the hero.”

“He sure is. And we’re sure happy to have you with us, Kit. There gonna be lots of people around you, twenty-four/seven, making sure you git better. Your daddy’s got hisself a room right next door to y’all so y’all won’t have time to be lonesome! We gonna have ourselves a party. Gonna have ourselves a get-well party.”

Burke nods, and one of the men pushes the wheelchair toward the building. The interior lights blaze.

“Well, well,” says Tyrone to Kit, clucking. “I thought you might at least bring Mr. Aronofsky with you.”

He’s a faggot negro that gets on Burke’s nerves — a pain-in-the-ass queen whom he nevertheless cuts some slack, knowing Tyrone is ultimately a very important player, and that their dramatic arrival has made him overwrought.

“That’s OK,” continues their sardonic host, as he rushes to keep ahead of the men. “Mr. Aronofsky isn’t here and we jus’ gonna have to deal with it. We gonna deal with everything. And we gonna have us a good time doin it, too.”

They reach the front door and Tyrone winks at Burke as they all go in.

An Actor Prepares

BECCA GOT A SMALL part in what Daily Variety called Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman Untitled A.K.A. Look-Alikes. Rusty got a big part, which had been kind of expected, and that was OK too, because Becca didn’t even want to think about the amount of shit she would have taken if given a commensurate role. Rusty seemed nicer now all around.

The look-alikes were scheduled for two weeks of rehearsal with Jorgia Wilding. (Rusty got privates.) The old woman was dismissive, demanding, and formidably gruff, but it was an incredible privilege to work with the legendary coach of so many greats — Al Pacino and Jessica Lange, Dustin Hoffman and Sally Field, Shelley Winters and Robert Duvall. Annie said that she’d even worked with Sofia on Godfather III.

For reasons of secrecy, scripts were mostly withheld; everyone got “sides” instead. (The pages were printed with invisible ink so they couldn’t be Xeroxed.) Decoy scripts had been circulated because the producers knew that sooner or later someone would type scenes straight onto the Internet. The look-alikes had to sign waivers stating they wouldn’t talk about the movie to friends, family, and especially the press. They’d be fired and fined if they did.

From what she had gleaned, Look-Alikes was one of those movies about the making of a movie. Becca played Drew’s camera double (which she actually would be, during the shoot. Spike came up with that idea, and Becca thought it was great because, aside from helping her get into character, she’d be paid extra too.) Her role was kind of mysterious — Charles hadn’t written her that many lines — but there was a dream sequence where she and Drew were supposed to kiss. Larry Levine said it sounded like “a postmodern Cruel Intentions thingie,” but Becca just couldn’t believe it. Her first film role and she was making out with Drew Barrymore!

She already knew some of her on-screen cohorts but got particularly friendly with the Barbra Streisand, who had a little cameo. When Becca asked if she had ever met the true Barbra, she said she’d only met Barbra’s mother, Diana Kind, on the celebrity mom segment of a defunct TV show called Photoplay. Diana had invited her home for lunch.

“So here I am in Barbra Streisand’s mother’s house. Now you can’t imagine what that was like because all my life people are telling me that I look exactly like her. And I’m gazing at the memorabilia, the framed photos and all, and it’s like I’m surrounded by my life because every image has a history — for me—you know: everyone said I looked like this one when I was twelve… and this one when I was eighteen… and this one when I was thirty. And it’s very, very strange. And I can never forget what Diana said. We were having our tea and chatting and whatnot and after a while she said that her daughter was so busy, ‘I’ll have to cart you around with me.’ Can you believe? I saw her a lot after that — we went shopping at Robinsons-May for Barbra’s brother’s wedding present. We talked on the phone. She’d tell me how to make chicken, how you have to clean it and be careful of the germs, how you have to let it soak, then wash your hands. And the fact she was Barbra’s mom gradually kind of disappeared — she was just a person. You know, I had a feeling that she liked the idea that people thought I was her daughter. To a point, I guess. I was a missing link. It was pretty strange. People occasionally said things… like once I was waiting in the car for her and some girls walked by and said, ‘It’s Barbra Streisand!’ And Diana could hear them and I know that part of her liked that but part of her didn’t. Maybe she was thinking, But this isn’t my daughter. Where is my daughter? This is an impersonator! Then one day I got a call from her saying she’d won an award from the Jewish National Fund. She asked me to go along, and I took my fiancé. I thought Barbra might be there, but she was in Europe at the time. It was a luncheon. There weren’t a million people. I got stared at in the elevator. I wasn’t really introduced; she never said who I was. My fiancé and I didn’t sit at the family table, but people were looking, I think, and wondering, Who is she? Barbra’s sister was there, and we took a picture — me, Barbra’s sister, and Barbra’s mom! I called to thank her and she said, ‘People didn’t know if you were Barbra, if you were a relative…’ My feeling is that it got to the point where it was uncomfortable for her — though not for me. And when I heard she died, I just broke down. Because I always thought of getting in touch to see how she was but I never did.”

• • •

TALKING WITH THE Barbra made her want to call her own mother in the worst way. She had a sudden, overwhelming need for Dixie to come to L.A. — it was primal, and Becca felt that if she didn’t make contact, now, she would surely die.

She had actually thought of phoning all week because she was short on rent. She hadn’t gotten a paycheck yet, even though SAG rules said that everyone was supposed to be compensated for rehearsal time. She wasn’t complaining. But here she was with a Spike Jonze gig and not only was she broke but she still couldn’t get theatrical representation. (Her so-called hip-pocketed commercial agent had done diddly-squat.) She told Elaine she was available for bookings, but ironically, the real look-alike work had pretty much dried up. She thought she should probably call Sharon but didn’t feel like submitting herself to the seduction thing either.

Mom wasn’t home. She hung up and played back messages.

“Becca? It’s Gingher Wyatt. Larry Levine’s friend? Remember me? Larry gave me your number. Listen, I’m moving back East — which means I’m quitting my lovely job! Which means I need to find someone to replace me and thought maybe you would be interested. She doesn’t pay much because Viv Wembley’s a cheap cunt — ha! — and of course you would have to interview, which is always fun depending on what mood the lovely and talented Ms. Wembley is in — but I have a feeling she would really like you. Anyway, I already talked you up with her and she thought the look-alike thing was a crack-up. (I hope it’s OK I said that’s what you sometimes do.) She was laughin it up, which means she was probably completely loaded. Hey, were you at a birthday party at the Colony once? Cause Viv said something about a Drew look-alike being there a while back or whenever. I think it really got her nipples hard. I’m kidding. Anyway, I don’t want to use up your entire machine for this message, so if you’re interested in gainful employment call my cell, 892-3311. Three-ten. The good part is, if she likes you she’ll just hire you cause she’s weird that way. But really good—I mean, the part of her that’s trusting is good. Oh my God, it is so like the best part! Call me! Ciao for now!”

