Walking to Hollywood

1. The Consultation

In early May of 2008, my treatment with Dr Shiva Mukti having reached a conclusion, with, I think, the feeling on both sides that there had been a measure of success, I decided to take a walking tour of Los Angeles.

Mukti showed me the last of the series of films he had made of me on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the same basement room at St Mungo’s where he had conducted our cognitive behavioural therapy sessions. In addition to using all the standard techniques, Mukti also videoed psychotics during their flamboyant episodes, then showed the films to them when lucid, in order to persuade these patients of the necessity of taking their medication.

‘In your case,’ he told me during our first meeting, ‘the situation is a bit different. Your reality testing seems wholly adequate; rather, your obsessive-compulsive thought patterns appear to have become, um, engrafted in the external world. It’s as if by continuously viewing the world through the anthropomorphic lens of distorted scale, you have projected on to it a form of body dysmorphic syndrome. This would account for the fugues you experienced while travelling in the States, the loss of the medium sized, your perception of the world as wholly comprised by the awesome and the very—’

‘Little.’

‘Quite so, the very little.’

The near-obsolete VDU monitor, with its mushroom plastic casing, sat whirring at a queer angle on the fake wood veneer of a refectory table. Was this a fungal growth, nurtured overnight under strip-lighting? On the screen, which lacked vertical hold, images of me flickered and kinked. In answer to questions from someone off-screen, I contended that I could sign my name on a dust mote and play billiards with Higgs bosons while simultaneously apprehending the sixty-mile span of the Middlesex tertiary escarpment.

My dottiness was obvious, yet what struck me more forcibly was the concentration of all this effort, expertise and resources into these mean and institutional images of the very mean and institutional room we were currently sitting in: I sat on the plastic stacking chair watching myself writhe on the same plastic stacking chair, and, although I felt removed from the on-screen antics, it was a disjunction of perspective alone — the man in the room watching himself in the same room insistently demanded another recursion of this POV, another plastic stacking chair, another me.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Mukti said as we watched the last film: ‘you’d like some Powerade.’ And he companionably passed me the pink bottle.

I had been referred to Dr Mukti by Zack Busner, the consultant psychiatrist at Heath Hospital, who for over a quarter of a century had played a major role in my life — part therapist, part mentor, part friend, part inspiration, part hierophant, part demiurge… wholly suspect. If I summon Busner up now it is as I first saw him. I was a troubled adolescent with a piebald horse face and wasted legs in drainpipe jeans; he was a plump, frog-faced man, his nondescript hair not so much thinning as giving the impression it hadn’t grown since birth. He leant back in the swivel chair behind his cluttered desk, his legs outstretched, and as he spoke, with great dexterity — as a card sharp in a Western runs a silver dollar over and under his fingers — rolled and unrolled the furry tongue of his mohair tie.

‘I have a patient,’ Busner said on that first meeting. ‘Who’s a very well-known jazz musician — a highly talented chap. He tells me that he takes cocaine, he takes heroin — for him it isn’t a problem. Tell me, why’s it a problem for you?’

I forbore from making the obvious point: if it wasn’t a problem for this jazzer, why the fuck was he seeing a shrink? Forbore for several reasons. First, aged nineteen, I was intimidated by Busner and his environs. His office was at the end of a corridor, which in turn was at the far end of the hospital’s general psychiatric ward. This wasn’t the locked ward where sectioned patients were confined, but nevertheless there was plenty of flamboyant mental distress on display.

As I had sat in the miserable little outpatients’ waiting area — a couple of uneasy chairs, a pained pot plant, a racked magazine rack — an anorexic had danced with her drip by the window, toying with the plastic chains that shackled the vertical louvres. Then she came over and sat beside me, breathing in my face caustic acid down a cracked commode leaking sewage. I studied Chat magazine’s great new recipe for banana bread, until a civil enough young schizophrenic came by and offered to sell me the alien implant he had instead of a leg. The anorexic had been replaced at the window looking out over Hampstead Heath by an old man — a catatonic I supposed — who rocked not back and forth on his heels, but from side to side like a metronome, while emitting a buzzing noise, Did he have a horsefly trapped in his mouth?

Were these people, I wondered, my new gang? The psychic insurgents I had fantasized joining as, fractured by acid, I riffled through the pages of R. D. Laing’s The Divided Self? I didn’t want to join now I was in the recruitment office — yet feared I already had. A few months previously I’d been an in-patient at Heath Hospital on a surgical ward. I’d had my tonsils taken out — a painful operation at that age. Ostensibly, this was because of all the sinus attacks I kept getting, which felt like thumbscrews being tightened — on my brain; but the real reason I kept getting sick in my nose was all the powder I shoved up it, the bathtub amphetamine, the cocaine cut with baby laxative, the scouring smack — and worse.

The nurses sussed me out and were less than nurturing. There was a tubby squaddy in the bed beside me, who, when he was conscious, spun me yarns about how he was a sergeant-major in the SAS, and had been shot in the neck by the IRA on the Falls Road while working undercover with an assassination squad. I put him down as a fantasist, but one of the nurses, tucking me in until it hurt, leant down and hissed in my ear: ‘He’s a real hero, you shoulda seen him when they brought him in. He had an infection on the back of his neck that was bigger than his head!’

With the nurse, too, I forbore from backchat: my addiction was an assassination squad, roaming the bombed-out streets in a West Belfast of the mind. I’d got my friend Dave to smuggle some cocaine on to the ward, and together we’d shot it up in the toilet. Paranoid, he’d split right away, leaving me with my grazed throat and revving heart to endure the agonies of an unanticipated ward round: the consultant, wading between the limpid beds, the stork’s plumage of his white coat parted at the breast, dipped down to peck at my wrist, yet seemed quite indifferent to my Max Roach pulse. No jazzer he.

It was my long-suffering GP who had referred me to Busner. She was understandably fed up with the house calls she had to make on my behalf: trips to the bathrooms I had locked myself inside, and where I lay on the mat, mewling as the intestinal reef knots of opiate withdrawal tightened inside me.

‘I think you’ll get on,’ she had said. ‘He’s a very, um, unusual man. I don’t expect he’ll want to treat you in any orthodox fashion — just go up to the hospital and have a chat with him.’

There were steely-green filing cabinets in Busner’s office and a chequerboard of institutional carpet tiling. The wall-mounted shelves were piled with everything from Wilhelm Reich to ‘Just William’. The hardwood kneehole desk lugged in from another era, the fronts of the shelves, the windowsills — in fact every available horizontal surface was blobbed with fossilized shits. Later, Busner told me that the coprolite collection had begun as a ‘juvenile riposte to the founding father of psychoanalysis’s own rather more aesthetic bibelots, his ancient tabletop statuary, but then… Well, it all rather got out of hand.’

On the walls there were four ‘imaginary topographies’, hefty clay bas-reliefs that I later learnt had been given to Busner by Joseph Beuys after he had treated the artist — I assume, successfully — for a drug-induced psychosis. They were ugly and rather threatening things, heavy tablets scored with miniature ravines and pinnacles. They distorted the scale of the cluttered and stuffy room — Busner had disabled the air conditioning because he couldn’t bear the noise. The view from the window was also disorienting: the gravelled roof of a wing of the hospital, upon which hunched four large rectangular water tanks — or were they, perhaps, very little?

I was aware that, together with Harold Ford, Busner had been one of the originators of the Quantity Theory of Insanity, and so assumed that he would be impressed if I brought up a half-digested splurge of Foucault with chunks of Bataille floating in it. He wasn’t dismissive, only cleared the ground between us, sweeping away the clutter of identity so that we faced one another unadorned.

We must have talked for fifty minutes or so minted lamb;^* then Busner said, ‘I’m afraid my caseload is such that I won’t be able to see you on any kind of regular basis. Still, I’ve enjoyed chatting to you and I hope you have to me. I don’t want you to feel rejected and if you’d like to pop in now and again to see me you’ll always find my door open.’ He pointed at the institutional plank, its Judas window reinforced with steel mesh; it was, indeed, ajar, although I found out later this was due to severe warping.

Before we parted Busner gave me a Riddle set. This was the ‘enquire within’ game that had made the psychiatrist simultaneously a household name and a laughing stock among his peers. Alone, or with a few select friends and a bottle of wine; a scented candle lit — or smelling only of your own desperation — Riddle players were encouraged to arrange the brightly coloured acrylic tiles in patterns they found pleasing, or suggestive, or unsettling — essentially, the thing was a DIY Rorschach test, the key for which had been written by the great soul doctor himself.

Everyone had played the Riddle at some time or other in the late 1970s; it was a hula-hoop for the mind and, like all such crazes, it soon became impossibly hackneyed; lost Riddle tiles lay trapped beneath the carpet underlay of the entire culture. ‘I’m solving the Riddle!’ — which Busner mouthed on a television quiz programme where he appeared in a grid of similar celebrities, answering facile questions — became one of the catchphrases of the era — and not in a good way. Still, I thanked him for the gift and tucked it into the side pocket of whatever Oxfam jacket I was wearing that month. Forty-five minutes later I was in a walk-up flat in Camden Town trying to barter the thing for a five-quid bag of smack.

For all the years I had taken the lift to the eighth floor of the hospital I had continued to find Busner’s door open — once it was right off its hinges, laid across trestles and being planed down by a maintenance man. Busner stood in the doorway, rolling and unrolling the frayed end of his tie, watching the man work while speculating on what ailed the door as if it were a particularly unresponsive patient. Nevertheless, the next time I came it still wasn’t pulled to.

Busner said he didn’t mind the malfunctioning door — it reminded him of the 1960s, when, shortly after qualifying, he had started a ‘concept house’ in Willesden, where therapists and patients had lived together communally with no distinctions between them. While Busner had long since enacted professional closure, abandoning his conviction that mental pathologies were in reality semantic confusions, he still counselled an inter-personal approach — even when liberally dishing out Largactil.

Our own long-term therapeutic relationship certainly had a playful character; in the nearly three decades his door had been open to me, Busner had sent me for psychotherapy with a succession of colleagues. There had been an anally retentive orthodox Freudian analyst whose consulting room was a garage conversion in Dollis Hill. There was a plump cat-furred humanist in West Hampstead, whose ability to feel my pain seemed to entail her crying a lot about her own. There was a media-friendly intellectual with jet-black kiss curls and the foam-rubber voice of the insincere, who encouraged me to view my life as a narrative that might be rewritten — by him. Then there was the group therapy, the rebirthing, and even a shamanic purification rite conducted in a polythene hogan off the A303. All the while Busner lurked in the background, ready to step forward whenever my condition deteriorated.

Over the years he must — at one time or more — have prescribed me most of the neuro-pharmacopoeia, from anxiolytics, hypnotics and sedatives, through tranquilizers and anti-psychotics, to opiate and alcohol blockers, lithium and methadone. On one occasion he smuggled me in the dead of night into Friern Barnet Hospital. There, using equipment dusty with desuetude — the rubber leads perished — he administered electroconvulsive therapy to me. During the aeons-long seconds when the current surged through my cortex, I broke the restraints and surged up from the couch, then plunged through the fire-resistant ceiling tiles and flew into the suburban night. Up there I was a superhero, with no mission other than to curvet above the rain-slicked roofs.

I was not insensible to the possibility that Busner was exploiting me. After all, he had always been frank about what ailed me and my prognosis, saying early on: ‘Essentially, yours is a mimetic malaise. You have an addictive personality, certainly, also a borderline personality disorder. You are a depressive, and, without certain strategies that you’ve devised for yourself, you would undoubtedly be crippled by phobias. Any treatments that I advocate for you are not to alleviate the symptoms of these conditions — which I regard as pretty much incurable — but to legitimate them.’

At least, I think that’s what he said — it’s certainly the kind of thing he would, as is: ‘Look on the bright side — your strategies work, by and large; mine will too, and your psyche is… um, ebullient and productive. I’m not some potterer in the allotment of the mind, offering to weed out your hysterical misery and replace it with commonplace unhappiness — for you this is impossible; the best you can hope for is a rollercoaster of despair and euphoria. Still, I like rollercoasters — don’t you?’

But what was it in for him? I’ve no doubt that like the majority of shrinks he was a psycho-empathetic voyeur, who, to begin with, clutched the safety bar alongside me and screamed along for the ride. Could he also have foreseen the curious creative symbiosis that would grow up between us? For, just as I incorporated him — thinly veiled — into my novels and short stories, so he made use of me in the numerous articles and case studies he published.^* Our collaboration — if that’s what it was — was a greater constant in my life than any other relationship, possibly for Busner as well; during it we were both married (in his case remarried), divorced and married again. Between us we added six more heads to the human herd: Busner had twin boys with his third wife, Caroline Byng, although he already had several grown-up children, one of whom, X, was a cabinet minister in the first Blair government.

Mythic skies, empurpled cloud ruptured above the cruising grounds of West Heath — a crumpled tissue snagged by a limp twig. The façade of the burnt-out Chinese restaurant at the junction of Belsize Lane and Haverstock Hill remained soot-stained for years — some people said the Tongs had done it, and the blackness under the gouged-out windows did suggest the agony of a tortured soul. Strange miasmas pooled in the hollow of Southend Green, where, when I first began visiting Busner, old Jewish émigrés still played chess at the Prompt Corner Café, slamming down the levers on their time clocks. Over it all loomed the vast hospital, its access ramps rearing up from the rooftops, while the Classic Cinema smarmed against its flank.

In there, one wet winter night, I saw Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing on its first run. My date was psychotic — something I was too wasted to realize until the feature had started, and she began burbling merrily decoction of dog-eared damp Penguin classics, as she ran her sweaty hands over my face, tweaking my nose, pinching my cheeks and poking her fingers into my dry mouth. It was by no means the last time that sort of thing happened to me.

What I’m trying to say is that I accepted all of this, not unthinkingly, or out of passivity — but joyfully. Busner remained for me the fixed point of a turning world, so that no matter how many times I walked the quarter-mile from Belsize Park tube, it was a homecoming: I may have wandered from city to city, but Laius remained right where he’d always been, playing with his fossilized shits while he dispensed Riddles, waiting to be killed afresh. I may have been in distant lands, yet in my mind’s eye I accompanied him on his ward round: a long dolly down one corridor, then through the core of the building, then back through the women’s ward on the far side. It was a technically demanding shot — especially before the perfection of the steadicam — but the absence of cutting meant that nothing diminished the impact, when, at the very end, the camera panned 180 degrees to reveal: me, enormous, swathed in grey gabardine, moon face cratered with debauchery, lurching up from my uneasy chair and heading towards that always open door.

It was a Tuesday and hot in the tube. Cans of human stewed in their own farts. I used to observe the anonymity that crowded in on me and at least see its feeling face. Not any more. Now I saw the features ageing would impose on all these suburbonauts as they rumbled through the clayey void; they were wearing not space helmets — but time ones. It was hotter still above ground, and the plane trees in the triangular plot beside St Stephen’s were sticky with sap and fret-worked by caterpillars. I stood, pissing, hidden by a redbrick buttress of the derelict church, then climbed back gingerly over the railings and continued downhill to the hospital.

Busner must, I thought, be seventy by now — yet to me he appeared unchanged. For as long as I’d known him he’d been a little overweight, yet his fleshy face, with its suggestion of jowls, resisted wrinkling. It seemed I had been doing the deteriorating for both of us. He was standing with his back to me when I squeezed through the door — in his shirtsleeves, with a Vaseline sheen on his fat neck as he rearranged his coprolites.

‘How has the CBT with Shiva Mukti gone?’ he asked without preamble, or even turning.

‘OK, I s’pose.’ I looked about for a chair — they were all piled high with ring binders, loose papers, and even some dry cleaning still perving in its polythene. I began clearing one.

‘He’s a well-meaning fellow, Shiva,’ Busner said; ‘perhaps a little prosaic.’

‘He shot films of me while I was in my… obsessive phases; then played them back to me.’

‘Did it help?’

‘Um, help… well, with film maybe, and a little bit with reality as well.’

‘A little bit, eh — how about the survivor guilt?’

I didn’t want to talk about the events on Foula; I could still see the human stain on the rocks below the Kame, the wheeling gulls and the plastic trousers — a speck on the swell.

‘I don’t know about that,’ I said testily, ‘but the fact is I haven’t written anything serious since last September and I’ve got mouths to feed. I’ve an idea for an investigative piece and I’d like to pursue it.’

‘And this involves a trip?’

He was behind his desk and at the tie again, rolling and unrolling. I’d once asked him how long, on average, it took him to twirl one to shreds. He said nylon ones lasted the longest — but he hated the feel of them. Silk was pretty good — but too expensive. Wool he found most comforting — and mohair in particular. ‘It’s a sort of carding, really,’ he told me. ‘I’m straightening my own neurons and glia, smoothing out my cortex so that I can spin it into threads of thought.’ Frankly, it was a little rich that such a man believed he could help anyone else with their neuroses.

‘Yes, I want to walk to Hollywood.’

‘All the way?’

‘Don’t be facetious — you know my methodology: I’ll walk from my house to Heathrow — probably via Pinewood Studios where they’re shooting the new James Bond film — then I’ll fly to LAX, and walk from there on to Hollywood.’

‘Dangerous territory for you, I should’ve thought — given the events of last year.’

‘That was different, I, I was caught unawares — I didn’t have an objective.’

‘I see, and what’s your objective now, precisely?’

I didn’t like the way this was going; it wasn’t exactly that Busner was being hostile — it was more that his tone was off, his voice pitched a shade too low. And, now that I stopped to consider it, wasn’t there something sinister about the way he hadn’t aged over the years? He wasn’t merely familiar to me — I knew every hair that sprouted from the tragus of his annoyingly complicated ear — but overly familiar; his mannerisms were exaggerated, his coughs studiously rehearsed. It seemed he was an accomplished actor, called upon to play the part of Dr Zack Busner.

I swept this useless paranoia aside: I needed him to share my enthusiasm.

‘I want to find out who killed film — for film is definitely dead, toppled from its reign as the pre-eminent narrative medium of the age. I don’t know if film was murdered — but I suspect there’s a killer out there!’

My melodramatic words hung in the air — THERE’S A KILLER OUT THERE! — meaning-motes aglow in a sunbeam projected from between the louvres.

‘Ahem,’ Busner cleared his throat, frog in Froggy. ‘I see. There may be something in what you say — change is definitely in the, ah, air — new media, streaming, that sort of thing…’ His fingers fluttered so as to suggest he was entirely au fait. ‘But why now? I’ve never known you take any especial interest in film.’

‘Me?’ I snapped back. ‘I’ve been a film critic — I’ve even written a screenplay… well, most of one. You, on the other hand, probably don’t even know there’s a screenwriters’ strike on, and I can safely say that in all the hundreds of hours I’ve spent talking to you I’ve never heard you reference the movies once. Once!’

He was unfazed by my anger.

‘It’s all those credits that get to me,’ he remarked, swivelling to face the scuzzy window. ‘You know the kind of thing: Fifth Assistant Director, Manuel P. Zlotnik; Personal Assistant to Miss Pearlstein, Carol Goodenough — then, marching up the screen, entire squads of carpenters, electricians, best boys, gaffers, gofers and key grips, to say nothing of the special effects technicians… In my day all it took to make a film was Will Hay and the Fat Boy… Anyway’ — he rotated back to face me — ‘I know you like walking, but why walk to Hollywood? Los Angeles is hardly pedestrian-friendly.’

‘I–I, well, to be frank I think it’s safer that way — it’ll mean I can slip beneath their radar.’

‘They have radar? And there’s a “they”?’

‘Obviously I’m not suggesting there’s a conspiracy.’ I was wary of appearing paranoid; tolerant as Busner was of my more exaggerated phases, he’d never made any secret of the fact that he would section me if he saw fit. ‘I’m speaking figuratively: windscreens are screens, after all — or lenses. Vehicular transport is either a cinema that you sit in passively while the world is shown to you, or else, if you drive, you’re operating a camera, directing the movie of your journey.’

‘I see.’ He was looking at me vacantly, but I blanked him right back and continued:

‘If I want to discover who — or what — did for film I’ll be better off walking. Walking is so much slower than film — especially contemporary Hollywood movies, with their stuttering film grammar of split-second shots — and it isn’t framed, when you walk you’re floating in a fishbowl view of the world. There can’t possibly be any editing: no dissolves, no cuts, no fades, no split-screens — and, best of all, no special effects, no computer-cheated facsimiles of the world. You see, if I walk to Hollywood I’ll be creeping along outside the ambit of the filmic — like a Vietcong insurgent tunnelling through the jungle — and they won’t be able to see me coming!’

Despite myself I had become overexcited, singing out the last line as if it were an affirmation of faith. Busner ignored this. He had retrieved yet another Riddle set from his desk drawer and was bridging the lumpy summits of his coprolites with the brightly coloured little planks. THEY WON’T BE ABLE TO SEE ME COMING! still hung between us, the air around it puckered up as if by heat convection. I rose from my chair and walked across to the title: when I poked it the letters had the slippery resistance of inflated plastic, while my own words continued to resound in the catacombs of my mind: ‘… they won’t be able to see me coming!’

It dawned on me, as I stood looking down at Busner fiddling with his toy, that I had already exited sideways into a discarded scene, the chopped-up frames of which lay curling on the cutting-room floor. It had been bothering me that although there had been establishing shots and even flashbacks, the main narrative had begun without a credit sequence: no slow-revolving globe pierced by photons, no torch-bearing Grecian goddess, no searchlights playing over monumental 3-D type, and — most of all — no Dolby histrionics, the orchestra of thousands chuntering away: ‘Chun-chunn! Chun-chunn! Churrrurrrl-chun-chunn! Ta-tatta-taa! Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tatta-taaa!’ With Hollywood, I thought, the climax always came at the beginning — all the rest was an insensate nuzzling, as the camera roved over the silvery skin.

Another title materialized in the stuffy office, replacing my graphic paranoia: ONE YEAR EARLIER. I walked round it. From Busner’s side the plain white capitals were reversed: — not that he was paying them any mind, as he’d dropped a Riddle tile and was now getting down awkwardly on his hands and knees to search for it in the kneehole of the desk.

I admired the title, which was positioned just so: in stark counterpoint to the cluttered shelves, the half-open door revealing a wedge of stock corridor, the dimply dullness of Beuys’s topographies. The title both moved things forwards — and backwards — while filing the current scene away. Not that it had been exactly a year previously — it was more like thirteen months, but the imprecision was forgivable dramatic licence.

ONE YEAR EARLIER

I was in a bistro in the Place Wilson in Toulouse. My POV was not from behind my eyes but disembodied, looking down at a 45-degree angle from somewhere near the ceiling at a table of diners. There was me, the writer Jonathan Coe, the journalist Simon Tiffin and his wife Alexa, Marianne Faithfull and François Ravard, and Yann Perreau, the organizer of Le Marathon des mots, the literary festival that had brought us all to town. It was a well-lit and wide shot, sharply focused so that all the detail of the scene — white napery, grey meat, red wine — was instantly caught. I could almost feel the snag of the diners’ teeth, taste the grease on their lips, and smell the foody vapours funnelling up their noses. Moreover, as it was an episode from my own life, I experienced an immodest thrill at the work expended by the production designers, lighting cameramen and all the other techies Busner was so dismissive of, in order to re-create it for the screen.

As for the casting — it was excellent. The man portraying Jonathan Coe had a strong likeness to the writer — the same symmetrical mop of greying hair, the same half-handsome features. François Ravard’s role had been nabbed by a swarthy little fellow, on whose broken nose the trademark heavy-black-frame spectacles appeared drawn on as if by a bored child. But perhaps because of this discord, François’s Gallic rolled r’s, his exasperated clucks and wheedles of annoyance as he dealt with Marianne — who, très fatiguée, was demanding to be taken back to the hotel — seemed all the more authentic. Marianne was played by a dyed-blonde at least a decade younger than the real thing — but she husked to perfection.

I couldn’t assess the Tiffins’ performance, because they were mostly silent, absorbed in the spectacle of François and Marianne’s pantomimic co-dependency. As for Yann Perreau, I couldn’t remember what he’d looked like at all, and, true to my agnosia, the filmmakers equipped his actor with a mask of featureless flesh.

The sound was as good as the camerawork, so that as I zoomed in the clatter of cutlery and the kvetching of François and Marianne became muffled, while Jonathan’s gently emphatic voice increased in clarity; he was saying to the man sitting beside him: ‘Yes, I know what you mean. I sat on the jury at last year’s Edinburgh Film Festival, and of the ten films we shortlisted for the Best British category not one got a theatrical release; they all went — if they went anywhere at all — straight to video.’

‘Mm, mm,’ affirmed the man playing me — he was chewing some bread. ‘It just goes to prove my point: film is dead, its century-long reign as king of narrative has ended, and we are in an interregnum, and, as Gramsci observed of such periods between political hegemonies — now the strangest freaks and sports will arise.’

I was disappointed, obviously, that my part hadn’t attracted a leading man, although there are worse fates than to be played by a classy British character actor. I couldn’t fault me on my mannerisms: the deep-sea waggle of the hammerhead, the lazy flap of the cartilaginous hands; the voice, too, was spot-on: nasally posh, whiningly mockney. But was this David Thewlis (too young, too good-looking) or Pete Postlethwaite (too old, too ugly), whose head, together with that of the Coe-alike, filled the screen as I closed on them?

No matter, because just as it seemed my POV was going to perform a laparoscopy on the mystery thespian, it reared back with the suddenness of a striking rattlesnake, swivelled right round, then tracked through the bistro and out the door. It paused for three seconds to capture a statue of Goudouli: the celebrated Occitan poet sat foppishly atop a rockery planted with swooning nudes, a pigeon perching on his wrist — was he was hawking for bread?

SIX MONTHS LATER annulled Goudouli’s stonily good-humoured features, and then this establishing shot — that ought, by rights, to have preceded the bistro scene — dissolved into smoky limbo. During this interlude I envisioned the opening of John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (1952), wherein Toulouse-Lautrec climbs down from his Montmartre bar stool, and, as he stumps towards the door, le patron peers over the zinc rampart and says, ‘So long, Toulouse.’ But of course in my version the painter of restricted height wasn’t played by José Ferrer but Sherman Oaks, and as he came on he winked at me, horribly, a crack in a face crusted with coagulated blood.

SIX MONTHS LATER

Exterior, night: the terrace of the Café Pinot beside the Los Angeles Public Library, a blowy evening in October 2007. The wind rattles the sunshades and the aurora urbanis streams in plumes of orangey light from the glassy cliffs of the surrounding skyscrapers. As my severed head is bowled through the double doors and past the giant rotisserie that’s the café’s selling point, it’s difficult to accept that this was a scene completely excised from my memory of the time I had spent in Los Angeles — for I know what’s coming: a long dining room of Bauhausian rationality, the windows outlined in black like Mondrian rectangles, below them a continuous banquette, in front of this white-clothed tables for two, mostly empty, but at one sits Ellen DeGeneres, playing the part of Stevie Rosenbloom, my Hollywood agent, while opposite her is… yes, David Thewlis.

His behaviour in Toronto now makes sense. At the time I’d assumed he was simply cutting me, sensing that I — like, no doubt, others he met — believed he gave his finest performance in Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), and that since then, like so many actors who have been hollowed out by the director’s compulsive improvisatory method, he had been coasting. Actors, humph! They’re like that — even the best of them are passive, receptive… can I get away with feminized? Waiting for the back of a hand to prink their rouged nipples, waiting for it to slide down into the dry cleft of their pride, moisten it — so that it swells.

From the bar between two rusty lamp-posts hangs the carcass of a newly slaughtered ox. Standing in a cloud of flies, a man with a knife is cleaning out the entrails. Huxley stands tripping in Schwab’s on La Cienega — and then again on the beach at Santa Monica with Thomas Mann. Partially sighted as he is, Huxley still notes that their leather-shod feet are dabbling in the slurry of used condoms expelled from a sewer outfall.

The freshly slaughtered beef forms a ridge of erect slices on my flat white plate; to one side there’s a rick of grated carrot and celeriac; to the other there’s a boulder of potato mashed with sage. Thewlis looks balefully at this, then away to where a waiter, wound into his apron as tightly as a plague victim into a shroud, stands forlorn beside a pillar.

‘We hear a lot about tortured genius,’ says Thewlis-as-me, ‘but what about tortured mediocrity?’

The waiter takes this personally and huffs off towards the giant rotisserie.

‘Now you’ve offended him,’ says DeGeneres-as-Stevie. I zoom in on her: she’s eating fish — a newly landed rainbow trout that arches on her plate, flipping beads of water across her brownish dress. There’s something going on at the neck of this garment, but such are the vagaries of my memory that what may have been silk ruffles have been replaced by the small squares of opacity used to obscure the faces of covertly filmed criminal suspects.

‘I don’t give a shit,’ Thewlis/Self comes back. ‘If he’s exercised about his craft he should go out on strike with the rest of ’em.’

‘What about you?’ DeGeneres I thought a casting against type, but she’s got Stevie’s gentle Angeleno rasp down pat. ‘I mean, doncha think you should come out in support of the screenwriters; after all you’re in an allied trade?’

‘Right! But what would my picket line be like? I mean, am I gonna stop myself getting to my own typewriter, or will I show up once a year to prevent myself mailing a manuscript to the publisher?’

‘I getcha — and y’know, there’s gonna be no real solution to this: the generals on both sides are fighting the last war, the dispute back in the eighties when the writers lost out on the revenue from video rentals. No one really knows what’s at stake now — if anything at all: these guys are going head to head over what they think the internet residuals from Dharma & Greg might be worth.’

Thewlis has felled one of the beef slices and managed a few bites, together with a scrape of potato, but he’s obviously not interested and lets his cutlery clatter into the shattered food, ruining something that had the compositional integrity of a seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas painting. He takes a swig of Powerade from a handy bottle. He looks DeGeneres in the eye: ‘It’s significant, isn’t it, that you talk of TV rather than the movies.’

‘Well, that’s where the money is — such as it is. I mean, there’s an avalanche of product now — most of the WGA people are network TV writers who’ll never work again.’

Thewlis doesn’t seem to hear this, but presses on: ‘And it can’t’ve escaped your notice that this is the first year ever that video-game sales are set to surpass movie receipts?’

‘No, no, it hasn’t escaped my notice.’ DeGeneres casts her blue eyes (a blooper, Stevie’s are hazel) down to her plate: the trout is dead.

‘Has it occurred to you, Stevie, that this is it?’ Such sententiousness! Can that really be what I’m like? ‘This is the death of the movies — the shattering of the century-old mirror within which humanity has regarded its own plug-ugly features—’ Thewlis is interrupted by the waiter, who has sidled back to remove DeGeneres’s dead fish, and is raising a brow at my mad cow platter. ‘I haven’t finished yet!’ Thewlis cries, attacking the mash with his fork so that white worms writhe through its tines.

DeGeneres sighs. ‘You’re right. Y’know, I kinda hope that the movies will end up like theatre — a secondary medium, sure, but still a revered one in which original work’s done; but now… I dunno.’

‘The question is, Stevie, if film is dead, who murdered it?’ She sighs again. ‘Could’ve been Mike Ovitz and his clients’ cancerous egos — or maybe it was CGI zapping them with an alien blaster; then again, it could’ve been something less dramatic: the steady downward pressure of marketing on the movies’ lifeblood, as they were used to sell more and more crap to younger and younger kids. But what I want to know is, Will, what’re you gonna do about it?’

‘Do? I’m gonna track down the killer, of course. Literally. I’m going to walk to Hollywood, my eyes fixed on the sidewalk, checking out the spoor. I’m gonna sidle up on the fucker—’

‘Or fuckers.’

‘Or fuckers — that way they won’t know I’m coming, and listen, you can help me here…’

Was it that Thewlis’s imitation of my voice had dropped into a conspiratorial undertone? No, it was my POV’s measured backtracking, first along the length of the dining room, then deftly through the vestibule, before, eyes-rear, madly stepping down from the kerb and into the traffic scooting along Fifth Street. The SUV that grazed my nose with its metallic-blue paintjob made the cut.

I had found Busner’s Riddle tile — it had fallen down the cable tracking slot, together with three others. I got unsteadily to my feet and handed them over. He grunted his thanks, then asked, ‘Have you solved it?’

‘Um, yeah, in a way — it’s this technique Mukti taught me: not just running the tape forward, so that I can reveal the consequences of my own negative thought patterns, but making little film clips out of them that I can play over and over again.’

‘Really.’ Busner was underwhelmed. ‘That Mukti seems more of a cineaste than a psychiatrist — but, still, if it works for you, Will, and I suppose you’ll need such, um, strategies on your… trip.’

‘Which you don’t approve of?’

‘Approve? No, I’m not in favour of your “quest”; to me it reeks of Kunstschadenfreude.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning the art that indulges its creator’s sorrow until it completely takes him over. Besides’ — he had left off his Riddle fiddling and now fixed me with his watery grey eyes — ‘there’s the film script you say you wrote — it was never completed, was it?’

‘No, that’s true — you’ve got me there.’ I retreated to my chair. Flinging a handful of summer rain against the window Nature called us to come out and play. ‘I–I… I couldn’t bear the thought of having to discuss the creative whys and wherefores with the producer — he wore a sleeveless anorak!’

‘A gilet.’

‘What?’

‘I believe they’re called gilets — sleeveless anoraks.’

‘That wasn’t all,’ I continued. ‘I also had this mounting inability to suspend disbelief.’

‘Explain?’ Busner rapped, and in that moment I realized who had been playing him throughout the entire scene: Orson Welles. Of course! Although master of stagecraft that Welles was — the dates were still all wrong.

‘I’d had difficulties with theatre since my late teens — all those RADA Imogens pretending to be Renaissance virgins; then, when I began writing myself, narrative fiction was the next victim — hauling on the strings of my own puppets meant I couldn’t help seeing everyone else doing the same tricks. Film and TV remained plausible — it was the spirit of the age, and no matter how jaded I might’ve felt, I could still immure myself in the wobbly flats of a daytime soap. But then — it must’ve been ten years ago or so — I began to be insistently aware of the sound recordist hovering out of shot, his furry boom mike dangling above the frame. So I started looking for it all the time — then I spotted other things.’

‘Other things?’

‘Well, continuity errors, anachronisms — anything that marred the accuracy of the representation: the wrong furniture for the period, the characters’ inappropriately modish dialogue — y’know what I mean.’

I stopped and looked at him. It was so much more than impersonation: Welles, a far bigger man, had somehow contrived to shrink himself inside Busner. The cheeks had been padded and prosthetics used on the nose. If the art of screen acting consists in stillness rather than movement, how much stiller did this performance have to be? And yet he’d pulled it off, managing to convince an audience of one who was sitting within feet of him. Then there was the voice, as familiar to me as my own, with its wheezy aspiration suggestive of a high wind in the upper branches of a mighty brainstem — how many hours had he taken to perfect this?

‘I don’t want to upset you,’ Welles said carefully. ‘But, if I hear you right, you take no pleasure in entertainment at all any more.’

‘Pleasure? It’s a torment to me.’

‘And you believe that by undertaking this quest, you’ll cure your depression?’

‘Depression — is that what it is?’

‘Mos’ def’.’

We sat and looked at one another for a while. I had no idea what he saw in me — but I knew what I saw in him: a suspension of disbelief that had endured my entire adult life. So I stolidly accepted the substitution, for to speculate as to why a long-dead Hollywood star had been directed to play my long-term therapeutic mentor, well, that way lay madness, and, as I’ve said, I knew better than to exhibit any stereotypy — let alone become strident.

I got up to depart — Busner tried to detain me: ‘No problems with packing?’

‘No, I don’t think so — I mean, not that I’ve done it yet, I’ll find out this evening.’

‘And the genre of the piece?’

‘Genre?’

‘Yes — I think film noir is difficult to resist, yet… ‘

‘Should be?’

‘Absolutely, I’d go for almost anything else, rom-com, frat boy or screwball comedy — horror, perhaps. Just don’t do anything arty or obscure, there’s a good chap, remember the Kunstschadenfreude — remember me, when you find yourself in a chain hotel room, staring fixedly at the bulbous prongs of a video-games controller, and wondering where it all went wrong.’

I squeezed out through the half-open door, then squeezed halfway back in again to wiggle my fingers, ‘Ta-ra.’

‘Ta-ra,’ Welles replied — he was fiddling with the Riddle tiles again.

I had never found Busner in the least bit pitiable before — this was Welles’s genius entirely.

^* I cannot recall tasting pre-minted lamb until the early 2000s, when Sainsbury’s began to offer it among their selection of barbecue meats. This was over twenty years after the events described, so the phrase ‘minted lamb’ is interjected here to convey the implausibility of this reconstructive memoir, and indeed of the genre as a whole.