Out of Hospital

SHE NAMED THE boy Siddhama Kitchener McCadden. He was in the neonatal ICU for a month. Once he was able to breast-feed, Lisanne gave him her teat every two and a half hours. She did that for ten weeks.

Reggie said she could come back whenever she felt strong and that it’d be fun having a newborn around the office (he had one of his own). The man was a saint. She was even visited by Wendy, Reggie’s wife. Mrs. Marck was on the board of a home for unwed moms, and suddenly, after all these years, she reached out. They sent flowers and sweet-tooth care packages and messenger-delivered all kinds of handy sundries. Wendy even sent her reflexologist to give Lisanne a foot massage.

The Loewensteins became unofficial godparents. Roslynn arranged for a cleaning lady and a nanny too so that Lisanne wouldn’t be entirely housebound. They got her an amazing stroller and a $2,500 gift certificate at Fred Segal Baby. The studio sent over a ton of crazy reality shows and DVDs, and Tiff wrote Lisanne notes urging her to heal quickly so that he could exploit her natural-born talent as an award-show “walker.” “So many tributes,” he wrote, in surprisingly elegant cursive, “so little time.”

She finally got the gumption to invite Philip to her apartment (that’s what she called him once the baby was born, as if to formalize and atone). Lisanne was generally mortified at having concealed her condition: in retrospect, she felt duplicitous even though the word wasn’t accurate. If the pregnancy had been unreal to her, how could she have made it real enough to have shared with Philip? She fruitlessly wondered if she might somehow have been forced to tell him the truth if only she had started to show. Maybe she’d have told him it was a fibroid tumor or just cut him off and fled. All she knew was that by hiding it from him, she had caused Philip tremendous pain. If she’d simply been honest (Lisanne used the word simply in her head and had to laugh), it probably wouldn’t have been that big a deal. She had become pregnant as the result of a fling with an old boyfriend — in the wake of her father’s death, no less, which actually, among excuses, was pretty much close to perfection — and couldn’t imagine Philip not being understanding. And if he wasn’t, so be it. Lisanne was frankly surprised that he still wanted her in his life at all. (He did, according to Roslynn.) She genuinely liked him, even if the physical attraction wasn’t there, though a selfish concupiscence lay in Lisanne’s suspicions that he got off on her obesity. She really did like the part of him that seemed damaged, the part that forced him to remain a goofy bachelor, the murky part he kept hidden — not so much that he was afraid to reveal himself but that he didn’t possess the language. She also enjoyed the part that was kind and inquisitive and gentlemanly, too.

“I should have told you a long time ago,” she said.

“It really doesn’t matter.”

He hadn’t been able to look in her eyes. He watched Sidd nurse instead. Philip’s glance furtively darted from suckling teat to Supreme Bliss-Wheel Integration Wheel and back; from suckling teat to plastic hangie thing above the crib; from suckling teat to the proximity of Lisanne’s pale, implacable brow.

“But it does. It does matter. And I’m sorry for that.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I do. I guess that I was, just, really confused.” Pause. “I’ve been confused about a lot of things lately. When I got pregnant, everything, just, kicked into overdrive. It’s probably a cliché to blame it on hormones, but I think maybe it’s true. Or partially. Maybe totally! I kind of ‘unhinged.’ I’m glad I’m not one of those women who drown their kids in the tub! I could be, but — anyway, I’m not, and I’m just, I’m just really sorry, Philip — that I didn’t talk to you. I mean, about it. And I think another issue is that I really kind of really like you. Being with you. Maybe more than like. Which is unusual for me. I hope this doesn’t make you uncomfortable because I know it’s crazy what I did. Not talking about it with anyone, especially you. (But it wasn’t just you.) And I’m not trying to justify it. I think part of me was in shock. Disbelief. At the timing. You know? And it’s weird because I think I knew that I would never carry it to term. Which I ultimately didn’t. And maybe part of me thought that if I told you, you would have just run. I know that sounds like bullshit because I’m the one who was running. And I probably would have too if I were you. But you didn’t — or you haven’t. Yet. And that shocks me! Scares me but in a good way. I think. I mean, I’m just really kind of impressed. By that. Is any of this making sense?”

“Are you still involved with the father?”

“No,” she said, emphatically. “I never was! That’s what’s so ludicrous. He doesn’t even know. I haven’t told him—”

“You haven’t told him?”

“I called a few months ago to say I was pregnant. When I knew I was going to keep it.” She got tearful. “Philip… I’m going to be thirty-eight. I think that was definitely part of why I decided to go ahead and have it, knowing there wouldn’t be a dad. Because Robbie Sarsgaard is not dad material. Then you came along—”

She wondered if she had spoken too much. Lisanne wasn’t sure why she’d said half of what she did (she realized she’d been talking like someone in a melodrama) but was pretty sure she meant most all of it.

“Well, listen,” said Philip. She sighed deeply, ready for the Dear Jane. “I’ve been thinking — and I know this sounds, whatever it sounds. Here’s — well, this is just what’s been going on in my head. I have a house in Rustic Canyon. I have this house. There’s a bunch of rooms, mostly empty, except for the little part I live in. But you — if you wanted — could come stay. You’d have a full-time nanny and whatever you and the baby needed. You wouldn’t be alone, Lisanne. And that would make me more at ease.”

She broke into sobs. He lurched forward, kissing her neck. It felt bruising, and the skin there got sweaty and hot. Then it happened, like a dream, head sinking down to breast while the infant worked beside him, Philip’s face beet red as they sucked and panted in tandem. He chewed hard on the already tender nipple, and Lisanne cried out as he quickly turned away, mouth open in a creamy, spastic glower as he came, lips fixed in a hellish hobbyist’s grin, shamed and sated. His entire body quickly shrank in retreat, as if dissolving into an aerosol of corpuscles soon to finely speckle the walls before passing, microbe-like, through board and stucco to emerge on the other side, evaporating in the noonday sun.

A Successful Interview

“IS YOUR CAR INSURED?”

“Uh huh.”

“You’re gonna need to send a photocopy of proof of insurance to my business manager. Cause if you hit someone, I’m responsible. People love to sue a celebrity.”

She sat in the living room of her new boss’s Beachwood Canyon home. The Together star had moved in just a few years ago, and Becca made a mental note to go on-line and see if the transaction was ever listed in “Hot Property.” She was curious how much Viv had paid and which celebs if any had lived there prior. She enjoyed researching pedigree and provenance. The high-roofed concrete house sat on five acres; Becca felt like she was in Griffith Park. It was awesome, if a bit modern for her taste — not really in keeping with the surrounding environment. Architecturally, the place definitely had a “Kit” vibe and she bet he had influenced the purchase.