^*The majority of Busner’s papers appeared initially in the British Journal of Ephemera, and have been subsequently collected in The Undivided Self: Existential Torpor and Schizothymia (Poshlost Press, 2007).

2. KerPlunk!

Hal, still fiercely red of lens, although now too old and hackneyed to be able to pick up much save for swivel-on bit parts — such as security cameras — gazed down on me from the corner of the Foyles travel section. I had spread out so many maps — checking for pliability, legibility, extent and area covered — that my miniature lebensraum was interfering with the shoppers. A bookseller came over to me; he was tall, raw-boned and wearing a T-shirt printed with the poster for Godard’s Breathless. His blue-black hair was cropped close at the sides of his slab head, and if he’d been better-looking the young Daniel Day-Lewis might have been playing him- or perhaps Lewis, a slave to the uglifying method, was playing him?

‘I’m sorry…’ he said, ‘but people are complaining.’

I told him what I was looking for and how difficult it was proving.

‘There’s a street map that Rand McNally do,’ he explained. ‘It covers the entire LA basin, if it’s not on display we might have one out back — I’ll go and look.’

While Day-Lewis was gone I tidied up the other Los Angeleses, then upon his return we spread this new one out on top of a plan chest. It would do — it showed every street, although so small I had difficulty reading the names, even with glasses; it was also a single, easily folded sheet. However, it stopped at the Hollywood Hills, so there and then I scotched the next leg of my provisional plan, which had been to leave Hollywood via the cervical ‘O’ on the Hollywood sign, sleep newborn in the sierra, then slither on, via Universal City, down into the Valley, where I might be taken on as a porn star, or a third husband.

Of course, the bookseller wasn’t only a bookseller — they seldom are. I wasn’t about to tell him the reason for my trip, although I did say something about walking and how antithetical it was to film, which gave him his opening: ‘Actually, I’m doing my doctoral thesis on slow motion—’

I stifled a sarcastic yelp: nothing could’ve been more antithetical to slow motion that the coiled power of this thespian cat-bear who leant, his coccyx stabbed by the corner of the plan chest. ‘I see,’ I said, ‘you mean Muybridge’s photographs, the variable speeds of old-fashioned hand-cranked projectors, Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho,^* that kinda thing?’

‘Well’ — his eyes were beautiful, his tone contemptuous ‘none of your examples are slow motion properly understood. Slow motion can only exist relative to full motion, and full motion itself has to be defined by a further correlate — say, a soundtrack. The Gordon piece — which I’m familiar with — is an example of extended play.’

Hal screwed me out from the corner, the other bookstore browsers free-floated among the shelves, their minds revving up to choose — then stalling. I remembered lurking beside a wall at the Hayward Gallery as Norman Bates’s knife deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeescended. I barely looked at it, so absorbed was I by the grain, rough against my cheek — it was an effect I knew had been achieved by pressing planks into concrete before it set. Might it be possible to date the building by counting the rings in its walls? And what of my own predicament: my mind, frozen in my body, which, cells apoptosizing, careered towards entropy? As for this punk, I paid him for his map, but — I hoped, pointedly — neglected to thank him. It was Hal I waved goodbye to.

There was one further errand to do before I could head home to pack. I left Foyles and walked up Tottenham Court Road to the Scientology Centre by Goodge Street tube. I had been dropping in at the centre for years and must have completed hundreds of their questionnaires. The so-called Standard Oxford Capacity Analysis was a simplistic personality test devised by L. Ron Hubbard himself, and I’d always scored well on it: I was unstable, depressed, anxious, sluggish, inhibited, feckless, compliant and antagonistic. The test confirmed that on those rare occasions that I found myself in groups (for the most part I was chronically withdrawn), it was impossible for me to successfully integrate. You would’ve thought that such corrosive traits, especially when combined with a sheep-like suggestibility, made me a perfect recruit — but the Scientologists stubbornly refused to let me join.

In the late 1980s I had managed to inveigle myself on to an introductory weekend course at their British headquarters, Saint Hill Manor, near East Grinstead. This cultists’ house party was everything I could’ve hoped for, from the diluted orange juice concentrate to the strip-lit repression of the single-sex dorms. I thought I was doing well: I joined in the discussions enthusiastically, and whenever we had a free moment I devoured the master’s works in an exhibitionistic fashion.

All went well until the Sunday morning, when, as a special treat we wannabes were given a test audit. The auditing procedure is the ritual that lies at the core of Dianetics; it’s nothing more than an extended lie-detector test, during which you’re wired up to a polygraph and asked a series of questions that range from the innocuous — ‘What is your favourite colour?’ — to the revealing — ‘Have you ever been sexually attracted to a member of the same sex?’ As long as you answer them truthfully you are awarded a ‘clear’, and your so-called ‘negative engrams’ are held to have been pulverized by the power of probity. In due course you ascend to the next level.

Except that I never got to the first one. It didn’t help that the auditor — his hair an extravagant bouffant — was played by the Who front man Roger Daltrey (who, following the success of Tommy, and the biopic of John McVicar in which he played the lead role, was trying to consolidate his acting career). Nor did it help that I was attracted to members of my own sex — albeit not Daltrey. The needles jerked on the meter, the pens danced on the graph paper readout, my auditor announced that I was exhibiting deep resistance. I was in a cleft stick: to admit to any homosexual inclinations would have ruled me out entirely, for the Church of Scientology was as bigoted in this regard as any fundamentalist sect.

Although sent packing from Saint Hill, I was still not to be deterred and over the coming years I went on pitching up at Tottenham Court Road, in disguises and under assumed names, armed with strategies for ‘fooling’ the Capacity Analysis. It was all to no avail: the smiling Scientologists would let me take the test again, then send me on my way, with the advice that I see a doctor, a therapist, a priest — do anything, in short, but submit myself to their own mind control.

The curious thing was that although at the outset I couldn’t have rightly said why it was that I so craved Scientology, as the years went by and my capacity to suspend disbelief in narrative was increasingly hobbled, I realized that my intuition had been sound: Hubbard’s opportunistic syncretizing of Astounding Stories, the Bhagavad Gita and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was the perfect refuge for someone like me, who found the probable impossible, and the impossible highly likely.

Besides, the Scientologists’ bizarre belief that their human bodies were only the temporary housing for immortal alien super-beings tallied with my own experience of life, in which well-established actors played even the walk-on parts — William Holden, long dead, adjusts his fedora by the ticket machine, then strolls on. The very condition of the actor, who assumes many different forms while remaining essentially himself, was like that of these Thetans — so was it any surprise that Hollywood stars, their frail psyches sprayed with incontinent regard, were also attracted to the cult?

Hubbard, whose entire life was the front-projection of a successful sociopath, naturally wanted to direct. And ended up bushed in Southern California, presiding over his own sci-fi epics with woeful results, the silvery squeezy bottle passes through the meteorite shower in the shower stall. The perplexing thing was that during the hundred-year hegemony of the movie everything had been filmed — including films themselves. Actors had played historical personages, and those personages had also played themselves, while the actors that had played them appeared in other movies — playing themselves. This poly-dimensional cat’s cradle of references had snared plenty of people with reality-testing abilities far better than my own, and I maintained a certain amused tolerance for the way I lost myself in fugal ruminations such as this:

Stanley Kubrick had used his own Hertfordshire estate as a location for his last movie, Eyes Wide Shut, starring the Scientologist Tom Cruise. In the film, London streets acted the part of Manhattan streets — a metempsychosis analogous to that of actors: the same place living through multiple locations. Kubrick was scared of flying — the young Hubbard pretended to be a fearless flyboy. Hubbard also claimed to have met Freud, who in turn had certainly known Schnitzler, whose Traumnovelle was the basis of Kubrick’s screenplay. And then… Kubrick was rumoured to have employed a special coach in order to invest Cruise and his then wife Nicole Kidman’s sex scenes with the barest plausibility — which brings me back to Saint Hill and Roger Daltrey.

You can, no doubt, see which way my mind was pelting… The completed paper ran to some forty single-spaced pages, the dense type studded with emoticons and interwoven with diagrams bearing labels such as ‘45 degrees where the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis is greater than 9.7’. I left it at the Scientology Centre, the pink plastic wallet also containing an explanatory note: ‘I will be staying at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard on the twelfth of June, should anyone from the International Dianetics College wish to discuss the enclosed with a view to preventing publication’, signed with the nom de guerre Will Smith.

I kept stopping on the way back from Stockwell tube to take photographs. The bases of the limes along Binfield Road were spiky with withies among which nestled the cigarette packets and energy drink cans let fall by the multitudes that tramped by every day. The buses were nose to tail, snorting for admission to their ferroconcrete stockade. I took maybe two or three hundred shots of these lime shrines before the dusk tumbled from the rooftops into the street and night swarmed over the police crime tape looped between the lamp-posts at the junction of our road.

Several of my neighbours were gathered at the cordon. One remonstrated with the officer on duty: ‘My son is disabled! He’s only fourteen years old — you can’t stop me from going home, he needs me!’

All eyes were on the confrontation: the officer in her stab-proof waistcoat, the citizen in his dudgeon, so I ducked under the tape and moved swiftly past the technicians in their white crinkled boiler suits, who were picking at the congealed blood in the roadway. More techies were at work on the set opposite my front door: a neighbour’s Audi estate completely dusted with fingerprinting powder — under the Kliegs it looked like a whale baby coated in vernix. As I put my key in the lock the techies turned their snout masks towards me and grunt-queried; I answered by waving my library card officially, then disappeared inside.

It was a Saturday night and as usual my wife had her cronies over to play games. We lived effectively separate lives; while I wrote screenplays that would never be made, she indulged in a rich fantasy life, one in which she was always about to start shooting — the very next day! An epic! She was Helen of Troy! Mary Magdalene! Joan of Arc! It was a sure-fire smash, with an astronomical budget! So, while I clickety-clacked away in my attic room, she swansoned from chamber to chamber, trying on outfit after outfit, then discarding them for the maids to tidy away.

Except that we didn’t have any maids — a verism that made a mockery of her pretensions; instead it was our children — who had the precocious maturity associated with such neglect, and who were portrayed by a rota of superannuated child actors, gawky Macaulay Culkin, wizened Mickey Rooney, ambassadorial Shirley Temple, etc. — who did the tidying up around the gloomy Victorian house. They also did the cleaning, the laundry and the cooking — they even paid the bills and put themselves to bed punctually at eight-thirty. I’ve no idea how they found the time to go to school.

I threw a few things into a bag ready for my departure on the morrow, then went to say goodnight to my wife. At forty-eight she was still a remarkably handsome woman, and if she had been content to age gracefully I think everything might have been all right between us. As it was, I found her playing KerPlunk with her tame fags, all of them dolled up like teenagers — she in a pink velour tracksuit, her dyed-blonde hair in madly streaked bunches, the others in saggy-assed jeans that exposed the waistbands of their underpants so their pot bellies were captioned ‘Calvin Klein’.

As I came into the kitchen my wife drawled, ‘Get me a drink, darling.’ And one of the forty-somethings leapt to do her bidding. ‘Make it frothier this time’ — she waved her heart-shaped lollipop like a lorgnette — ‘and I want more marshmallows!

‘Oh,’ she deigned to notice me. ‘It’s you — don’t hover like that, pull up a chair and join us.’

Reluctantly I did as she bade me, and Frankie or Hud (I could never tell them apart, and both were played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) equally reluctantly made room for me.

‘It’s too late to join in this round,’ my wife continued, expertly feeding marbles into the tube, ‘but you can play the next.’

She smiled merrily, her coralline lips peeling back from her tiny even white teeth. There was no malice in her — merely utter self-absorption. Hud — or Frankie — who was modishly shaven-headed (or perhaps simply bald), and who had once directed her in a breakfast bar commercial, fouled up his go and as the tube lost its marbles they all cried, ‘KerPlunk!’

I played with them for an hour or so while an ancient Madonna album gently vogued through the sound system. This and the KerPlunk players’ clothes were the only contemporary props — for we had bought the house fully furnished, complete with the splayed bearskin, the miniature church organ, the looming tallboys and hammered-brass aspidistra pots. Glass domes cluttered with songbirds stuffed in mid-flutter stood about on occasional tables, while a vast mezzotint of a Holman Hunt leant against the coffered panelling — I had always felt a deep sympathy for the parasuicidal sheep it depicted, which were huddled together on an insufficiently vertiginous grassy knoll.

Talk was of reality TV shows and the indiscretions of the junior Royals; a new face cream was passed around and smelt. Around eleven I said my goodnights and went to bed with a glass of water. Passing along the hall I was seized by the police lights glaring through the panes of the front door, and so detoured into the drawing room. Here it was even brighter, the radiance lifting the rug’s pattern — trellises twined with the tail feathers of peacocks — so that it floated in the must.

The forensics team were still out there — two of them, seated in the road with their backs against my neighbour’s car. There had been no Vorsprung durch Technik, and, while it was no longer a newborn whale, nor was it a shiny aerodynamic status symbol. Instead, a pre-war Packard dusty and alone in a four-car garage scattered with dead leaves. What was it William Holden had said when the repo men took his car?

A disturbed night followed. I slept poorly on my narrow canvas cot, not helped by the screeching and giggling that floated up the stairs into the small hours. In the morning I found the superannuated child stars — three, maybe four of them — eating Sugar Smacks at the oval mahogany dining table, which was still littered with KerPlunk straws, marbles, chocolate-stained mugs and Bacardi Breezer bottles. The pathos of Macaulay Culkin’s bare elbow in a smear of spilt milk was… indescribable. Frankie — or was it Hud? — had lumped up a bed out of cushions and lay spread-eagled in the corner of the room, snoring noisily.

Mark Lester accompanied me to the end of the road and, standing either side of the crime scene tape, we said our goodbyes.

‘Look after your mother,’ I said as I kissed him on his greying blond curls. ‘She may be a little daffy, but she has a good heart.’

He removed my hand from his shoulder with professional courtesy, then enquired, ‘Will that be all, Mr Postlethwaite?’

Each purposeful stride kicked me free from the entanglements of my life, until a reveal shot done with the side of a Number 87 bus exposed the Wandsworth Road, its multicultural parade of food premises — The Sea Lamprey (Muslim fish and chips), Twice as Nice (Carribbean), El Golfo (Portuguese pasteleria) — marching beneath yellowing London brick and the arched eyebrows of gothic rendering. I was safe now, walking out of town on a June morning — if I could be captured at all it would be possible only with a hand-held camera, fitted with a revolutionary lens capable of embracing the paradox of the human visual field, with its saccadic pans, zooms, tracks and stills spuriously contriving a synoptic unity.

The airy bulk of the gasometers, the heroic hulk of Battersea Power Station, the liberating span of Chelsea Bridge, the plane trees romping in the breeze along Sloane Street, the Michelin Man squatting on top of his building, the Linnaean façade of the Natural History Museum — the only disturbing note was struck by the branch of LA Fitness on Pelham Street, which, sited as it was beside the trompe l’œil Thurloe Square — a thin wedge of terrace hiding the District Line cutting — suggested movie trickery.

I didn’t let it get to me; after all, the familiar dumpy shapes of London cabs were wrapped around with the skyline of Hong Kong or Copacabana, and besides, Hyde Park had given way to Queensway, and I was already making my way through the backstreets of Notting Hill before the dump bins of newspapers outside the corner shops began to impinge, and I started to obsess about the weighty potential of Rhys Ifans’s scrotum. The shaggily mournful face of the Welsh comic actor stared up at me from newspaper after newspaper, on rack after rack, trapped there by the protracted and public break-up from his starlet girlfriend. He had come to prominence in Y-fronts and a snorkelling mask, typecast as an out-of-work Welsh comic actor in Notting Hill (1999). And so there his representation was, in the neighbourhood the representation of which had caused him to be so represented.

I pushed Ifans’s bare back against the artex wall and took the soft gristle of his nipple in my dogged teeth, while Notting Hill grabbed the adjustable wrench of Ernõ Goldfinger’s^* Trellick Tower and whirled it around my head. I lurched through Meanwhile Gardens, and came to on a bench beside the Grand Union Canal, staring at the brown emulsion waters, the decrepitating plunge of a skateboarder in a half-pipe resounding in my ears.

As I headed west along the towpath the afternoon came puttering extended-play towards me — a broad stroke of sunlight painted by a narrow boat. Brawny young fishermen sat in the historic present: on empty milk crates, stripped to the waist to have it out with minnows, their six-packs of beer beside them, shiny as shell cases in the grass. And so by the time I reached Old Oak Common I had regained some kind of equanimity. All I had to do was maintain my course through the summery snowfall of dandelion spore and the giddy flip of the cabbage whites, not forgetting to duck when I saw Hal, sitting on a pole by the railway siding, or screwed into the masonry at the rear of the Car Giant warehouse, his brow knitted with pigeon-repelling barbs, a windscreen wiper for an eyelid. True, he might capture a few frames of me, but I doubted that I could be identified; I was merely a glyph in this panorama of subjects — bridge, lock, fisherman and lamp-post — which could be shuffled to produce an endless vista.

Morgan Freeman and Ron Howard were waiting for me where I’d arranged to meet them: beside an information board disfigured with graffiti tags. It wasn’t until I came right up to them that I could establish who it was they were playing, and then initially I thought Freeman hopelessly cast against type — like a black King Lear. However, within seconds it was clear not only that he was Nick Papadimitriou, but that he had captured my friend’s mien perfectly: the hands-on-hips-belly-out stance, the furious intensity of Nick’s stare and his slightly nasal whine.

As for Howard, I could never stand him anyway — and dying his hair red was cheap. Moreover, he was toting a large digital camera with a directional mike attached to it. Ignoring their greetings, I lashed out at him: ‘Why the fuck did you bring that?’ Then rounded on Freeman-as-Nick, ‘I told you to tell him not to bring a fucking camera — it’s crucial that there be no footage of me, if they get hold of it… What’s more, it ruins all this—’ I waved a hand at the enervated canal, the road bridge leapfrogging the canal, the empty skips piled like dirty crockery in a factory yard. ‘Now I can’t suspend disbelief in any of it!’

‘C’mon, Pete.’ Freeman, to his credit, refused to be intimidated. ‘Lighten up — if you don’t want to be filmed, that’s fine, John’ll keep you out of shot. He’s come along to film me, not you — you knew he was making this documentary about me.’

I splashed some water from the Evian bottle I was carrying into the palm of my hand and dashed it against my rage-engorged face. Freeman was wearing the same white shirt, dark trousers and heavy leather shoes that I’d last seen Nick in — but, while there was pathos in the half-mast flies, the shirtsleeves rolled up pre-war high, he still looked dapper. I realized my anger was born of pride as much as anything — I’d been counting on Thewlis playing me for these scenes with Nick. My self-esteem required that I be better-looking as well as younger.

Ron-John was cowering by the info-board, so I went over to him and did my best to sound contrite. ‘Look I’m sorry, John.’

‘It’s OK, Will, really — I understand. I’ll keep tight in on Nick, and if you want to examine the camera before I go that’s fine — besides, I’m only going to tag along for a couple of miles.’

The situation remained deeply unsatisfactory for all of us. Ron-John ran on ahead, took up a stance, then filmed Nick as he walked by, then he squeezed back past us and did the same again, over and over. He’d fitted Nick with a radio mike so he could indulge in his penchant for hymning such quotidiana as the abandoned warehouses along the canal side, the Middlesex County Council shields on the lock gates and the steel-clapboard Travelodge by the North Circular Road — but, although he launched into a lecture on the industrial estate conceived as the props department of capitalism, he kept being interrupted by passing joggers and cyclists, who upon noticing who he was stopped to natter among themselves.

I’d long since accepted Freeman’s performance — barely seeing him as African-American any more — and was infuriated by this gauche behaviour. As for Ron-John, no matter how ingratiating he was, or how many high-grossing movies he made, for me he’d always be the bat-eared sycophant in a letter jersey making up to Henry Winkler. When he offered me the camera for my inspection, rather than examining the playback, I simply removed the tape cassette and chucked it in the canal. He trudged away disconsolately over Horsenden Hill, while Morgan and I went on towards Northolt.

Later, standing with him on the footbridge that crossed the A40 Western Avenue, and looking out north-west across the RAF airfield, I felt so happy to have escaped London that I was moved to embrace Freeman and cup his globe of white curls in my hand.

‘Steady on, feller,’ Nick said, but before he could disengage I was shocked by the frailty of his thin back. ‘You’ll be OK,’ he went on gravely, ‘so long as you’re prepared for Laurel Canyon.’

I realized he had been granted a deeper insight than my own, and as we went on across a half-landscaped golf course, then into a nature reserve shaded in with un-coppiced beeches and cross-hatched by reed beds, I nerved myself to ask him what he knew. Yet couldn’t — and so we reached Uxbridge and the same little boxes of ticky-tacky we had left behind in Northolt, then the Hobbiton of its suburbia, then the redbrick carcerals of its office blocks — and still I hadn’t spoken.

I left Nick at the tube station, standing by a half-century-old train indicator that promised a Metropolitan Line departure for Finchley Road. Stumbling on from one tepee of streetlight to the next, I missed him acutely. Morgan Freeman’s was the last familiar face I would see until I met up with Ellen DeGeneres in Los Angeles — unless, that is, I counted James Bond’s.

^* 24 Hour Psycho (1993) by Douglas Gordon is a video installation that slows down Hitchcock’s Psycho so that it lasts for twenty-four hours.

^* Of whom more later.

3. My Name is Bond!

I had booked a bed and breakfast on the south side of the town. I’d been able to tell on the phone that the woman of the house was played by Brenda Blethyn, and now that we were standing face to face in the atrocious vestibule of her bungalow, I was glad I’d soon be rid of this supporting cast of British character actors, who, after all, had no traction in Hollywood.

I paid Blethyn in cash as soon as she’d revealed to me the converted garage lumbered with a double bed, a smoked glass table, a widescreen television and a partitioned bathroom. She waggled the banknotes in her hand, and my gaze skimmed past her creased top lip to bury itself in a massy spruce that writhed in the darkness.

‘Y’know, you remind me of… you remind me of — now, who is it you remind me of?’

‘I dunno, David Thewlis? Or maybe… Pete Postlethwaite?’

‘No, it can’t be, I’ve never heard of either of ’em.’

‘Well.’ I was barely civil. ‘I can’t possibly assist you to remember the name of someone I know nothing of to begin with, now can I?’

But she ignored this comment. ‘My husband and I don’t stop in the bungalow, so if you pull the door of the room to when you leave in the morning that’ll be dandy. You’ve breakfast things in the fridge there.’

Milk puckering under cling film, indescribably obscene. Soon after that I heard the flutter and crunch of her Vauxhall Corsa pulling out of the drive. It was a minor part for Blethyn, and, as I made myself a bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, I wondered why she’d taken it on at all — I’d offered to send her a cheque or cash up front, and then she could’ve left the key under the mat for me.

At 2.00 a.m. I began my preparations, naked in the bathroom, working the special forces camouflage stain into my skin from the hairline down — face, neck, arms, hands, cock and balls — but by the time I reached my ankles the gunk had run out and it looked as if a bear had been shitting incontinently in the bath. Of the life of man the duration is but a point, its substance streaming away.

I tiptoed through the sleeping dormitory town, not moving freely until I had crossed the M25 by a footbridge and was heading north on a wooded path beside the Colne brook. The predawn sky draped over Iver Heath, the clouds a peignoir, the stars jewels gelid against its blue-black skin. It must have been freezing up there, because a plane taking off from Heathrow unzipped a distrail with its passionate heat. The cumulus gaped, the night moaned, and I streamed away through the long grass, leaving a long swathe of misplaited blades behind me that pointed the way to Iver, a hamlet that had had been ravished so many times by the camera, all the specificity had been sucked out of it.

Beyond the houses, across Pinewood Road, the birches of Black Park were doubly silvered in the sidereal light. Over fifty films had been shot among these dense thickets and drives choked with fallen boughs. Black Park had been a wood in Wisconsin, a forest in Slovenia, the Siberian taiga — it was a hack woodland actor, ever ready to put on its pine-needle overcoat and make a multiplex believe. It was perfect cover — they’d never look for me here, where millions had already looked, unseeing.

There was a fence of course: savage tridents and coiled razor wire; in among its loops Hal’s touring company dreamt on their poles, rapid-eye movements laying down the beat for their lullaby, ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer doooo…’ I dug down quickly into the leaf mould and earth — then I was in, loping from one shadow to the next. I’d cased the joint thoroughly and wasn’t anticipating security — they were tucked up in their kennels, watching reruns of Baywatch with their comedy dogs.

Even in the starlight I could see the faded lettering — Clennam & Sons: Importers of Fine Fabrics and Silks — and the floral-pattern wallpaper exposed by the wrenching out of the carious house next door — except that there never had been one. With its stacked windows — dormer, upon bow upon bow — and steeply pitched roof, the set for the BBC’s latest TV adaptation of Little Dorrit was as familiar to me as my own childhood home — and so the perfect place to hide until dawn, when I could mingle with the techies, chippies and sparks. After all, no one ever looks upon the classics with fresh eyes, especially tired security men on minimum wage.

Inside there was silence, half a room and no staircase, the things of the body are as a river, and the things of the soul as a dream and a vapour. I waited in the fake Victorian business premises until day came, pink and dewy, and with it a red and sweaty security man, played by Ray Winstone, who, led by an Alsatian, barrelled straight towards me from the direction of the sound stages. An extra would’ve been one thing; an actor like Winstone was quite another. Self-preservation took over: I scrambled out the back of the set, ran ducked down behind the half-hovels, then sprinted across the open lot.

Would, I wondered, Ernõ Goldfinger, the architect of Trellick Tower, have been amused by this: a sign reading ‘Goldfinger Avenue’ slapped on the side of a Brutalist hangar? A reference not to him directly but to the Bond villain named after him — by which he had not been amused. I pelted down the avenue and, spotting an open side door into E Stage, shot through it and found myself inside a replica of the mausoleum at Chatsworth — a rotunda, surrounded by pillars, which was familiar to me from many happy visits to the estate as a guest of the Devonshires.

I pushed on into the depths of the Stage, passing through bedrooms, dressing rooms, halls and a solarium — all of which belonged to Chatsworth but had been disarticulated to suit the logistics of shooting the interiors for The Wolfman, which began summarily in a blaze of lights that sent me diving behind some velvet drapes. When I peeked out the body doubles for its three stars — Anthony Hopkins, Benicio del Toro and Emily Blunt — were drinking coffee and chatting about last night’s television.

My hand discovered a spirit level, and shouldering this I stepped out from my concealment and into a replica of the main hallway of the house. At the head of the marble staircase, between two stone lions, a dog handler stood with two Dobermanns on leashes, while an assistant swung a flail, provoking them to rear up and bark. I ducked behind a Grecian urn, although I needn’t have worried: only the dogs were in the shot being framed by an assistant director.

I was beginning to enjoy my stay at fake Chatsworth, which was like any house party but without the tedium of having to make conversation. Then Winstone blundered in and ruined it all. His paunch advanced, there were sweaty patches at his armpits — his Alsatian dragged him on. He caught sight of me behind the urn and bellowed, ‘Oi! You slag!’

‘Cut! Cut!’ the AD cried, then Winstone’s dog slipped its collar and flew at the Dobermanns. A maelstrom of fur and flob ensued, into which I lunged — how to explain all things of the body are as a river? I had noted that one of the antagonized Dobermanns had hands rather than paws — four of them; I grabbed one and while the others were distracted pulled him from the mêlée. So we escaped from The Wolfman set, out through another side door, across the lot and into the cover provided by the Winnebagos, ambulances and fire engines that were assembled around the famed 007 set on this, the penultimate day of shooting for Quantum of Solace.

Blue screen is always a comfortable experience for an idealist. As soon as Scooby and I were alone, I realized that’s what was happening — because this was no flesh and sinew Dobermann but a cartoonish hound who stood on hind legs puckering his muzzle to bow-wow-wow the near-discernible words ‘Ruffankyourufferrymuch.’ It followed, of course, that if Scooby were being projected after the fact of my own performance, then so too was all of this: the hive of activity around the wardrobe trailer, where extras were getting kitted out in army uniforms to play the part of a corrupt Bolivian general’s entourage.

As in life we strike attitudes on a bare stage, responding to phantoms we cannot see with lines scripted for us, so now I joined in idle chatter, hidden safely in the simple past. ‘Basically,’ said a plump chap with a sporran of keys dangling from his belt, ‘they’ve reached the point in the schedule where there’s nothing left to do but trash the sets — burn ’em and blow ’em up.’

He spoke the truth: ranged across the lot were the toasted slices of bogus buildings — a Haitian tenement, a Siena palazzo, a Bogotá slum. I suppose I should have been overwhelmed by this, the wide Sargasso of the narrow and destructive imagination of commercial imperatives — but I was filled only with my love for Scooby, who reared up on his hind legs so I could help him into his camos. He licked me in gratitude, his tongue curling right round my tired face. ‘Scherlupp!’

‘Nice work, boy,’ I told him. ‘I needed to lose the stain.’

The voices of two rehearsing actors floated through the open window of a trailer: ‘Was there any trouble securing the hotel?’

‘No, none.’

‘It’s just the fuel cells. The whole compound runs on them.’

‘Pain in the ass really.’

‘Sounds highly flammable.’

It was beyond wooden dialogue, rewritten so many times that it had the ugly believability of multi-density fibre. Still, it sounded to me like something worth filing away for future use — from the extras I’d gathered what the morning’s shooting would entail: the Götterdämmerung of the lovingly constructed interior of a Chilean desert resort hotel.

I could hear the low rubba-rubba-rubba of the generators, the whine of a truck’s power steering as it turned in the lot, the tick-tick-tick of metal expanding in the sun — my system was, I realized, flooded with adrenalin, hence this dreamy state, this sense of hours to kill that invariably preceded deadly action. Still on his hind legs, Scooby wrapped his foreleg tightly in my arm and we walked to the enormous 007 sound stage, picking our way between the loops and coils of fire hose that linked bowsers to engines.

The PR was waiting for us at a picnic table underneath a sunshade; her eyes tracked from mine to Scooby’s, then dropped to his bare paws. ‘Old mate of mine,’ I explained. ‘Turns out he’s doing a bit of extra work — Rex, this is Karen.’

‘Grrullo Grrrraren,’ growled Scooby.

‘Er, hullo,’ said the PR, not wholly convinced.

Nevertheless, she gave us security wristbands and led us into the hangar. The narrow defile between the outer wall and the reconstruction of the hotel was cluttered with scaffolding and snaked with high-tension cables; techies and firemen bustled about in the confined space. We stepped between the flats and found ourselves in the central hallway beneath a lattice of steel walkways connected by stairways. Charred extras playing corpses lay about underneath DANGER OF CRUSHING signs.

‘This is the twenty-second film of the franchise,’ Karen explained as she led us on past the open doors to the suites; then came the rest of the spiel: the six independent crews, the millions of dollars, the thousands employed, the hundreds of plane flights encircling the globe like warped meridians — then there had been the near-fatal accidents, and the bust-ups in Haiti, and all of it, I thought, in the service of convincing the ticket-buying public for a few minutes — or seconds — that the man who stood by the curved panoramic window, looking out on to a desert counterfeited with hundredweight bags of sand, was an ultraviolent assassin retained by Her Majesty’s Government to eliminate its former friends.

He turned to greet us. ‘David, good to see you — and this is?’

Phew! I was Thewlis — to have been Postlethwaite would’ve been humiliating.

‘Dan, this is Rex, old mate of mine — I understand you’ll be shooting him later.’

Craig laughed. ‘I love dogs,’ he said, and shook Scooby’s paw. ‘So,’ he continued, as the three of us sat down at a circular glass table beside an ornamental pit full of multicoloured stone balls, ‘why’d you want to come on set?’

The PR was a few yards off talking to an ex-public schoolboy in a sleeveless anorak (or gilet), so I took a deep breath and explained how cinema had been found — neck snapped, throat slashed, eyes gouged out — in a back alley behind a cinema in a small town that no one had ever heard of.

Craig laughed again. ‘I suppose you’re gonna tell me I bear some responsibility for that — but let’s get real here, I’m not the guy who did Dinotopia.’^*

Whatever chagrin I felt, I hastened to reassure him that there was nothing personal: ‘It’s just, given your own career trajectory, from playing tortured and sensitive types, to torturing sensitive types, presumably you have a view?’

Craig was looking at me with mounting scepticism. When I’d picked up Scooby’s camos from wardrobe I’d also selected a costume of my own: black dress trousers, black leather windcheater, white shirt and product-placement sunglasses — and this outfit seemed to be bothering the Bond star.

‘Why’re you dressed like me?’ he snarled.

Then it hit me, and I snarled back: ‘Why’re you dressed like Daniel Craig when he’s meant to be dressed like James Bond?’

How could I have been so naive? Quite suddenly the stunt double’s stuffing an empty Evian bottle in my mouth as I lie back in a pile of snapping, crackling and popping empties. Scooby leaps at the PR’s throat — I try to shout, but all that emerges is a pre-orgasmic ‘Gnnnn!’ and now the Craig doppelgänger’s pummelling me in the face with blows of a chronometric precision: ‘Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff! Paff!’ So hard that these bones are pulverized in this order: 1. glabella 2. nasal bone 3. supraorbital margin 4. superior orbital fissure 5. lacrimal bone 6. zygomatic bone 7. inferior orbital fissure.

I have to act fast, and jerk my knee up into his crotch so hard his testes are mashed into his pelvic bone, which in turn ruptures his bladder. The assassinalike barely flinches, merely shifts the locus of his blows lower, so that ‘Paff! Paff! Paff!’ The maxilla, mandible and mental protuberance are all shattered. My face is a blood-filled sponge of traumatized tissue and bone fragments, but scrabbling among the Evian bottles my hand discovers a hammer left there by a careless chippie; I swing this again and again at my attacker’s spine, popping his atlas, his axis and his cervical vertebrae (1–7 inclusive) like… popcorn.

Instant paralysis should rightfully ensue, not this marvellous bit of choreography: the two of us leaping away from one another, so that upright we circle the pit, searching for secure purchase in the slag heap of plastic, then ‘Whack!’ as a steelcapped leather shoe lashes out, breaking my sternum so cleanly that a shard spears my superior vena cava. Despite the plume of blood jetting from my ruptured chest, I drop back on to one leg and whip my own foot round at shoulder height in an expert taekwondo that propels his humerus — like a battering ram — into his scapula, a blow so devastating that the tendons snap with the resonant ‘pings’ of piano wires breaking.

Still, as he closes in to deliver a chop certain to crush my trachea, I realize this can’t continue indefinitely; for a start, it’s getting boring, so I pull the automatic from the stunt double’s shoulder holster and wildly discharge three or four rounds. I know they’ll only be blanks — but I’ve remembered the fuel cells.

J. M. W. Turner and Vincent van Gogh aren’t names you see on movie credits that often — but you should. The masterful brushwork of exploding petrol caught by the lens at 24 frames per second owes a lot to their impressionism — red, orange, yellow deliquescing in an expanding volume of white phosphorescence analogous to the primed canvas: these painterly effects were well hung in the salon of the Atacama desert resort beneath a shower of tinkling glass and the hiss of the sprinklers.

Doubled over, the stunt double ducks beneath the Wagnerian curtain of roaring flame — only the sleeveless anorak (or gilet) keeps his nerve, summoning a camera that comes nosing in further to capture Scooby and me, trapped in the pit, the Evian bottles melting all Dalí about us. Scooby, mute and suppliant, yet not reproachful: he trusted me, I had liberated him from the set of The Wolfman, we danced on blue screen and now it’s ended up like this! I cock the automatic and above the roar of the flames we hear the round slide into the breach. I lay the barrel along his foamy muzzle; he ducks his head acquiescing to the inevitable.

Which was never going to happen — for moments earlier I’d noticed a fuel cell still intact on the far side of the salon; when I expertly shot and hit it the ejaculation of flame that propelled us through the wall of the burning hotel, then through the wall of the 007 sound stage, was one of those… those sleights-of-mind without which not only action movies but the entire mystery of life itself would be unsustainable. As we wandered dazedly across Broccoli Road and turned into Bond Drive, I noticed first that Scooby was naked once more and I back in my kidult walking garb of shorts and T-shirt, then that we had returned to a simpler past. I looked back to see the sound stage peeled open, blackened and belching inky smoke — a tin can on a homeless person’s fire.

Karen caught up with us as we reached the security barriers; she was waving a clipboard. ‘I hope you enjoyed your visit,’ she said.