She wondered if the actress had been planning to move in with him once they got married. Now that things were up in the air, she’d probably stay put. But you never knew — sometimes celebrities changed properties just because they could. The great thing about having so much money was, you could ditch everything at a moment’s notice and check into any five-star hotel you liked. You could lease at the Colony or buy a ranch in Ojai or Idaho or Wyotana or wherever. Celebrities were always moving, sometimes upsizing, sometimes downsizing, but mostly they upsized. Still, Becca prided herself on being able to read between the lines of “Hot Property” blurbs to intuit when celebs were unloading because they needed cash — a sure sign being when a home was described as having been sold because so-and-so (faded rocker/older comedian/onetime game-show host) “found he wasn’t spending that much time in Los Angeles” or so-and-so (forties film star/fiftysomething model with fledgling cosmetics line/Broadway icon) exchanged her house for a Century City condo because “her children were now in college.” Anything going for under a million was another sign of trouble, though sometimes the charming “first home purchase” (usually Studio City or Silverlake) was inserted by the wily publicist of a young and up-and-coming USA or WB series star. Becca noticed that if a house was sold at more or less the same amount it was bought for, that was another sign of a celeb on the skids. All that being a far cry from the rarefied strata of perennially housenivorous dinosaurs like Stallone or Willis or Schwarzenegger, who still bought multiple lots (and even whole towns) with impunity, tearing down mansions so as to surround themselves with the luxury of undeveloped land. “Hot Property” said that Schwarzenegger and his wife had been looking for a place to stay while their home was being redone but couldn’t find “a suitable lease”—and wound up buying a place for $12 million instead, which they planned to sell upon completion of the makeover. Becca’s mom couldn’t believe it.

“My business manager will have a confidentiality thing for you to sign. And they’ll probably run a background check. Ever been to jail?” Viv said, with a laugh.

“Not that I know of!”

“They’ll need a urine sample, for drug testing.” She saw that Becca was taking her seriously and laughed again. “I’m kidding! We’ll have fun. It won’t be so bad, contrary to whatever horror stories I’m sure Gingher told you.”

“She said it was really great,” said Becca unconvincingly. “That you were great!” Viv only smirked. “I just really want to thank you,” she went on, in earnest. “I have so much respect for you. I’ve watched your show from the beginning. I always wanted to model myself on you.”

“You’re not going to All About Eve me, are you?”

“No!” said Becca, not knowing what the actress meant.

“Anyway,” said Viv, impishly. “You’re not Eve Harrington, you’re Drew Junior. Which one’s worse?”

Becca was too nervous to respond directly. “I just wanted to say that I’m going to do a great job for you. I am so motivated.”

“Good,” said Viv, tartly. She lit a cigarette. “But I want to warn you: if you have a conflict—an audition or a whatever—and you can’t do what I ask you to do in that particular moment, that is so not going to work. OK? If I need you to go to Rexall for Tampax or pick up a tape or a script — messengers do that most of the time — and you happen to have a fourth callback for Steven Soderbergh’s amazing new film at the same time, uh, guess which one you’re going to do if you want to keep your job.”

“I totally understand.”

“So were you and Gingher big buddies?”

“Not really. We met through a friend.”

“You like her?”

“She’s nice.”

“I think she stole from me.”

“Money?”

“Oh yeah. Lots of it. But that’s not your problem. I’m not even sure whose problem it is because I haven’t decided what I’m going to do about it. And I’d appreciate your not passing on that bit of information. What we say here, stays here.”

Viv stood up as the Pilates teacher came from the back of the house in readiness.

“Do you have my business manager’s address?”

“Yes.”

“Then see you Monday, Becca,” said Viv, shaking her hand.

“Thank you so much.”

“Call me V. Don’t call me Viv.”

Home Away from Home

SADGE WAS BACK. He i-mailed someone in Europe while Becca flipped through a magazine. They were smoking weed.

Drew was number 61 on Premiere magazine’s Power List, but Sadge didn’t seem to give a shit. She was wedged between Michael Bay and Sandra Bullock. The tiny paragraph said that Drew “painted the living room of her new bachelorette pad a tawny color called Naturally Calm” and that her boutique production company was called Flower Films. Sandra’s paragraph informed that her company was Fortis Films. Becca said that she was going to have her own boutique one day too. Sadge kept taking hits off the joint and i-mailing. Becca thought, Probably someone he was fucking. A backpacking Serbian skeev. Blue Ridge Films, she said out loud. That’s a pretty name. But maybe she needed an F, like Drew and Sandra. “Fast Forward” popped into her head. Fast Forward Films was cute! Or Pass/Fail. That was really good. She asked Sadge what he thought but he wouldn’t talk.

Sadge had diarrhea, something he’d picked up in the Canary Islands and couldn’t shake. A little bonus from the skeev-hump. Plus, he had some kind of worm in his foot. The doctor said the way you killed the worm was by freezing. You didn’t even try to extract it. It gave Sadge the willies to just leave it in there, and Becca thought that was why he seemed underwhelmed when she told him she got the Viv Wembley gig. Maybe he was just jealous.

She slowly chewed an overdone cheese melt. It was too soon to talk about his moving out; she didn’t want to kick him while he was down. She read aloud another item, clipped from the L.A. Times for her “Drew archives,” about the former actor John Barrymore III getting beat up inside his “upscale Mountain View” home by a bunch of crazed teenagers who were after his pot stash. She wondered how Drew and John III were related — a half brother? Then she told Sadge about how she met this adorable young actress at the Coffee Bean who had actually grown up in the house where Drew and Tom Green lived before it went up in flames. The girl said her dad used to be Marlon Brando’s agent, and back then the property had four or five different houses on it. One of them was underground, with windows peeking through the hill — very Alice in Wonderland. Without looking up from his i-mail, Sadge said, “Would you please shut up?” Becca blithely ignored him. The girl said they had a screening room, and the mom, who was a painter, had fashioned a studio from inside a famous hamburger stand on La Brea that the dad bought lock, stock, and barrel and had trucked onto the grounds. The girl said she cried when the house burned down but then Ben Affleck had apparently bought the parcel and the girl and her dad drove by and all kinds of construction was already being done. Sadge literally threw his sandwich at her, and Becca burst into tears. She told him he could go fuck himself and that he wasn’t even supposed to be here, that he was supposed to find someplace else to live, and Sadge stopped typing, then sulked in that simmering way a man has of signaling a woman he is not a little boy but a coiled snake who by rights could rape and kill her if it weren’t for the fact that he was a good person, a good man, who conscientiously exercised extraordinary sobriety, discipline, and restraint. And that one day she would see with what wisdom he had held himself back and would recognize her shrewish ways but by then it would be too late.

She tossed some things into an overnight bag and cried all the way to the car. She was on her way to Annie’s, but Annie didn’t answer any of her phones so Becca took Fairfax to Washington and then turned and headed for the beach.

The World of Mu

LISANNE MOVED TO Rustic Canyon. The house was empty except for the few rooms Philip inhabited, just as he described. She had her own wing. Mattie took Lisanne on a Beverly-Melrose furniture outing and spent a small fortune. She liked the idea of finally having an excuse to decorate her eccentric brother’s house. She couldn’t have been kinder if Siddhama had been her blood nephew.