‘Sure,’ I replied laconically.

‘I’m sorry Dan wasn’t, um, chattier — but there’s only two more days’ shooting and he has a lot on his mind.’

‘Sure,’ I reiterated.

‘D’you mind signing this release form?’ She thrust the clipboard at me. ‘I’m afraid you can’t write anything about what you’ve seen without the producers’ approval.’

‘Sure.’ I whistled for Scooby, and when he came lolloping over I took his paw in mine, thrust it in the soft mud edging a puddle and then pressed it on to the form. Karen didn’t seem to mind — if she noticed at all.

We wandered off down the road, crossed a field and worked our way through Iver via drowsy paths and somnolent streets. As we were passing a bungalow with a sign outside advertising KOI FOR SALE, Scooby veered off. I like to think that he hung on to his liberty, but I doubt it: even in this age of unfettered personal freedom there are still the small-minded mobs of Transylvanian peasants who object to hell hounds on the loose.

As for me, what was I? A passer by Skoda showrooms whose middle-aged face bore nothing but the impress of a lifetime’s affluent typing. A contemplator of the way the blades of grass fringed the lettering of a discarded crisp packet, FLAME-GRILLED STEAK FLAVOUR. A stopper on footbridges across dual carriageways, taken by the way the railings formed a cage for a shabby pony cropping a balding pasture. And then transfixed by the lilyfringed banks of the Grand Union Canal, above which dragonflies hung in a pattern that held all beauty — and then abandoned in a lost landscape of pylons and alders beside the Colne; and then squatting beneath the concrete caissons of the M4 to leave a spiral offering close to where flies spiralled over a dead rabbit. And then slipping into Sipson, past the picture postcard of church, village green and Five Bells pub, soon to be buried beneath the global tarmacslide of another runway. And then following the distrail across a field as wide as the sky to where the Marriotts and Hiltons stood in line along the Peripheral Road.

The cab driver who took me the short distance from the Renaissance Hotel through the tunnel and into the terminal was palpably disturbed; his wide red neck radiated waves of psychosis through the glass partition. He twisted his hands on the steering wheel while muttering obscenities that, if I chose to hear them, had a disconcertingly gynaecological specificity. Pubic symphysis… External urinary meatus. . Cunt! He wouldn’t look me in the eye when I paid the fare.

And then I was aboard a taxiing Air France jet, grumbling past the old shell of a plane used for fire brigade practice, while the man in the seat beside me yattered on about the air traffic controllers who had been brought over to Pinewood to play the parts of the air traffic controllers in United 93 (2006). I thought of the air traffic controllers who had ensured those air traffic controllers landed safely, so that they could pretend to be witnessing the feigned destruction of real bodies.

As we banked and turned to the north-west over the Thames Valley, I saw the film studios laid out far below. Had I been hoping for circling helicopters, the sparkle of emergency services’ lights, a tumescent smokestack and all the other set dressing of civil disaster? ‘Are you on your way to Los Angeles to do some filming, Pete?’ asked my neighbour, and while the clouds tore ragged chunks out of England I made it clear that such familiarity was less than welcome.

He wasn’t to be dissuaded, this plump, white haired, Rolex-wrist-watched, beige-linen-trousered, twenty-seven-years-in-senior-management-once-drunkenly-fucked-a-whore-on-the-Reeperbahn-then-went-on-Seroxat-while-he-waited-for-the-AIDS-test-result man. But when the seatbelt light was extinguished I forced him to withdraw the LCD screen from his armrest, manipulate it into his eye line and begin to watch a Harry Potter film, while I filled my mind with Balyk salmon cooked in crème fraiche with chives and watercress salad, the confit de canard enhanced in honey sauce accompanied by sautéed potatoes and French green beans.

Eleven hours later the pilot pointed out to us the nuages maritimes creeping across the darkling plain. The Sierra zigmauved along the horizon, Huxley’s graph of civilization’s boom and bust. Not long after that we touched down at LAX.

^* Dinotopia (2002), a TV miniseries in which David Thewlis played the part of Cyrus Crabb, one of the people shipwrecked on an island where dinosaurs and humans have coevolved and founded a society somewhere between Periclean Athens and Disneyland. It need hardly be remarked here that this conceit is far more imaginative than anything conceived of by Ian Fleming, and that, while the screen adaptation involved a certain bowdlerization of the original illustrated books by James Gurney, I had no reason to feel any shame for having portrayed Crabb.

4. Among the Chocodiles

‘Next victim!’

Can he seriously mean me? This fat and fatiloquent young man, his cheeks dimpled by silver studs, his black dungarees wide as an army tent, his moobs silicone-stiff beneath the Gothic fluting of his Tarp-shirt.

‘I said: next goddamn victim!’

I’m among the Chocodiles and the Donettes, athwart the Sno Balls and the Cherry Slices, all tangled up in the Gummy Worms and the Sour Neon Worms — I’m a paedo cruising the Sour Patch Kids with a Gummi Bear on my arm—

‘I can’t make change for this.’ He snaps my twenty in front of his miserable face like a small green clapperboard, yet here — at the counter, in the gas station a couple of miles along Century Boulevard from the airport — it isn’t the beginning of this scene at all.

‘Oh boy, you’re gonna regret that.’ I deliver my line with edible insouciance, the calm before Kali comes, four arms whirling, double jaws snapping, skull necklace clacking.

‘Excuse me?’ I now have both Rivet-Cheek’s attention and that of his colleague, a blameless Hispanic kid, whose slick hair is teased and trimmed into all manner of points. Before answering I take a bottle of Powerade from a cooler, crack the screw cap, ostentatiously down the entire twenty fluid ounces, then burp:

‘Urrrrp! I say, you’re gonna regret being impolite to me, because now I will be compelled to shove all those Starlight Mints, Candy Corns, Baseballs, Twinkies, Peach Slices, Ding Dongs and especially’ — I turn to point to the bottom of the display rack — ‘Dunkin’ Stix, right up your fuckin’ asshole, before employing your friend’s greasy head as a plunger with which to pump up the resulting sugary muck into an arterybusting froth.’

Reflecting on the incident later, as I lay across my bed in the Uqbar Inn, I realized it was the ‘greasy’ that’d cost me the sympathy of the other customers in the gas station, who, hitherto merely restless nobodies, now asserted themselves as dangerously individualist frontiersmen and women. With five months still to go until polling day, the wind of change was starting to blow away the nuages maritimes of the Bush administration, so that any racial tokenism that may have been lingering in the body politic was also purged. But at the time I responded purely to the filmic grammar — not, I hasten to add, that CGI can possess syntactic clarity, uttering as it does only the same proposition again and again: we cannot, dull clay that we are, ever fully suspend disbelief in the physics of mass, and so, fingers coated in slip, we spin the wheel.

But first, in advance of the ass-stuffing, I run out on to Century Boulevard, straight into the traffic stream, and stand there arm outstretched, palm raised, daring the next vehicle — which happens to be a passenger bus, fully laden with newly landed Japanese tourists — to run me over. It does; or, rather, since I do not move, impales itself on my arm, with the crunch of punched steel and a hiss of escaping radiator steam. There I am, only slightly rocked on my rubber soles (and the juxtaposition, as ever with effective CGI, is between the utterly ordinary and the vanishingly probable), the rosette of peeled metal bunched at my shoulder, making of me what, a blushing debutante at the Crillon Ball? With a tortured groan from the ruptured chassis and the shrill cries of the Japanese — who, having fallen forward on impact, now roll down the aisle to pile, a jerking mass of flesh, leisurewear and baseball caps in the unbroken dish of the windshield — I raise my arm to the vertical, then flip the bus backwards over my head, so that it revolves, end-over-end, along the roadway, flailing into the oncoming traffic, knocking cars and trucks into the air so that they too resemble ninepins. The metaphor, although obvious, is not strained: because there’s no experience of phenomena on such a scale being cogently witnessed in the realm of the real, the animators — like all honest creators — needs must resort to what they know. So, a petrol tanker star-bursts in the Southern Californian night, while a squad car, siren whooping, crashes down on the crown of a palm, and as a milk truck cannonades through the wide revolving door of the airport Crowne Plaza its whacked crates shed cartons that also flip, end-over-end, a teasing visual synecdoche that serves — in the scant seconds the entire sequence lasts — to reintegrate the fantastical disaster with the homely anxiety of spilt milk.

Not that anyone has time to dwell on this — or the fate of the scores of maimed and, presumably, outright dead — because I’m returning to the gas station. I still look exactly the same — gawky in my kidult gear, my long face gaunt and ineffectual — but of course, now we know I possess superhuman powers, so my appearance underscores the pathos of everyman — or woman — compelled to withstand without a murmur the humiliations imposed by boorish sales assistants. It is as a demigod that I loose still more the drawstrings of my bag o’ winds. Naturally, the very visceral mechanics of punishment must be decently veiled: so, there’s a pro-action shot of the assistant’s petrified sneer, another of his colleague whimpering exculpatory please-not-mes, then all is submerged in swirls of multicoloured motion-blur that the eye, rightly, reads as the grappling of many cellophane packets, their ripping; the stripping of the assistant’s heavyweight dungarees, the fisting and the stirring. When it’s over — but is it ever truly over? — teetering on top of the counter is an awful centaur, its front legs with denim bunched at the fetlocks, its hind legs clothed; its torso is writhing, its face is pulsing cherry-bomb-red as systole sucks up all that sugar, sugar that also — in variegated droplets and powdery smudges — is to be seen spattered on the disgusted faces of the customers I shoulder my way through, while dusting my hands off with that rapid, semi-automatic motion that suggests — as much to myself as the restive bystanders — job’s a good ’un.

Indeed, it isn’t clear to me exactly when the scene did begin. Out from the terminal, under the planking of flyovers, the headlights of Infinitis and Escalades left glowtrails worming across my retinas, while the globalized skyline of Marriotts, Hiltons, palms and flagpoles seemed that much bigger — what with the streetlights smudged by the nuages maritimes.

As instructed, my crew had met me by the departure gate, locked and loaded so they could start shooting right away. I dimly registered a middle-aged cameraman with a comfy belly lying in a hammock of red shirt — then I was past him, and I could only assume that he was hurrying along in my wake until he drew level, walking backwards at speed, the sound recordist guiding him by gripping on to his belt.

So it continued, on past the XXX Sex Shops and across the intersections, the two men passing me, then stopping, panning as I went by to my departing back, then passing me once more. It reminded me of overtaking a truck with a shiny aluminium tank, then pulling in front of it, then dropping back behind, then passing it again — all this in ’94, on the Santa Ana freeway, with Polly Borland in the passenger seat, filming our reflection in the mirrored belIy of the grunting beast with a Super 8 camera. Rodney King was newly tenderized by the truncheons of the LAPD, and this was our anticipation of what became the signature CGI shot of urban destruction: the huge vehicle either laterally twisting, or — as above — turning end-over-end as it caroms along a city canyon. Why? Because, paradoxically, while the shot appears to be about the destruction of technology, it reinforces the notion that planes, trains and automobiles are like boulders tumbling down the hillside of civilization — natural and unstoppable.

I had no idea what the recordist was picking up with his fluffy loofah — wild track, I supposed. I hadn’t particularly wanted sound, but the cameraman had said on the phone I always work with Ray in such a way as to suggest it would arouse suspicion if I didn’t take them on as a unit, together with a third: a fixer-cum-gofer who I now assumed must be the clumpy-thighed girl in a hoodie who, whenever I directed my gaze away from the sidewalk, was standing in a parking lot, or beside a useless hedge footling with her BlackBerry.

I didn’t have a reservation, yet, despite it being the middle of the night for me, rejected Inn after Court after Lodge. Rejected them, although I believe I know better than most that selfconsciousness — and hence the illusion of choice — must only be a function of the time-lag between the determined action and our decision to take it. In our innermost portions, we understand this, and so are impelled to place a face on this milliseconds-long void — revere it, even. So…

Ever the victim, I take back my twenty and pocket it, cross the oil-stained forecourt, cross another intersection, pity a jet screaming overhead, then swing into the lobby of the Uqbar Inn. The crew tumble in after me, panting. I look round from the receptionist’s bored make-up to mutter a curt ‘Cut!’ at their sweaty faces.

We sat in the lobby area on foam chunks covered in citrine nylon to discuss the following day’s filming. I explained my objective: that they should film my walk from LAX to Hollywood as a single continuous shot, at times static, at others panning, at still others tracking or zooming. The cameraman objected that the interruption of night-time, to say nothing of the gaps between set-ups, would ruin the effect: ‘You’d need a relay of goddamn camera coolies walking backwards the entire way!’ I nodded understandingly, then palmed him off with the offer of a beer — and pizza, which the trio then ate, their triangular tongues darting out to capture the wedges before tomato purée and mozzarella muck dribbled into their laps.

My map was spread out on a coffee table, and we were hammering down tomorrow’s route and deciding where exactly they should pick me up, when I realized that if all three weren’t exactly sui generis, neither were they featured players. I had, of course, forgotten the sound recordist and the gofer’s names the instant they were introduced to me; however I knew the cameraman was Jeff, so decided to term them generically ‘the Jeffs’. Jeff was curious about the project — he was English and had been based in LA for over twenty years. I reiterated the explanation I’d given him on the phone: that it was an experimental film, with Arts Council backing. But this had scarcely sounded plausible when I was sitting in the B&B in Uxbridge, and he hadn’t swallowed it.

A TV monitor in the corner of the lounge area showed the San Diego Beach Patrol moving on a homeless man who had the varnished cedar complexion and puckish features of the English screenwriter and novelist Hanif Kureshi; while a voiceover intoned: ‘The drunk’s emotions can become dangerously aroused…’ I thought nothing much of the coincidence at the time, but rounded on Jeff: ‘You’re no Scorsese, only a dumbass who came to Tinseltown with big ideas, then ended up shooting wedding videos!’ He just sat there, disconsolately looking at his spreading paunch, and it was left to Gofer Jeff to calm me down by raising such pedestrian issues as municipal film unit permissions. This kept us occupied for… aeons, until finally they went away. That was the trouble with film people, I ruminated as I slumped in the elevator, then limped along to my room: they applied the same basic principle to all their practices, so ended up shooting far more of the breeze than could ever be reasonably required.

What was it Busner had warned me about? I knew he had warned me about something that I might find in a hotel room, so I carried out a minute examination as soon as I’d dumped my bag, kicked off my shoes, stripped and showered. Damp and naked, I squatted to peer beneath the valance, then stretched up to see under the pelmet — but there was no sign of anything untoward, no hidden Hals or button mikes. Then I snapped on the radio and smoked for a while as I listened to the subscription drive on KPFK. Now I was standing looking at the bulbous prong of the games controller, an alien’s digit crooked over the top edge of the TV. The ergonomics of the controller were at once obvious and obscure, its yellow, red and green buttons; its twin toggles and further buttons marked with square, circular and triangular symbols.

What was it Busner had warned me about, surely not the drapes in Room 423 and their similarity to a Jewish prayer shawl? I could only imagine my occasional therapist would approve of the lengthy reverie I then plunged deep into, concerning Extended Mind Theory as it related to video games and the driving of cars — cars, which are the true superheroes of the modern era, powerful demiurges that canter across cities on their rubbery pseudo-pods. Those adverts for Citroën cars that feature innocuous hatchbacks metamorphosing — à la Transformers — into huge dancing robots express a fundamental truth: the servant has become our master. When the movie came out (the third in a series based on a toy), Anthony Lane devoted 1,000-plus words to it in the New Yorker, which, for sheer sledgehammer- ’n’ — nuttiness, were unrivalled — except, possibly, by an as yet undiscovered Montaigne essay, ‘On Flipper’.

I came to at around 5.00 a.m., still staring at the prong of the controller. During the night I had peed and the uric salts were grainy between my chafed thighs, while the pancake-thin carpeting had been soaked through, then clawed into ridges by my bare feet, which must have continued shuffling on the spot. Pre-dawn leeched the colours from the already muted institutional room. The fugue hadn’t been qualitatively different from waking consciousness, so I was still more exhausted than I had been when the fat controller grabbed me. I fell across the bed, but sleep was tantalizingly out of reach: a beautiful rose garden glimpsed through a vanishingly tiny door, and eventually I dressed and went down to breakfast, which I ate listening to three prominent neurosurgeons discuss cell phone wave shields with Larry King. Their radioactive deliberations were interspersed with the traffic report on KNBC — news that had as much purchase on me as updates on the Assyrian occupation of Babylon c. 3200 BC. Possibly less, given that the UN mandate permitting US bases to operate in Iraq would expire by the end of the year.

I fought off the urge to pick up the dinky blueberry muffin I had unthinkingly opted for and hand it to the bleary child at the next table with the words, ‘To scale with you, I believe?’ Fought it off because the child’s mother was played by Kim Basinger. Basinger, whose forehead had bulged so provocatively as Mickey Rourke slam-dunked her pelvis in 9½ Weeks (1986) — a swelling that suggested he was pumping her so full of semen there was nowhere else for it to go. She still looked pretty shiny despite being on a career-slalom on sheet ice.

The KNBC man’s face was as ancient as an Assyrian basrelief — but full face rather than in profile. He spoke of an accident on Freeway 10, his shattered visage looming between the hieroglyph of civilization and the crumpled topography of the Sierra, then dissolved into live footage of a chariot broadsided across two lanes, with CHP officers dismounted from their Harleys and taking notes on wax tablets.

Far from lifting over night, the nuages maritimes were even denser that morning, yet, despite not having slept since Uxbridge, as I left the Uqbar Inn I had a fresh spring in my step. I resolved to stay there again in the future, so delighted had I been by the pathos of its frosted floral lampshades — assuming, that is, that my incontinence would be held against Postlethwaite or Thewlis rather than me. Yes, there had been Basinger, and Hal hung above the reception desk as I paid my bill, but once I was out the door the mist was so dense that I doubt any camera could’ve registered the blur when I turned to the right — or the left.

Counter-intuitively, a grid-plan city forces more decisions on the walker than the winding folkways of an older more haphazard urbanity. Since diagonal progress can be made equally effectively by any given series of horizontal and perpendicular traverses, at each intersection the choice of two directions remains, maddeningly. No wonder I opted for one huge L, and so plodded on along Century, then turned left up Cienega, which ran beside a God-gouged gutter full of the San Diego Freeway. Within three miles the limp pennants of the medieval car dealerships and the donutmorphic drive-ins were doing my fucking head in, man. The Edenic valley of the Colne, with its pylons and reedy rills, now came before me in all its lush raiment — why had I not remained there, waiting for my Sissy Spacek, then together with her raised a tribe of feral survivalists among the alders and poplars?

The signal phasing was weighted heavily against the pedestrian, while the clearance zone at each intersection was wide enough to swallow tribes of the impious. But there was one of me to tens of thousands of the Transformers. Each wait for the stickman to shine through the nuages was a vigil — I was finely balanced between grief and joy, while Hal cloned himself from one pole to the next. Eventually, at Florence, the sidewalk gave out and I was forced into the ur-suburba. As I ascended the Baldwin Hills, it occurred to me that almost all my life had been a topiary hare’s hopeless race along silent sidewalks beside empty homes. The buttery swathes of the lawns, the oh-so-slow lava flows of the crescents and drives, the Ionic, Doric and Corinthian columns as hollow as subprime mortgages — it didn’t matter a jot if the inhabitants were white or, as here, black, suburbs were always at once pre- and post-apocalyptic. In the two-car garage the wayward Cal-Tech physicist connects a purloined cyclotron to a Barcalounger — with devastating results.

The stop lady for Highland Elementary hustled some kids — including me — across the road and I arrived at Homebase, where a score or more of Hispanic extras hung out in the parking lot to see if they’d be taken on for a day impersonating gardeners in long shot. I stopped to chat: no, they didn’t mind the stereotyping, but ‘Y’know, my friend, in this part of town ground staff are almost always whites — it’s, like, a status symbol,’ said one with Coppertone skin and a Fu Manchu goatie.

‘Yeah,’ his buddy concurred. ‘For a reactive industry Hollywood is so fuckin’ slow.’

I went on past caged-in basketball courts and reached the scrubby uplands where oil pumps rose and fell like dipping bird toys. The Jeffs were waiting for me and I conspicuously ignored them as they set up for a long shot in a lay-by. Still, I was grateful for their perfect timing: the nuages maritimes were lifting, and to the north the Los Angeles basin lay revealed: 300 square miles of eyes and camera lenses. Somewhere out there was a killer or killers and I needed the crew’s prophylaxis badly; unprotected, who knew what I might become prey to — surely only the pathetic self-consciousness of adolescence, which commences with checking for zits in wing mirrors, and culminates — ten years or yards along the road — in a screen test?

Absorbed in the steady rhythm of my paces I forgot about the Jeffs. I was walking through the Ruben Ingold County Parkway — a strip of greenery that ran along the spur above Slauson — when down in the valley, on the far side of the highway, I spotted a bum asleep on a bench. At least, I thought that’s what it was — I couldn’t be certain from this distance. There was an uncanny flatness to the static figure — besides, I knew most LA benches were bum-proofed, their seats either canted forward so it was impossible to find repose, or else segmented with hip-spearing ridges.

I turned aside from the path and plunged downhill, leaping fences and crashing through the undergrowth. Was it a man, or some weird hallucination of mine, provoked by sleeplessness? It wasn’t until I reached the verge and Escalades were whipping past the toes of my shoes that I realized it was a trompe l’œil ad for Will Smith’s latest movie, Hancock, in which, cast against type, the suave actor played a bum who also happens to be a superhero. Swept with an unreasonable rage, I glowered on Smith’s life-sized 2-D copy: the reflective shades, the stubbly jaw, the woolly hat and Hawaiian shirt. 1-800-LAw, NO WIN-NO FEE — that I could cope with, but movie ads should stick to billboards, the hopeful tombstones of dead drive-ins.

I rolled down the hills to Leimert Park, where I got a bucket of tea and stopped for a smoke by the art deco movie theatre that marks the cultural epicentre of the city’s black population. The bench I reclined on burned with a slogan for the MAALES project (Men of African American Legacy Empowering Self): ‘Bisexual, curious, or straight but fool around now and then?’ Then, like a bandsaw’s blade, I juddered my way through the Carpenter Gothic streets of Crenshaw and West Adams, which, under the guise of Sugar Hill, was the only racially desegregated neighbourhood in 1920s Los Angeles: Theda Bara, Busby Berkeley and Fatty Arbuckle had been replaced by a weeping fat boy pushing an obviously new mountain bike, whose father taunted him, ‘You can’t ride it, you’ll never ride it!’

When I came along Jefferson to the leafy environs of USC, the mission Muslim architecture gave way to postmodernist parkland. I patted myself down for sawdust and tried smiling at the coeds, but they took one look at my middle-aged white man horror mask and swerved away. There was a flyer up outside one of the halls advertising a lunchtime jam by NWPhd, and, intrigued by the sounds that were emanating — Gil Scott-Heron mixed improbably with Orlandus Lassus — I plunged inside. The Jeffs, who were still strapped up in their equipment, couldn’t follow me into that darkness, so joined Will Smith on a bench to wait.

Up on a low stage four tall African-American men were rapping; one of them was doing the Latin: ‘Hoc quicquid tandem sum, caruncula est et animula et animi principatus.’

The next the English: ‘Whatsoever I am, is either flesh, or life, or that which we commonly call the mistress and overruling part of man: reason.’

While the others picked out a word or two and scatted with it in a deep undertone, so: ‘Quicquid-quicquid-principatus-quidipatus…’ Or: ‘What-so-what-so-what-so-reason.’

It was a commanding performance. The four were dressed conservatively in bankers’ suits, shirts and ties, their hair closecropped, and so resembled a new generation of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Their rapping was at once percussive and euphonious, plaiting the two languages together: ‘Missos fac libros: noli amplius distrahi; sed ut jam moriens carunculam contemne: cruor est ossicula et reticulum, ex nervis, venulis et arteriis contextus.’

(‘Venulus-nervis, venulus-nervis, nervulis-venis…’)

‘Away with thy books, suffer not thy mind any more to be distracted, and carried to and fro; for it will not be; but as even now ready to die, think little of thy flesh: blood, bones, and a skin; a pretty piece of knit and twisted work, consisting of nerves, veins and arteries; think no more of it, than so.’

(‘Veins-an’ — nerves, veins-an’-nerves, neryvein-vein…’)

I was surprised there wasn’t more of an audience for NWPhd — only a few lounging emos picking their hangnails in plastic chairs; but then, what did I know?

‘Quin etiam animam contemplare, qualis sit: spiritus, nec semper idem, sed quod singulis momentis evomitur et resorbetur.’

(‘Spiritus-singulis, spiritus-singulis…’)

‘And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again.’

(‘One wind — one life, one life — one wind…’)

Not much, although even a moderately competent Latinist would have been able to detect the incorporation into the English translation of later interpolations.

‘Tertia igitur pars est animi principatus; ad hunc igitur animum intende: senex es; noli pati, ut ille amplius serviat, aut amplius impetu insociabili raptetur aut amplius fatum vel praesens inique ferat vel futurum horreat.’

(‘Serviat! Raptetur!’)

‘The third, is thy ruling part; and here consider; thou art an old man; suffer not that excellent part to be brought in subjection, and to become slavish: suffer it not to be drawn up and down with unreasonable and unsociable lusts and motions, as it were with wires and nerves; suffer it not any more, either to repine at anything now present, or to fear and fly anything to come, which the destiny hath appointed thee.’

‘Slavish lust! Slavish lust!’

As each of the doctoral rappers completed his line, he took up this chant, until all four were hammering it out: ‘Slavish lust! Slavish lust! Slavish lust!’ Building to panting crescendo: ‘Sla-vish luuuuuust!’

By way of applause there was a scatter of ironic finger-clicking from the stoner kids; NWPhd didn’t seem to mind. Exactly like any professional combo, they slid straight into bickering about the performance: Howie had been a beat out on Quin etiam, but — Howie rejoined — it shouldn’t be con-tern-nee but con-tem-nay.

The college kids filed out into the noonday sun. I found myself unable to leave yet too shy to approach the group. Eventually, one of them dropped off the stage and shuffled across to me, his leather soles squeaking on the woodblock floor.

He saluted me lazily, ‘Word up, man,’ then double-took. ‘Oh, you’re that guy — Brit actor, ain’tcha? Saw you in that kids’ movie — wha’ wuzz it, now?’

‘It was Harry Potter, man,’ said another, still taller NWPhd coming up beside him. The two of them stood towering over me, mild curiosity on their handsome faces.

I flannelled: ‘Um, yeah, I did do those films but it was only for the—’ I pulled myself up short: how could admitting to mercenary motives be an excuse? I tried another tack: ‘Y’know, I was in Malick’s The New World, a biggish role — I’m not primarily a Hollywood casting.’

‘True dat.’ This came from the third NWPhd, who was wearing a purple silk Chanel tie. ‘You daybooed in that kerazee movie that starts wi’ you raping some sorry bitch in a goddamn alley. I guess you’d know all about slavish lust.’

‘It’s ambiguous.’

‘What you say?’

‘It’s not certain that I’m raping her — I mean, that the character I was playing was raping her.’

He shook his head gloomily, ‘Motherfucker, if that’s your idea of consensual sex I hate to think what you rapin’ would look like, sheee!’ He blew hard then collected himself: ‘No disrespect, man — what’s your name, anyway?’

I ignored this and said, ‘Y’know your English translation doesn’t exactly match up — there’s nothing about wires and nerves in the Latin.’

‘Oh, really?’ Purple Tie called to the last of the NWPhds, who was coiling a microphone flex on the stage: ‘Howie, get over here will’ya?’

As Howie approached I saw that he wore studded leather wristlets, and that, although he was dressed like his fellow band members, the crotch of his suit pants hung low — almost between his knees.

‘Yeah?’ He looked at me belligerently, eyes bloodshot in ochreous skin, wispy hairs threaded his lower lip to his chin.

‘Man’s questioning the translation, Howie,’ Purple Tie said, then to me: ‘May I introduce you to Professor Howard Turner; he holds the chair in classics and comparative literature here at USC, so, if you-gonna-be-questioning’ — he poked me in the chest to emphasize each word — ‘you-gonna-be-answering to Howie, you fill me?’

All four NWPhds had ranged themselves menacingly around me. ‘You dig Aurelius, man?’ Howie growled.

‘Well, we’d all do well,’ I wittered, backing towards the sunlight, ‘to maintain a stoical attitude in the face of… y’know — stuff.’ Outside I could see the Jeffs sharing a bottle of Powerade Aqua; they and it both looked appealing.

‘Don’t come down this way again,’ said the leader of the NWPhds, who had the passionate beauty of the young Marvin Gaye. ‘Unless you be confident you can parse a Latin sentence purr-fic’-lee.’

‘An’ declaim some,’ said the second giving me a light shove.

‘An’ display appropriate rhetorical style,’ Purple Tie added with a fist flourish that knocked me into the realization that he was being played by Jamie Foxx.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you won’t believe this, but the day before yesterday, back in Britain, I took a long walk with Morgan Freeman.’

‘What the fuck’re you talking about?’ Foxx had backed me right to the door. I made another bid to connect:

‘I don’t want to be intrusive, but did you learn anything about Cruise when you worked with him on Michael Mann’s Collateral, for example, the sigmoidal flexure of his… ah, penis?’

Foxx looked almost pitying: ‘I don’t wanna know nothin’ ‘bout that, my friend,’ he said. ‘This here is a litigious town — and then there’s the Scientologists.’

We were in the open air; SUVs full of coeds farted past. Waving a plastic bottle at me, Gofer Jeff called out, ‘I’ll getcha a Powerade, Pete.’

‘Pete?’ Foxx looked at me speculatively.

‘I’ve gotta get going,’ I said. ‘I’m due over at the Shrine Auditorium, but one thing: you were awesome back there, you guys gigging anywhere soon?’

Foxx laid a hand on my shoulder. ‘Anything is possible, my friend.’ The transition in a few seconds from anger to incredulity to sympathy would’ve been bewildering if he weren’t such an accomplished actor. ‘You take care out there.’

5. The Atrium

A statue of a Shriner stood in the parking lot — like me, he was slightly bigger than lifesize. Unlike me, he wore a bum-freezer and a fez and was holding a child of around five in the crook of his arm. But, there again, like me, both figures had faces the colour of pipe clay and eyes like pee holes in the snow.

I had walked to the Shrine Auditorium for obvious reasons: if, as I believed, buildings were corporeal things, briefly animated by mind or minds, then this was one of the corpora delicti that would prove not just that film was dead — but that it had been murdered. From the 1940s through to the 1990s the Shrine had hosted Oscar ceremonies; even standing in the open air, looking through the barred doors, I could still smell the reeks of stale narcissism, avarice and hunger. I banged on the doors until a security guard played by Ken Sansom came stumbling through the gloom, then palmed him a couple of hundred bucks to let me in. I strode through the darkened halls and passages, before stepping out into the cavernous auditorium itself.

Vast plaster swags bellied from the roof a hundred feet overhead; above the stage dangled a chandelier the size of a flying saucer. The polyhedral niches and recessed colonnettes to either side of the proscenium, the latticed screens that rose behind the forty-seat boxes, the ogee arches standing proud of the curving walls — it all post-hypnotically suggested an alternative history for the Americas: Los Angeles settled from the west in the fifth century after Muhammad by Arab dhows that had rounded the Capes of Good Hope and Horn, their lanteen sails dipping like rocs’ wings into the long swell of the Pacific. The indigenous tribes of the Californian littoral had all joyously submitted to Islam, green flags fluttered along the spine of the Sierra, and two centuries later the Shrine was raised as the physical embodiment of the evolving Al Malaikah consciousness, its dome swimming in the bilious smog of a million Al Forsan autos… But I remained unaware of this until the following evening, when the desk clerk at the Roosevelt snapped his fingers.

I walked out on to the stage followed by Sansom, who was morphing — his hair reddening and curling, his face growing shinier and more venal — until he was not just an acceptable stand-in but a dead-ringer for the founding charlatan of Scientology. Hubbard approached and, raising a hand to my forehead, tipped me straight back into the mind-bath of Dianetic reverie, where I lay feeling the warm current of time course along my flanks and sweep between my parted thighs. Then Hubbard gave me a gentle push and I found myself carried swiftly upstream, my arms and legs mutating into flippers, then fins, then polyps — until there I was, beached in the Upper Palaeozoic, with Hubbard rapidly opening and closing his fleshy hand to simulate my shell, and so sending waves of anxiety through the audience of pre-clears unable to cope with their own molluscan memories.

As one genetic entity to others, I sympathized, yet at the same time I could feel that every single sleight, cramp, twinge and sniffle I had experienced in all my multitudes of animal lives had been accepted, digitized and rewritten in the binary encoding of my analytic brain, a smoothly functioning computational device with the power of a thousand networked super-computers — although this analogy is woefully impoverished, implying a clackety-plastic clunkiness to what’s beyond the grasp of any pre-clear, especially you.

I, the Thetan, lifted off from the stage, my silky-brown hair haloing my superfine 35,000-year-old features, and so L. Ron and I danced a pas de deux as, to the amazement of the crowd, we orbited the chandelier before touching down together, hand in hand. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Elron boomed, ‘I give you the first clear, Sonya Bianca, a physics major and pianist from Boston. In addition to her many other accomplishments, Miss Bianca has full and perfect recall of every moment in her life. But first, if you will my dear, please tell us how Dianetics has helped you.’

‘Well.’ To begin with my voice was tremulous and my pulse raced, but as I spoke I grew in confidence: ‘I had a strange and, um, embarrassing allergy to… well, paint.’

‘Paint?’

‘That’s right, paint — whether wet or dry; and if I came into contact with it at all — which is, as I’m sure everyone realizes, difficult to avoid, well, I got a painful itching in my eyebrows. Now the condition has cleared up and I feel… well, like a million dollars!’

There was a scattering of applause, but there were also mutterings of discontent and somebody called out, ‘Tell us what you had for breakfast on October the third 1942!’

I fidgeted with the hem of my twill skirt. ‘That’s easy, a bento box. The sushi and sashimi were fine, and I asked for a refill of miso soup, which I sipped together with mouthfuls of green tea from a china beaker—’

In a chain Japanese diner on Figueroa? I don’t think so — not a china beaker, only a lidded styrofoam cup, the textured dimples of which squeaked beneath my sweaty fingertips; across the road Felix the Cat pole-sat with a come-hither grin on top of a Cadillac dealership. ‘I’ve scheduled a meeting for you with Michael Lynton at Sony Pictures in Culver City this Friday — the thirteenth,’ said Ellen DeGeneres’s voice in my ear. Frank Tenpenny was sitting with a table of LAPD patrolmen next to mine — a more or less solid block of heavy-duty navy cotton accessorized with forearms, side arms and crew-cut heads on V-shaped plinths of white T-shirt. It was true about the bento box, though — the lacquered tray littered with rice lay on the table beneath my eyes. ‘Kinda unlucky, maybe…’

‘Maybe.’ I was mightily impressed at my ability to pick up my end of the phone conversation. ‘But then I could always pitch him a nightmare.’

She laughed throatily. ‘Pitch him a nightmare — I like that. Anyway, you’re set to see him at ten that day, and I can get you a five o’clock at the Marmont with Michael Burns — if you think you can get from Culver City to the Marmont by then? ’Course, you’ll need to get back by seven anyway ’cause I’ve arranged a little party in your honour—’

‘A party?! But I don’t know anyone — and no one knows me.’

‘Lissen, don’t worry, it’s a tiny affair — more of gathering, really.’

A useful little heads-up display map had appeared in the corner of my visual field, and using this I could quickly and easily estimate the mileage from Culver City to Hollywood, so said, ‘Actually, it appears eminently possible for me to meet with Burns — but listen, are you sure these guys want to see me, I mean, it’s not like I have anything to offer them and I don’t want to go squandering your agent capital.’

‘Puh-lease, David, you’re a respected actor — you’re bankable, guys like that are always gonna want to meet with you.’

I said nothing to her of the black-clad legs stomping the prone form of the studio head until it disintegrated into its encoding. We hung up. I paid the bill and found the Jeffs outside waiting for me. ‘Eat well, WW?’ asked Camera Jeff. I checked out my HUD health bar and saw that I had plenty of lives, so grunted affirmatively.

Jeff had rigged up a new gizmo during his lunch break, a tiny digital camera mounted on an aluminium pole he could hold at ground level, angled up to give a shot of my walking feet. I appreciated the thought he’d put into this amblecam — all the way from LAX I’d been agonizing that without sufficient close-ups of my feet they might be cropped, then grafted on to the legs of an extra in a crowd scene of a thriller featuring a psychopath hell-bent on shooting a politician the name of whom no one will ever remember. Really.