Philip put thirty thousand dollars into an account for her to draw on for living expenses and whatever Sidd might need. They had sex twice a week. He liked taking her pants off and licking her there while she nursed. She remained passive, simply widening her legs. Anything he ever did made him come within a few minutes. He told her it had always been like that, he couldn’t hold it, and Lisanne said she didn’t mind, which she really didn’t. She was actually grateful. Philip became active only when the baby was nursing. As long as he did his business without involving Siddhama, she was OK with it. He drew comfort from her easeful indifference. That she never judged him made him less ashamed.

• • •

LISANNE RECEIVED AN e-mail from L.A. Dharma, a Buddhist Web site she corresponded with, announcing that a great teacher, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, would be giving a series of talks at a Zen monastery in the West Adams area. She didn’t know those kinds of places even existed, locally. Something about his name looked familiar, so she confirmed on-line that Kit had once spent time at the Mount Baldy center where the roshi lived. He was almost a hundred years old.

The zendo was long and woodsy. When she arrived, male and female monks already sat in meditative posture upon cushions lining the walls. A wide bench bisected the room, and people sat on that too. Everyone took the lotus position, spines ramrod straight, but Lisanne knew she couldn’t hold that too long (she hadn’t really lost much weight since the birth), so she tucked a leg underneath instead and let the other one dangle. The roshi appeared and slowly made his way to a tall oaken throne on a raised platform. He was tiny and broad, and Lisanne thought he looked just like Yoda as he shuffled past in elaborate, impeccably arranged robes. An interpreter sat on the floor in readiness.

There was once a teacher and his student, he began. Teacher and student were in deep meditation when suddenly, a dog appeared between them. The student asked, “Does the dog have the Buddha nature?” To which the teacher replied, “Mu.” The roshi explained that both teacher and student represented Oneness. He said that, in an eternal act of cosmic beneficence, Oneness divides itself to make room for sentient beings — bird, dog, self. It then becomes the duty of sentient beings to return to that Oneness, to rejoin the great Source whence they came. The roshi said Buddhists sometimes call such Oneness “the singular reality” or True Love. The act of division itself was an act of True Love.

She struggled to understand, but her mind kept drifting. Slowly, as she grew more aware of her surroundings, Lisanne became cognizant that she was sitting beside the singer Leonard Cohen. How strange. Her back hurt, and she stirred, to avoid spasm. No one else moved — all were yogic veterans of self-abnegation, insightfulness, and zen combat. Why was she even there? She was a coward, a poseur, a grotesque. A dilettante. Unworthy. She thought of Kit, in the Painful and Unnatural Bardo of Neurological Netherworlds. She could shift a leg if her pose grew unpleasant, but what was he experiencing? What could he shift? How could she dare even presume? One of the books she got at the Bodhi Tree said that, through the vehicle of dream yoga (whatever that was), a person might be able to realize that dreaming life and waking life were the same — mere projections. Last night Lisanne woke up with a jolt because she dreamed she was riding bareback on a gigantic horse, galloping with such primal velocity that it frightened her. She was born in the Year of the Horse; maybe the dream meant this would be the year her life ran away with her. In her own analysis, the horse didn’t seem to represent so much her personal life as the wild, rushing force of life itself. (Most of the time, Lisanne felt as if she were in the midst of a dream that she couldn’t control, inescapable even by death.) What kinds of dreams was Kit having? Were they mundane or surreal? Or was there even a distinction? When he awakened, when he floated back from dreaming into the waking life of his disconnected body, each time that he consciously inhabited his newly ruined world afresh, the circumscribed, humiliating, crater-pocked landscape far from arc lights and movie sets, from gilded Buddha and sylphlike fiancée and the simple pleasures of food and drink, where exactly did he find himself? How did he perceive? Did he wear a chain-mail shroud made from the vortex of unfamiliar words and faces, where thought and syntax continuously stuck and unstuck like worn gears, veiling the possibility ever to make his most basic or nuanced needs known? Abject and disoriented, unmoored… And if, while in such a state, he could actually glimpse with any lucidity the cataclysm that had befallen him, such a revelation alone might be enough to drive him mad. Another scary Buddhist text spoke of the “kundalini crisis” sometimes elicited by drugs or trauma, in which subjective and objective states, waking and symbolic, merged together and broke apart in an endless loop until “consensus reality” died as surely as did the proprioception of those suffering vertigo. (A blow to the head could evoke both such crises, she thought.) A person subject to this energetic chain reaction was said to literally disintegrate but not in a good way. Oh, who needs consensus reality anyhow. Lisanne comforted herself by thinking, Just because it’s something I wouldn’t be able to deal with, doesn’t mean it’s something Kit can’t. Yet what if, on top of everything, his literal practice hadn’t been “right”? What if he’d made gross missteps (on the Path) that hadn’t been corrected along the way, particularly since his root guru, Gil Weiskopf Roshi, was long since dead — making Kit the equivalent, now, of a pilot in a small plane flying by instruments in a thunderstorm on a moonless night. There was no one to guide him but his derelict father and a bunch of lame RNs.

Lisanne shook off her agitation, retucking first one leg, then the other. She took long, discreetly deep breaths to steady herself. She could smell her perspiration and was glad she wasn’t menstruating. Leonard Cohen stared ahead with downcast eyes, oblivious.

A gong sounded, and the old man said he was out of time. “What is time?” he casually inquired. “Time is an activity of the Buddha. That is not a definition you are taught in schools!” He ended by saying that it was a shame the student interpreted his master’s response to the question, Does the dog have the Buddha nature? as “No” when in fact he had said “Mu.” Mu meant something entirely different. Mu meant nothing, non-existence, non-being. “Yet just because he misunderstood does not mean the student was unworthy.”

Chanting immediately began, accompanied by drums, as the translator helped the roshi from the throne. After he disappeared, Mr. Cohen was the first to stand. Lisanne noticed that, as he left, the poet kept one arm tucked to his side while the other jutted forward, parallel to the ground, the hand ritualistically cleaving sacred space like the ice cutter at the prow of a trawler.

The morning air stung her cheeks. She smiled at the world and made mental prostrations to the roshi, the gravel, and the trees — to Oneness itself. Everything was clear now. Just as the old monk had benevolently created a space for her liberating insight, Lisanne knew the destruction of the sand mandala had created a space for her child, for she remembered that as the very moment in which she had decided to keep him. The ejection of Viv Wembley’s doomed fetus’s consciousness into the great Source (a kind of innocent, unschooled phowa after all) had created the space for Siddhama Kitchener McCadden’s hastened birth. All were part of the Wheel — just as Lisanne herself had been instantly, fatefully bound to Kit Lightfoot through the cauterizing gift of the auction house Buddha. Tiff Loewenstein had obliviously played spiritual midwife. For this, he was and always would be a very important man in her life.

Again Lisanne felt a great peace, the same that had flooded over her on the day of Siddhama’s birth — the singular reality of True Love.

• • •

ON THE WAY BACK from West Adams, she stopped at Bristol Farms in Beverly Hills. She laughed to herself as the housewives stepped from their Range Rovers and Lexus SUVs — she was practically one of them. Her life had taken a peculiar turn.

“Hey!” said a big woman with frizzy hair. She planted herself in front of Lisanne like some rank frontier hippie. “I remember you.” Lisanne stared, blinking. “From the lawyer’s office. You were at the meeting.” She extended a hand. “Cassandra — Cassie Dunsmore.”

“Oh! Hi! How are you?”

“Couldn’t be better!” She rocked her newborn in the crook of her arm. “That’s my Jake. Ain’t he dreamy?”

Lisanne said, “Oh, he’s beautiful.”

“Honey, what’s your name again?”

“Lisanne — McCadden.”

“You should come up to the house, Lisanne! You and your boss— Reggie. Oh, hey! We incorporated. QuestraWorld Productions. It feels good. Man, Grady and I can’t even believe it! Actually, it’s QuestraWorld Film and Television Productions. That’s the long and the short of it. We were gonna call it QuestraWorks but — Hey, know what we want to do? I mean, we wanna make movies and all but, man, I wanna do TV real fuckin bad. We’re gonna do The Osbournes—but hard-core. I mean hard fucking core. Cause that other shit is so tired. Don’t get me wrong, the Osbournes opened the door. But we wanna seriously show fucking. The final frontier! America’s been headin straight for it, right? Gonna take the Dunsmores to keep it real, cause it seems everybody’s been busy keepin it un-real. I am tellin you, folks want to see other folks gettin it on. Honey, we are the next wave! And you know what we got in our corner? The pathos of Baby Questra. Not as exploitation but as righteous inspiration. Where’s the pathos in Sharon Osbourne’s gut cancer? The girl had chemo and looks better than she ever did in her life, right? And now she’s gonna be out there hostin a talk show—where’s the tragedy? I mean, what’s the lesson? Get cancer and get glamorous? Lose weight now, ask me how? Get cancer and get rich? Or richer? OK, that’s bullshit. Let me tell you somethin. Big C ain’t nothin compared to watchin your baby die. OK? Right? Eric Clapton like to kill hisself when that little boy flew out the window. People at home want to see that shit—not babies dying! — they want to see survivors who still fuckin hurt, that you can survive, cause the people at home know some terrible shit like that could happen to them. An’ they need to be able to commiserate. Grady and I are gonna do it for HBO. Class it up. We ain’t had the meeting yet but they be fools to pass-ola. Gon’ be QuestraWorld’s first production, that’s right. We are virgin! We! Are! Fam-i-lee! I got all my sisters and me—Next week, I’m talkin to the Six Feet Under people, to partner up.”

A Day of Fun

BECCA AND RUSTY spent the afternoon at Mulholland. She liked playing mommy with Jake.

When Grady heard that she had moved in with Rusty, he bought them an expensive robot dog. The droid kept raising its hind leg to pee, and Rusty couldn’t figure out why. “This manual is two hundred fucking pages.”

Grady sipped his beer, watching the miscreant dogbot like a proud parent. “Every young couple needs an animal.”

They smoked dope while Cassandra prattled on about Questra-World ramping up production for the X-rated skein “Been There, Dunsmore” (working title) as soon as the Six Feet Under posse signed on. Their new lawyer supposedly was going to hook them up, but Cassandra argued that Becca already had a “relationship” with the show and should be able to get them “entrée.” Cassandra said the next time their little girl did “a guest shot”—“If there is a next time,” said Becca — she was going to come and watch. That way she could introduce herself to Their Highnesses, the two Alans. “Because in this town, that’s the only way things ever get done.” By extreme measure (if smuggling in during Becca’s corpse gig could be considered extreme). She cited Spielberg as an example of someone who “did what he had to do.” Broke into the Universal Studios backlot when he was first starting out — that’s how he got hired as a director. Pretended to work there and even scammed an office, just like that movie he did, Catch Me If You Can. Rusty interrupted, saying if they really wanted the “unreality show” (the catchy phrase Grady had come up with to promote it) to be a success, they should maybe think about adopting a few kids. Especially a few older kids. Because that was the secret to a show like that: teenagers. Rusty said that was the main thing the Osbournes got right. You had to have kids, for demographics, drama, and relatability. Ozzy and Sharon had ruthlessly cut the older daughter out of the series, the p.r. cover being that she had declined because she was “private.” Rusty said that was pure horseshit. It was “all about demos”—getting rid of their eldest was a smart business move, clean and simple. Cassandra loved the adoption strategy and got a brainstorm that the whole process should become part of the show. Definitely. “That is fantastic. Why can’t you come up with a million-dollar idea idea like that, Grady? I’m gonna have to make Rusty here a fucking exec producer.” Grady belched and said, “Right on. You go, girl. I don’t need me a million-dollar idea cause I already got a million. Got more than a million. So do what you have to do.” Rusty said Web sites existed where prospective parents could go shopping for kids who were currently wards of the state. Cassandra got superexcited. She said the cameras could follow them to the orphanage and they’d pick the kids out right then and there. The audience could even phone in preferences, to make it interactive. “Naw,” said Grady. “That interactive shit don’t never work. That’s a nineties thing.” “Yes, Mr. Gates,” said Cassandra. Rusty said he read in the newspaper that some of those places had special picnic days where people came to look the kids over like at a slave auction. Becca thought that Rusty knew way too much about it, as if it were all close to home, so to speak. But that was the kind of thing she would never ask him about.

• • •

LATER ON, RUSTY talked about a script he was working on. “You oughta pay me for it,” he said. He was stoned. He randomly murmured, “You oughta pay me for it,” over and over, a sly, wacko catechism.

“We’re gonna pay you for it,” said Grady reassuringly.

“First we need to see it,” said Cassandra, with a smirk.

Everybody was stoned.

“You’ll see it,” said Rusty.

“Promises, promises,” said Cassandra.

“It’s gonna be good,” said Grady, in his friend’s defense. “I know it’s gonna be good.”

“Got QuestraWorld written all over it,” said Rusty.

“Hope it does,” said Cassandra. “Hope we do make it.”

“How much you wanna spend, Rusty?” asked Grady. “On the budge. On el budjo.”

“Ten,” said Rusty. “But we could do it for seven or eight.”

“Hell,” said Grady. “Do it for three and you can make the cocksucker immediamente. Ipso facto. We’ll get Fucko the robot wonderdog to direct.”

“I’m gonna direct,” said Rusty, reminding. “And we can’t do it for three.”

“Three ain’t chump change,” said Cassandra. “Lotta movies been made for three.”

“What world are you living in?” said Rusty, cockily.

“Shit, what’d they make Reservoir Dogs for?”

“It wasn’t three,” said Rusty. “Not in 2004 dinero. No way, José.”

“You could be right,” said Cassandra. “Maybe it was two.”