No sooner had I begun walking and Camera Jeff was turning over, than I realized this set-up had a radical effect on my point of view. Listen, I’m not a fool-I’d known for years how detached I was from the normal range of feeling, how solipsistic, how dissociated, so that on occasion I seemed to be observing myself acting out a predetermined role. Busner may have termed my malady ‘ebullient and productive’, yet all too often it felt merely hollow and miserable. What was it he had warned me about? What…

To the north-east the Downtown towers rained down light-spears that disappeared into the smog bank lying above Broadway and Bunker Hill. I glanced right and left and the fishbowl turned while my arms remained lifelessly projecting ahead. Was I in the world any more? Or was the world in me? Just before the Shrine Auditorium I had crossed the fault line where the plate of the old pueblo grinds against that of the new city, and now as I navigated east towards south central I realized I had crossed the border that separates LA from Los Santos.

The 45-degree downwardly angled shot was reminiscent of the bistro in the Place Wilson, but my POV remained hovering while the figure in the green T-shirt and green short pants advanced, long legs eating up the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure about the Mr T. Mohawk, but I liked the way I’d acquired a muscular build; nor could I see the point of the cross hairs, that, whichever way I turned, remained aligned — for I wasn’t armed. Indeed, although I was headed straight into the gang territories of East Los Santos, where the Ballas and the Vagos ruthlessly battle for supremacy, I felt not the slightest anxiety.

Neither anxiety — nor remorse, when I thought of the killing at the carniceria in East LA the preceding fall, the choking dust clouds when the digger went to work among the Civil War dead in the Evergreen Cemetery, me stuffing the bloodstained handkerchief into my pocket, then furtively adjusting its engorgement as I rode the bus back along 1st Street into town. These memories could have no purchase here, where a sweatshop full of wetbacks plying sewing machines swam out of the nuages maritimes. No! The sea mists had dispersed in the Baldwin Hills; this was some other phenomenon. If Mr Me went towards the sweatshop it increased in definition, until I could read the very headline of the sun-yellowed copy of La Opinión that lay in the gutter in front of it: ‘Adiós Triunfal!’ Next to a photo of La Senadora Hillary Clinton, arm upraised as she gracefully bowed out of the contest.

Then, when I toggled away to the blank space, alien evergreens materialized, their upper limbs customized with the needle-shaggy bafflers of a cell site. Yes! I grasped it at last: I was an aboriginal spirit in the city of unbecoming, who had only to walk towards the void for some new thing to be swiped into existence with Ed Ruscha strokes of oily pixels. Superhero, pah! I was a god now — with a god’s penchant for vengefulness and real-time moral experimentation.

I summon up Marisco’s seafood, a beige stucco box that’s abierto. José stands in the doorway, his singlet grimy, the Madonna tattooed on his right arm, Mary Magdalen being sodomized by the Devil on his left. His hair’s gathered in a do-rag, his automatic is stuffed down his pants. As Mr Me comes right up to him, he sprouts bling, shifts on his Keds and rolls his shoulders while spouting pre-recorded dialogue into his cell phone: ‘It’s that gringo loco WW again, we told him not to come back here, this time something gotta be done.’

When Mr Me snatches the phone, drops it to the sidewalk and grinds it out like a cigarette butt, José plunges his hand into his pants, but before he can withdraw his piece my long black legs are upside his head, scissoring his thick neck. ‘Ooooh, noooo!’ he moans, then he’s on the ground and I’m break-dancing on his chest.

A low-rider pulls up beside us. The hood pops, the trunk pops, it bounces on its tyres, the doors burst open and disgorge a quartet of Uzi-toting heavies and the ‘Weeechung-chung! Weeeechung-chung!’ of a rap backing track; Mr Me despatches the first with the heel of my hand, the second with the scythe of my foot, the third gets me in the shoulder with a round, yet when I consult my target health indicator I see that I’m still well ahead of the game. The fourth is encouraged to kneel in the open door of the gun wagon, then it’s shut, hard, again and again.

Pumped up with success, Mr Me disdains the jalopy — its door a bloodied mouth beseeching him to enter and drive. Instead, I check the HUD map, then thumb-swagger him east towards Central. The ‘Weeechung-chung! Weeeechung-chung!’ of the backing track is joined by NWPhd: ‘And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again. One wind — one life, one life — one wind, one wind — one life, one life — one wind…’ The dreamy-creamy superstructure of the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant rises smoothly into my crosshairs above what should be the messy contingencies of power lines, signage and stop lights — should be, but even this far in I’ve spotted the patterning and concluded that this parodic LA has most probably been woven from machine code in a nerdish workroom half a world away.

Still, when a pneumatic ho pours her jugs from the backroom of a tyre shop echoing with the ‘Whirrrrschunk!’ of wheel nuts being drawn like monstrous teeth and coos, ‘Hey, Double-U Double-U, why not step inside for a latte?’ I respect the clarity of the prompt and reply with one of the 4,200 lines of scripted dialogue at my disposal, ‘So long as it ain’t skinny, bitch.’

‘It ain’t skinny at all, homie, it’ll make you froth.’

No more stereotypical than any seductive banter — I hope you’ll agree. And what of the sex act itself? From behind, natch, her cartoon face sinks into a yielding wall, her coffee haunches seesaw, the PlayStation squeaks… Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy being manipulated as much as the next puppet, but there’s work to be done: since their arrival in the late 1930s, inside the Coca-Cola plant German Expressionist émigrés have forged an indissoluble association in the collective unconscious between tooth rot and eye candy, so that no movie is complete without a waxed-paper demijohn of sugared water and caffeine pumped full of CO₂…

‘I’m gonna take these muthafuckahs down,’ Mr Me says to the Jeffs, who’ve come up beside me. Sound Jeff pushes his cans up on his head, panda style.

‘Man, WW, that’s some crazy stuff,’ he sighs.

‘The more you know,’ Mr Me says, pumping the shotgun that magically appears in my hands, ‘the better. Now cover me!’

I push-button into the fray, my wild discharges set the line of innocent acacias ablaze as Mr Me sprints through the traffic across Central; pickups side-swipe saloons that frontend UPS trucks. Smoke staggers, tracers doodle, sirens yowl and the security men take stances to unleash their impotent allusion to automatic fire: fluttery little yellow flashes, ‘Dapocketa-pocketa-pock!’ Mr Me karate-chops one Hal, then the next, gains the door of the plant, forgets what he’s meant to be doing…

And wanders away aimlessly, following his crosshairs, lost in a reverie of competence, his fingers pushing his own enigmatic buttons — the yellow, red and green, the square, circle and cross — while the HUD map oscillates wildly. The nuages de jouer condense into 7th Street, then the flower market, where the stalls are hung with piñatas. There are piñatas in the shape of lions, rabbits, snakes and lizards; traditional seven-pointed star piñatas and piñatas fashioned — albeit poorly — to resemble logos: a blocky ‘GM’, a Hummer shield, Dolce and Gabbana’s copulating initials.

At the next stall to come into existence the woven-straw heads of Cheney and Rumsfeld spin slowly in the breeze on the strings that trepan their hollow heads. Ditto the Weinsteins, Karen Bass and Arnie; Nicole and Angelina kiss with a ‘Tthwock!’ and a riffle of their paper-streamer hair, while Thewlis and Postlethwaite duel with Cyrano noses.

When the stallholder enlarges in Mr Me’s direction, I’m searching through the available lines for: Why have these relatively minor English actors been fashioned into fiesta toys? But he forestalls this by squawking: ‘Petey Postlethwaite, man, I loved you in that Brit TV show.’

‘Which one?’

‘The Sins, man — that’s why I had the piñata made of your head.’

I rotate the market 20 degrees. ‘But why Thewlis?’

‘Aw, dude.’ The stallholder cups the back of the straw head. ‘Ain’tcha seen Dinotopia — it’s the greatest.’

Along the kerbs of the fashion district bolts of cloth are extruded into being, ready to be cut and sewn into the piping through which watery bodies will flow. Cars keep slewing to a standstill and offering themselves to me; light aircraft taxi up, their propellers lickety-licking like the tongues of affectionate dogs; at one point I’m even offered a jetpack. But I keep on walking, and by the time I’m following my own avatar along Broadway I’ve long since forgotten that it’s all a game, that somewhere a primum mobile sits, gritty with cookie crumbs, his thumbs numb from twiddling the toggles — my disbelief is suspended, spinning in the green air that solidifies into the ornate façades of the Mayan Theater, the Belasco and the State, while the crowds of stereotypes and replicants thicken: Tyrell Corporation, heading home.

I gather the crew into a team; standing close to Gofer Jeff I can appreciate the care that’s gone into plotting the downy bell curve of her standard deviation face. ‘It’s a wrap for you guys for the day,’ I tell them, ‘I won’t be needing you here — sure, stuff is shot around Downtown, but it’s mostly TV: suits and skirts crossing Main Street in long shot to City Hall to engage in the highest of all sciences and services, or the Walt Disney Concert Hall — architecture conceived of as a frozen moment of sandwich wrapping. Pah! I have nothing to fear from that!’

Camera Jeff is eyeing Mr Me quizzically, but before he can be supplied with any dialogue I turn on my zigzag legs, head on along Broadway, then swing into the foody-gloom of the Central Market. A hiatus while the interior loads, then: comforting down lights and exposed piping spring into being, together with a sawdust-strewn floor and fruit stalls piled high with Arnie hands of bananas. Lobsters scuttle in glass tanks, noodles steam in hanks, greenbacks spit from a freestanding ATM and the replicants mill and mutter

Lawrence G. Paull had it right in his production design for Blade Runner. Downtown LA was shuyu, a borrowed urban background for a formal garden of noirish planting, equally and elegantly stunted love and hate. Mr Me and I are both transfixed by a modular plastic display stand full of sour worms, gummy sour mix, neon sour worms, sour rings and cherry sours.

And so: the game is paused while I’m left to consider this Möbius strip of celluloid: in 2008 the lobby of the Bradbury Building has been beautifully renovated, yet in the early 1980s, seriously dilapidated, it served as the apartment block of bioengineering genius J. F. Sebastian. Paull and director Ridley Scott drenched Downtown LA in a toxic rain that fell from a sky sullied with the smoke of oily flare-offs,^* and made of these seventy-odd city blocks an evaginated Central Market full of jabbering Asiatic proles spearing their neon sour worms with chopsticks. Overhead a dirigible wallows in the smog; its belly nudges the top storeys of the 1920s blocks and is wrapped round with a screen-sash upon which cherry-red lips part to receive more wriggling neon sour worms.

Harrison Ford hunts replicants in 2019 (1982). The replicants track down J. F. Sebastian to the Bradbury Building (1893, but built according to principles of urban architecture advanced by Edward Bellamy in his utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887). To recap: in 1982 a Dutch movie star pretends to be an android in an 1893 building intended by its architect to be futuristic, but now impressed on an imagined future to leave the shape of the past… in the past.

Shortly before I left London I had watched a DVD^* of Blade Runner with Sean Young, who, for the duration of the movie, played the role of my wife — or at least some of it, because I kept being interrupted by SMS text messages sent by Busner to my cell phone, a technology the ubiquity of which in 2019 wasn’t anticipated in 1982. Although, to be strictly fair, we could propose an alternative timeline, BR1, in which cell phones are everywhere in 2008, then entirely gone less than two decades later, to be replaced by older devices that are prized for their ability to both mediate and disjoint communication: answer phones.

Deckard, the blade runner, has an answer phone. I didn’t need to dwell on the cheesynthetic Vangelis soundtrack, or the dyed and shocked hairstyles of the women drinking blue neon cocktails in the bar where Daryl Hannah shakes her bootie, in order to find the movie dated; the answer phone’s flex was already lashed round my neck and it dragged me down through successive time currents, each one full of such anachro-snags, to where I type this on my dead mother’s Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, perfectly aware that you — perhaps in 2019 — are entirely at a loss to understand what so exercises me.

For as long as I’d been visiting Los Angeles the funicular alongside the Angel’s Flight had been out of order. Anyway, I didn’t want to take that route up Bunker Hill: boring through bank lobbies and shopping concourses, climbing flights of concrete stairs rising from parking lots to become the crenulated underside of freeways, the cobblestoned embankments of which are strewn with the discarded mattresses of the homeless. No, I had no desire to extract a core sample of this power-midden, with its bottom layer of grandiose clapboard, which, by the 1930s, had festered into the boarding houses where John Fante’s young men typed and diddled; I had no wish to expose the Otis Chandler stratum, or the unholy alliance of Westside movie Democrats and Downtown propertocrats that sat on top of it.

Instead, I schlepped up 5th Street in the malodorous twilight. I had panned 360 degrees since the October evening when I mooted the death of film with the gay comedienne at the Café Pinot, and no matter how ceaselessly the city retro-fitted itself with its own futurity, there was nothing it could do with the 35-storey-high mirrored gas tanks of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, a structure I had last gazed upon in its guise as the Atrium in Los Santos. Having been soundly thrashed by my son, CJ, in a game of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, I lay on the sidewalk and watched him disappear into its lobby accompanied by a bevy of bitches in skin-tight micro-skirts. Still, what can you expect from an entire world a mere 13.7 miles square? One in which the omniscient deity of narrative has been abandoned, pumped full of pixels in a back alley, leaving everyone to run amok, minumental masters of their own fate?

Once I’d checked in, I stopped to chat with Felipe at the concierge desk — he was still wielding his pencil, still embroidering the gold thread of fantasy on to the uniform straitjacket of a less than congenial reality. There had, he said, been an amusing incident the week before, when one of the delegates to the Integrated Systems Convention tripped while fetching yet another muffin from the coffee stand and fell into the fountain, triggering a geyser that surged up, racing the glass elevator, until he was suspended, screaming, high above the lobby. When after twenty minutes the manager charged with choking off the jet nervily jerked the stopcock, the systems delegate was dead on arrival at Level 1, floating face down in the carbonated pool, while his moribund internal monologue fizzled out altogether.

That evening, I was the only diner in a Japanese restaurant on Level 6. I ate beef teriyaki in a woody nook, peering between paper screens at a carved and ornamented bar that gaped like a mouth full of gold crowns. I’d had indigestion before I started eating, and with each mouthful I considered: would that this — which Frederic Jameson has defined as ‘the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism’ — didn’t taste so fucking bad. Farting like a cannibalistic cow in a clover field, I shifted the heavy, plush-seated chair so that it pounced on my own feet with its claw ones.

All revved up, all four stomachs swollen with bio-fuels, I jetted the lift up to the twenty-third floor, then lay stranded across the bed in my room. It had been quite a day. I thought back to that moment in early afternoon, when, crossing Grand, en route from the Shrine Auditorium to the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant, I had my first clear sight of the Hollywood Hills. By rights there should have been contentment; for here was the long view that my feet, scraping away layer after layer of paving, bitumen and concrete, had exposed: the pointed breasts of the slumbering giantess, dreaming of a city of angels, radiant as Klieg lights.

Not this time. It had been the cab ride at Heathrow that had done it — a scant half-mile of rubber rolling through the tunnel to the terminal building had erased entirely what should always be written on the body: the land’s enduring love for those human feet that had strived through the eons so as to be able to walk upon it. And so the Buckinghamshire lanes didn’t debouch into Century Boulevard, and the Grand Union Canal didn’t feed into the Los Angeles River. It bore down on me as I washed my underpants in the sink, then hung them up to dry on the shower rail, that my entire strategy had been devised not simply to repel the filmic, but to tape back together the Pangaea that had been cut up by the movies.

During the night the radio murmured: a 52-year-old woman had been found murdered in her BMW in Alhambra, a single shot to her upper torso. I tried to prop her up, to talk to her — but she wouldn’t take direction and kept sliding down the gory upholstery. Now that film had died, there was no one to enforce the 30-degree rule.

^* This has become known, by ecologists, as the ‘Blade Runner outcome’.

^* Digital Video Disc, an optical disc storage media format developed in the early 1990s.

6. Timber Just in Lake

Not a jump cut at all — more properly understood as a graphic match, the same sight gag that Kubrick made when he cut from that first triumphantly flung war bone to the space station waltzing across the starry backcloth accompanied by the liquid strains of ‘The Blue Danube’. Thus: morning discovers first the concrete logs of 4th and 5th streets felled across the trench full of the Harbor Freeway, then dissolves the heavy drapes of Room 237 to seek out my own trunk lying in a pool of sheets.

And so I awoke to the push-button phone on the malachite bedside table, the hefty hardwood armoire, the lamps swivelled in on their brass-effect wall brackets — all of it neon-furred by dream. And so I floated down the elevator shaft, through the glass roof and into the cavernous atrium, noting the jogging track that runs around the building’s core. Clearly the Westin Bonaventure had been en route to Jupiter for decades now, its bulbous mirrored hulls groping through inner space while its crew remained either in suspended animation, or keep fanatically fit.

Then I was turning into Figueroa, centring my bag a little more comfortably in the small of my back while trying — despite the nuages maritimes that had crept back during the night — to preserve a sunny disposition. Next, I was beside the Los Angeles Central District Health Center, its dusty black cladding grafitti-smeared ‘Hollywood Digz’, ‘Reeper’ and ‘Largo Rats’, where I was hailed by a lithe mixed-race young man, the crotch of whose saggy-assed jeans touched the crossbar of his dinky BMX bike: ‘Say, man, d’you know where the two towers are at?’

He raised himself from the saddle and hitched up his saggyassed jeans. He couldn’t possibly mean Barad-dûr and Orthanc, could he? Nor, I thought, could he be mistakenly referring to the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which had given the producers of the movie adaptation of Tolkien’s novel such cause for anxiety they considered changing its name before its eventual release in 2002. Then again, recognizing the young man as an Anglo-Nigerian writer whom I had encountered a week or so before at a garden party in Notting Hill, I wondered whether or not he might — just might — be referencing Tolkien’s real-life inspiration for his fantasia: Perrott’s Folly and the tower of Edgbaston waterworks, both of which had been visible from the future fantasist’s childhood home?

Fatal Flaw — as I thought of him — didn’t appear to have recognized me, or whoever was playing me this morning. True, the last time I’d seen him his nose was dog-damp with cocaine, while he snuffled the explanation for his failure to publish anything in the past ten years: ‘A fatal flaw. I mean, everyone’s got one, yeah? Mine happens to be — you won’t laugh, will you, promise? — OK, girls in boots with guns. Y’know, before the web it wasn’t so bad — I mean, I had to work at it… but now, well…’ He snotted so loudly the other guests at this tony summer party turned to look. ‘Like I say, it’s a fatal flaw.’

Again with the hitch and a small blue cotton cloud puffed from his waistband; invisible wires of humming tautness connected Fatal Flaw’s saggy-assed jeans to those of hundreds — thousands perhaps — of other young men throughout Los Angeles, Pasadena and even into the Valley. Seeing my perplexity, he explained: ‘It’s the courts, man, the fuckin’ courts.’ Of course, the County Criminal Courts Buildings, colloquially known as the two towers, and buried in the acropolis of the nearby Civic Center.

We chatted for a while, and Fatal Flaw mugged that he didn’t like the bus and so had cycled in from Melrose for his appearance that morning. His espadrilles were worn through — filthy toes fingered a bike pedal. He offered me his pouch of Bugler, but there were only a few pinches of tobacco dust. The last I saw of him was when I looked back from the junction of Figueroa and Sunset: he was deep in conversation with a bag lady pushing a shopping cart who bore a distinct resemblance to the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison.

Years before I had queued for tickets at Cologne railway station. It was an innocently racist era in Germany, and the poster of a wanted Libyan terrorist stuck up by the Bundespolizei had been captioned below the usual Roswell photofit ‘Michael Jackson phenotype’. To transmogrify from an abused child star to an abusive adult has-been — this was a far scarier metamorphosis than the jaw-stretching and fur-sprouting Jackson underwent in John Landis’s fourteenminute music video for Thriller.

The Jeffs were waiting on the set for this extravaganza: the Carpenter-Romantic woodhenge of Angelino Heights, a lumber yard of open-truss porches, high gabled roofs and exposed rafter ends — all of it ill with shingles. Peeking out from upper windows, banners whispered ‘Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home’. Home to where Woody Woodpecker perches, ‘H’h’h’h’-ha-ha! H’h’h’h’-ha-ha!’, drilling his geist into the boards with no lubrication of beak or hole.

There it is, take it — and it goes without saying (except by a legion of postdoctoral students) that there’s little more fucked up than a fairytale. Besides, between Angelino Heights and Alvarado there runs a fatal flaw in the earth’s crust, one that links the Echo Park boating lake via William Mulholland’s aqueduct to Benedict Canyon. Hollis Mulwray sculls along it, with his daughter’s incestuously begot daughter sat prettily in the stern, while that unhappy detective Jake Giddes (when he turns up people get dead) spies on them from the parking lot. Or is that the thirteen-year-old Samantha Geimer, logy on ludes and champagne, being ferried to her rendezvous at Jack Nicholson’s house near Mulholland Drive? Ah yes, a photo shoot with the diminutive director-cum-actor whose credit should read not ‘Man with Knife’ but ‘Man Who Will Put his Dick in a Child’s vagina /mouth /anus (delete where appropriate)’.

1969, Manson waits back at the ranch while Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Charles ‘Tex’ Watson head for music producer Terry Melcher’s house in Benedict Canyon. 1973, the boating lake in Echo Park is a location for Polanski’s Chinatown. 1977, the very little director does the big bad thing. The steady 4/4 rhythm of the oars, the silver nitrate surface of time flows along the fatal flaw, until, thirty-seven years later, Atkins, in the terminal stages of cancer, applies for parole. So what if she were sprung, she’d still be a lousy walking companion — what with one leg already amputated. The only people I envy in this thing are the dead.

The nuages maritimes had finally dispersed as I made my way along the path beside the boating lake; conservation volunteers were picking up trash, while a couple of fountains simmered offshore. At Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple on Logan Street a gang of middle-aged bikers were doubling as extras in a TV shoot, their hogs lined up along the kerb: slices of chromed bacon. McPherson had been a devotee of shuyu, her Sunday sermons preached in front of a mock-up of the LA skyline, complete with two miniature aeroplanes, one piloted by Beelzebub, the other by the Good Lord.

As I scaled the hump of Montrose Street, then continued down Alvarado, the Wilshire corridor was spread out below me, frothing with greenery, wispy with smog. Shortly before I turned to the west along Beverly — in order to avoid MacArthur Park — I passed a grotty little dealership. Alvarado Auto Sales were pushing rusty pickups riddled with rust, decadent compacts and my own VW Variant Fastback, a car I’d last seen in a breaker’s yard in Battersea twenty-two years previously. The chances of this were minute — yet when I stopped to peer through the wound-down driver’s window and caressed the pimply vinyl hump of the dash, there could be no mistaking it: this was the very same car, the one I’d bought from a social worker on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, shortly after the riot of October 1985 in which PC Blakelock was hacked to death by Mob with Axe.

I’d crashed the VW a year and a half later on Chelsea Bridge — and although I knew it wasn’t a write-off, I’d still been in shock when the man at the breaker’s menaced me with a tyre-iron and said, ‘Take a tenner for it — or just fuck right off.’ I found the reappearance of my old car strangely heartening: the three-car shunt that had seemingly killed it must have been a stunt, the directors of which had arranged for it to be transported here and restored. I crouched to pray, a devout machinist, and called unto the Great Car Spirit to enter me, pump the gas, slip the clutch and drive me west towards Hollywood.

When I straightened up I noticed overhead a billboard advertising The Incredible Hulk, the release of which was now: 11.6.08. The Chrysler Building peeked over the bugaboo boffin’s green-skinned shoulder; surely, I thought, it must get tired of this shtick? Then I hitched up my short pants — which seemed ridiculously baggy — and besides, why did I find it so difficult to remember?

The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Considered as a Precursor of Express Checkout

Somewhere between the Town House — an English manor held down in the shrubbery and force-fed pituitary gland — and the Bullocks Wilshire, I stopped at a grocery store for an energy drink with a dumb name like Relentless. Big mistake. From its terracotta base to its oxidized copper finial, the old department store was streamlined: an autobuilding speeding from the roaring twenties to the choking noughties. In seconds I was 500 yards up the road and only six days and forty years late to meet the bullets from Sihran Sihran’s.22.

Bobby Kennedy, hustled through the kitchens of the Ambassador Hotel by his security detail, had just delivered his victory speech following the 1968 Californian presidential primary. That speech! Its homage to his assassinated brother, its guileless paean to the Great Society, what… what were these? Ticked boxes on a card, the drinks swigged and peanuts snaffled from the minibar of democracy. Bobby is gone — unceremoniously dumped in the trunk of Monroe Stahr’s 1934 Chrysler Airflow sedan, which shoots out from the portecochère, the chrome angel lying across its hood absorbing the up-thrust of the road through his fanned wingtips. Kathleen’s in the passenger seat, her beautiful composite of a face framed by one half of the split windshield. As for Stahr, his olive complexion cannot hide the tide of death rising up from his white silk shirt collar.

As the Chrysler turns left on to Wilshire the sound of Bobby’s drumming fists is clearly audible, yet neither Monroe nor Kathleen registers any emotion. Why should they give a shit about Kennedy? He’s way in the future, but in their immediate past are all the greats whooping it up at the Coconut Grove — Swanson and Shearer, Valentino and Flynn, Mayer and Chaplin. They’re too early, accelerating west, fuelled by the lust that will propel them all the way to Stahr’s half-built house in Santa Monica, where the nuages maritimes will creep through the chinks in its fuselage as they fuck on his raincoat on the floor.

They are too early — and I was too late: the Ambassador had been through the crusher and all that remained were chunks of dusty-white rubble baking behind a chain-link fence. When Scorsese pitched up to shoot The Aviator in the Coconut Grove, he had to back it up 500 yards to the Bullocks Wilshire, and it was there that Leo DiCaprio sipped milk and schemed to swat biplanes out of the sky — an actor playing an inchoate pathology, which would one day grow into a giant corporate gorilla.

We stopped for coffee — another big mistake: there was only so much anyone could take in when it came to Camera Jeff’s career lows. A missing poster tacked to a tree beside where we sat offered $1,000 for Scooby’s safe return. I thought back to the last time I’d seen him, disappearing behind the koi sign outside Iver, and, tearing off one of the paper slips, I resolved to make the call that night, a facecloth over the receiver to disguise my voice.

When we went on, with Jeff jogging along beside me, his eye-on-a-stick staring at my shoes, something had changed. My pulse began to quicken, lump-a-lump-a-lump-a-lumpa-lump-a-lump-a-lump-a — it was paranoia on my part, certainly, but then they were sending them against me, these bioengineered anthropomorphic killing machines, human brains yoked to hundreds of horsepower. Waiting for the stop lights so I could cross into Hancock Park, I sympathized with those familiar features as they loomed in the screens, awfully contorted by the effort of braking. I could almost taste the sweet white flesh inside those two-millimetre-thick steel shells that had been artfully folded into Infinitis.

Lumpa-lumpa-lumpa-lumpa- I had been alone for a long time — not because I wanted to be, but because until I solved my. . problem, there would be aspects of my personality I was unable to control. I was compelled to move from town to town, taking odd jobs where I could, staying off the books and below the radar, just an ordinary nerdy Joe with an IQ of 198 able to expand the coefficients of the binomial theorem while fiossing my lacquered teeth. I might hide out here, in the eight-car garages attached to Florentine villas or Tudorbethan mansions, but sooner or later I would have to deal with it, did I want to fight them, or was it the dewily protuberant top lip of my only true love I saw shadowed by the sunshades?

Back on the Miracle Mile, the streamlined blocks taunt me with their grande vitesse, while I remain crawling along at ground level, menaced by a dump truck, lumpa-lumpalumpalumpluml’l’ — my hands clench in front of my starting eyes, green, alien, engorged, the pastel-painted oblongs of the storefronts ripple with distortion: a fireball has been ignited behind my eyes! The orange-and-white canopy of Busby’s movie theatre radiates visible spectra! A roar of rage, deep and grinding as a malfunctioning camshaft rotating all the way from Hellenistic Greece to Detroit, bursts from my barrelling chest. My T-shirt falls away in shreds, my baseball cap pops off like the plastic cap on a wine bottle. At last! Now it’s clear to me why my short pants have been so saggy-assed all day! Now that I have metamorphosed they’re a perfect fit!

I leap twenty feet in the air and come down hard on all fours, my elephantine hands and feet sending cracks fissuring through the sidewalk. I grab handfuls of hardtop and yank the roadway like a carpet runner, so that it rucks up, sending BMWs and Renegade Jeeps cannoning into one another. Oh! The heady perfume of spilt petrol, the festive tinkle of shattering glass!

I turn this way and that before the empty eyes of polystyrene heads ranged in the window of a wig store, marvelling at my own preposterous physique, abs and pecs wrapped around my ribcage like the coils of a monstrous green-skinned constrictor. Deltas of arteries radiate out from trapezius and sternocleidomastoid muscles thick as hawsers.

The thoughts of this gross a body cannot help but be visible, so, notwithstanding the drivers — who either run screaming, or grab guns from the glove compartments of their stalled and crashed cars — I pause to consider my prospects… my sexual prospects. I mean, c’mon, I’m, like, fourteen feet high, with a build that makes the most avid steroid-guzzler look mimsy — surely my cock ’n’ balls are to scale? Anger and lust — never more that a synapse apart — fuse behind the baroque half-dome of my forehead with its convex mouldings and entablature of worry lines. True, these vile creatures may be my sworn enemies, but I’d still like to. . fuck one.

Say… that one, over there, the gridlocked black Hummer, with its tinted windows wobbling a come-on, as its speakers pump out the hypnotic bass line of a rap song that’s familiar despite my hydrocephalus. ‘Serviat! Raptetur! Serviat! Raptetur!’ Wires and nerves threaded through my unreasonable lusts and unsociable motions pull them tight and I kick out, sending an auto spinning on its longitudinal axis, scattering trim, fenders, fragments of window glass, then its doors, hood, wheel trim and alloys. The anti-roll bar neatly skewers a woman drinking a frappuccino outside Starbucks to a poster advertising frappuccino — violence of such jocular savagery it can be accepted uncritically as wholesome entertainment.

As can the kicked car, which goes on spinning until all that’s left is a body shell — the engine having long since plunged through the awning of the El Camino tapas bar — inside which the skull of its late driver is rattling like a pea in a whistle. Not that anyone pays any attention: the arty-slackers who were goofing beneath the awning have scattered already, whipping out their camera phones, so it’s with the low definition (yet enhanced newsworthiness) afforded by the tiny screen of a Samsung SGH-G800 that we witness my next trick: a Pontiac G5 coupe grabbed in one hand, my huge fingers fitting so neatly into the window holes that it’s impossible not to think: why hasn’t anyone done this before? And an old clunker of a Dodge Intrepid grabbed in the other — then the two autos beaten like cymbals as I roar and roar and roooooarrrr!

Suddenly squad cars are barricading off the four blocks of Wilshire between Detroit Street and Burnside Avenue, while the fat blue-and-white LAPD choppers bumble down over the rooftops, the perforated stings of.50 calibre machine-guns poking from their open hatches. Like I should care? I’m gonna hump a Hummer, so hurl the crumpled-tissue cars away, then lifting the off-road vehicle — perhaps for the first time in its life off the road — I tear a gash in its rear end the approximate size necessary. With disturbing tenderness I shift my grip so that I’m holding the car by its rear wheels and pull it towards my tumescent crotch.

Appalled fingers drop the SGH-G800, the view rears back and widens — but it’s too late! The choreography of the scene is unmistakable: given the proportionality of my sweat-greased carcass and the dirty boulevard, this could be any poolside out in the Valley, with me an oiled stud limbering up for the money shot, but:

Uh? Uh-oh.

No one need be that alarmed; for one, because this is a PG or at most a PG-13. I mean, nobody lays out the budget for this much wantonly artful destruction without a teenage target acquired. Also, there are — as I previously remarked — aspects of my personality that are beyond my control; surely, it stands to reason that a twice-life-sized bogey boy would have an erectile dysfunction? I may pull the rear of the Hummer towards my tow-hook, my ass cheeks tensing, my rictus widening to reveal incisors the size of dentists, but even as the four Crips leap from its front doors, MAC-10s jerking their hands as if they’re demented conductors, it’s clear I am unable to perform.

The comity of African-American gang members and white LAPD officers is definitely the subtext to this playlet. So what? The Crips’ pistols may spit fire, the cops’ handguns may boom — yet only every twentieth round hits me, and then I merely yelp as if this were flung gravel. The copters’ machine-guns spray this humongous gook more accurately — but I only clap a hand to my neck each time I’m bitten by a.50 calibre horsefly.

Nevertheless, like any frustrated rapist, I am doubly enraged, so snatch up more cars and hurl them at my antagonists but when this fails to stop them I leap high in the air and come down near the summit of Desmond’s department store. Grabbing the chamfered corner, I start to tear one letter after another from the neon sign, sending them skimming down into the street, where they cleaver into buses, or else up into the sky, where a boomeranging e deftly shreds the rotors of a police copter so that it spirals into the citrus blooms of death.

Things are going my way until the untimely arrival of a marine company armed with FIM-82 Stinger ground-to-air missiles. The first three they launch miss me and inflict devastating collateral damage on Melrose. I leap to evade the fourth and land in the La Brea Tar Pits, where I make free with the hot black gloop, disembowel model mastodons and generally amuse myself. Still, it’s clear that the fight’s going out of me as I wade in circles waisthigh in the pit. So much so that emboldened tourists creep up behind me like kids playing grandma’s footsteps, then pop their miserable flashes. The money shot — when it finally comes — is a tarry plash across their lenses.

I came to in the Farmers Market on Fairfax and 3rd, sitting at a Chinese food stall with two or three other toothless old Jews jew-jewing on noodles and kvetching our way through the hot afternoon. ‘Jesus, Willy,’ said one, ‘you’re so goddamn thin you need reverse lipo, man — some fat squirted into you.’

It was true: my pants were so slack they could comfortably house the Incredulous Hulk. ‘Yeah,’ I mumbled, ‘you’d know all about getting fat squirted into you, Al, coz that’s what your Dora does with her lokshen soup.’

‘Heh-heh-heh,’ gum-chuckled the oldsters, then went back to their jew-jewing and slurping.

I was only mildly fazed by my ability to seamlessly Matthauize with their Parkinsonian blur of liver-spotted hands; hadn’t this always been the key juxtaposition of Hollywood: up on the screen the industry of souls, while in the backroom the sunshine boys black up and cry for mama? So I sat, smothered by awnings and homeyness, contemplating the Three Dogs Bakery (‘Bakery for Dogs’), while from the south there emanated the wailing of sirens, the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic gunfire, and the kerboom! of ground-to-air missiles. This, the latest death rattle of the megalopolis, was something we oldsters were all familiar with, and so we went on with our ho fun, continued the green tea treatment.

I left a ten-spot for my share of the check and wobbled off into the hurdy-gurdy consumerism of the Grove Mall. All those screen gunfights, what were they, if not a brilliantly deployed strategy of Calm and Blasé against the insurgency of the Id? Of course, things could get out of hand — there was mission creep to contend with. It was only nine days since the propane cylinders on the New York set at Universal had exploded sending a King Kong cloud roaring into the sky above Hollywood. While LAFD’s finest had fought the flames sporting the gold foil suits of poorly conceived aliens, 40,000 archived videotapes had burned — together with the sets of Back to the Future.

As I bent to pick up a strip of packing tape twined in the fence of Pan Pacific Park, Gofer Jeff came barrelling along the sidewalk on her denim kegs. ‘Mr Thewlis! Mr Thewlis!’ she puffed. ‘We’re so sorry — we kinda lost you back there.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ I snapped. ‘So long as you keep laying down covering fire for these last three miles I’ll be just fine.’

‘Covering fire?’ She looked at me as if I were aha-a-ha-ha-ha a cold-blooded killer.

‘Sorry, I mean, so long as you keep rolling until I get to Hollywood, then…’ I struggled to cinch my elephantine pants with the tape.

‘Then what?’

I knotted the tape. ‘Then it’s a wrap.’

At 6922 Hollywood Boulevard there was a small terrace outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. I sat dunking two of Earl Grey’s hot nuts into a styrofoam cup full of boiling water. Opposite me a bum with an uncanny resemblance to the French romanciermaudit Michel Houellebecq was nursing a mug rimmed with old froth. He wore a mauve shirt over a leather jacket and his sock-puppet face was scuffed and scabby. A Discman lay on the metal tabletop between his bloated fingers, the headphones of which clipped a dirty-cream panama to his ginger hair.

I had loathed him at first sight — would that I could’ve been planted opposite the efficient student at the next table, whose thrift-store cheongsam was split high on her chubby thigh. I eyed her well-thumbed Pride and Prejudice and her puppyish tummy with equal covetousness. The Houellebecqalike smelt — he muttered ‘Get it together!’ and other worrying exhortations.

Behind me I could hear the squeaking and baying of a rapidly gathering crowd. As I had taken my seat I’d clocked the security barriers, the bald boys in black suits and the limos pulling up outside Grauman’s — there was obviously a première under way, but I wasn’t going to let that interfere with my teatime, any more than P. G. Wodehouse had allowed the transportation logistics of Los Angeles to disrupt his habits, when he reported for his first day’s work at MGM in Culver City, having walked the six miles from Beverly Hills.

I sipped my Earl Grey judiciously — the only movie stars left in Hollywood were the supermen’s batmen, the jokers’ tin men, the Elvises and the Marilyn Monroes. Still, at least the impersonators had the virtue of honest subterfuge — not so the out-of-towners treading on the stars’ stars who were being drawn to the red carpet like flies to an Insect-O-Cutor. Once they got between the pavilions, under the mad eaves of the Chinese Theater, they’d get uglier: sunshine and oranges were not enough, not now they were a lowering and bitter crowd.

The traffic continued to rumble and toot, the Houellebecqalike continued to mutter and poot. The first screams were synchronized with the camera flashes reflected in the window of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, but soon enough this son et lumière became a dinning zoetrope, then a howling stroboscope — and still I did not turn; didn’t until from out of the hysteria projected a single comprehensible line of dialogue: ‘That guy never gives autographs!’ Then at last I swivelled in my seat to be confronted by a black face gone blubbery with joy. He held out his book so everyone on the terrace could see the page. There was the mark, the stave of the J serving for the T as well, both names lying upon a dais of a flourish and — a few feet beyond the baying hound — there was the marker.

He was wearing a shiny slate bomber jacket with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows, a $500 T-shirt, and there were sunglasses tipped forward on his charming nose. There he was, Justin Timberlake, his pale trunk tipping forward into the pool of faces, while a forest of limbs reached up to grab him. And there too, floating on the end of a blue-and-whitestriped tie, was the clown-face-designed-by-committee of Mike Myers, while beside him bulged the baby puss of Jessica Alba.

‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ the crowd chanted, while the security detail that had ushered these, the stars of the new Myers comedy vehicle, The Love Guru, across the road, were now frantically trying to get them back. It wasn’t the cars that were the problem — their drivers sat, docilely accepting the mêlée — it was the crowd, which, having filled up the forecourt of the theater, came coursing between the stalled vehicles, a human torrent with waves of faces.

Rising unsteadily to my feet, I addressed my fellow patrons: ‘C’mon, people!’ I struggled to make myself heard. ‘This is lunacy. Justin Timberlake! Mike Myers! Jessica-fucking-Alba? These are not big stars even by the standards of our Lilliputian era — seriously, no one’s gonna riot over them.’ I waved my arm wildly and knocked over my cup. Earl Grey leapt into the Houellebecqalike’s lap. He leapt up crying, ‘Roi du cons!’, grabbed me by the throat and began dragging me off the terrace.

Before I toppled into the millrace of sentiment, I was gifted with a moment of clarity: I saw that the bald boys had succeeded in corralling the money back on the far side of the boulevard, while the crowd that whirled around Grauman’s had swollen mightily, its turbulence of bodies enveloping the stalled vehicles and washing up against the fronts of the buildings to twice head height. I saw that the people closest to me were highly individuated — I had only to look upon them to know all about them.

Valerie Schultz, a dental hygienist from Portland, Oregon, a tad overweight, a jet-bead bracelet buried in her wurst folds, a cold sore on her full lower lip, had been date-raped in 1984 and became pregnant. She gave the child up for adoption, but two years ago he tracked her down. He was angry, almost illiterate — he’d run away from foster parents in Cedar Rapids to join a biker gang. Valerie got him on a methadone programme, but he still drank — and when he drank he beat her, hence the yellowy-blue stippling of a bruise on the flap of belly exposed as, bobbing in the mob, her T-shirt rides up.

Bob, Duane and Kerry-Anne — I can smell their separate savours as they sibilate ‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ But, just as anonymity shades in notoriety, so the further my eye roves the more stereotypical the faces of the crowd become. Then I’m being tossed and buffeted, bouncing off a belly over here, receiving a clout from a stray fist over there. As I am pitched up on to their heads and shoulders, the cacophony of moans, catcalls, shrieks, chants and applause becomes overwhelming. From up here I can make out small islets of the recognizable — a Tin Man with an oil-funnel hat, Elvis mouthing, ‘Everybody let’s rock!’ — but these are surrounded by visages, the eyes, noses and mouths of which are no more differentiated than the funiculae, mandibles and compound eyes of a locust corvée.

To begin with I assume that it’s my own proximity that can imbue these anthropoids with individuality — but I’m soon disabused, for as the agitated waves sweep me away from the terrace of the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, the crowd becomes more cloned. By the time I’m two blocks further and being scraped along the stone rendering of the L. Ron Hubbard Gallery, I’m surrounded by a swarm whose faces are smooth convexities of flesh, gashed with slots from which issue a monotonous drone.

My clothes are ripped to shreds, blood flows from cuts on my chest and thighs — unless I can gain a place of safety soon I’ll be torn to shreds by the computer-generated mob. Think — think! The clones may be frenzied but they move only where preordained by their creators; if I can read the currents and cross-currents perhaps I can go with the flow? I note the alignment of the Orange Grove sign with a palm tree: that bearing should take me towards the Roosevelt Hotel. I twist and slip sideways into the tide coursing back towards Grauman’s; then, as it draws level with the tree, I push hard at a head with both feet and reach for the trunk… only to be swept backwards by a rush heading the other way.

Horrified, I realize I’m in the van of a flying wedge charging straight towards a horde going in the opposite direction. Their impact flips me head over heels, and as the two columns grind against each other I’m twirled again and again, as a spar is battered by a weir. ‘JussstinJussstinJussstinJussstin!’ The pressure increases — if I’m sucked into an eddy I’ll be trampled to death beneath the clones’ feet, which, despite their binary DNA, are rigid and hard. My ribs are cracking, my shoulders and hips disjointing… I fight it, kicking out to keep my feet on the ground. Another moaning rush, ‘JusssJusssJusss!’, and I find myself in a calm spot where the pressure slackens — although now I feel a terrible stabbing pain in my lower back. It’s strange, given that the forms that surround me have no more angles or projections than mass-produced souvenir Oscar statuettes… I can’t turn but manage to twist my head: a very skinny kid wearing a Lakers cap has his sharp shoulder digging into my kidneys. Shocked by this reindividuation, I pan about and see that, yes, others of the homologues are becoming distinguishable, with here a shock of brown hair, there a scattering of freckles, over there a beaded dreadlock.

It must be that whoever animated the scene anticipated action here requiring a close-up. I crane to see under the peak of the boy’s cap — he’s as vague as a ghost, so, having laboriously freed my arm, I swing on him, a clumsy haymaker that comes down on top of his head and with a yelp he goes under. There’s a further wild surge that washes me into another calm pool; this time I’m facing a young woman who sobs hysterically. Her cotton print dress has been ripped from the neckline to her waist — her brassière as well. Her breasts would be beautiful, were it not that one of them is missing a nipple. I push back to give her some room, but every time I move she moves with me, insinuating her leg between my thighs. I’m becoming aroused — until the girl spasms violently and her blonde bob lifts to reveal that she has no ears. ‘Stop it! Fuckin’ quit!’ she yells — but it isn’t me that’s bothering her, it’s the clone behind her, whose blank screen morphs into a goatish leer… then I see that he has his hand up her dress, while he dribbles on her bare neck.

My arm is still aloft, so I grab his ear — another action that’s obviously been anticipated, for it’s as well formed as an anatomical drawing. I squeeze it as hard I can and twist, but it isn’t long before skin melds with cartilage and the ear disappears back into a slick egghead that’s borne away from me. At least the young woman has escaped, although when I try to pick out her blonde bob in the crowd it too has been subsumed by the pixels… Another spasm passes through them; I find myself within an arm’s length of a signpost, a second spasm and I grab it, am swung up and round into the air…

A final view of Hollywood Boulevard crashing with waves of sound: ‘Juss-tin! Juss-tin! Juss-tin!’ The pagodas of Grauman’s soar thousands of feet into the sky, as do the other, less ornate buildings, all of which have been subjected to the same crude multiplier. In the deep trough between them the crowd ripples, and there’s a last sensation of buoyancy as I float on this lake of doppelgängers before a providential swirl carries me into the gloomy inlet of the Roosevelt’s lobby.

I stared at my idol face in the tarnished pool of an old mirror for a long time, yet there seemed no evidence of the ordeal I had just survived: my clothes were intact; my baseball cap was clamped firmly on my head. True, my expression was a little wary, but even as I looked a familiar superciliousness crept back in from the edges. I sniffed deeply, sucking up the ineradicable odour of old hotel — dust and static electricity — then padded back towards the stairs that led down to the reception desk.^*

Between square pillars I could see that the tables were already laid in the restaurant, glassware and cutlery gleaming on dark wood. I checked my watch: 7.16 already — I had better get ready fast, or I’d be late for my dinner with Bret.

^*After I had levied my Mastercard and signed the form, here, here and there, the receptionist clicked his fingers for the bellhop. I tried to say that I didn’t require any assistance but the words crumbled on my tongue, and for what seemed like several hours I was suspended in a reverie during which I surveyed an entire alternative history for the North American landmass. One in which the second wave of colonization was from the west, in the tenth century ce, and by Arab traders who then converted the Native Americans to Islam, occupied the entire continent, established a caliphate, rapidly industrialized and then in the seventeenth century mounted a war of conquest against the sleepy European backwater where the Reformation — not to mention the Enlightenment — had yet to occur.

7. My Dinner with Bret

‘Is the asparagus fresh?’

‘Well, it’s in a soup, so it’s been, like, puréed.’

‘But was it fresh when it was puréed?’

‘I guess.’

‘What about the halibut?’

‘I can assure you: that’s definitely fresh.’

‘Definitely?’

‘Definitely.’

Fresh the halibut may have been, although this was still the type of restaurant where dead fish were laid out for boning on squared-off mounds of clapshot or polenta. Over Bret’s shoulder the dun dining room of the Roosevelt seamlessly merged with the deeper and wider murk of the Spanish Revival lobby, where an enormous crystal chandelier dripped wanly, scarcely illuminating the exposed ceiling beams, let alone the mezzanine level cornice with its pattern of desert blooms.

There had been some manoeuvring before we were installed by our own square pillar, which, like all the others in the restaurant, had been boxed off at head height by interior designer Dodd Mitchell — although probably not personally.

‘I don’t want to sit next to anyone in this town,’ Bret had explained to the maître d’ after rejecting the first two tables offered. He was wearing a cool-looking cream linen suit and a positively chilly blue silk shirt. Ray-Bans poked from his display pocket, and when he canted sideways on the banquette suede loafers poked out from beneath the table. He was being played by mid-period Orson Welles — neither the obese, sherry-swilling old roué who had taken on Busner’s role, nor the young Welles who had impersonated the writer back in the mid-1980s, at the summit of his notoriety.

I didn’t know who’d taken me on this evening — and Bret was giving nothing away. I thought it unlikely that Postlethwaite had been racketing around Manhattan in the nineties, which was when I’d got to know the author of American Psycho, but it was possible Thewlis had been there for raucous dinners at Elaine’s, big drinks in the small hours at Mary Lou’s in the Village, then dawn upchucking from the East River, glimpsed nauseously by vampires doing lines of cremains off somebody’s butcher block in someone else’s apartment.

In those days Bret had struck me as high, wide, handsome and more than a little bumptious — this was forgivable, given that he was scarcely thirty and already with the masterpiece of Citizen Kane to his credit. Now he seemed leaner — the Welles glimpsed only briefly on camera during the shooting of his Rockefellerfunded South American travelogue, a fiasco that had ended up way over budget. Perhaps it was this that had winnowed him out?

He finished ordering with a run through the white wines available by the glass, before settling reluctantly on a Zinfandel.

‘And for you, sir?’

‘Me?’ I was flustered, and as my Adam’s apple scraped in my dry throat I flashed back to the $1,000-per-night poolside cabana where I had checked myself out obsessively in the mirror before this rendezvous. What madness! How could I have forgotten the thinning hair, the pocked cheeks, knobbly knees and hairless ankles? I was Postlethwaite, of course, and no matter how many Kiehl’s bath products I lavished on myself there was no possibility of my seducing Bret, I mean, I was hardly his type. ‘Uh, I’ll have… the same as him.’

It was the pathetic non-order of a subaltern of style, who knows nothing and so uses the quince spoon to ream his pipe.

Two pools of thick soup soon lay before us, inscribed in truffle oil with the worthless autograph of the sous-chef. ‘A script is a commodity,’ Bret was saying; ‘nothing more — oftentimes a hell of a lot less. It’s no longer simply a case of “to the victor the spoils”; the actual craft of screenwriting has become having the balls and the connections necessary to get your credit.’

He stopped speaking and began paddling his fibreglass face towards the soup. I already regretted having given him the whole death-of-film shtick, although at least he seemed to think it was a metaphor — and when I’d contemptuously observed Postlethwaite babbling my lines, I’d held back from admitting I was in Hollywood to find its killer or killers.

‘But, Bret,’ I said, ‘you’re a native Angeleno, your own books have been filmed — isn’t The Informers in production right now? — you must feel an affinity for the industry?’

‘Industry? It isn’t an industry any more, man, it’s a fucking business. I tellya, if I’d’ve known the whole extent of the bullshit I was going to get caught up in, I never would’ve come back — and now there’s this other crap, the writers’ strike.’

‘Why did you stay?’

He sighed, an expiration that was mouldering in its dead civility: ‘Phew… Money, dummy — I need the money.’

Welles and Ellis — they seemed like a failed anagram or a botched palindrome. Certainly, Welles had never bettered this performance, what with its re-uptake of inhibited diffidence, its Mesolithic tedium vitae. I recalled that shocking first sight of him as Captain Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil, lunging up from his squad car, his saltpan of a face mottled and cracked. He was only forty-two when he wrote, directed and acted in the movie, yet the taint was already on him: green grave weeds, rotting at the edges. Did he see then how it would all end up, with his final role being the voiceover of Unicron, the planet-eating robot in the first Transformers movie?

The waiter came across and took our soup bowls. The restaurant had filled up with hay-hair honey-skin blondes in knock-off couture squired by men fully suited. Still, with no climate variation to speak of all four seasonal collections could be spanned by a few degrees: if the temperature fell to seventy, couples began promenading Sunset togged up as Nanook and Nyla of the north. The waiter returned with the halibuts and a bottle of Powerade tucked under his arm. I was about to remonstrate with him when he swerved aside and plonked it in between the tête-à-tête at the next table, so that it hovered in my own mid shot.

‘Whoa,’ Bret muttered, ‘the hard stuff.’ Then he went on about the death of film as he teased out fish bones with the tines of his fork: ‘I don’t think you’re right, there’s always dynamism in movie culture, whatever the mechanics of production. Even now with this, like, avalanche of product there’re still innovative things getting made.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, Knocked Up — didya see Knocked Up?’

I groped in the mildewed reticule of my memory and came up with, ‘Um, yeah, sorta slacker comedy type thing. Not bad.’

‘Not bad? It was a whole new approach to formula pictures like that. You should read the New Yorker review — actually, it was more like an essay—’

‘By Anthony Lane, right?’ I simpered disparagingly, while thinking most of what follows.^*

The Love Guru

Billboards advertising this movie’s release dominated my circumambulation of the Los Angeles basin, and during my 120-mile, week-long walk I must have passed scores of them depicting the Canadian comedian in a fake Bhagwan beard and the orange robes of a sannyasi, sitting cross-legged, one hand grasping a yellow flower, the other held — incorrectly — in the Varada Mudra pose of Theravada Buddhism: palm out, thumb and index fingers touching. Myers was, it transpired, welcoming moviegoers into an entertainment that — even by his own unexacting standards — was a pile of shit: impotent sexual innuendoes, incontinent scatological jokes, bigoted intercultural gags — The Love Guru had ’em all.

I assert this, but when I eventually saw the movie in my local hot-buttered multiplex, I realized I was in no position to judge it, for so long had I been out of the celluloid loop. Sure, it was shit — but then for all I knew all movies were shit; either that, or, given that cinema was the world’s dominant narrative medium, the silvery mirror in which Humanity viewed its own raddled features, perhaps those features were themselves daubed with shit.

Besides, I was not insensible to the halo effect, whereby the new work of any given filmmaker is surrounded by the penumbra of his or her earlier efforts. In Myers’s case, The Love Guru came haloed in shit, because I’d disliked his movies from the very first time I’d seen one, on a flight back from New York in June 1992. I suppose if I had the exhaustive critical intelligence of an Anthony Lane, rather than the planet-devouring negativity of a Unicron, then I might reserve my judgement (both then and now), not having seen the original Saturday Night Live sketches on which Wayne’s World was based. But I appeal to your own better judgement: would it really have made any difference?

Sixteen years ago I failed to find any charm in the two provincial bohunks and their amateurish cable TV show. My companion on the flight, Charles Hudson, was, however, happy to lose himself in the fartantics of Myers and his co-star Dana Carvey for 94 minutes. Then we talked, drank vodka miniatures and I smoked. Strange to recall how cigarette smoke looked in plane cabins: the ghost of a smirch in the rapidly rarefying atmosphere; it’s something my own children will never see, although they may well live to witness the extinction of mass air travel that my own generation saw evolve — all those dinoboeings, choked on their own tailpipes.

We drank many, many Smirnoff miniatures and decompressed from our Stateside trip in the acrid fuselage. On our first evening in Manhattan the crack vials had crunched under foot as we made our way downtown to go clubbing. Late that night I had to wake Charles up and ask him for a sedative — I knew he had some, old-school things, chalky little manhole covers inscribed with one of those Big Pharma coinages — Evaqual? Navarolt? Intephrine? — that make anxiolytic medications sound like the bastard offspring of a Turkish fisherman and a planet-eating robot.

Slowly, the Kematrol beat the cocaine hydrochloride molecules into submission. I stopped having to patrol the nylon trench in between the twin beds, ceased to be worried that the TV stand would sink further into the tufted orange hotel carpet. A couple of hours later I fiddled open the glassine envelope and tipped the last of the coke on to the toilet seat in a stall at La Guardia, then flubbered it up.

The flight to Syracuse was uneventful, if, that is, you’re used to the transcendent misery of realizing you have been sent back from the future and at any minute will be killed — a murder that you yourself witnessed as a small child. I was used to this. From the airport I took a cab to the university’s Health Science Center. Dr Thomas Szasz, a dapper septuagenarian in a neat blue suit, was waiting for me in a room full of ventilation ducts and polystyrene fire-retardant tiles that audibly crackled with static electricity.

I recall my conversation with Dr Szasz perfectly well (or should I say, with his impersonator, for I realized soon enough that he was being played by Donald Pleasence in his last major role), and in particular his goulash-thick Hungarian accent that added the suffix szasz (pronounced zarj) to many of his words, thus: ‘Yesasz, my criticszasz are many, my enemieszasz ubiquitouszasz,’ giving me the uncanny feeling that his speech was a form of prayer, consisting in the incantation of his own — possibly divine — name.

Not that there was anything self-worshipping about the veteran anti-psychiatrist (as portrayed by the valetudinarian actor). I had a journalistic assignment, but was also interested in speaking with him because he had known Zack Busner well during the early 1960s. At that time Szasz was working on what would become his signature work, The Myth of Mental Illness, while Busner was setting up his ‘concept house’ in Willesden. Both were engaged in a revolt against the dehumanizing character of institutional psychiatry, both fundamentally questioned its view of mental pathologies, but only Busner had ended up on celebrity game shows.

Peering over his bifocals, Szasz looked at me as if I were a psychic gift sent by his old comrade in arms-thrusting-from-the-walls-of-her-flat. I told him about the Riddle, and how buying up shares in the manufacturer had almost financially bankrupted Busner, just as publicizing the enquire-within tool had done for him professionally. ‘I seeasz, I seeasz,’ Szasz muttered as I spoke; then when I’d concluded he said: ‘It isasz, I think, a caseasz of hubriszasz.’

‘Hubris?’

‘Exactly, hubriszasz. You seeasz, like me, Zack Busnerasz believed that schizophreniasz was not a pathology at all, only a semantic confusionasz.’

‘And it isn’t?’

‘No, of courszasz not — researcasz in the last thirty yearszasz haszasz conclusively established the genetic basiszasz of schizophreniasz, if not its actual causzasz.’

‘So, you were wrong?’

‘We were wrong, which is by no meanszasz to endorszasz the way the therapeutic state treats schizophreniasz, or to admit that any other so-called mental illnessasz — such as depressionasz — are anything of the sort. But in this caszasz, we were wrong. I think perhapszasz that Busner is too proud to admit thiszasz, and so…’

His fingers, which had been steepled beneath his chin, now interleaved, then inverted to reveal all the pink little people straitjacketed in his institution. So, as you can see, it was an epochal encounter for me — one that had far-reaching consequences, especially when I became aware that Szasz had cofounded, with the Church of Scientology, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights.

For the rest of the interview Dr Szasz treated my questions seriouszly if peremptorily, szwiping them out of the air in such a way as to suggest he was translating from one conceptual language into another. Which made it all the more bizarre when, at the end of our hour together, he turned hospitable — very hospitable — and suggested that while he had no wish to detain me against my wishes, I might like — on a purely voluntary basis, of course — to be his guest in a nearby facility… indefinitely.

On the same trip to the States, Charles and I went up the Twin Towers. Given subsequent events, I’d like to be able to tell you that they made a big impression on me, but that would be a lie. Indeed, I can honestly say that I never gave the vast blocks another thought from that day until 11 September 2001, whereas my revulsion from Mike Myers returned again and again over the years, rising unfunnily up my gorge whenever I caught a few seconds of a trailer for one of his movies, saw a poster, or even heard the words ‘Mike’ and ‘Myers’ in completely unrelated contexts.

The scene in The Love Guru that most outraged me was one involving the actor of restricted height, Verne Troyer, who Myers had imported from his earlier Austin Powers movies to play the foul-mouthed manager of the Toronto Maples ice hockey team. I suppose that given my own issues it ill behove me to be quite so censorious, but when I saw Troyer upbraiding the Guru (Myers) and his star player (Timberlake) in a scaled-down office obviously modelled on the dwarfish train carriage set in the Marx Brothers’ At the Circus,^* I longed for one of those vodka miniatures that I drained during the 1992 JFK to Heathrow flight to magically reappear in my hand, so that I could smash it against the wall of the cinema, then plunge it into Myers’s chipmunk cheek.^†

It may be the vagaries of memory, but I think the vodka miniatures were glass. I don’t believe either Charles or I behaved at all badly — we didn’t even raise our voices, only unravelled the way even well-knit folk do when drinking to excess on long-haul flights. Nevertheless, about an hour before landing the stewardess approached our scaled-down barroom and told us that she refused to serve us any more liquor, and that if we didn’t moderate our language she would have the pilot radio ahead and we would find the police waiting for us upon touchdown.

‘He was wearing crocodile-skin shoes the last time I saw him,’ Bret was saying of a former brat pack writer-buddy. ‘He told me they cost $20,000.’

I pushed my spoon through the quarter-inch of tarte au chocolat and it clicked with china. The waiter materialized with a vodka tonic for Bret; then, as he turned away, he moved the bottle of Powerade from one point on the adjacent table to another more exactly in my own mid shot. As if this setdressing were the cause, the voices of the other diners were now right in my ear.

‘It’ll be huge, see,’ the man was saying. ‘I mean, we’re with this guy all the way — he doesn’t know who he is any more, hell, he doesn’t know who anyone else is either.’

‘Uh-huh.’

I’d misread the situation: this wasn’t a date; the suit was pitching to hay-hair, who had to be a studio exec.

The suit pressed on: ‘Everyone he runs into is played by an actor — some well known, others not so, and people’ll have a great time trying to identify who’s who — that’s how they identify with his, his—’

‘Condition, yeah, I hear you.’

‘But there’s more’ — he began waving his hands — ‘our guy has these delusions, he sees things, he hears voices, everything is incredibly significant — everyone is in on the conspiracy –

‘He’s a paranoid schizophrenic, right?’ She was bored. ‘Lissen, Griffin, I don’t want to, like, pop your bubble, but I’ve had people coming on to me with these psycho ideas for months now — it’s all over town like a goddamn rash.’

I could understand why Bret didn’t want to sit next to anyone in LA. I couldn’t tell if he’d overheard the schizopitch; his face bore an expression of frightening ennui. I began babbling: ‘I’ve been reading your Lunar Park, man; it’s great, truly great — maybe your best yet. I love the way you play with your own identity, create a doppelgänger — but isn’t that what the movies can do now, there’s no disbelief so heavy that it can’t be winched up with fleets of computer-generated helicopters? I mean, it’s also like a psychosis, believing in this stuff even for a second — that’s why they’re putting so much into the new 3-D technology. Shazzam! And you’re in the insect mines of Minroad. Shazzam! again, and you’re in some poor fucker’s liver, kayaking down his bile duct… and, well, this is what we fear, isn’t it? The numbers of people with mental illnesses are increasing exponentially — bipolar, hypomania, OCD, dementia, addiction, schizo-fucking-phrenia — it’s a plague, and these Hollywood movies are expressing that fear! What’s so incredible about the Hulk? I’ll tellya: he’s got BDD, body dysmorphic disorder. He’s a perfectly ordinary guy but he thinks he’s got green skin and this, like, obscenely muscled—’

The waiter was back with a credit card receipt to sign. I scanned it and from the total realized we were going Dutch. Bret was already tucking his Mont Blanc back inside his jacket. I had no idea if he had heard what I’d been saying — or if I’d said it at all.

‘Look.’ He was staring at my retreating figure in the rear-view mirror of his mind. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy — this script, the rewrites, it’s been grinding me down, besides I gotta drive.’ Bret got up to leave, and when he turned his back I snagged the Powerade from the next table, cracked the lid and drained it in a single heady draft, then I followed his shrinking back.

While we waited under the porte-cochère for Bret’s car, I tried to revive the conversation. Where was he living? Did he get out much — socialize? The more fatuous my questions, the more his face folded in on itself, an origami of mouth tucked under ear, ear poked behind eye. Eventually I resorted to blandishment: ‘Ellen DeGeneres is throwing a little party for me Friday evening at the Bar Marmont.’

‘For you?’

‘It’s a very little party — more of a gathering, really. Anyway, if you show up that would be… nice.’

The parking valet leapt from behind the wheel of a big black Beamerish wagon and held the door open for Bret. I was reminded of the scene in Swann in Love, Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu, in which Odette de Crécy (played by Ornella Mutti) is dressed by her maid with a sensuousness all the more compelling for being an expression of the way nineteenth-century labour relations made of one woman’s body a workhorse, and another’s a commodity to be sponged clean, then boxed in its clothes.

The valet clothed Bret in his black BMW, tucking him between its steely folds and binding his breasts with a nylon band. The final touch was to lift his limp legs and insert them into the leatherette hole formed by the seat and the dash before shutting the car door with the sumptuous delicacy of someone smoothing rumpled silk. The window moaned down and I was confronted by two anxious Postlethwaites leering from the lenses of Bret’s Ray-Bans.

‘Y’know,’ he said, ‘you’re not fooling anyone with this, this imposture — least of all me.’ He squirmed and the car juddered into drive. ‘I don’t know the guy well enough to know whether you’re doing a good job, but let me tell you, if you’re a professional actor — and come to think of it I do vaguely recognize you — if people get wind of this you’ll never work in this town again.’

The car purred forward, then moved to the right. I stared at Bret’s face, which remained turned towards me, as, instead of taking the exit, he came back round the circuit to where I stood. The 180-degree revolution of the writer’s head was disturbing enough, but when Bret drew level he said casually, ‘See you tomorrow,’ then accelerated away in a cloud of nitrogen, water vapour, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter and un-burnt fuel.

Naturally, I understood what Welles had been doing: referencing the revolutionary opening shot of Touch of Evil, a single continuous take over three minutes long that sent the camera tracking down the main street of a dusty border town, then plunging clear through a building in order to follow the progress of a bomb planted in the trunk of a car. If Welles-as-Bret had been the camera, it must have been me who’d swallowed the dynamite.

It certainly felt that way as I ambled poolside: the halibut had reanimated and was threshing about in my belly full of stale asparagus soup. Nothing was helped by the movie star impersonators who were sitting at the circular tables in the Tropicana bar. The pool had been decorated by David Hockney, his clever embellishment consisting of the signature blue curlicues painted on the bottom, which on his own canvases gave the impression of clear water with a rippled surface, but here suggested the blue-varnished toenail clippings of giant starlets.

I assumed the impersonators were there to re-create the first Academy Awards ceremony, held at the Roosevelt in 1929, but there were far too many Charlie Chaplins, Clara Bows, Gloria Swansons and especially Errol Flynns among the guests to make the scene remotely credible. Besides, the twenties were roaring with contemporary chatter as they downed their cocktails: Atkins’s parole hearing, the election campaign, the writers’ strike, Bratton and Baca’s set-to over racial violence, where to buy the longest-lasting garden flares. .

I turned my back on the haunting — I couldn’t stand to look them in their other people’s faces. I walked along the musty dogleg of the cabana corridor and slid my key card into its slot. I hit the lights and a filament squirmed in a goldfish bowl. Christ, what a dump! Hemispherical vinyl bolsters were tacked up the wall above the bed — which was a squared-off mound of clapshot. I sat down on it and put Postlethwaite’s face in my hands. The Powerade was coming up on me, the 1929 Awards were getting louder and louder — sleep would be out of the question, and worse still it was so dark I couldn’t see to read.

There’s a knock on the door and when I open it a solid man-shape stinking of sweat and body paint pushes straight past me.

‘Hey!’ I exclaim.

‘Guest services — mind if I come in?’ A coarse voice sounds from head height in the drear.

‘You are in,’ I snarl; ‘what the fuck d’you want?’

‘Man on the desk says you gotta problem with the lights, can’t see to, uh, read. The dimmer switches in these cabanas are set real low, I can fix that for you.’

‘Why, thank you.’

Is my tone coquettish? I hope not. There’s a clanking as of a toolbox being opened and then the chink and scratch of a screwdriver applied to a switch panel. The light wells up in the cabana and I see the screwdriver twirling in midair. The voice says, ‘Say, you’ve got quite a build on you, you work out, do weights?’

‘We-ell, not exactly.’ Under the warm scrutiny of this void I feel the grotesquely magnified self-consciousness of an adolescent — and with it the lust. ‘But I do a lot of, um, walking.’

‘Walking, huh, you mean walking like this—’ The screwdriver clatters to the rug and it’s upon me, invisible hands pushing up the breathable fabric of my T-shirt, invisible thumbs circling the aureoles of my nipples, invisible fingers flicking the rapidly erecting teats. I moan, and slump back against the door to the patio, my pulse begins doubling its beat as an invisible tongue snails back and forth across my belly.

It should smell of chemical sweat percolating through a dermis abraded and abraded again, by hand, with a pumice stone, in a walk-up hotel room in West Hollywood — yet doesn’t. It should feel like a violation: the fat tongue shape urging into my mouth, the grappling hook caught in my hair — yet doesn’t. I sense myself levitating, I mewl and struggle — not to escape but so as to arrange for my T-shirt to twirl over my head, my belt to whip away, my pants and underwear to slide along my legs, then flip over the TV set.

The vortex sets me down on top of the minibar, where I teeter on my fundament. What would the reverse shot show in this now glaring cubicle? No perfect buns, rock hard — the hollow in each gluteus maximus so pronounced that were it horizontal it could serve as a bird bath — but my own splayed thighs, my own puckered-brown anus growing pinker as it lengthens into a gaping vagina. Men as far off as Cancún or Coventry are watching this — but they can’t see this piece of beefcake, its wipeable hide, its brows knit and its jaw set with the effort of whaling into me. They can see my thighs gape still further to allow an unobstructed view, but for them there’s no glistening penis writhing with veins — so why should there be one for me?

I fly, legs akimbo, from the minibar to the sink in the bathroom. Kiehl’s bath products rattle in the cabinet, then tumble about my shuddering shoulders. I fly from there back to the minibar, which rocks, rolls and spews its tiny Rémy Martins, gives birth to its jars of jelly babies. Then from there — at last! — to the bed. I rise up from my knees as if on an invisible horse going at a vigorous trot. I reverse this posture and joggle on. I sink down on all fours and the cabana resounds with the crack of an invisible palm that sets first one of my buttocks then the other shivering like jellies, while my face crashes into the pillows and my hand grips one of the hemispherical vinyl bolsters.

Then I’m on my back, my labia pulsing, my clitoris vibrating. I groan and squeak — as abandoned as an abandoned chest of drawers being sawn through by a rusty saw. Still, what do I expect? Pornography is the CCTV of the Id, with its fixed camera angles that capture the dullest views of suburban bedchambers and anonymous hotel rooms. But be not censorious, we actors are not malefactors — only ordinary folk going about our fucking business. It’s all perfectly workaday; and since I was never going to soar over the Hollywood Hills, then down into the Valley where the flightless birds fluttered and gobbled, they’d come to me for a turkey shoot instead.

Half the adult population of the world rasps, ‘I wanna come in your mouth!’ and I gasp,

‘Whatever.’

Their semen is as frothy as aerated cream and as toxic-tasting as typewriter correction fluid. ‘Did you get that?’ I ask the gauzy crew as, up on one elbow, I unceremoniously spit it into a tooth glass.

Afterwards we are surprisingly tender with each other. I lie in the crook of his arm while he tousles the mussed hair on my forehead. He sips a Rémy Martin while I reminisce:

‘I used to bunk off school — y’know, play hooky — and go to the Everyman cinema up in Hampstead. I can still remember those rainy Tuesday afternoons — it’s always a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the past, isn’t it?’

‘Sure, David,’ he says, ‘that’s sweet.’

‘I’d be alone in the fusty little cinema, watching the screen, which wavered and distorted, hot as a furnace. I’d be lying on that blistering tarmac, with the heat beating off the cowling…’

‘So the road, that was your thing?’

‘Yeah, Electra Glide in Blue, Two-Lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point — I loved those movies.’

‘Me too.’

‘But then when I was at home it was different stuI–Continental stuI the BBC would screen late at night. I’d be crouched over the black-and-white set I had on a chair in my bedroom — it used to be my father’s study and the wonky shelves were still stacked with his books on planning and government. Before that it had been my elder brother’s — and his double bass was propped in the corner. All the rooms I’ve ever had since then have been sort of sets — trying to re-create that room.’

‘I understand,’ he coos.

‘Sitting there late at night, staring at Giulio Brogi sitting on the abandoned station platform, looking down at the weeds struggling up through the ties and realizing — you see it only in his face — that he’s never going anywhere, that he’s doomed to remain in Tara, that he is… he is…’

‘His father.’

‘Right.’ I twist round to look at him. ‘So, you know that one?’

‘Sure I do — and I did the same thing. OK, it was a colour TV and I never had a hand-me-down room, but essentially it was the same in Sherman Oaks.’ His voice rumbles beneath my ear, a soothing voiceover to the smell-o-rama of cigarette smoke, brandy fumes and fast-drying sweat. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it,’ he continues. ‘How even as kids we sought out unerringly those movies that told us not the truth about ourselves as we were, but about what we would become.’

‘Yeah,’ I weep softly. ‘The truth about what we’ve become, which is cheats.’

‘Cheats?’

‘Cheats, we’re lousy cheats — unfaithful to film.’

I must have slept the same dreamless sleep I endured for all the nights I was in Los Angeles. The only visions were Hal’s-eye views of the beds I thrashed about in, flickering stop-action as my grub’s body mutated under the sheet, until, in the grey dawn my white wings shakily unfolded and flew me to the bathroom.

At some point during those hours he had left me, and if the thousands of frames had been scrutinized there might have been five in which he tenderly disengaged my head, sat upright, then stood, the coiled diaphragm of his underwear held in a deliberating hand, the swirl of his shirt, the door half shut.