“It’s gonna be good,” said Grady. “Hell, Cassie, if the man’s starrin in it and the man’s writin it, you know it’s gonna be good. We got in on the ground floor — the man’s the lead in a Spike Jonze! Gonna be a worse triple threat than Billy Bob. Shit, we’re lucky, Cass. Motherfuckers be givin Van Diesel or whatever the fuck his name is twenty million—I can’t even remember the name of that chrome-dome bitch and they’re givin him twenty mill. Fucker has about as much charisma as the head of my dick. Fucker looks like the head of my dick too!”

“How’s that Spike thing goin, anyhow?” asked Cassandra.

“Goin good. Goin real good.”

“Gonna start shooting soon?”

They alternated pulling with lazy industry on the pipe.

“Bout six weeks,” said Rusty, playing it movie star cool.

“You’re in it too, huh,” said Cassandra.

“I’m just doing a cameo,” said Becca.

“Bullshit,” said Rusty, feeling all generous.

“Rusty’s starring,” said Becca, proudly.

“She’s got a sweet little part,” said Rusty, noblesse oblige. “She sticks her tongue down Drew Barrymore’s mouth.”

“Duelin Drews,” said Grady.

“Bet you’re looking forward to rehearsals,” said Cassandra, lasciviously. “I’d floss my tonsils if I was you.”

“I’m actually not!” said Becca.

“Better not blow your lines,” said Grady to Rusty.

“Blow this,” said Rusty, as he took a hit.

“You might get tongue-tied,” said Grady to Becca. He laughed while grabbing the pipe from his friend. “My man Rusty can write too!” he giddily exclaimed, to no one in particular. He sucked and nearly gagged. An effete, wincing smile imploded above his chin while smoke poured from his nostrils, four-alarm. “Help,” he said, wheezing comically through whitened lips. “I’m having a fuckin heart attack.”

“Ever seen anything Rusty wrote, honey?” asked Cassandra, ignoring her husband’s pulmonary spaz.

“I seen how he writes his name,” said Grady with a joker’s grin, as he messily recovered. “It look real pretty.”

“Yeah,” said Rusty. “Your name’s gonna look pretty too, when it’s on that QuestraWorld check.”

It went on like that for a while. Then Grady started tripping that one of the homies at Valle Verde said Kit Lightfoot was there, and was totally twapped out. The homie said the superstar had a wing all to himself, and whenever they let him walk the grounds, the madre pulled his pud and had to be hustled inside before some paparazzi in a helicopter squeezed off a shot. Cassandra said they should all pile in the G-wagen and go on down. No one was unstoned enough to drive so Avery, a live-in part-time student and all-around gofer, was enlisted as chauffeur.

• • •

GRADY KNEW THE gate guard, who waved them in. They were a few blocks away when de Becker’s men turned them back. As they left, Grady asked the guard about Kit.

“Ain’t seen him,” he responded, with a wink.

Grady was jonesing for a Krispy Kreme. Cassandra pinched his love handle and said, “Why don’t you just have one of these? Feels like about a dozen right here.” Grady told Avery to find them a Krispy Kreme, pronto. Avery called 411 and located a franchise near Knott’s Berry Farm. They went and gorged. Then Cassandra got the urge to visit Knott’s and pan for gold, something she hadn’t done since she was a kid. They spent a few hours there, and Becca had the best time. As they left, the couple argued because Grady wanted to make a “pit stop” at Hustler’s. “I just wanna place one bet.” He wouldn’t say for how much, and that pissed her off. Rusty and Becca leaned against each other in the backseat, eyes shut, wasted. Cassandra fumed while Grady went inside the casino.

He came out five minutes later with a loopy grin.

“One bet,” he said. “See? A man of his word.”

“Asshole. How much did you lose?”

“Five large.”

“Asshole. Feel better?”

“Fuckin a I do. Fuckin a, b, and c too!” Then: “I’m a disciplined motherfucker. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. But it’s fuckin weird, man. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gone into a casino and placed one bet. I mean for bupkes! For ten, twenty, a hundred. I cannot tell you how many times I have done that in my fuckin life. And you know what? Man, tell me the odds, but I have never fucking won, not even once.”

Rusty roused himself from a stupor to laugh, without opening his eyes. Cassandra laughed, then Grady too. Becca was blasted and smiled only because the others were merry and mellow. “And half the time, the dealers get blackjack!”

“What does that tell you, niggah?” said Rusty.

Becca stirred, clinging to him.

“Tell you what it tells me, dog,” said Grady. “The house always wins.”

Synchronicity

HIS SON LAUGHS wildly at something on TV. Burke makes sure the only fare is DVDs like Shrek or Sound of Music or Chariots of Fire. Nothing violent or sexual. And no channel surfing: he guards against Kit mistakenly stumbling across one of his own films, or news reports about his injuries. Doesn’t want him watching Viv Wembley cavort on that idiotic series either.

Lately, Kit erupts into hysterical outbursts in the middle of the night. (The sanghanistas like to say he’s finally getting in touch with the cosmic joke of it all.) Sometimes he sings himself to sleep like a child, but that’s the only time he comprehensibly strings more than a few words together, albeit slurred. He possesses an amazing surplus of energy — the sanghanistas call it ch’i—and Burke makes certain that energy is properly channeled, that his son is occupied by some form of therapy each waking hour.

His father wants him out of there.

His father wants him home in Riverside, where he belongs.

He speaks in monosyllabic plosives. He says fuck a lot, eerily reminiscent of the patient with whom Kit and Darren Aronofsky visited months ago. One day, an inspired Tyrone brings Roy Rogers to the private wing for a summit. Seeing the two together — trepanned superstar and blastomaed McDonald’s franchiser — watching the Blown-Mind Twins sniff each other like tentative street dogs was a rocky horror show for sure — more like one Special Olympiad passing the torch to another, because it just so happened that Roy was at the stuttering tail end burnout of “I fuck fuck fuck” just as Kit was coming into his full-throated, full-chorus own. Like that summer Tyrone went to New York and John Stamos replaced Matthew Broderick in “How to Succeed”… but try as he might, Ty couldn’t get a dysfunctional duet goin. Connie Chung enjoyed the impromptu reunion, though Ty didn’t think she fully dug the interaction. She wasn’t twisted enough; it was a cultural thing. But he thought the way Nurse Connie kept wrangling the veggies so they’d be face-to-face like sexy toy soldiers was beyond dope. Tyrone shook his head and smiled. It was so messed up.

• • •

HE ASSIDUOUSLY LIFTS himself a few inches on the parallel bars. He grins madly, wily and rabid, flashing the erotically mischievous Kit Lightfoot of old. (A bad haircut ruins the effect. Fearful of “anecdotal” leaks to the press, his father shot down Kit’s stylist’s request to come give a trim.) His body glistens, the layer of posttraumatic fat belying its good bones; Portrait of a Bruce Weber almost-ran, with bad breath.