In the morning I could only deduce the memory of his presence from forensic evidence: empty Rémy Martin miniatures, the salted slug of a used condom on the wooden floor, a pummelled lube tube on top of the minibar, a screwdriver lying on the rug.

At reception I paid my bill and the clerk handed me a stiff manila envelope: ‘Several gentlemen dropped this by for you earlier this morning, Mr Smith.’

‘Several?’

‘Well, OK, there were five of them.’

Walking a few paces away, I slit it open; inside were the forty single-spaced pages of my position paper. In the designer dimness of the Roosevelt the dense type, studded with emoticons and interwoven with diagrams bearing labels such as,‘45° where the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis is greater than 9.7’, seemed to belong to an earlier era — was this the evidence of Jesus’s morganatic marriage to Mary Magdalen we had all been seeking?

With the typescript there was a compliments slip printed with the legend ‘From the desk of the Chairman of the Board of the Religious Technology Center’, and, handwritten on this, ‘Many thanks for your interesting insights and observations.’ The signature was quite like Justin Timberlake’s.

‘Can I arrange a car for you, Mr Smith?’ called over the clerk.

I laughed towards his face — and was still laughing as I strode through the dingy lobby and hit the gilded boulevard.

^*The exception being the framing device — which implies retrospection — not, counter-intuitively, those events that on Thursday, 12 June 2008, still lay in the future and that I flashed forward to by using Dr Mukti’s CBT techniques. The accuracy of these elements of my reverie was confirmed when they eventually came to pass.

^*Jerry Maren, who played Little Professor Atom in At the Circus and who was the ‘prop’ for the gag in which Groucho declines to take the third light from a dwarf on the basis that it’s ‘unlucky’, has had the last laugh accorded by longevity. He’s the only surviving Wizard of Oz Munchkin and has outlived entire legions of full-size thespians.

^† I realize this homicidal impulse towards Myers’s projected image suggests — in the jargon — inadequate reality testing on my part, but, in my defence, the indoor golfing range in Hove that I attended with my father when I was a child made a deep and lasting impression on me. He would drive a real ball towards a screen back-projected with a fairway; then it would reappear (or, rather, an actor golf ball playing it would make an entrance) bouncing towards the green.

^†I realize this homicidal impulse towards Myers’s projected image suggests — in the jargon — inadequate reality testing on my part, but, in my defence, the indoor gol: ng range in Hove that I attended with my father when I was a child made a deep and lasting impression on me. He would drive a real ball towards a screen back-projected with a fairway; then it would reappear (or, rather, an actor golf ball playing it would make an entrance) bouncing towards the green.

8. The Happy Detective

A man walks these streets alone; or, more usually, he drives. He’s not an especially good man — nor is he an evil one. He understands, in the immortal words of multimillionaire Harlan Potter, that ‘A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.’ You — you know that a headline in the LA Times announcing that a US airstrike has killed eleven Pakistani infantrymen is bound to make you scrabble for change, lift the rubbery lid, smell the refried human beings.

A man walks these streets alone — why, hasn’t he got a car? Has he, like the failing screenwriter played by William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, had it repossessed? ‘You’re cutting my legs off!’ Yes, I remembered now: that was what Holden-as-Gillis howled despairingly as the tow truck jounced away. No, our man walks out of choice, and walks because only on foot can he engage in the sciamachy essential to his trade: fencing with the shadows of hat brims, gun muzzles and arms flung across brickwork by the beams of the Kliegs.

A man walks these streets alone: attuned to the tyre slap and engine howl, he is content in his solitude. If a Predator drone were to come dallying overhead, dipping into the canyons, then rising up to skim the apartment blocks, he would not flinch — for he is the happy detective. The happy detective knows no angst, for he has made peace with this moment and for all eternity; he remains sublimely unaffected by the thinness of his characterization while more rounded characters bemoan their stereotypy.

The happy detective accepts that when he turns up, so do the corpses: sluttish young women, their faces beaten to bloody pulp with brass statuettes; venal old men, the third eye just below their hairlines weeping blood; an Infiniti full of gang members riddled with bullet holes.^* If you ask him — and believe me, I have — whether it might be better for everyone if he stayed at home, played with his kid, bickered with his wife, he’ll look at you with his doggedly honest brown eyes, suck doggily on his brown moustache, hem a little, haw a tad, before replying in accents as flat as his Midwestern home state, ‘No, I don’t think that. I guess… I guess I figure it doesn’t make any difference. I mean, it could be that I’m, like, the catalyst for some of these serial killings, but with an isolated homicide there’s no way I could be causing them before arriving on the scene. Lissen, what I believe is that if people are gonna get killed they’re gonna get killed.’

In a lesser man such an attitude would seem sociopathic; in a greater one foudroyant; but the happy detective is of the middling sort, the sort who come to LA either because they’ve made some money and want to spend it, or because they want to exhaust some spiritual capital with breatharians, sucking up prana or checking out chakra. Not that Mac Guffin is a slacker; he works full time on the LA Times editing the culture section, and whatever time he has left over he dedicates to his detection. He doesn’t do divorce, obviously, but he’ll handle missing persons, straying dogs, industrial espionage — the cases that require legwork. And if he gets tangled up in loops of wire with razor-sharp barbs, then so much the better.

‘I’m at peace with myself,’ he says. ‘I’ve found my niche. When I was a young man I wasn’t exactly searching so much as yearning for something I couldn’t even identify. Nowadays it’s different: I’ll be crunching over broken glass down a back alley out in Alhambra, I’ll see the body slumped over the wheel of a BMW, and I’ll breathe deeply of the cordite and the blood and the urine, and I’ll think to myself—’

‘It’s a wonderful world?’

‘Yeah, kind of.’

I hit the gilded boulevard moving purposefully. I’d arranged to have dinner with the happy detective in Culver City; it was a short drive from Venice Beach where he lived, but a ten-mile walk for me from Hollywood. I’d have to walk back to Hollywood the following day after my meet with Michael Lynton at Sony in Culver City; still, it was inevitable that on a circumambulation such as mine, which aimed to mix business, pleasure, therapy and the solution of a major cultural murder, there would be certain… longueurs. It helped to think of myself as a one-man Bennet sisters, clopping through a prelapsarian Hertfordshire — its elms, beeches and lime avenues superimposed on the concrete chicane of Sunset, in the same way that a 120-foot-high Jennifer Aniston was plastered across the façade of the Hyatt — and naturally, if when I arrived at Netherfield Park I had so much as a sniffle I would be compelled to put up there for weeks, wrestling with marriage proposals and the foxed endpapers of my family bible.

Along the Strip the Jeffs beamed down in front of me looking utilitarian in their baseball caps and denim shirts. Sound Jeff taped the mike to my chest while I looked away to the tattered copra that had been wind-whittled from the palms, a torn Detour candy bar wrapper, a Häagen-Dazs coffee and almond crunch box, a roasted peanut crunch wrapper and the paper napkin that had been used to wipe the eating-disordered mouth before being discarded in the gutter with all the rest. It all spoke to me — and I spoke of it — as evidence of an uncertain narrative trajectory. It was all very well suspending disbelief in the road movie of LA, but sooner or later you had to question where it might be taking you.

No one had expressed this better than L. Ron, whose Association for Better Living and Education (ABLE) I had passed shortly after leaving the Roosevelt. His sometime friend, colleague and early champion of Dianetics, A. E. Van Vogt, said of Hubbard: ‘(He) wrote about a million words a year… I have seen typists working at that speed, but never a writer.’ No wonder he could maintain such resolute narrative headway, his plots moving forward like the starship Hound of Heaven, which, crossing the galaxy at the speed of light, exiles its crew by the passage of time, as back on earth whole generations and societies vanish for ever.

In the introduction to his final and most monumental exercise in ‘pure’ science fiction, Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000, L. Ron reprised his own career as a genre typist, relating how he had been brought in by the publishers of John Campbell’s Astounding Stories to inject a little humanity into these tales of futuristic hardware, because ‘[I] could write about real people.’

Well, I could write about real people just as well — real people like my old buddy Morgan Freeman, who, together with smouldering, stick-thin Angelina Jolie (rub up against her and you might catch fire!), was starring in Wanted, a thriller about a secret Illuminati of assassins, the billboard for which stood proud of the Viper Room. On our walk out to Uxbridge, Morgan had told me enough about the movie for me to feel that I’d seen it already: ‘There’s a neat CGI effect,’ he said, ‘that makes the air appear like kinda limpid water — it happens whenever we’re fighting each other, and then if we fire a gun we can warp the trajectory of the bullet.’

The air that morning, 12 June 2008, seemed like limpid water, and Camera Jeff’s lens a muzzle from which a bullet curled — was it the brutal, Powerade-fuelled congress in the cabana at the Roosevelt that made me feel as I had on those wet Tuesdays, when, emerging from the coruscation of the Californian highway into the familiar artificial twilight of a London night, I discovered that it wasn’t familiar any more, but strangely exciting — charged?

Surely it was this feeling, rather than the movies themselves, that so entranced career film critics? Because, let’s face it, there are only so many times any sane person can expose themselves to such hokum before they begin soundlessly lip-synching to the giant mouths on the screen, or running a chipped nail over the dead skin of the lips transfixed in the seat beside them. Bad rhyming quitting the Classic, leaving the Everyman, hitting the gilded boulevard, accompanied by some torpid fiddling about on the G string of a cello that suggests a troubled sexual repletion… The alternative — that critics retained the childlike ability to identify so closely with the sassily imperturbable Fox (Jolie) that they left their own foetuses reposing in red plush, to float up the tractor beam then dive through the screen and penetrate her drum-tight belly — was too awful for me to contemplate. It implied a relationship between critic and star analogous to that of Thetans and those genetic entities they had entered, millions of years in the past, long before they crawled from the primordial slime and became critics in their own right.

Either way, they were all wankers — an English term of general disapprobation drawn from the masturbatory that, to my way of thinking, has far greater resonance than the American ‘jerk-offs’. Sexual wankers, cultural wankers and — an Australian coinage this — time wankers, beating off their lives in the darkness while without the world goes on, a two-reeler, hand-cranked at an unrealistic speed, so that whole societies arise, then vanish forever, leaving behind only the dust of their own prematurely ejaculated geist. The money shot — again.

Wankers, and far more voyeuristic than honest subscribers to pornography, whose pay-perpreciation of the warped trajectory of a penis entering a vagina or an anus takes on the rarefied aestheticism of a Ruskin when set beside such gross satisfaction: piggy little eyes screwed up against the light, envaginating the madonnas on the hu-uge iconostasis over and over and over again. Is there any limit to the capacity of cineastes to be absorbed into these folds and curves of photons? They write their reviews, they expand these into essays, monographs and eventually entire books anatomizing their goddesses and gods. A chapter on their cheekbones, another on their clavicles, lengthy footnotes on the spaces in between their toes, because of the mind of the goddess — her ideas, her thoughts and feelings — there is precisely nothing to be said.

As I trudged on, my own warped trajectory brought me to the border between Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The limpid water grew thinner and bluer as the sunlight gained in intensity. The grass along the verges was dense enough for any colt to crop. At the junction with Doheny Drive I spared a thought for Bret: was he up there in his ritzy apartment hosing off the crusts of last night’s fun? Was he wearily contemplating another day in the word mine, chipping away at the computer to expose veins of terse couplets?

Ray: Well, yeah, uh, I guess.

Phil: Later on, OK?

Or perhaps plotting a silken road through cyberspace to the pharmaceutical kampongs of the Far East, where brilliantly hued mounds of OxyContin, Halcion and Paxil sprawled on the ratscuttle floors, their silica slopes illuminated by the rays of light that shot through the perforations in the corrugated-iron roofs high overhead?

I well remembered the last time I had visited the pharmacy on the South Lambeth Road to fill my prescriptions for Seroxat, Dutonin and Carbamazepin, the feijoada complexion of the Portuguese assistant, in the fatty mass of which swam morsels of acne. She had looked at me — quite reasonably — as if I were mad. Busner had prescribed the Seroxat for depression and the Dutonin because of my volatile reaction to what itself was intended as a dopamine governor. Then there was the Carbamazepin, a further tranquilizer necessitated by my restless spirit. I understood why, because left to my own devices I had a way of cabbing into the West End, scoring on the street, overdosing in the alley off D’Arblay Street, then beating off the paramedics who were reviving me, only to be found hours later wandering over Vauxhall Bridge, with the crotch of my jeans torn out and my jaw half dislocated, as if in the intervening period I had been practising enthusiastic soixante-neuf with a werewolf. American, natch, who, after his lectures at Richmond College — where his folks have paid for a summer semester — cruises the Soho bars sporting a charmingly recherché sleeveless anorak. Or gilet.

Standing beside the rack of plug adaptors, zip-up neoprene pouches and personal grooming tools, under the watchful eyes of a plaster Alsatian on a top shelf, I could feel the sine waves plotting the metabolic half-lives of these drugs tangle in my cortex, and in that moment I decided that a life in which happiness was mixed up like a mental cocktail was no kind of life at all. So I paid the assistant, took the plastic bag of meds home, tied a knot in the handle and chucked it up on to the top shelf in my study, where it lay for years, beside the yellowing typescript of my grandfather’s doctoral thesis ‘The Divine Indwelling’. This was his attempt to reconcile the then (1960) modish Existentialism with Eastern religion, Christianity and science. My father, who viewed his own failure to find a publisher for this weird synthesis as a betrayal of his patrimony, once asked me shortly before he himself died what I thought of ‘The Indwelling’. I confessed that after attempting a few pages I had come to the conclusion that Grandad — a notorious autodidact who studied for seven ordinary degrees while commuting to London each day on the Brighton Belle — ‘had suffered for his learning — and now it’s our turn’.

‘What’ve you done with Pete Postlethwaite?’

Camera Jeff, Sound Jeff and Gofer Jeff were standing round me in a menacing semicircle on the verge beside the Will Rogers Memorial Park. On the far side of Sunset Boulevard, the Beverly Hills Hotel was flanked by three-storey palms. In there, I imagined, execs were strong-arming deals; out here there was an intervention going on.

‘What’ve you done with him?’ reiterated Camera Jeff, the Fletcher Christian of this mutinous crew.

‘We’re working on this together,’ I said, looking down at my Rockports nuzzling in the clover-dense grass.

‘Lissen, I was prepared to shoot some footage of you when we picked you up on the Strip where we’d arranged to meet Pete, but enough’s enough.’

‘Enough’s enough? What the fuck—’

‘Yeah, enough’s enough. You may think you’re a player in this town, while we’re nobodies, but this is… this is—’

‘Bullshit!’ Sound Jeff pushed his angry red face forward.

‘Fuckin’ A!’ Gofer Jeff was dancing on the spot.

‘OK, OK, cool it you guys.’ Camera Jeff patted them down. ‘Mr Thewlis, we don’t want to alienate you.’

‘No, right,’ I laughed sarcastically. ‘Because you want to get paid, don’t you.’

A note of pity entered Camera Jeff’s voice, ‘Actually, that’s not an issue here — we were paid in full in advance by Mr Postlethwaite’s agent — a Mr Self?’

‘The name means nothing to me,’ I lied.

‘Anyway, this isn’t about money, it’s about our professional integrity.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Pete said this was going to be an experimental film — a subversive take on Hollywood consisting of a continuous take of him walking round Los Angeles for a week. From the get-go we told him it wouldn’t add up to anything, but he insisted we trail him all the way from LAX Downtown, then from there to Hollywood. I didn’t know what to expect from him — I mean, I’d seen some of his work, but in the flesh he was, well, skittish.’

‘Skittish? You mean like “houynhmnhmnhmn”!’ I bared my yellow teeth and pranced on the verge. Camera Jeff chose to ignore this.

‘That’s right, skittish — ordering us about, then, when we miked him up he began talking this—’

‘Unbelievable bullshit!’ Sound Jeff bellowed. ‘I’ve had to listen to this crap for two days now!’

‘I don’t think that’s exactly nuanced, Jeff,’ said Camera Jeff. ‘I’ve listened to some of the recordings and it sounded to me as if Pete is having some kind of breakdown. Then this morning you turned up instead of him but wearing the same clothes and behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening — I’m gonna ask you one more time: where’s Pete? Is he back at the Roosevelt? We’re worried about him.’

I thought: the traffic, it’s always building up, silica grains flowing into mounds dammed by stop lights. What were roads anyway? Only pipelines of exasperation pressurized by time. Crown Victoria nosed Taurus, Taurus rimmed Corolla, Corolla went down on Tahoe. Between the snout of a Fusion and the butt of an Equinox I saw long-dead dreamer Richard Brautigan sporting a headband and shades, his big pack dragging on his shoulders as he wove towards Hollywood.

‘Let me get this straight.’ I stepped into Camera Jeff’s banally furnished personal space. ‘Are we splitting up over artistic differences?’

Someone, I thought, ought to be filming this: I needed a reverse shot, so I could see my wispy moustache bristle. I needed Dolby surround sound so I could hear myself shouting: ‘I don’t need this shit! I hired you fuckers and I can fire you too! You’re off this goddamn picture — off it, d’you hear?! Pick up your gear, bubba, and walk!’

But it was me who did the walking, after I’d torn off the mike, then ripped the power pack from my belt and slapped it into Sound Jeff’s pudgy hand. They stood there bemused while I strode around the bougainvillea beds and away down Beverly Drive. I considered shouting back at them: ‘You’ll never work in this town again!’, but the line can be overused, don’t you think?

Carlos and Simon had made their mark on one of the birches lining Beverly Drive. Other Okies had taken time out to play noughts and crosses or score prick ’n’ balls pictograms. Soon enough my angry exhilaration subsided into the tangerine dream of première classe suburbia, where Latinos made with the flagstones and nobody’s escutcheon leant against a portico — and the sky, the sky was no longer limpid water, only a steadily dilating Playboy bunny’s hole lined with shelves upon which were stacked iPod Nanos and player-piano rolls, Box Brownies and HD video cameras, search engines and difference engines. Tipping back my head, I could see that this warm void was aching for Sergey Brin’s re-entry, as he splashed back down into Marina del Rey after his midweek break at the International Space Station. What — what would he find to google at, now that whole generations and societies had passed for ever: only a savage sitting on the dock of the bay scratching a prick ’n’ balls pictogram into its concrete. Under this the legend: DO NO EVIL.

I had my own small digital camera, and if I sensed the Hals clustering, or a wildcat crew creeping up on me, I could always whip it out and start filming myself, much as a boy wizard wields an invisibility cloak. The only problem I faced was the one of any ham alone in the age of technological reproducibility: who was looking at the me looking at me? Even Sergey hurtling earthwards in his steam-punk Soyuz capsule still had a back-projection of blue chiffon sky framed by the triangular porthole — this, a technique essentially unaltered since Sunset Boulevard, when the cops in the pursuit car stared intensely out at us, while behind them a second film of the unspooling roadway did for the trompe l’œil.

This then is the whole equation

projector → audience (screen) → cops driving (rear window) → Sunset Boulevard receding = reality

that, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stand-in asserted, ‘Not half a dozen men have been able to keep… in their heads.’ It was nothing to do with the residuals for Dharma & Greg, and, believe me, I felt brittle just containing it in my nut, and wondered as I footed down Carmelita Drive whether it might make sense to hole up in the Spadena House. No one would look for me in this symbolic assemblage of witchy elements: burnt-toast eaves, spangly windowpanes, roughed-up plaster and a toad spawn chimney stack. The little homestead of horror had originally been built as a novelty office for the Culver City Movie Company, and only latterly rolled up into Beverly Hills on a truck. I could lie low — the house would recede on a low-loader. Like Donald Crowhurst when he abandoned the 1968/9 round-the-world solo yacht race, I would fake a diary of my own circumambulation, while in a parallel notebook I frantically operated on the equation, multiplying its terms until the warped rooms were cluttered with screens and retrospectives.

There was no smoking in Beverly Hills Park. Kitted out as a bum, the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott sat slumped in an abandoned office chair in the empty pergola — there was a beer bottle, queerly limp, drooping from his hand to his inner thigh. I crossed the road and holed up in the Coffee Café for a sandwich, observing the anthropophagi that patrolled the sidewalk in their Palomino-skin cowboy boots, the bands of jewelled denim between their hips taut as bowstrings.

For a less doughty voyager, departing the island of affluence lying between Santa Monica Boulevard, Wilshire and Rexford might have been dispiriting — yet I felt carefree, reknotting my shoelaces, reefing the strap of my backpack and stepping out with the wind behind me. It’s only those who have no experience of round-the-conurbation walking who imagine suburbia as an unvarying ocean of roof peaks and garden troughs; no, here is the great individualism Americans justly pride themselves on, with each property distinguished from its neighbour: Spanish Mission instead of Neogothic, japonica in place of bougainvillea, TruGuard rather than Mercian security.

From the ridge at Pico I could see the whole dish full of smog spread out beneath me, from which popped the up-plummeting bodies of trampolining children and the inverted mop-tops of truffula trees. For a moment I hesitated — might it be an idea to set a course through the Hillcrest Country Club? I could join a lost tribe of rich Jews and wander that landscaped Sinai for… years. But no, I had a rendezvous with Tamisa the crossing guard, who sat in regal splendour at the junction of Beverwil and Cashio on her throne of puddled fat. ‘You’ve gotta get offa your backside,’ she told me without a smidgeon of irony. Then reassume it, I thought, part time at twelve bucks an hour.

Quite suddenly I was standing in a grocery store at Hughes Avenue buying a can of Kobe energy drink and chatting to the sales assistant, who was from Bhutan. He was unimpressed by my voyage: ‘I run a trekking business in my own country,’ he told me. ‘Also, I am a mountaineer.’

Outside I looked up at the frozen wang of the Santa Monica Freeway and thought better of it — so poured the drink away on to the asphalt. It wouldn’t do to arrive all fired up. I spat my tasteless cud of nicotine gum into my palm and was appalled to see that my jaws had expertly worried it into a perfect little voodoo doll of Orson Welles, complete with cloak and wide-brimmed hat. I shuddered, remembering the micro-manipulation of Hagop Sandaldjian, and, last fall, Sherman flung naked across the high bed — then Willy Town Mouse scuttled into the cheesy wedge of the Culver Hotel.

Which wasn’t so bad — there was a high staff turnover and no one remembered me. I was given a room on the third floor with a dinky four-poster garrotted by swathes of muslin. The shower’s low pressure felt historically accurate, then I sat drying off in a wing armchair looking out through breeze-buffeted net curtains at the balding Baldwin Hills, with their oil pumps rising and falling like failing hair implants. I had come almost full circle, and might reasonably have gone on to LAX and flown home to London. After all, no one else had turned up dead — yet.

Instead I phoned and in the gap between ‘Hello’ and ‘How are you?’ heard the low moan of eight lost hours and the dumb percussion of falling marbles. I wanted to ask about the crime scene tape — was it still there? But she hardly ever left the house — except by Packard; while the children — who would’ve known — were out at casting calls. So we said our goodbyes and hung up, and in the seconds after the marriage of the plastic I felt as if, far from having communicated, we had only defined the vast compass of the incommunicable.

Guffin was waiting for me at a table outside Ford’s Filling Station, a self-styled ‘American gastro-pub’ on Culver Boulevard, whose ‘executive chef’ was none other than Ben Ford, Harrison’s son from his first marriage. I nodded to Mac and for a while we sat silently in an establishing shot, absorbing the drivel on the menu: Ford’s culinary philosophy was much influenced by the French slow-food movement, which favoured authentic locally sourced ingredients, simple preparation, blah-blah-bleurgh! It wasn’t a philosophy that extended to the establishment’s décor, with its gas station logo implying that esturgeon confit was another type of high-octane fuel.

The happy detective was being played by himself — he’d even grown his own trademark brown moustache for the role. It was a relief, of course, because I never knew before I actually saw someone who would be impersonating them, and even then if it was a good method actor it could still take a while to identify which one. As for me, Mac didn’t seem to care who had the part, only remarking, ‘You look well, man,’ before moving straight to business: ‘So, you’ve got a case for me?’

I filled him in on the conflagration at Pinewood and my escape with the quadrumanous cartoon dog. Then there was the episode on Century, and my discovery of the adulteration taking place at the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant. I alluded to the car fight at the La Brea Tar Pits, but didn’t go into too much detail, then went over the horrific riot outside Grauman’s so exhaustively that by the time I’d finished we were both staring down at matching tartes tatin. Of anything to do with Thetans I said nothing — this was a litigious town, and then there were the Scientologists.

I suppose we must have had Ipswich clam rolls and polenta cakes but saving Mr Ford’s finer feelings it was all plaster casts to me — prop food that had me gulping down glass after glass of water, then calling the waiter to get more. The unemployed actor could barely conceal his annoyance, and every time he plonked down the flask he grunted like a woman tennis pro serving an ace.

Mac sucked his moustache and tousled his own hair. ‘You’re racking up enemies with your behaviour, man,’ he said, as weary as a walrus. ‘You got any protection?’

I explained about the Jeffs.

‘You’re screwing up big time, aren’tcha.’

‘I’m sorry?’.

‘Well, if you’re right and the movies were murdered — not just accidentally killed — then you’re a real slow-moving target. Personally, I think your initial strategy was the right one — be filmed or get drilled. Now how’re you gonna keep safe?’

‘Tomorrow morning I’m going right into the heart of the machine.’ I stabbed a finger towards the Sony lot. ‘It’s the last place anyone will think of shooting me.’

‘And then?’

‘That’s where you come in. Listen.’ I dropped my voice conspiratorially and, leaning towards him, took a forkful of his tarte.

‘Hey!’ Mac was outraged, and struck out at my fork with his own. We began fencing with the cutlery, until the waiter broke it up. ‘You were saying?’ Mac asked, picking bits of caramelized apple off the lapels of his corduroy sports jacket.

‘I can’t keep track of all the leads — that’s the trouble with a victim that’s a representational medium —’

‘You say that, but everyone knows who murdered portrait painting — the camera, right?’

‘Right, but portraits in oils were slow fucking food, man, one frame, hanging around on walls — they had it coming. The movies are something else — sixteen, twenty-two frames every second; for over a century they sopped up the world like a celluloid sponge, they saw everything — they depicted everyone. Sometimes they mocked up real events; other times those events were staged for them. As for the actors — they played characters based on real people; real people played themselves — or else made-up characters. That’s too many linkages, Mac, too many suspects. Have you seen the titles at the end of an average Hollywood movie nowadays, there’s thousands of the—’

An old homeless man, who had been standing watching us from the far side of the waist-high canvas partition penning off the patrons from the sidewalk, now approached, his hand outstretched. I looked at its dirty and cracked nails — there was an open sore on the leathery palm. ‘Please,’ the poor fellow croaked. ‘Please, gennlemen, I only need a few cents to get a sammich. I’d be obliged.’

He bore an uncanny resemblance to the Indian-born British novelist Sir Salman Rushdie, what with his straggling grey beard and dishevelled pride, so I dropped a few coins into his hand, then said, ‘But tell me one thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘How come you’re begging — I would’ve thought that with your sales you’d be set up for life.’

‘Oh, yeah, sales.’ He shrugged philosophically. ‘It’s true, the books sell well enough but that’s chickenfeed; the real money is in movies, and they option stuff and option it again — then they drag me out here for meetings with execs and like a sap I come. Then nuthin’ happens — nuthin’ at all.’

He shuffled away disconsolately, and turning back to Guffin I deftly changed the subject: ‘So, Calista Flockhart, her cunt’s still wedding-fresh, right?’

The happy detective spat a chunk of pastry on to the table, while all around us the baboon diners rose to their bandy legs.

‘Ferchrissakes,’ Mac said, recovering himself, ‘d’you wanna get us lynched, or what?’

‘I was only asking — I’m sure it’s a question that’s on everyone’s lips.’

‘Maybe, but they kinda slurp it back down.’

The baboons were settling back down as well, their muzzles dropped to their arugula. We sat in silence for a while.

‘I dunno,’ he resumed eventually. ‘I’m not sure I want to take this one on — we’ve got troubles of our own down at the Times.’

‘Your man Zell?’

‘The word is we’re looking down the barrel of a gun.’

‘And people are going to get fired?’

‘Absolutely — and you wanna know why? It’s the same as your movie case: the readership can’t suspend disbelief in newsprint any more, it’s just dead meaning swatted on the page to them. They want something that lights up, scrolls down, they want inset full-motion videos and pop-up—’

‘Idents.’

‘Right.’

Dusk was fingering along Culver Boulevard, together with the traffic and the No. 11 Nocturne played with a jazz twist. There was a lazy intimacy to the scene — they didn’t call Mac the happy detective for no reason; whatever his own problems — and he had them — he always succeeded in infusing any scene with a comfortable tannin vibe, ironic considering that when:

‘You turn up people get dead — now don’t they?’

He wasn’t taken aback. ‘So that’s how it is, is it, you’ve got a third act problem.’

‘I guess.’

‘So you think: bring in Mac and the body count’ll rise.’

‘Something like that had occurred to me.’ I took out a miniature Effie Perrine and she took out a miniature bag of Bull Durham and fiddled a cigarette into tubular existence. ‘Anyway,’ I resumed, ‘what’s your scruple? You say people’re gonna get dead anyway, leastways in my scenario they get dead in the service of a decent cause — finding out who clipped the most beautifulest narrative medium the goddamn world has ever seen!’

He stood up and, pulling a rawhide wallet from his pocket, dealt a couple of twenties on to the table. ‘You’re fucked up, Will,’ he said conversationally. ‘I don’t believe you give a damn who killed the movies.’

‘Frankly?’

‘Yeah, frankly. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out you’d killed them yourself in some guarana-fuelled blackout.’

‘That’s harsh.’

‘You think so? Well, try this on: you were a spotty brat jerking off over Ornella Mutti in the London burbs. Then you grew up and began writing your dismal fucking tales — a depressive’s exercise in wish fulfilment: slash your wrists and the world slashes with you. Against all the odds you got successful enough to come out here — and whaddya find? An industry that doesn’t give a damn about you, ‘cause you’re a cheapie, a peanut grafter, you’re so goddamn small no one could even focus on you—’

‘OK, OK.’

‘That’s not all, man, ’cause after all there’s thousands like you in this town but you’re different: you’ve got the motivation. The movies may’ve rejected you, but then you go and fall in love with Angel herself.’

‘You believe this?’

‘I’ve read your stuff, man, it’s a fucking love letter to LA, all about how she’s been betrayed by the movies, how they eyed her up, used her, then cut her up into so many pieces nobody can put her back together again — no one, that is, except you. That’s what this walking tour is really about — you aren’t looking for who killed the movies, you’re trying to get your skinny shanks inside LA’s hot haunches!’

As parting shots go it was a good one, and although he wasn’t a fellow given to melodrama Mac made his exit, strolling off the Filling Station’s apron and sauntering away along the boulevard.

I called after him: ‘But you’ll still do my legwork for me, won’t you?’

He turned back. ‘Oh, I dunno, man, I dunno.’

‘Just check a few things out, be a friend to the cause.’ He ambled back, and I whispered, ‘But don’t call me, it’s not safe.’

‘What, then?’

‘Ellen DeGeneres is throwing a little party for me tomorrow evening at the Bar Marmont.’

‘For you?’

‘It’s a very little party — more of a gathering, really. Anyway, if you show up we can talk after.’

‘You better have some cash for me. Two hundred — plus whatever expenses I’ve incurred.’

‘Naturally.’

‘But don’t get your hopes up, my friend, and remember: client privilege don’t buy you no protection — this is a helluva tough town.’

‘I know that.’

But did I, really? The elevator gate closed in a monogamous marriage of old metal, and the Culver Hotel seemed quiet enough — yet was there perhaps a trill of dwarfish laughter from the end of the corridor? What eerie visions would trouble me as I turned and turned again in my rental four-poster? Judy Garland going down on the Tin Man, her carmine lips sliding lubriciously over his steely rod, then rearing up, green oil dripping from her sharp little chin? The money shot — again.

When I eventually made it into my room the message light was winking: Busner had rung while I was at dinner. ‘I do hope you’re having a good time.’ His recorded voice was far more immediate that his spoken one. ‘And that you’ve remembered what I said… about avoiding the noirish.’

To my surprise I slept soundly and blankly, awakening to the Dolby hiss of another day. I ate bacon and eggs in the foyer, then, after returning to my room, expeditiously shat. I was a man with an appointment.

^*This may be the purest form of the jump cut, the eye’s saccade involuntarily following the gun barrel’s pan, so seeing the same wound in metal, then flesh, then metal again.

9. The Pitch

Way back in the beeswax-scented past, Arnold Schoenberg had woken one fine morning, and, in the last heady rush of his Romanticism, decided that it would be a good idea to pen some music for exactly these sorts of comings and goings, small swoops and glissandos of strings that with uncanny prescience suggested the yaw of Escalades as they swung off the boulevard, the reeling down of tinted windows, the reeling up of tinted windows, the red-and-white-striped baton flung high to conduct them on to the Sony Pictures lot.

I dogged along behind, then picked my way between acacias and eucalyptuses towards a Palladian façade, the pediment of which was lettered IRVING THALBERG BUILDING in Art Deco bronze. There was a copper stoup bolted to the wall beside the doors. Assuming that the liquid in this must be the tears of stars delivering Oscar acceptance speeches, carefully captured in vials by their personal assistants, then deposited here at the behest of the studio, I dipped my fingers, genuflected, then went inside.

In the foyer there was a reception module womaned by central casting, and mirror-backed cabinets lined with Oscar statuettes, the tragic masks of BAFTAs, and some other awards I didn’t recognize but that were symbolized by figurines of Pan sporting what looked like Stetsons.

Having been announced, I travelled along a sunlit corridor, my nape hairs erect in anticipation of the smack of a bullet. To either side open doors revealed sets of offices expertly arrayed with exactly the kind of desks, framed movie posters, filing cabinets and waggle-on-their-springs desk mascots that you would’ve expected. In front of the desks, tipped back in their swivel chairs, were minor players played by minor actors. Discreetly, quietly, they made marks in the margins of scripts, or else, ear-muffed by surround sound, watched product on their computer screens.

Upstairs, unity of production design, which in the movies makes of the entire world an opulent suburban home, was spectacularly in evidence. On Michael Lynton’s set high, narrow windows leaked daylight between drapes of taupe crushed satin; the floor was rough-adzed boards; a Columbia icon hefted a torch on the wall; a white orchid sat on a glass table surrounded by steel-framed chairs. There were two conversation areas: one had sofas, covered in creamy fabric patterned with black coral polyps, grouped around a hardwood coffee table; the other involved mushroom leatherette club chairs menacing a discoid of white-veined marble. Somewhere in the beeswax-scented present Lynton was on a call. Nearer, in the antechamber, his secretary was finishing one. ‘Love you guys,’ floated through.

I sat waiting on the polyps — yet felt no discomfort. This was the Zoloft of interiors. Lynton made an entrance at the back of the open plan: he was wearing plain black shoes, grey trousers with a light check, a subdued and striped blue shirt. He had the lean, dark expressive good looks of the younger De Niro. His hand, when it shook my paw, was cool and beautifully manicured.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you walked here, is that right?’

I admitted this was the case.

‘Any particular reason?’

We sat down behind our palisades of sharp knees and the tea arrived. I gave him my spiel: how walking was the least filmic possible way of travelling, while Los Angeles was the most filmed location. I told him that I suspected that the movies were waning as the dominant cultural discourse of our era, and that this seemed the easiest way of gaining entrance to such a labyrinthine subject… I left out the stuff about the murder, the fugues I experienced after drinking Powerade, and the fact that he himself was in the frame. Despite these cuts Lynton still seemed engaged and when I finished — as if to season his shoulders — he shook his lightly pepper-and-salted coif and said:

‘Oh, I thought you’d come to make a pitch.’

I was momentarily dumfounded, and my mind laboured through the possible permutations: I was Thewlis, I was Postlethwaite — he was De Niro, and had done the decent thing with the mole.

‘No, really,’ I said, recovering myself, ‘I was simply interested in your take on all this; after all, here we are in the Thalberg Building, while you, I suppose, are the closest thing to a contemporary mogul.’

He smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘Maybe, but in many ways I agree with you: the wow effect has gone from the movies — the wow effect and a certain degree of social relevance. By the way,’ he said abruptly, ‘I heard you were on the set at Pinewood.’ I sat looking bemused, and he pressed: ‘Quantum of Solace?’

‘Well, uh, yeah — I did stop by.’

The masterful brushwork of exploding petrol, the Wagnerian curtain of roaring flame, the koi for sale from the bungalow… How much did he know about Scoobert?