• • •

WITH MOUTH CLOSED, unspeaking, only the wobbly, jerky gait betrays him. After all, he was in perfect shape at the time of the assault; not so many months have passed. He never stopped moving — Burke forbade that — not even in coma. Therapists and sanghanistas threw his limbs around more than Christopher Reeve. Tyrone said, We the A-Team. Put Mr. Reeve to motherfuckin shame.

• • •

“HELLO, PIRATE!” said Tyrone.

Kit wore an eye patch because the left lid drooped. He no longer tried to tear it off. Burke arranged for surgery; the docs said it was a simple fix.

“Find any sunken treasure today, Captain Cook?”

• • •

VIV LEFT A MESSAGE on Becca’s pager that she needed her to pick up the Ambien refill at Horton & Converse.

When she got to the house, Becca punched in the ROCK^* code at the gate. As she wound up the drive, the FooFighters blasted. The front door gaped open.

She set the pharmacy bag on the table and called out, “Viv?” She corrected herself: “V?” She thought she heard a response, muffled by music from upstairs. “V?”

Barely audible: “Come up!”

She went to the master bedroom. Viv was on her back, fucking. “Did you get the Ambien?” Becca had already shyly turned around. She said she brought it, and Viv said, “Where?” “Downstairs.” “What about the Norco?” Becca asked what was Norco and Viv said testily that they should have filled that along with the Ambien. Becca said she didn’t look inside the bag. Viv told her to go bring it. This time when Becca came back, Viv was on her stomach and the man fucking her faced the door instead of the headboard.

It was Alf Lanier.

Becca loved Alf Lanier.

(It looked exactly like Alf Lanier.)

Viv said to put the pills on the dresser and leave. Setting the Ambien down, she couldn’t help glancing over to see them sweat-coiled, and Alf caught her eye, either laughing or wincing, she wasn’t sure what. She thought that maybe the actors were making fun of her, “having sport” as Dixie used to say whenever Dad was being mean.

• • •

KIT WAS STONED — that was Burke’s idea. Pot helped with the pain and the muscle spasms. The staff looked the other way. Half of them were hemp-heads, anyway.

There was so much fear that he couldn’t verbalize, which terrified him even more. So much shame and embarrassment. What had happened to him, really? Got his head hit. What hospital was this and what was the one before? Sometimes he went monkey nuts, throwing food and masturbating in front of staff and guests. He was hungry all the time. Ate and ate and started to get doughy. Sometimes he got confused that he couldn’t dress himself. He had blinding headaches and threw up, and they gave him shots that made him dreamy all the next day. The Shaved-Head people visited, some in robes but different from the flimsy hospital gowns that he didn’t even wear anymore. (Burke liked his boy to be in real-world civvies.) They made him laugh. Things were funny, especially when he smoked the reefer. Things on TV, and things his caregivers would say or do. It was funny when they read from books or said their prayers. They taught him mantras, those were funny too, repeating words he couldn’t understand, strings of words, one after the other, going to the end then beginning again. The sounds were strange, and sometimes he panicked he should know what they meant. He would grimace and nervously try to ask if he should know their meaning, and wonder if he ever would or if that was beyond him now, but in his crowned and crowning agitation, in his disorder, could not get inquiring words to form, and the benevolent patience and solicitousness of the sangha only made his fear and panic grow.

• • •

STOPPED LOOKING in mirrors.

Not wishing to see his own visage or the purplish white fissures of his broken, thousand-petaled lotus.

• • •

HE FOUND OCCASIONAL respite in remedial Buddhist practice. The edifice had crumbled yet the foundation was there, rooted and unassailable. By his stalwart guests’ incessant cues, he slowly resurrected the meditative state, starry spangled night on mind-screen — disciplined sits over the course of a decade had stored in the body and served him well. The sanghanistas verbally guided him through: on days he couldn’t tie his shoes, he still crudely focused on the Shaved-Heads drum of Christ consciousness, seemingly lucid enough to laugh at his hallucinatory predicament. Words began to rearrange themselves like magnetized particles. A flurry of interchange, like a vast hangar filled with square-dancing phantoms, crepuscular and insolent, dysphotic, drowsy and spooked, orphans and changelings come to vellicated, marvelous life as the orchestra struck up its synaptic symphonics.

Sometimes being adrift was his only mooring.

• • •

ONE DAY RAM DASS came to see him. That was a great boon. Kit recognized him but couldn’t recall their meeting at the Gubers’. (Memory withheld its muddy welcome mat for the six months immediately prior to his insult.) Ram Dass floated over in his wheelchair and looked deep into his eyes. He laid hands on Kit’s shoulders and smiled, an electric clown.

Ram Dass said, “Surf the silence.”

He told Kit to think of his guru, Gil Weiskopf Roshi (whom Ram Dass reiterated he had known). “The guru will set you free.” He shared some rambunctious observations about his own recovery that were exorbitantly pertinent to Kit. He even got him laughing about the Hollywood game — Burke had steered everyone away from mentioning the Business, but Ram Dass cut through. “God,” said Ram Dass, “will always make more than you per picture!” He began to chant—Om Ram Ramaya Namaha—and Kit tried his best to follow (he’d been play-chanting with the sangha for the last month), swept up in its emphathenogenic energies. The others joined in while Ram Dass held Kit’s hand and wept ecstatically. They were all weeping now, even Kit, though water filled his smiling befuddled eyes as it would those of a sensitive child who had been moved not so much by others than by the joy-jangling vibrations of a great and noisy organ during mass.

• • •

SHE ASKED HIM to put it in her bottom, the way Kit did. Alf had never done that. Was that sodomy? He thought sodomy was the legal term for assfucking but wasn’t sure because every time he read about a sex crime in the paper they called it sodomy — there couldn’t be that much assfucking going around. (Could there?) Maybe the rapists and molesters knew a thing or two. He had tried before but had never been able to consummate. After amazing heroics, he would manage only to get the head in and the girl would say it hurt and to take it out. He didn’t really care all that much but felt it was his duty as a man at least to have the thing on his résumé. Other times, when the girl was seemingly OK with it, he lost his hard-on. Alf reasoned that he probably just didn’t get off enough on the deed. Wasn’t his kink. Or whatever. He thought maybe he was just lazy. By nature, he had a conservative streak — certain things had always creeped him out, like if a girl went down on him too wildly or tried to suck his nipple. Besides, assfucking was a control trip, and Alf prided himself on not having those kinds of issues with the ladies. Jailhouse issues, he thought. But now the tip of his cock was nudging its way inside the butt of his semiretarded best friend’s ex-fiancée. Viv worked it like a pro — kept urging him on, using her fingers to oil him with her juices while begging him to make it hurt, make it bleed — then suddenly he was in. It was a different pressure than pussy pressure for sure. 20,000 leagues under the sea. There was something metallic about it, mechanical, submariney. Das Boot. Das bootie. She slowly pushed against him, swallowing him up, and took the whole thing. Like watching a garter snake swallow a fuckin gopher. He asked if she was OK and Viv said uh huh and her shithole got wet, that’s how turned on she was. I didn’t even know a girl got wet that way. Once, he was with a stripper who shot a warm geyser from her puss when she came, but this was a first. He thought maybe he’d blundered onto the Secret of the Fags. Dark Tomb Raiders… Raiders of the Golden Sphinct—or maybe the hole was slick with shit. That would be fucked. He peered down in the half-light, and his cock looked clean on each outthrust. Wasn’t any stink. She probably prepared. Like when his mom went in for a colonoscopy and had to fast for twelve hours before. Sure knew what she was doing…. He began to ram her, devil-may-care, and she went crazy. The harder he rammed, the more she groaned and twisted and talked dirty. Maybe she was a pain freak — Fine with me. I mean, I don’t want to be inflicting it deliberately, but if I’m feelin good and whatever I’m doin happens to hurt as a sidebar but she gets off on it, then cool. Cool. Although he didn’t relish the idea of being back at Cedars signing autographs for the cops while Viv had her poop chute stitched by the same folks who’d tended Kit’s wounds. Then she told him to fuck her “up the ass the way your best friend liked to fuck me” and it wigged him but only for a second. All’s fair in loving and whoring. (That’s what Kit used to say.) Fuck me up the ass at the hospital, so he can watch.