‘A difficult shoot,’ he continued conversationally. ‘I heard Dan Craig sliced his fingertip off on the last day.’

This must be some kind of code. ‘Um, yup, I heard there’d been a couple of… accidents.’

‘Well,’ De Niro said, ‘this is this.’ Then he continued his discursive remarks on the state of the industry, animadverting on counter-programming, Made of Honor, budgetary constraints, spring-versus-fall release dates, the threat of SAG industrial action — I mimed taking notes. What seemed to exercise him the most was the advent of PVRs: ‘In the seventies there were maybe sixty or seventy movies released a year — now it’s four hundred. If we want to get people into the multiplexes we have to focus our big TV advertising on the weekend before release, but now, well, if they skip the ads…’

His hand tensing, De Niro pinched the insinuation between his thumb and forefinger: this infinitesimal wilfulness had killed the movies; like participants in a perverse psychological experiment, encouraged to administer electric shocks to actors playing guinea pigs, the public had demonstrated that their empathy went no further than their own fingertips.

I must have been making the right kind of grunts — good enough for him to keep talking. Yes, he himself admired most the era of The Deer Hunter, Platoon and The China Syndrome — movies that minded the gap between social relevance and commercial success; but, while times may’ve changed, the movies still had a role. What about motion-capture and CGI? Well, the bar kept getting raised; Bob Zemeckis’s Beowulf had showed the way: a new generation of 3-D was coming, I’d soon find out about that.

He stood, and I rose up into that lovely hand-job: his was firm and dry, mine limp and clammy.

‘Relevance,’ Lynton said, ‘that’s the key word.’

‘Listen.’ I hung on to his fingered thing long beyond the socially prescribed time. ‘I do want to make a pitch: one of my therapists back in London — a guy called Shiva Mukti — he’s making these films of his schizophrenic and bipolar patients during their flamboyant phases — you know the kind of thing, whirling their arms like copter blades, trying to claw the transmitters from their foreheads — then when they’ve calmed down he shows them what it looked like. You see, the biggest problem with these guys is that they can’t accept how crazy they get if they don’t take their medication — obviously the whole thing is done with their consent.’ I laughed, in such a way, I hoped, as to imply that anything else would be deeply unethical — unfortunately all that emerged was a horsey lip-fart. ‘But the thing is you here in Hollywood are doing the same thing on a massive scale and without anyone’s consent. I mean, tell me I’m wrong, but what are these car-crushing beasts, these shape-shifting chimeras, these liquid buildings and this solid air, if not the death-ray projections of our own unfettered Ids?’ Tiny beads of my spittle jewelled the luxuriant chest hair in the V of his open-necked shirt. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ I cantered on, ‘I approve of this, I think humanity needs to be told to take its medication — I just think it should be done with more conviction and greater artistry. I think everyone leaving the theatre — whether in Des Moines or Dubai — should understand the magical significance of the number of footsteps it takes them to cross the foyer, should believe the voiceover telling them what to do with the knives when… they get home…’

‘Great.’ He released my hand. ‘It’s been great talking with you, and I’m glad we understand each other so well.’

I had reached the outer office when Lynton called after me: ‘By the way, if you’d like to take a walk around the studio while you’re here that’ll be fine. I’m afraid we aren’t actually shooting anything today but it’s still worth a look.’

We did indeed understand each other — he had blown my cover and granted me temporary sanctuary at the same time: I would be safe at Sony. I thanked him and turned to leave.

‘Bye, Pete,’ Lynton called.

‘Goodbye, Mr Postlethwaite,’ his secretary echoed. ‘And, by the way’ — she made the usual moue — ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying it, but I loved you in Dinotopia.’

I walked down Main Street, passing neon signs for bowling alleys, a piano bar, the Continental Hotel. This was no torn children’s book, the fragments dancing in an open fire — nor was it the Sargasso of the imagination where all the dreams ever dreamt are becalmed. No doubt somewhere in the cool, humming interiors of the sound stages, animatronic ducks were dancing in front of a blue screen, but out here there was only a carpenter lifting paint pots from a golf cart, and the open doors to a cavernous prop warehouse.

I paused, rubbing my eyes, hearing them squelch: a Spiderman caught in the web of the present. On three-storey shelves sat the things, the great material substratum of the enacted, its TVs and washing machines, magazine racks and rugs, bottles of Powerade and bathroom mats, telephones and coat trees, brass statuettes and Barcaloungers, pool toys and vibrators, the neurofibrillary tangles and Bronze Age funerary gifts of a culture crazed by its own capacity for replication. Even a cursory examination was enough to tell me that this hangar possessed its own stratigraphy; that the stuff of Now reposed on the highest shelves, up near the roof, while at ground level I was staring at the fox-fur stoles, Victrolas and aspidistra pots of the era when the movies had only just begun. As I looked on, a forklift truck pulled into the stores and shovelled up a henge of ancient beige plastic computing equipment. No doubt soon enough it would be shot; and then, chained to their seats in the caves of illusion, the prisoners would watch the shadows of these things cast upon the wall. So that when they arose they might go back to the plaster and plywood of their own lives, bite down on the sawdust.

Beyond the main gates Los Angeles was waiting, her hot legs spread — and I entered them, devoutly. In the Hayden Tract, a phantasmagoria of Sci-Arc buildings with broken bone girders, staircases to nowhere and oriel windows bursting like buboes, I found a café where I could sit outside. I smoked, drank tea and finished Bret’s Lunar Park. There was room in the novel for Harrison Ford to have a walk-on part — he, who had himself once been a set carpenter, hammering away on the hulks becalmed in the Sargasso of the imagination. I left the book lying on the table — what did narrative have going for it anyway — only smelting kryptonite out of coincidence so as to trap us superheroes in the mundane.

Out here, by rights, I should have feared the zephyrs uncoiling from the brows of the Baldwin Hills — but instead I hitched up my pants and made for La Cienega; it — not they — would carry me the six miles north, back to Hollywood.

‘Surfer frat boys — that’s all I can think about.’

‘And you’re telling me he didn’t have a place to live?’

‘Yeah, but he was sooo cute, but crazy — when I first started dating him he admitted it.’

‘It?’

‘That he’d set the fire himself — the one he received the, uh, commendation for.’

I couldn’t prevent myself from eavesdropping: did she really say ‘surfer frat boys’? Or from looking from the sheepskin seams of her lambbag to her charm bracelet to her anorexic bangs. Her companion was just a hair head to me.

I’d regained consciousness in a booth in a McDonald’s, and, judging by my small pot of soda and skimpy burger, I’d only popped in to use the restroom. It wasn’t until I was back out in the street, striding through the tinted air, that it occurred to me to offer her this factoid: her lover was not alone. It’s been estimated that 20 per cent of all fires are set by the LAFD itself — acts of daring professional closure that could only make psychiatrists gasp in admiration as they drove their patients insane with neuropharmacology.

It wasn’t until I was back out on Cienega that I realized where I was: around the junction with Olympic. And this… this too needed to be noted: that every time Marlowe or Archer got sapped, then came to with a line of inconsequential dialogue in his ears surfer frat boys… it was a metaphor for Los Angeles’s sprawl, as its long lean boulevards stretched out from the rumpled bed. Too much trouble to describe all those Hummers with their wobble-board doors bass vibrating, too much effort to block in those body shops and dental technicians, the stench of a gas station and the street persons, who, skin like bacon rind, were frying today as the smog blew away. Keep on walking… Johnnie Walker, dapper in top hat and frock coat, his boots shined, his monocle screwed into his eye, strode out towards Hollywood, yet never arrived, pinned as he was like a butterfly to the billboard.

I came to again in a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, getting ready for the party being given in my honour. (Well, not so much a party — that implies an importance I wouldn’t wish for a second to arrogate to myself; more of a gathering, really.) I was still thinking about the burning of Los Angeles and waiting for Faye to get back — it was that kind of bungalow. Naked, fresh from the shower, I wandered from the small bedroom, icy with state-of-tech TV and music system, to the kitchen, which, with its humming rhombus of an icebox, its foursquare sink — suitable for tanning hides — its chintzy muslin curtains and linoleum pong, suggested a happier era of making do belied by the dishonourable tray loaded with potato chips, cookies, cashews and liquor bottles.

I dressed and went outside to where evening had sidled between the palm leaves, and cheery lanterns lit up the mini-homesteads of this dinky banana republic. From the direction of the pool I could hear a little pre-supper goosing going on: a splash, a cry, the wet thwack of a bikini strap. Behind my bungalow Mike Myers’s moon face rose up, cratered by the Mare Imbrium of his fake beard. His karma is huge…

I walked towards the thwack, let myself out through the metal gate, skirted the porte-cochère, walked down the lane, then along Sunset, and, passing between two sharp-featured young women snapped into black Lycra, entered the Bar Marmont. My key fob bulged in the pocket of my short pants as I walked up some stairs, along a narrowing corridor, through a barroom the width of a train carriage and into a second, narrow as a toilet stall, then into a third no wider than a chicken run, at the end of which I climbed through a trapdoor into a hutch cluttered with armchairs and oil paintings and people — most of whom were thrashing about in a purse seine smoking area, accessed via french windows the size of marmalade jars.

They were all there in the limelight: the Jeffs and Bret, Michael Lynton and Ellen DeGeneres, James Crespinel and Judy Brown, Michael Laughlin^* — who was explaining the genesis of his self-designed sneakers to a young woman whose name I never did learn — and Mac Guffin, who immediately drew me to one side: ‘Jesus, man,’ he said. ‘I picked up five fucking tickets minding your back all the way up Cienega.’

‘No one asked you to do that,’ I hissed. ‘And if you had to, why didn’t you ditch the wheels?’

‘Aw, c’mon fellah, don’t be like that — I’m just trying to look out for you; they’re on your tail — y’know that, don’tcha? They’re sharpening their knives, putting on their leather faces, cranking up their chainsaws, I mean, it’s because you’re paranoid that they’re now coming to get you—’ He broke off to take a highball glass full of fruit from a waitress struggling through the throng.

‘Yeah, thanks for nothing, Mac,’ I snarled; ‘why not just piss all over my party.’

‘Party?’ He shook his Labrador head, then began slobbering on a pineapple chunk. ‘Isn’t that a little grandiose — it looks more like a—’

‘Nice gathering,’ Bret said, cutting in appositely. ‘This is Brad.’ A tall, good-looking young man in blue jeans and a silky-black hoodie, the pink drapes of whose top lip parted to reveal expertly bleached teeth.

‘Hi,’ said Brad chirpily.

‘Brad is directing a movie called The Shrink.’

‘Really?’ I said with maximum disdain. ‘And what of it?’

‘He wondered if you might like to drop by the set — they’re shooting on location down at Venice; wouldn’t that be on your way back to LAX?’

‘Uh, yeah, I guess,’ I said, trying to sound unconcerned, although I was whining inside: Is he trying to get rid of me?

‘Bret says you’re walking clear round LA,’ said Brad.

‘That’s the aim.’

‘Any special reason?’

‘I’m location spotting for a movie about a guy who circumambulates Los Angeles,’ I told him. ‘I originated the script, did the development myself, put together a lot of the finance, then took it to Sony.’ I jabbed a finger towards Lynton. ‘They’ve green-lit the project and I’ll be directing as well.’

‘And starring?’

I really didn’t like this Brad — he was snider than an ill-gotten Madison hidden in a coffee can.

‘Well, no, since you ask — obviously not. I may have some profile as an actor but I’m not that bankable. Leo DiCaprio will be playing me — although he’s gonna need a body double for the walking scenes.’

Brad was smirking and I foresaw that our next exchange would cross the border at Tijuana into outright savagery. Luckily DeGeneres took my elbow and guided me away, throwing over her shoulder, ‘Don’t mind us, guys, there’re some people I’d like David to meet.’

There was Dervla, who as she spoke took strand after strand of her own chestnut hair in her scissoring fingers — as a hairdresser might — and who wondered if I would be interested in her idea: ‘Based on an original phobia of my own — fear of candlesticks.’ And there was Ogden, who had bitten his nails so badly he had to wear ten finger puppets. ‘What’s the pitch?’ He threw his chucklesqueak into the felt mouth of the Mickey Mouse one. ‘I’ll tellya, it’s about a guy who’s nervous, nervous, noy-vuss — set in Manhattan, natch — or at least, on a set of Manhattan crowded with scrumptious twenty-somethings deafened by canned laughter.’ And then there was Artie, who had spent the last thirty years in a remote cabin in Montana obsessively writing and rewriting a movie script about a reclusive anarcho-Luddite who launches a bombing campaign aimed at derailing the relentless reproducibility of technology: ‘I worked on birch bark,’ Artie confided, ‘using a bone stylus and pigments I had extracted from wildflowers. Then, when I finally returned to civilization, I found out about the Unabomber — man, was I pissed — my whole fuckin’ idea stolen for real.’

They were all interesting pitches, yet I found it difficult to concentrate and kept grabbing Coke after Coke from the trays swirling through the smallish crowd. So there was my mounting and gaseous turbulence — and also the disconcerting presence of Susan Atkins’s amputated leg (which, so far as I knew, no one had invited), which kept kicking the guests’ butts, a grim travesty of the murders it would undoubtedly have tried to perform if it could’ve got their necks behind its knee.

‘What’s with the severed leg?’ I asked Ellen. ‘I mean, is it some kind of ironic comment on my walk?’

‘Lighten up, David,’ she said. ‘Think of Atkins’s leg as just another Mac Guffin — like the hands of Orlac.’

‘You’re not gonna graft that thing on to me, lady. I mean, I’ve got enough homicidal tendencies of my own.’

She looked at me with an odd expression, but only said: ‘Shall we go on and have some dinner at the hotel? The others are already there.’

It was then that I noticed that the once-threshing crowd had been landed — the purse seine was empty except for me, Ellen, the leg and the legman. ‘Will you join us?’ I asked Mac, but he only handed me a manila envelope.

‘It’s all in there,’ he said. ‘Everything I could find out; read it later and then call me.’ He snagged Atkins’s leg, which was hopping past, and tucked it under his arm like an umbrella. ‘The sick shit that goes down in this town,’ he muttered as he duck walked in front of us along the chicken run, but I knew his comments weren’t addressed to anyone in particular, just as I also knew that he was as happy as a pig in it.

The evening began to end in the hotel restaurant. We were eating paella made with giant insects, and although the antennae caught in my teeth they didn’t taste too bad. I was sandwiched between a movie lawyer and the teenage wife of a mogul who was fully gravid — it seemed she might give birth at any moment, a baby doll torn bloody from beneath the hem of her baby doll dress. The lawyer was telling me he represented Rutger Hauer — although what that had to do with anything (even Hauer himself) was entirely obscure. Then he said, ‘I live out at the Palisades in a one-storey house. Y’know people aren’t killed by earthquakes at all — they’re killed by houses.’

The evening was killed off by my bungalow. Coming along the path from the pool, I saw that the moon had risen above the billboard advertising The Love Guru, and I cursed myself for my earlier trope: the Mare Ibrium was nothing like a fake beard — Myers’s or anyone else’s.

I sat smoking a Joya de Nicaragua and got out Mac’s report — which turned out to be a photocopy of my own. I leafed through the forty-odd pages, smiling grimly at the smiley faces and scattering cigar ash on the elaborate diagrams. Mac had scrawled a few words across the final page: ‘Copies of this are being widely circulated — if you can’t join ‘em, beat ’em.’

^* It was anomalous that no one seemed to be played by anyone else at this gathering, although when I came to reflect on it later there was one exception — Ellen DeGeneres as Stevie Rosenbloom. I cannot account for the veridical nature of the events recounted below, except to suggest that I was thrown by the contrast with the last Hollywood party I’d been to, almost a decade before, at Carrie Fisher’s house. That was a true ‘night of a thousand stars’ — or at least, I think it was. At one point I found myself in the line-up for the chicken gumbo with Rod Stewart, Geena Davis and the entire featured cast of Blake Edwards’s The Party (excluding, of course, Peter Sellers); then later on I asked the crown of Jack Nicholson’s head if: ‘You get out much?’

Being in one space — albeit the sort of hypertrophied living room-cumterrace mandatory for second-generation movie royalty — with that much notoriety could’ve been the beginning of the Syndrome, because, while these faces were as familiar to me as my own (and, in many cases, having examined the play of their features for many hours, far more so), I had the disagreeable sensation that they were not who the world claimed them to be, but rather a bunch of saddo impersonators, scooped up off the sidewalk outside Grauman’s and taken on by Fisher as a job lot to amuse persons unknown who were sitting hidden behind two-way mirrors, snorting cocaine and laughing hysterically.

10. The Virgil of Laurel Canyon

It must have been a hell of night, because when I awoke — tucked as savagely into my bed as I had been by the disapproving nurse at Heath Hospital thirty years before — I found I’d had breast implants done. And not just any breast implants Laura Harring’s. At least, I fantasized that they might be Laura Harring’s breast implants, because when I examined them in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door they had a combination of inelasticity and prominence that reminded me of the improbability of her chest — relative to the slimness of her back — when Harring and Naomi Watts took off their tops to fake love in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive^* (2001).

I wondered whether implying that anyone might have had breast implants was libellous — but the alternative — that these were Laura Harring’s actual breasts — was too awful to contemplate. I mean, there was I, idly caressing them, while Harring might well be lying somewhere dreadfully hacked about. In an interview I had read with the actress she said: ‘Life is a beautiful journey. Every episode of my life is like a dream and I am at peace and happy with what life has given me.’ But there was no way she could factor a sadistic double-mastectomy into such a beneficent dream — this was a thieving nightmare. Or had Harring been murdered, her beautiful face beaten to a pulp with a brass statuette of a monkey? If so I was off the hook for libel — but without an alibi for the caesura of the past twelve hours.

Clearly, it was time to force the pace of events: if they were messing with me to this extent I’d better take the fight to them. I leafed through the Yellow Pages, found the number, called it and discovered there was a meeting in Hollywood that very morning. Good, I’d have some breakfast, then stroll over.

Slumping in the kitchenette, teapot on the table, and beside it the newly polished brass statuette of a monkey, I poked one long lean thigh languorously out from the folds of the hotel bathrobe. Ignoring the multiple sections of the LA Times strewn all around, I felt as iconic as a Terry O’Neill photo which was just as well, because even in a town renowned for sick shit it was going to take some guts to hit the streets with my purloined tits.

I needn’t have worried, by the time I’d shaved and dressed, the breasts — or implants — had begun to subside, becoming first perfectly normal middle-aged bubs and then the budding nubbins of a teenage girl. Locking the door to the bungalow, I slid a hand up under my T-shirt and was relieved to discover coarse hair. The whole tit-thing must have been the after-effect of a particularly polymorphous erotic dream, and although I felt a little cheated it had to be better than murder.

I found the meeting up on Hawthorn in some kind of community centre. There was a Formica table covered with leaflets and a forty-year-old woman with braces and a tongue stud serving coffee through a hatch. Savouring the ghostly aroma of last week’s cheap meals, I took one, figuring it was only Nescafé, and thinking also of how it was I walked among them, these seraphic folk, able to suspend disbelief in films, in TV adverts, in pop songs, in microwaved food — and even in age itself. Maybe — just maybe — this could work for me too.

All the rest of the cast was assembled — exactly the players you’d expect for a self-help production almost anywhere in the maldeveloped world: following men and trailing ladies, character-defect actors, bit failures and spare extras. I slotted right into this stereotypy and no one paid me the least attention as I threw myself down on a canvas bottomed chair, muttering and slurping and giving off that supersonic whine that’s unfailingly associated with mental distress.

I watched and listened as the children of Xenu were called onstage to testify to their treatment at the hands of the cult. This frail girl, all elbows and ears, the ends of her hair as fractured as her psyche, explained how she had been recruited into the Sea Org^* at the age of twelve and spent eight years being bullied and abused — four of them as a suppressive person, forced to wear an orange jumpsuit and wield a mop for fourteen hours a day. She wept.

As did a burly man, who said that while he had managed to make the break, his parents — despite everything that had happened to him — continued to believe that they were Thetans who had been exiled to earth 75 million years ago, and that after arriving at an implant station housed in an extinct volcano, they had clung to genetic entity after genetic entity, piggybacking their way through evolution, until they ended up passing out leaflets on Hollywood Boulevard. He himself had had a breakdown after leaving, and when his parents ‘They still love me…’ — had the temerity to meet with him, they too had been labelled ‘suppressive persons’.

‘You guys know what that’s like,’ he sobbed. ‘Nobody can talk to them, sit with them, hand them a friggin’ cup of coffee — and you know the awfulest thing, I kinda feel that way too. I feel like I’m a suppressive person even out here in the real world — I just can’t connect.’

The testimonies were getting to me. I’d known in general terms the secret arcana that Scientologists became privy to only when they attained the grade of Level 3 Operating Thetans, but still: to hear how this hokum had corrupted minds and distorted lives was… salutary. I looked at the slack skin on the backs of my hands. True, it would’ve been a reassurance to be admitted to the religion — neither of the actors playing me was getting any younger, and while I was confident they’d still be having offers for years to come, what kind of parts would they be? I didn’t want to end up in soaps — or sitcoms. Whereas if I were a Thetan, I’d effectively become an actor with a billion-year contract and there’d be no resting at all: as soon as one part (or ‘life’) ended, another would begin—

‘Are you going to join us on the demo?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Are you coming with — on the demo?’

I had been romping in my reverie of full and eternal employment, with its personations flowing seamlessly, each into the next, never the dull requirement to just be myself, when suddenly there were the braces and the tongue stud and the petty earnestness of it all.

‘Well, uh, where?’

‘We’re going to picket the centre up on Hollywood — you don’t have to if you don’t feel comfortable, I mean, we’d understand.’

‘Sure we would,’ said the burly man, coming up behind her with an ursine undulation of his sloping shoulders. ‘I mean, you could be recognized by someone — and that can cause problems in this town, you could end up as fair game.’

I knew what he was talking about: to be branded ‘fair game’ was the Scientological equivalent of being forced to wear a yellow star in Germany after the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws. Persons designated ‘fair game’ could be ‘deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist’, and this included being ‘tricked, sued, or lied to or destroyed’.

‘I gotta tellya,’ said the burly son of Xenu, leaning down to me conspiratorially, ‘I had no idea you had any involvement with the Church.’

‘Um, well, not formally,’ I stressed, ‘but I did go to Saint Hill a few times — y’know, in England.’

‘Sure, sure, I understand — loved you in Dinotopia by the way. Lissen.’ He held up a swatch of black cloth and a white mask.^* ‘You could always wear these if you don’t want to be recognized, and we’d be grateful, we could use the numbers.’

I stood up and took the robe and mask from him. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘I’ll come along — I could use a walk.’

They couldn’t — the children of Xenu piled into a minibus and several cars, leaving me to plod the couple of miles to where the demo was assembling at Hollywood and Vine. They said they’d try to wait — but, as Busner often used to say, ‘Trying is lying.’ I’d been thinking of him on the walk over, and what he’d make of these odd polarities — here was I, joining the anti-Scientology march, while over there, on Sunset, was the office of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, the anti-psychiatric pressure group szupported by Szasz and the Scientologists.

From the corner I could see the Scientology kids wending their way through the crowds along the boulevard, all of them in their V masks, and carrying placards with slogans such as ‘They Want Your Money and Your Sanity’, ‘Scientology Disconnects Families’ and ‘Tax-Exempt Pyramid Scheme’. This last seemed the most problematic — after all, just about all of late capitalism was founded on a tax-exempt pyramid scheme; or so it seemed to me, on Saturday, 14 June 2008.

I shrugged on my own black robe, donned my V mask, then hustled through the tourists and the cruisers and the movie star impersonators — but the demo kept on marching, while I was only floundering: walking to Hollywood was one thing; running quite another. In a way, it was relief when a van slewed into the kerb beside me, its side door slammed open, and two Mormonesque heavies leapt out, grabbed me and hustled me inside. ‘C’mon,’ said one of them. ‘You’ve done enough walking for a lifetime — why not take a ride.’

The last thing I saw before the door was slammed shut was Margaret Atwood slumped by a storefront, a pathetic styrofoam begging cup on the sidewalk in front of her. I’d had no idea dystopic novels were selling that badly. Then, as the van pulled away, through the tinted rear windows, I spotted Kazuo Ishiguro, the British novelist — another writer who’d had many of his works adapted for screen; but, while to be down and out in Hollywood was one thing, why was he wearing that curious robe, which looked like a couple of camping mats and an election placard strapped round his torso? And what was he wearing on his head? Was it a hat — or a house? And if it was a house — which one? Darlington Hall, as featured in The Remains of the Day, or Netherfield Park?

But I had no time to reflect any further on these mysteries, for the van’s driver — who was hidden from me in a sealed compartment — must have seen a break in the traffic and accelerated, and I was thrust backwards on to the point of a hypo. I felt the drug ooze into me — then my consciousness, tissue-thin to begin with, was balled up, wadded and thrown away.

I get it back standing stark naked in what appears initially to be a featureless room: plain white walls, a high ceiling with recessed lighting diodes. Then I see, lying on the smooth white floor, the silky pool of a Spandex bodysuit. Next, I notice a single prop: a stop light, such as you might see at any LA intersection. It’s working, and as I look it changes from the red DON’T WALK to the green stick-figure with its legs parted. There’s no smell at all, except the stray whiffs of my own sweaty armpits — yet I sense altitude and aridity, and wonder if the room might be in a desert, say, the Mojave.

‘Put on the bodysuit,’ a voice crackles through a hidden speaker. I’m a little miffed — at forty-six I’m proud of my toned appearance, and, despite the kidnapping and the drugging, the idea of displaying myself naked to unseen voyeurs is the most arousing experience I’ve had since the girl in the CGI riot involuntarily came on to me.

The speaker crackles again, ‘Put on the bodysuit — or we will send someone in to put it on you.’ This time I reluctantly obey. It fits me like bespoke and, as delighted by my new clothing as I’d been with my nakedness, I swing my arms this way and that, then flex my legs. ‘Be still!’ the disembodied voice orders me. A door whines open and a huddle of white lab coats come bustling in, one of them pushing a shopping cart full of small balls covered in Velcro. They’re all wearing V masks and as they cluster round me I ask — I think entirely reasonably — ‘What’s going on, guys, is this part of the demo?’

But if they’re the children of Xenu they aren’t letting on; without speaking they begin sticking the Velcro balls on to my bodysuit, one each at all of my joints: ankle, knee, hip and so on. It’s done in a matter of seconds, then they retreat back through the moaning portal. I’m equally pleased with my new bobble suit, which resembles one of Leigh Bowery’s rather more restrained costumes. I start doing knee bends and humming Divine’s ‘You Think You’re a Man’ until meany-voice rasps: ‘Stop that!’, then begins ordering me about:

‘Now, do exactly what I tell you: walk towards the stop light, then wait for the green man. No! That’s too fast, begin again… Better. Now wait… OK, cross.’

I don’t snap back, ‘Cross what, exactly?’ I understand what’s wanted of me — you don’t get anywhere in life without being able to take direction. Besides, I enjoy strutting about in my bobble suit, while crossing intersections is something I’ve been doing for days now — it may be typecasting, but at least it’s my casting.

After we’ve done crossing for a while, the voice commands me to amble around the periphery of the room, then to assume various conversational postures, then pretend to take notes, then photographs. Next the V masks reappear, pushing before them a platform on wheels and a swivel chair, while two more bring up the rear carrying a table. With these new props the voice’s directions become more complex: it wants me to pretend to sit at the table and eat, to write, and then to make a phone call. After which I’m urged to lie down on the platform and feign sleep — in a foetal position, and also thrashing about in the flicker of REM. Next I’m to roll over and fake masturbation, before rising, sitting backwards on the swivel chair and straining my way through a realistically effortful shit.

All in all, over the course of an hour or so, a Marcel Marceau on crystal meth, I recapitulate the entire gamut of physical actions I might expect to perform in the average day. It’s an exhilarating workout, but, even as I prance and dance and stop and swing, something’s nagging at me — eventually I ignore the next direction and instead stand with my face petulantly downcast.

‘Bend over,’ orders the voice. ‘I said bend over,’ it reiterates. ‘Bend over or we will MAKE YOU bend over!’ it barks.

‘I truly want to do my best for you guys,’ I pout, ‘but what I want to know is what’s my motivation here?’

‘OK, OK,’ the voice fizzes, ‘you gotta point. Just bend over for us this last time and then we’ll get to your motivation, OK?’

I bend over.

The Vs come bustling back in; some spirit away the platform and the table, others remove the Velcro balls from my suit and depart with them. ‘Sit on the chair,’ orders the voice. A pair of Vs return with a basket of tiny plastic balls and begin expertly attaching these all over my face using some kind of clear adhesive. They stick balls to my lips, top and bottom, to my frown lines and to still more of my frown lines, all along my brows and on my eyelids, they near beard my chin with these nurdles. When they’re done there must be over a hundred of the things hanging off me, while presumably I look like a sufferer from some hideous alien skin condition.

‘Face the wall,’ the voice spits, then it coos, ‘Ree-lax.’

If the body workout was exhausting, the psychic one is both more demanding and more satisfying. The voice begins simply enough, getting me to frown, smile, scowl, laugh, mime soliloquizing, dialoguing, arguing and shouting. Soon enough, however, the directions become more complex: I’m to adopt an expression of weary pity, existential angst, frozen pride, justified hauteur. Then I’m asked by the voice to appear as if I’m listening intently to the recursive eddies of flute and woodwind that flow into the oceanic melodies of the Andante to Mahler’s Sixth—

‘Whoa,’ I cry, ‘that’s a hell of a subtle mien!’

‘You can do it,’ the voice urges — and so I unstitch my brows, flutter my eyelids and suck in my already hollow cheeks, because I’m beginning to warm to the voice — love it a little even. I can imagine that if we were penned up together for long enough in this rehearsal room we might have an affair — hadn’t I already pretended to masturbate for it?

‘Great!’ the voice cries. ‘I believed that one. ‘Next try conveying the countenance a character in a narrative might adopt, were he to realize not only that he was a character, but that the narrative itself was—’

‘What? Unstable — deconstructed altogether?’

‘Let’s just say… decentred.’

‘Interesting,’ the voice sighs. ‘Although perhaps just a tad forced.’

‘All right, d’you want me to go again at that one?’

‘No, let’s move on, we don’t have all day — how about this: a kind of “whither the Left” wistfulness, incorporating an acknowledgement of the bitter-sweetness of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a harder-edged perception of the fissiparous effects of post-9/11 conflict?’

‘That? — That!’ I guffaw. ‘C’mon, that’s first-grade stuff: watch me.’

When I’m done, the voice seems gratifyingly transported. ‘Beautiful,’ it groans, ‘just too, too beautiful, darling…’ Then it pulls itself together and crackles. ‘A still easier one: give me man-having-tiny-plastic-balls-torn-from-his-face, followed by a mickey finn.’

And that one is easy, because the V masks come barrelling back in and I have someone to do the scene with. I’m still frantically mugging when the pearlescent drop appears at the bevelled end of the hypodermic and the house lights go down, and the spot focuses in tighter… tighter on my face… and… blanks… out.

I came to being thrown from the back of a Lincoln Town Car that was taking the bend in Mulholland Drive immediately to the north of Runyon Canyon Park at twice the limit — or so I estimated as I windmilled into a ditch right at the feet of a family of joggers in full nylon kit.

‘Oh my God!’ the mommy ejaculated.

‘Oh my god,’ the daddy rather more agnostically echoed her.

‘OMG,’ their tweenage daughter cried.

‘Oh!’ said a toddler in an all-terrain buggy.

‘Wuff!’ said their Airedale, nuzzling between my thighs with his square-haired head.

‘Frodo!’ the mommy called it, reeling the poor unfortunate in by its extendable lead. Once the dog was landed the daddy approached:

‘Are you, like, OK?’

‘Kind sir,’ I said, clambering to my feet and straightening my torn clothes, ‘there is no question of similitude at all; thanks to Laura Harring’s breasts I have been spared any serious injury.’

He didn’t recoil, nor did the rest of the FoJ — once they’d floated off on their air soles, paws and tyres I realized why: it may’ve felt as if shells full of silicone gel had broken my fall, but for the second time that day my fingers crept up my T-shirt and discovered only the same old skimpy pectorals. Ho-hum, I sighed, picking bitumen from my knees, snuffling up the bouquet garni of the mesquite and looking out over the Los Angeles Basin. I may’ve lost the breasts, but I stood at last on those exposed ribs and gullies of the Sierra, stacked with hundreds of thousands of dollars of firewood and the palm froth of kindling. In the distance the skyscrapers of Downtown rose up straight as ruled lines, the Y-axis for Huxley’s graph of civilization’s boom and bust.

From the angle of the sun I estimated it was a couple of hours until dusk. A more timorous hiker would’ve probably given up at this point, slumped back down the hillside to his bungalow at the Marmont, eaten far too many cashews and nutted-out in front of the TV, but I was made of more suicidal stuff: I would follow the great silicone migration along the escarpment. True, my circumambulation had been ruptured by the van and the car rides, and I had also been kidnapped, possibly even abused, although this was debatable: was an actor like a child, passively acquiescing to perverted direction because she knew no other authority?

And now that I came to think back over the episode, as at first I made my way along the verge of Mulholland, then dived down a winding side road into the dark heart of affluent suburbia, it dawned on me that not once during that strange interlude had the voice referred to me by name. Who was playing me, then? As I walked I ran my hands over my face repeatedly — but one angular middle-aged male face feels pretty much the same as the next, and it wasn’t until I crept under a carport and crouched to frame my features in the wing mirror of an Infiniti that my hunch was confirmed: this was not homely Pete Postlethwaite’s face, or Thewlis’s haughty mien. But as to whose lumpy nose, rag-rolled cheeks and equine teeth were described on this face mask — well, I was at a loss, so I squeezed a blackhead.

And soon lost interest, plodding on along the road towards Mount Olympus. Somewhere up here Huxley’s house had burnt down, a domesticated fireball of mystic books — what was it his friend Gerald Heard had said? ‘Man is the general name applied to successions of inconsistent conduct having their source within a two-legged and featherless body.’ Poor Aldous, his visual field so savagely foreshortened by myopia and his attention span — sooo long, a stretch limmo of awareness, capacious enough to seat the entire casts of all the movies ever shot in Hollywood, in Culver City, in Burbank, in the Valley. Will Hay and the Fat Boy sat up with the driver, and in the back compartment Manuel P. Zlotnik carousing with Miss Pearlstein, Carol Goodenough… and all the rest.

That was Aldous’s misfortune: spaced out in Schwab’s, he had seen Los Angeles’s hair was burning, that her hills were filled with fire, and with that he broke through from the monochrome world of the 1950s to the other Technicolor side. Poor Aldous: if all the movies ever made had been spliced together, wound on to a reel the size of a Ferris wheel and projected on to a screen two inches in front of him, it still wouldn’t have been long enough to divert him, it still would’ve seemed over in a blink of his mescaline eyes. For he had seen the future: the after-image of the movies, flickering on the inside of his lids.

I had noted the flyers for Location Services stuck in the mailboxes along Willow Drive, and now I reached Laurel Canyon Boulevard only to discover that in my flat-footed abstraction I had lost the straight way and that the sun had dipped behind the shoulder of the mountain. The canyon was a deep place and with Saturday fast fading the snorting beasts were rampaging back from the beaches, their headlights piercing the gathering shadows. The hardtop snaked between steep bluffs terraced with real estate and there was no sidewalk. I got out the map crumpled into my pocket, but once I’d unfolded it saw that the available routes back to Sunset were all equally wiggling — they wormed across the rumpled paper, the apotheosis of the grid, as if the plotting pens of an EEG had simultaneously registered the nightmares of the city’s entire populace.

I tried walking on the left-hand side of the road, but each time I rounded a bend I was horribly aware I was invisible to the beasts that came at forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour, panting hydrocarbons, their fenders-for-jaws snagging the pandanus along the verge. I sprinted across to the right — but here my terror was still greater, for each time a beast came charging up the hill, its headlights ignited visions in my eyes — while they, I knew mos’ def’, could see nothing at all.

I tried switching from one side of the boulevard to the other as it wound down through the canyon, so as to provide the beasts coming from either direction with the greatest possible visibility — but this was no good, for darkness was upon us all now, and as I pelted like a picaro (or do I mean a picador?) beneath the points of their chrome horns I couldn’t prevent myself from witnessing the abominations inside these Escalades and Infinitis and Tahoes. I may have been a cryogenically preserved Disney head bowled chuckling down this lane of death, I may have been a silica grain impelled by time, but at least I wasn’t like these… these… sinners.