It took everything he had to concentrate on not coming.

• • •

EARLIER, HE GAVE Kit some pills, and now Tyrone sat with his charge while he nodded off. Ram Dass and his coterie were long gone.

Ty snorted some crystal and massaged the star’s shoulders, oiling the skin. Smooth and unmarred. He rubbed oil into the FOREVER VIV, lovingly polishing the varied tattooed heart, Pacific Northwest Indian, and Sanskrit motifs. He reached around and rubbed the flat-muscled, soft-haired belly; the one-time orderly began to perspire and yawningly hyperventilate. He moved a hand up to the flat tits, tenderly tracing a finger around the nipple. He tongued one, nervously looking around, even though he knew nobody was there and no one would enter. Kit gaped with sleepified incognizance. Ty rubbed the tense muscle-braids of the actor’s neck for just a moment, then gently turned him on his back, softly whispering, as if auditioning the words aloud to see if the void would answer: I love you, Kit. He tripped on how the phrase sounded when uttered in the presence of the devotional object itself, tripped on the astonished hyperreality of it. Whoa. Whoa. Moved his hand to the radiant bush of soap-scrubbed pubic hair. Said, louder this time, “Kit Lightfoot is my lover.” His heart almost popped from his chest when he touched the shaft. Whoa — nearly fainting as he stood, he needlessly ran to recheck the door, already locked. Light-headed and light of foot… Lightfoot is my man. Lightfoot is my man — worked off the pants, fastened onto cock with his mouth, his own already leaking, clear as spinocerebellar fluid. Looked up, still sucking, at the idol of his prostrations and good fortune, to see perchance to dream if Kit was reacting. Any old reaction would do. Perchance to ream. The supernova only stirred, mouth open, and that was more than enough. He imagined the actor to be in some faraway place — a summer place… sucked and sucked, gentle, gentle, sucking, kneading, poundingheart, vertiginous stabs of paranoia whenever hearing nonsounds, willing now to lose his job and do hard time for this fleshy succor, this godhead paradise. I deserve this. Whoa. A K-Y’d finger in the ass to get Kit hard elicited a fart. Worked two more fingers in. Still got the touch. In and out till it was easygoing, leisurely cupping and weighing the balls between reentries. Big-time fun. Slid his pants down. Fingers in Kit then same fingers inside his own anus. The superstar groaned, eyes still shut. Heart slammed against steel cage of Ty’s torso, graveyard shift foundry, thin black pink-spotted snake cock in hand. Too excited! — oh no. No no no — Kit was half-hard from Ty’s expert manipulations. Jacked him fiercely, it was almost over, better luck next time, wanted Kit to come, mouth on it now as he worked his fingers like a safecracker’s, turgid ticking cock, lock to catch and spring, whoas! out loud, no no no shit no as he pushed further and sucked on Kit while jacking himself and Alf can hold it no more and is thankful Viv senses that and urges him on — maybe, he thinks, she’s in pain or I’m doing it wrong, can’t work it like Kit, can’t do the real deal dillio, I’m an assfuck loser — but he’s grateful she’s urging cause the thing he hates most is when a girl says, “Don’t come,” that means she’s totally frigid and wants to drag it out forever, he’s slept with so many of them, but Viv can come, can she ever, one of the lucky ones, doesn’t have a problem in the vaginal departmento, this he already knew from Kit’s innuendoes and Alf says “Now? Now?”—he doesn’t want her to think that he has to or needs to or wants to even though all of the above are true — and she says “Yes,” so he instantly comes in that tight slick chute and it feels better to come in a pussy but the cool thing, the kink of it is, that he comes in her bowel, in a place whose chemical wretchedness kills babies, vilifies and degrades his sperm, and somehow that’s exciting, that she hereby consents to infernal degradation, such apostasy, adulterous and unadulterated, that is what makes him come so deeply while she arches beneath like an animal being killed until yes, Kit arches too, sharp coughy intake of breath, Ty’s four-fingered hand inside him while the other pulls Kit’s cock as he sucks and the star suddenly comes as Ty nudges the G-spot, the Motion Picture and Television Entertainment Liaison quickly bowing to suck the come, coming more himself without even needing to be touched or nudged, climaxing like a woman, immaculately, licking Kit’s shaft as it spunks Ty’s dark-backed palm-white hand, which has drifted to the tip, not wishing to miss a precious drop Viv is coming like she hadn’t with Kit in so long, Alf doesn’t know they used to talk about it more than the actual doing, mostly embedding fingers instead, and now she cries out and is crying too because she thinks of Kit and is getting off on the betrayal, a helpless whore who’d sell anyone or anything out, she would not even make the call to stop the WTC hijackers, she should have put the engagement ring on for this, further frisson, and though she knows that later she’ll feel badly, all those useless feelings of guilt, right now all she wants is to be evil, evil, supercallifragalistic axis of evil—please don’t let the coming stop—and she comes some more because she knows her new assistant is listening to the wolflike screams, in the entry hall or in gleaming $300,000 kitchen, sipping a diet Coke through a straw while taking it all in, the whole house reverbing with screams, CD juke shuffling to lame-ass Bright Eyes-Blur-Sheryl Crow, and she feels the warm narcotic glow of the Norco and the Klonopin, everything so perfect, she, still coming before plunging the white dick back into his mouth and it goes on, him doing cleanup with his tongue, it takes a few minutes like that to settle accounts and close the books, Tyrone like a runner slowly calms, he’s crossed the finish line now, walking aimlessly from the crowd until lungs and worldly locomotion are returned, remembering old History Channel kinescopes of Jessie Owens….

What a surprise.

I deserve this. (Viv.) I do, I do. I motherfuckin Queer Eye do. (Ty.)

Everyone came together.

Baby still got the touch

That was cool (Alf)