No wonder they couldn’t slow down, when this lustful man’s penis was so engorged, so turgid, that I could see it thrusting up towards the windshield. No wonder they couldn’t see me, when this gluttonous family’s minivan was so stuffed with their own fat and discarded food that even as they screamed by I noted the high tide of gnawed drumsticks, frayed corncobs and crescent burgers pressed by paps and thighs against the greasy windows. No wonder they had no care for the future, when, like this derivatives trader, they urged their Crown Victorias forward, while their heads were reversed.

This last beast, sightless, sunless, ravenous, clipped my shoulder and sent me flailing into a drive. I wasn’t injured at least the skin wasn’t broken, and only swirled into an oily multicoloured whorl when I pressed it with my thumb — but I was finished. I slumped down on the concrete, my throat combusting with nitrogen, nitrogen oxides, water vapour, particulate matter and, of course, hydrocarbons. It was the nadir — and then he came, and I was lifted up.

He came, tripping down the side of the boulevard, his silky three-quarter-length pants shimmying as his highly toned calves took the stresses of descent in their stride. He came, strips shaven into his scalp beneath the arms of his shades, a tattoo of a torpedo on his stringy neck, a tuft of hair on his decisive chin. He came — and when he saw me there, washed up on the shore by the metallic storm, he stepped aside and pulled away the headphones that cosseted his noble ears.

Despite the whoosh of the boulevard, I registered familiar close harmonies, staccato yet melodious cheeping from the tinny-tiny speakers: ‘Whatsoever thou dost affect, whatsoever thou dost project, so do, so do… (Aff-ect! Pro-ject!) And so project all, as one who, for aught thou knowest, may at this very present depart out of this life… out of it, out of it… (Pro-ject! Dee-part!) And as for death, if there be any gods, it is no grievous thing to leave the so-ci-ety of men—’

‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what happened to the Latin?’

‘Excuse me?’ He hadn’t noticed me before I spoke.

‘That’s NWPhd, isn’t it? I saw those guys rehearsing down at USC a couple of days ago.’

‘Aw,’ he said, shaking his head dismissively, ‘I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that, this is my roommate’s MP3. I just grabbed it as I took off — this ain’t my kind of shit at all.’

‘You don’t dig Aurelius?’

‘Or who?’

‘Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and stoic philosopher — it’s his Meditations those guys are rapping, I just wondered what’d happened to the Latin, they usually do the Latin as well as the English.’

‘Oh, OK, I getcha — my roomie, he did say this was some kinduva remix, so maybe they, like, dropped the Latin to make it more commercial, or some kinda shit like that.’

It had been a long and substantive speech — which I was grateful for, but I needed more; he, however, seemed intent on leaving, pulling the headphones back on and turning to resume his goatish descent. ‘Hey, wait!’ I cried.

‘Say what?’ He turned back.

‘You aren’t going to walk all the way down Laurel Canyon, are you?’

‘Fool, I live up there a-ways, so I do the walk down to Sunset twice daily — I’ve a little problem with my licence, you dig. The only time I don’t walk down is when I skateboard.’

‘Skateboard?’

‘You heard it. I got me one of those big three-foot boards with the meaty wheels. I start back up a-ways by the park. Man, I tellya that thing goes — I guess I must be hitting thirty by the time I get to here, and when I drop back an’ brake, the sparks fly.’

‘But what about the sinners?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I mean the traffic — the cars.’

‘Ain’t no traffic late at night to speak of, and when I’m walking I go right directly t’wards ’em. Then they see you — so long as they see you they won’t hit you. And if they do hit you, well.’ He started to rap: ‘It-is-no-grievous-thing to-leave-the-so-ci-ety of men.’

I was impressed by his nerve — and told him so, then asked, ‘Would you mind if I followed along behind you? The traffic terrifies me.’

He grinned. ‘Sure, man, whatever you need.’

It took us around half an hour to cover the two miles back down to Sunset. He loped on ahead, his life story trailing over his shoulder like the silk scarf of a valiant fighter pilot. Which in a way he was now — strafing the enemy with his gaze as they came swooping up towards us.

‘You know that TV show, man, Intervention?’

‘Can’t say I do.’

‘My folks, they set me up for that. One day I was sitting in my condo in West Hollywood doin’ meth, the next I was in the Betty Ford Clinic in Palm Beach, Florida. Craziest thing ever happened to me. I’m only telling this you this’ — he glanced back at me earnestly — ‘’cause I’m pretty much recognized wherever I go. See this: I’m only going down to Radio Shack to get them to look at this busted cell phone I got, but I’ll be hollered at least three times. Three times!’

I was grateful to him — but put him down as another fantasist. The town was full up with them, after all, and if the senescent could masquerade as the juvenescent, and starlets could go supernova — why couldn’t a deluded drug addict be the star of a reality show? But then we hit Sunset and right away a car slowed down and the driver leant out the window: ‘Good to see ya, Virgil!’ he roared. ‘You stay away from that shit now, y’hear.’

‘I hear you, man,’ Virgil called back, but his face — a perfect vacuum of nature-abhorring need — belied his words.

I thanked Virgil for guiding me, and was on the verge of asking him back to the hotel for a drink when some cloudy premonition got in the way. The last I saw of him was his jaunty pair of pants fluorescing in the headlights as it floated across an intersection towards the discount electrical goods store.

Back at the Chateau Marmont the desk clerk wouldn’t let go when I grabbed the key fob. We tugged it this way and that for a while; she was trying to get through to me that: ‘There’s a gentleman to see you Mister Self, he’s waiting in the bar.’ But it had been so long since anyone had called me that I thought she must be addressing the man waiting behind me, scuffing his shoe irritably on the carpet. Eventually she gave up, released the key and passed across a stack of phone message slips, all of which bore the same name: Dr Zack Busner, together with a series of times — 8.30 a.m., 9.30 a.m., 10.00 a.m. — that grew progressively closer to one another, until, as the present drew nigh, he had been calling repeatedly: 6.58 p.m., 6.59 p.m., 6.66 p.m.

He was indeed waiting for me in the bar with his red froggy face, and his pale yellow young Orson Welles face, and his dead-black Sandeman Port face. His six eyes were weeping (‘It’s the smog,’ he explained), and his six wings were beating (‘I just flew in’), and there were so many ice buckets ranged round him on stands that it looked as if this great monster were waist deep in the crystalline chips and cubes.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there you are! Don’t you ever answer your phone? I’ve been leaving messages on it all day — calling here as well. I mean, the last thing I wanted to do was surprise you.’ He passed a clawed hand over his face and I felt it.

I sat down opposite him, not speaking, just getting the measure of the situation and the degree of danger I was in. A waitress brought a menu and I ordered a bottle of Powerade^®. It was quiet in the bar, that blissful early-evening calm when the barman is dusting all the bottles on the shelves so that they shine, and the atmosphere is quivery with the anticipation of what that night’s patrons will do to each other once their blood begins to boil.

When the waitress returned with my energy drink and poured it into a highball glass, I added a couple of ice cubes from one of the buckets and took a long draught. Setting the glass back down, I looked from one pair of eyes to the next, then said levelly, ‘There’s something you really ought to know.’

‘Oh?’

‘I never did see Citizen Kane.’

^* A scene that was shot — or so she assured me — in Stevie’s old apartment building; or possibly Ellen DeGeneres’s (which, might be more apt); anyway, one or the other.

^* The Sea Org was formed by Hubbard as his Praetorian Guard in the 1970s, when, facing what he viewed as persecution (or taxation, as it’s commonly known), the core group of Scientologists took to the waves in a couple of clunky old merchant vessels. Mostly comprised of pubescent girls clad in itty-bitty miniskirts and sailor tops, the Org members, while not actually physically abused by Hubbard, were manipulated by him into the most fanatical loyalists.

^* Interestingly enough the Guy Fawkes kind — saturnine features accentuated by slashes of’ tache and goatee beard — sported by the anarchist revolutionary V in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta graphic novel. Moore himself had violently objected to the Wachowski Brothers movie adaptation of his book, stating: ‘It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.’ The question was — and is — which V were the children of Xenu hiding behind?

11. A Touch of Evil

Going home always feels like the real getaway to me. To depart on a journey is to simplify your identity: you must present a serviceable persona to strangers shorn of ambiguities — be just x, or y, or possibly j. But when you scoop the strange coins from the unfamiliar bedside table and funnel them into your pocket, when you flex your passport and put it away in the zip-lock bag inside the zippered compartment, when you look at your face in the mirror above the sink — and queasily catch sight of the back of your spacey head in the mirror on the bathroom door — you begin to feel the first stirrings of adventurousness: who will I be when I get back? Will I have changed? Will they have changed? The world is all used up — only tourists or salesmen set off on journeys; the real explorers strike out for the known.

These were some of my more spacious thoughts as I got ready to quit my bungalow at the Chateau Marmont on the morning of 15 June 2008. Making some coffee in the kitchenette, packing my small bag, drinking the coffee and eating a cinnamon donut while I scanned the map — these were actions: easy enough to suspend disbelief in, having as they did the robotic character of the pre-credits sequence for a movie that’s gone straight to video before it’s even in the can.

Touch, taste — smell! Don’t make me laugh — all these are barnyard senses, grossly overrated, only pigs would want points. That my thoughts had a quality of being somehow pre-cogitated — at once a little glib and overworked — I didn’t let bother me. Nor did I make too much of the way that I was conscious of these thoughts not merely as subjective intimations but as actual declamations that resounded in space. It was inevitable that I’d be feeling a little spaced out — it had been quite a trip, although I couldn’t remember much about it. Still, I had a long day’s walk ahead of me if I wanted to make my flight, so: ‘I’d better not linger.’

At 8.12 a.m. I was standing at the junction of Sunset and La Cienega, looking down the long gentle slope into the nuages automoteurs that blanketed the Los Angeles Basin, out of which came the occasional set of headlights, dragging behind them a car. A billboard rose above the intersection, on it the sad black face of a giant captioned in the art director’s conception of the giant’s own handwriting ‘I lost me too meth.’ ‘Me too, brother,’ I muttered as I loped past. ‘Me too.’ Then I was working my way down, block by block, to Santa Monica Boulevard, egged on by Johnnie Walker, who seemed to be striding out from every billboard that didn’t feature a gargantuan speed freak. ‘Keep Walking!’ Johnnie’s copywriter exhorted — although he himself remained pinioned. ‘Keep Walking!’ I admonished myself, then noticed a strange phenomenon: my own shadow, legs parted, cast on to the smogbank by the rays of the rising sun.

Keep walking — early morning on Sundays is the time allotted for pedestrianism in LA. For an hour or so those of us on foot had the city to ourselves. There was a mackerel sky over the Santa Monica Freeway and a steady stream of joggers coming between the mirrored donjons of Century City. Then there were the street persons, old hags bent double under sacks who turned their backs on the haunting flares of sunlight. ‘You have really pretty eyes,’ said a scuffed-up ladyboy who pulled me up outside a deli somewhere around Glen Boulevard. ‘Can I have a light?’ I took in the shaving rash, the baseball cap, the hip-hugging cut-offs and the just-picked-up butt of filter tip stuck in a face that was dustily lacking in registration.

I gave him one, although he too had a disconcerting air of being pre-known, as did the petals lying around a storm drain and the WARNING. THIS AREA CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER, BIRTH DEFECTS AND OTHER REPRODUCTIVE HARM, as did the Elysian Fields of the Los Angeles Country Club.

A linguini of LAFD hoses had been vomited across the sidewalk from the engines parked by the kerb, and there, sitting at the metal tables in front of a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, were the fire starters themselves, companionably planning their day’s arson. I stopped for a smoke and a coffee — decaf, of course. But, even so, this was a big mistake, because as I kept walking my bladder swelled and mutated until I was but a hollow man who could barely put one leg full of urine in front of the other.

What to do? Gas station after gas station taunted me with its signs: RESTROOM FOR CUSTOMER USE ONLY. Until I got it into my thick head and became a customer myself — but what to buy, not a candy bar, or a spare cap for my gas tank. No need for a newspaper or a rubber mat either… Aha! Quick Energy Drink^® — small, portable, inoffensive. I paid and knocked it back. Then the Cha’ an meditation illness began, in front of the urinal, it was of course state law that employees wash their hands, but as for the rest of us we were free to walk the streets with our hands dripping blood and excreta. The incontinent recall of Buddhist texts, which is the symptom of this overstraining of the pupil’s psyche, can be rectified only by the master hitting him hard on the head with a stick. Otherwise the texts range themselves, left to right, across the pupil’s visual field, not interrupting his view of a homeless man foetal on the sidewalk — but augmenting it. More disturbingly, the texts are no mere phenomenological wallpaper — the meaning of every word is instantly grasped by the pupil, even as he stares through them at the sign for historic Route 66.

And still the texts proliferate — at first only ones the pupil is familiar with, but soon enough these are joined by others he has only heard of. Yet these too are comprehended in their entirety, at once, even though he can see straight through them to a plate-glass window, and beyond that a store full of running machines. The pupil’s mind becomes bloated with a consciousness that inexorably ramifies, his ego, free-will, intentionality — whatever — it is trapped like a swarming water drop pinioned in a microscope slide. There is worse to come, as flying from all angles wing still more texts that the pupil is compelled to include in his screaming wits — these are texts he has never heard of at all, texts he didn’t know could exist, texts written by alien civilizations, texts doodled on the Etch A Sketch of God by archangels peaking on acid –

The Quick Energy Drink^® had to have been a mistake, because this was the mosh-pit of soma I was chucked into as I continued west to Santa Monica — with one key distinction: I saw not texts but video clips. Clips of me walking out from the arrivals terminal at LAX and on to Century Boulevard, clips of me freaking out in a gas station, clips of me checking in to the Uqbar Inn, clips of me passing by donutmorphic drive-ins, clips of me surging through nuages maritimes in the Baldwin Hills, clips of me beating on piñatas east of Broadway — in short, video clips of me at every stage of my circumambulation, and not just the ones I knew had been taken by the perfidious Jeffs, but all the clips from the security cameras I’d long stopped trying to avoid.

I was pondering this — in as much as anyone could ponder such an extravagant onslaught of visual imagery, tens — hundreds even — of thousands of full-motion shots of himself walking, streamed straight to his visual cortex — when I realized that one of the clips was in real time and that it coincided, more or less, with my own POV. I was passing by the John Wayne Cancer Institute; it was a pretty big cancer institute — but then he had been a pretty big guy. I had reached Santa Monica and regained some sort of equilibrium, standing on the sidewalk like any other rube and reading the following text:

‘Here are described the humble beginnings of the once swamp dweller whose fortune was lost many generations before his own birth due to the unfortunate and unexplainable misplacement of his great, great, great, great, great grandfather’s will and the deed to 21,138 acres of land which once encompassed the greater part of what is now San Francisco. Legend also tells that the soul of SCUSSUXYKOR III, an ancient Egyptian pharoah murdered by his very own soothsayer priest, sometimes dwells within his flesh. The astrological sign of the squid from the zodiac of the planet Jamzübati-Remoti on the outer Stewart Skippy Socrates solar system centered on the SUZIIR23 galaxy exemplifies the Amazing Chain Man.’

Which was written in marker pen on a piece of cardboard stuck on top of shopping cart, beside which sat a street person I thought I recognized. He was rattling hanks of chain between his hands. His bald head was surmounted by a twist of bandana, and above his beard was the benign expression of someone who believes that the everyday slights of this world can be fully explained by pan-galactic conspiracy theories.

‘Hey, Chain Man,’ I said.

‘Hey,’ he replied.

‘That’s a fine piece of writing.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Not to be picky, but it’s p-h-a-r-a-o-h.’

‘A-o-h what?’

‘Pharaoh — you’ve reversed the o and a.’

‘Right, whatever, dude.’ He let the chain hank fall to his lap. ‘But I’m a writer — not a fuckin’ speller.’

I make no excuses, I was weary and anyway facetiousness comes naturally to me: ‘Oh, OK,’ I chuckled, ‘so what do you write?’

The Amazing Chain Man got out a bit of a Marlboro and lit it before continuing, ‘Before the strike I had a pretty good gig churning out scripts for Stargate SG-I, did some stuff for Atlantis and Universe too — that was my eating money anyways.’

‘Oh — you mean you’re a real writer.’

‘Like, d’oh, we’re all real writers.’ He waved the tip of his cigarette to encompass the tramps, winos and bums who had congregated on these benches at the intersection of 7th and Santa Monica. ‘Whaddya think, that the WGA had a generous strike fund? There was too much fuckin’ product anyway, now they’ve gone head to head over the new media residuals for Dharma & Greg, well, most of us will never work again. Some of these guys, though, they’re, like, idealists.’

‘Like idealists — you mean they’re transcendental idealists?’

‘No, dummy, they’re novelists, short story writers — even biographers. They’ve come from all over to back the strike. They can read the writing on the wall: if it that’s all she wrote, that’s all they’ll be wroting too.’

I let this solecism slide and confined myself to the matter near to hand:

‘So this’ — I pointed at the cardboard — ‘is what exactly?’

‘That’s my shill, man, people see that they get to talking, maybe they ask me to write something for them — tell ‘em a story perhaps, y’know oral literature may be the way the whole thing is going, kinda back to the future trip.’

It was lost on me — the shill, the riff — I was already heading on towards the beach. Thomas Mann was calling to me from his exile in the sewer pipe — the Santa Monica Pier was calling to me too. Not all writers were down and out. I ignored the Amazing Chain Man’s cry, which followed me down the block: ‘I do kids parties too!’

There were no surfer frat boys for me down at the beach, no muscle Manns either, only tourists de-evolving into Segways, and kites tethered to the sand, and craft stalls selling serapes made from tin foil, and glass-bead purses, and figures carved out of pine with quartzite pebble eyes and detachable penises. And there was the Freak Show and the boardwalk cafés, and a wino who looked like Ernest Hemingway with a sign that read ‘Why lie, I need a beer’, and quaint little bungalows festooned with flags, and jogging families, and fat teens hunting for weed, and all the carnival of a Sunday afternoon that I had been exiled from by a circumambulation I now realized had been completely traduced, for I was but one of a legion of writers tramping round LA, we were all the same: poorly registered, our very images thieved from us — just another chapter in the tale of our immiseration. And in final confirmation of this Kazuo Ishiguro danced past, Netherfield Park tied to his head: he’d made it to Venice before me, together with the Bennet sisters.

I left the beach and floundered inland to where, at the intersection of Windward and Pacific avenues, a section of the old arcade was still standing, with its Corinthian columns striding along the sidewalk. I was so disoriented — so dispirited. If I’d had anything to write on I would’ve made a shill of my own, but instead the very ordinary chained man leant against a pillar and felt the whole city — from LAX to South Central, from South Central to Downtown, from Downtown to Hollywood, and from Hollywood to here — revolve about his head, a whirlpool of ’burbs and malls and office blocks and country clubs, through which cars drove and Metro trains clattered with absolute disregard.

Some scenes from Brad’s movie The Shrink were being shot on location nearby, so I headed on over to Dell Avenue with a view to hanging out for a while — the circumambulation might have failed, but not to visit a murder scene when I was in LA to find a killer seemed like a dereliction. This neighbourhood boasted the last-remaining canals, long troughs of stagnant water reflecting the façades of the self-conscious buildings. The vibe was arty, not artful — men who moisturized sat outside upmarket patisseries in the hot June sunlight, sipping cappuccinos with cashmere pullovers tied round their necks.

I spotted where the filming was going on from a long way off: there were maybe twenty or thirty trucks and SUVs parked along the kerb, and around a hundred techies wearing carpenter jeans and T-shirts merchandising Pacific Northwest grunge bands were milling about performing essential tasks. They were all elbows and earrings and had mouthfuls of crocodile clips but no time for me because time was at a $50-per-hour premium. So I pushed on through and discovered maybe fifty or so boys and girls armed with clipboards, and one of them fetched Brad, who swished his lips open in what I supposed was a welcoming smile — either that, or he might’ve been trying to dazzle me with his teeth.

‘There’s not a lot happening,’ he said, ‘but feel free to wander around — we’ll be doing a couple of takes… soonish.’

The house was a 1980s riff on the modernist Case Study aesthetic, all sliding glass doors, wide windows and external conversation pits. A portable generator burbled power on the ground floor, and this was piped up the steep concrete stairs to where cameras, lights and monitors were clustered about the small zone that was to be immortalized. It took over an hour for the eight producers, four directors, seven lighting cameramen, fifteen sound recordists and thirty-eight lighting technicians to be happy with the set-up. I found the process utterly absorbing, all the more so because in order to get the lighting and the camera angle exactly right I was asked to sit on one of the banquettes as a stand-in for Pete Postlethwaite, who was late on set.

When he eventually arrived he came skipping up the stairs looking tanned, relaxed, fit and debonair, with two or three achingly beautiful personal assistants tripping along behind. He barely glanced at me as Brad made a fragment of an introduction — ‘Pete, this is—’ — and skipped on to a zone of mirrors and clothes racks where twenty or thirty makeup artists and wardrobe assistants began prepping him.

I might have been offended, were it not that Postlethwaite’s arrival was immediately succeeded by a still greater commotion — a running back and forth of production crew, the collective making of manifold phone calls, the passing of orders up and down the chain of command, the mournful note of a bosun’s whistle. I hunkered down in a corner and made myself as small as possible; when I looked up again a mass of denim legs was shuffling along the corridor. I stood and peered over their shoulders.

The cynosure of all this activity was looking grimly at a tray being held in front of his overly familiar face, a tray containing a selection of watches — the straps gold, chrome, leather; the faces jewelled, plain or black. It was Kevin Spacey — I recognized him instantly, because in common with all movie stars he had that quality of being pre-known, his face not so much a visage as an a priori category waiting to be filled with a serviceable identity. In this case the limp pennant of a mohair tie, the clever prostheses that filled out his cheeks and neck, the still more skilled weeding out of his hair and the inspired tarnishing of his teeth confirmed that he was portraying Dr Zack Busner.

As Spacey’s hand ranged over the watches, picking one up and then dropping it with a ‘chink’ clearly audible because of the hushed reverence of the 250-strong crew, I was visited with an overpowering intimation of death: Death pressed me back against the rough concrete wall, Death rubbed my belly, Death circled my wrist with his bony finger and bony thumb and all the rottenness of this world oozed from the holes in his skull.

‘OK, rolling.’ Brad’s instruction was incredibly downbeat — no bullhorn, no gofers yelling, ‘Quiet on the set please!’ We couldn’t see the players from where we stood, only a monitor upon which the fuzzy black-and-white figures of Spacey and Postlethwaite confronted each other, seated either side of a concrete coffee table. A clapperboard was waved in front of the camera scrawled with: ‘107 #I. INT. DAY. Busner’s consulting room, Venice Beach’. Then:

BUSNER: How’s it going with Shiva Mukti?

CLIENT: OK, I guess.

BUSNER [provocatively]: He’s a neat guy, Shiva, but kinda dull.

CLIENT: He shot movies of me when I was, like, freaking — then played them back to me.

BUSNER: Did it help?

CLIENT [giggling]: Help… well, I guess with the movies — and a little bit with reality—

‘OK, that’s cool,’ Brad called, and the whole schmozzle ground to a halt. Spacey stood up and began rolling his shoulders, presumably to ease the tension of performance.

‘Where’s Philbin?’ Brad asked a nearby AD, ‘I need Philbin here right now — and tell him to bring the sides.’

‘Philbin!’ ‘Philbin!’ ‘Philbin!’ The name echoed away through the house and in a short while a fussed-looking writerly type — small, glasses, needlessly sensitive face — came hustling up clutching a handful of A5-sized yellow pages.

‘OK, Philbin.’ Brad took the sides from him and shuffled through them rapidly to find the right scene. Maybe seven or fifteen men and women in business suits materialized out of nowhere, and the entire group adjourned sideways through sliding doors on to a roof terrace, where they formed a promenade of couples, passing the yellow pages back and forth between them.

Eventually some sort of consensus was reached, because Brad and the blackleg writer came back with the relevant side and they bent over it together. Brad said, ‘Uh, yuh, uh, so… here, and here — I don’t like that — that doesn’t seem to me the kinda way he’d say that at all.’

‘It’s too, uh, teen?’ Philbin ventured tentatively.

‘Yeah!’ Brad was delighted. ‘You got it, Philbin, it’s too goddamn teen, now put some words in his mouth that have got more… more… ’

‘Gravitas?’

‘I’ll grab your fuckin’ ass if you don’t hustle, Philbin,’ Brad laughed, and the writer withdrew to a corner with the script editor and the script editor’s four assistants. Spacey was now doing neck rolls.

After a few minutes Philbin was back with the new sides and Brad okayed them and Spacey and Postlethwaite scanned them fast like the pros they were, and the makeup and wardrobe people stampeded out of shot and the clapperboard was waved in front of the camera again: ‘l07 #2. INT. DAY. Busner’s consulting room, Venice Beach’. Then:

BUSNER: How’s it going with Shiva Mukti?

CLIENT: OK, I guess.

BUSNER [provocatively]: He’s a cool guy, Shiva, but sorta dull.

CLIENT: He shot movies of me when I was, like, freaking — then played them back to me.

BUSNER: Did it help?

CLIENT [giggling]: Help… well, I guess with the movies — and a little bit with reality

There was no denying: it was an improvement — far more plausible. But I knew there’d be at least twenty or fifty more takes before they nailed the scene down and I had six or seven miles still to go. I didn’t want to disturb Brad while he was shooting, so I asked one of the gofers to tell him goodbye from me. She said she’d make sure Brad’s PA got the message: ‘He should know you’ve gone by early next week — midweek at the latest.’

I set off along Dell pursued by the sinister intimations I’d had when Spacey was sorting through the watches. Watches! Such a cliché — whether on wrists, mantelpieces, or melting in the corner of Dalí canvasses, timepieces were always just that. Still, what did I have to fear? I’d survived it all, and here were the cheery apartment blocks surrounding Marina del Rey, their balconies like the open draws of filing cabinets, their sunbathing tenants brown-papery in the afternoon sun.

I’d survived it all, and here were out-of-work hoofers break-dancing with placards advertising real estate brokers at the intersection of Washington and Lincoln boulevards — tossing them up in the air, then catching them behind their backs. There was a metaphor there, but I was too weary and footsore to reach for it; I only wanted to keep on going across the Ballona wetlands, where Leonardo DiCaprio had flown his Spruce Goose, and the Native American juju had repelled the developers and the toxic effluent from Hughes Aircraft had been pumped away and the egrets and the herons waded… I only wanted to keep going, but there was this awful tinnitus plaguing me — bass notes and bum notes, a sax riff that pierced me from ear to ear.

The sidewalk gave out and I went on, the fenders of SUVs shaving my cheek. I wanted to keep going — but out here in the middle of the marsh, where freshwater floods met saltwater tides and the wrack was Infinitis and Escalades and trucks and town cars, all mired in solid oil, I spied a figure tailing me from the front. How long had he been there? Had he been keeping tabs on me all the way from the Chateau Marmont, or from still further back along my circuit? He was in shirtsleeves, a jacket slung over his shoulder, and although I thought I recognized the set of his shoulders and the shuffle of his gait, every time I tried to catch up (the bass doubling time, the sax beginning to rock), he accelerated as well. I slowed down and he slowed down, I hopped and he hopped, I skipped and he skipped.

Tiring of this, I stopped — and he stopped. The tinnitus faded to a distant plink-honk. We stood twenty yards apart for a minute or so. I turned back to face Marina del Rey, then whipped back round — I’d caught him out: it was Mac Guffin. ‘So it’s you,’ I called. ‘Should I be afraid? I mean, when you turn up people generally get dead — even your clients.’

‘Especially my clients,’ he called back. ‘My clients have a near 100 per cent fatality rate.’

‘But you don’t let it get to you, do you, Mac?’

‘I try to maintain a regular disposition.’ He held his hands palm up, the laughter lines creased around his trustworthy brown eyes.

‘What’re you trying to tell me, Mac — that the worst has already happened?’

‘I figure someone had to, Will: you’re a dead man walking. You’ve been dead since Laurel Canyon.’

‘Was it the implants?’ I asked, kneading my breasts through the damp fabric of my T-shirt. ‘I mean, I know suicide rates are way higher for the women — the people who’ve had them.’

‘No.’ He shook his head pityingly. ‘It wasn’t the implants; it was that dumb-ass report you wrote. You didn’t think you could get away with saying those things about the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis without getting clipped, didya?’

‘Well, I dunno…’ I hung my head in the sweet breeze coming in off the wetlands.

‘Y’know what it was, Will, it was attention-seeking.’ Mac shook his head; he didn’t seem so happy today.

‘I… I just wanted to belong.’

‘Well, now you do belong: to the departed. And, while we’re at it, it’s 10.2 and 67 degrees.’

‘I had no idea it was that… big.’

‘No’ — again the weary shake — ‘you had no idea.’ And he turned his back on me and trudged on along the scrappy verge. Having no alternative, I followed my Charon, the swish-swash of the traffic fading imperceptibly into the moody horns and sucrose strings of a pickup orchestra fucking over The Isle of the Dead in Westwood.

Which faded out on the rise, where Mac halted and I turned back, hoping for a sweeping panorama of the coastline, but saw only a sign for La Vista Motel and the highway in its mid-ground of embankment and plantation, up above the blue screen and a few dabbles of cirrus. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve gotta leave you here, man; there’s a hiking trail along the bluff to the playa — kinda neat walk.’

‘Neat walk!’ I spat. ‘What is this crap?’

‘Y’know,’ Mac said, observing me with impatience and pity, ‘some people walk for fun, Will, for leisure — to have a good time.’

‘I… I don’t know what to say…’

‘You mean there’s no illusion of a core self that’s giving you direction?’

‘Ye-es, I s’pose so.

‘Well, what can I tell you,’ he said, sucking his moustache; ‘this is an amazingly complex piece of software — there’re bound to be some glitches. I mean to say, this has to be the first time anyone’s tried it.’

‘Tried what exactly?’

‘Kidnapping someone, forcing them to undergo systematic motion-capture filming and standard-deviation face tracking, then replacing them with a 3-D image of themselves.’

‘So that’s what was going on — I wondered. Boy’ — I shook my empty head — ‘they must have been laughing when I asked what my motivation was.’

‘Yeah, kinda ironic: they knew all about your motivation and I have’ta give it to you, Will, you were on to something, you got close, but there was no way they were going let you find out who killed the movies—’

‘So they killed me and replaced the actors playing me with an animation.’

‘You got it.’

That’s why I’d been feeling so exiguous, so thinly drawn — and that’s why my thoughts came to me unbidden, and I had no sense of smell, taste or… touch. I wondered how far back it all went — to the CGI riot in Hollywood or even before that? But there was no point in speculating, not when I’d paid someone to discover the truth for me. ‘Tell me, Mac.’ As I spoke, I expertly rolled a cigarette with one hand, struck a non-safety match on my thumbnail and lit it — now that I was a simulacrum of myself cliché came unbidden, and smoking was a stylish breeze. ‘If I’m a 3-D image of myself, then what exactly am I being projected on to? I mean, what’s all this stuff, is it LA or just a blue screen?’

Pity gave way to impatience as Mac rolled down his sleeves and fastened his cuffs. The dirty work had been done. ‘I’m a detective,’ he snapped; ‘not a fucking metaphysician. You want answers to that kinda appearance/reality stuff, go ask the Wachowskis.’

That was it: no farewell, no bear hug; he just turned and strolled away from me, the happy detective out for a Sunday afternoon promenade. While somewhere out in the Valley, in a darkened home studio, an overweight claustrophobic, headphones clamped on his head, crunching Cheerios and messing about with a synthesizer, turned the volume back up on the Rachmaninschmaltz.

Having nothing else to do, I went on. Isn’t this what we do: go on, no matter how depersonalized and useless we feel, no matter how lost in our own lives and confused about our role in the universal — if any? I went on past the Westchester golf course and saw the first sharks’ fins cutting through the wavy air on the far side of the savage fences. I went on to the junction with Sepulveda and made a right, and then a right again for the terminal. I went on through the curtains of light falling from between the decks of the overpasses, and I went on past the birches in their triangular concrete pots and the benches shaped like aerofoils — fly away, you writing bums! I went on until my rubber soles married with the treads of the escalator and carried me up to departures, and I went on through security and groped my way towards the Air France lounge.

Sitting in there, I looked about me at the other whey-faced travellers contemplating the imminent hurl skywards. They did their best, rattling the sections of that Sunday’s LA Times, making last-minute phone calls, fiddling in their laptops — but it was hard. The light in the lounge was yellowing, like a fishtank that hasn’t been cleaned, and the sounds were all muted except for Lionel Ritchie singing ‘All Night Long’ — which was far too loud. And I thought, well, I may be dead, but who’s to say everyone else isn’t as well?

So I did my best to conform and called Stevie Rosenbloom to say goodbye — and got Ellen DeGeneres: ‘That’s you gone, is it?’ she said, and I could only mewl:

‘You knew, didn’t you?’

‘I kinda did,’ she admitted, ‘although I wasn’t in on the whole thing, I mean it was like the tag line for the movie, “The Strangest Vengeance Ever Planned’.’

‘What movie?’

‘Touch of Evil.’

I broke the connection without saying goodbye. Of course! And that’s why when I reached the colonnade in Venice I had felt so peculiar. I had never circumambulated Los Angeles at all, only remained standing exactly where Welles had executed his famously circuitous tracking shot while the entire city walked around me.

The Heathrow flight was called and I staggered towards it. Then we were taxiing and then we were taking off, accelerating along the timeline of the Sierra as it described civilization’s boom and bust, and then the plane lifted off from the runway of LAX and began almost immediately to bank round over the ocean, bumpily gaining altitude. I looked back and below to see enormous cracks snaking across the Los Angeles Basin, some following the boulevards, others cutting through the freeways. I watched, bored, as the Baldwin Hills slid into Crenshaw and Hollywood tumbled down into the Wilshire corridor. The Downtown towers bowed, then curtseyed, then disappeared in boiling clouds of dust, the Sierra itself humped up into a vast breaker of earth, lava and fire that came surging down, annihilating all of Pasadena and East LA in a matter of seconds.

The final thing I saw before the first clouds began flickering by was the dome of the Shrine Auditorium standing proud of the maelstrom, the crescent atop its elegant spire glinting in the rays of twilight’s last gleaming.

12. Will Hay and the Fat Boy

‘And that’s what happens to you when you don’t take your medication,’ Shiva Mukti said in the matter-of-fact way psychiatrists affect in order to cope with the extremities of mental delusion.

We sat and stared for a while, first at the pots and packets of my medications, which he had lined up on the desk — the Seroxat, Dutonin and Carbamazepin — then at the near-obsolete VDU monitor with its mushroom plastic casing that sat whirring at a queer angle on the fake wood veneer of a refectory table.

‘Humph.’ I was not to be persuaded so easily. ‘You say that, but perhaps that’s what happens to entire civilizations when they don’t take their medication.’

‘Listen,’ Mukti said, solicitous, ‘I understand that you may feel a little… put out.’

‘Put out! Of course I’m put out — wouldn’t you be if you discovered it had all been a videotape that your psychiatrist had made of you? And such lousy production values as well.’ I drummed the table with my quick-bitten fingertips and longed for a cigarette.

‘You have to appreciate, don’t you, that these symptoms are potentially very dangerous: the paranoia, the visual and auditory hallucinations—’

‘Next you’ll be telling me that everyone I meet isn’t played by a well-known screen actor!’

He took a ballpoint pen from his jacket pocket and began to draw a series of boxes on the sheet of paper next to my medication. What was this, the beginnings of a storyboard?

‘No, that’s right — they aren’t actors, any more than you are. Capgras and Fregoli’s delusions, these are well described in the literature: the impersonation of people known to the, ah, patient — either by the famous, or by doubles. I admit, you seem to be experiencing a rather unusual combination of both, but, as Dr Busner has remarked, yours is an especially ebullient and productive schizothymia.’

‘You don’t understand, do you?’ I countered. ‘I like my delusions. They’re a form of entertainment for me — what the hell else is there to amuse me any more, now that film is dead?’

This seemed to stymie Mukti and he left off his doodling to examine me more intently through his antiquated pince-nez. Really, it was a ludicrous bit of miscasting: the white skin, the fluting voice, the thinning hair and the hoary old comic delivery — still, I was happy with it if it kept the credits sequence short. What I was less happy with was my trousers, which were painfully tight. Holding Mukti’s gaze, I surreptitiously loosened my belt — it wouldn’t be good if he realized that I had realized that he was being played by Will Hay.