Wetbones

2

Los Angeles, a Day Earlier

Prentice drove the rented Tercel down Sunset to Highland, made his way to Barham, bypassing the freeway where sunlight lanced off the thick metallic flow of traffic. He followed the curving road through the hills, past condos and ranch homes, and down into Burbank. His eyes burned as he drove into the valley. The palm trees looked gray as dead skin here.

Arthwright had a development deal with Sunrise Studios and they gave him a little bungalow office on the old studio lot. Sunrise had bought the lot from MGM; somebody else had recently bought Sunrise, Prentice had forgotten who. A soft drink company or an oil company. Or possibly a soft drink company owned by an oil company which was maybe owned by a plastics conglomerate. The Security guard at the gate's little Checkpoint Charlie – a black guy in cop-style mirrored sunglasses – scanned a clipboard list to be sure Prentice really did have an appointment with Arthwright, then directed him to Parking Area F.

"F for full," Prentice muttered, looking at the rows of Porsches and Jags. There was only one empty space, where the tarmac was stenciled LOU KENSON. The erstwhile star had lost his deal with Sunrise and was now on the actor's Out List. Kenson could be relied on not to show up to claim his parking place and Prentice was on the verge of being late. He took Kenson's place, but with a twinge: thinking maybe it was bad luck

You could be as rational as a mathematician, but working the film industry you eventually came to believe in good and bad luck.

Prentice got out of the car and looked around. The studio looked like a series of overlarge warehouses and overgrown barns with oversized doors. The sunwashed buildings were old, mostly dull green, their paint peeling. On the other side of the lot, just visible between the interior-shoot buildings, there were a few generic tenement-facades, false fronts used for shooting generic inner-city street scenes in generic cop movies.

Prentice glanced at his watch, hurried out onto the little studio road. He found Building E and Zack Arthwright's office.

Arthwright could have had a spacious suite in the big mirrorglass skyscraper that Sunrise had built adjacent to the old studio, but he affected the air of a Colden Era traditionalist – 'Arthwright Pictures' was printed on the door – and he stuck to the old-fashioned office bungalows with their wonky air conditioners and cracked green walls.

This particular air conditioner was working too well, and noisily, thrumming rheumily to itself from a corner window behind a secretary who probably no longer heard it. The room was almost refrigerator cold, making Prentice think of the morgue. Amy in the file drawer. He'd worked hard at not thinking about that and he'd almost succeeded for half an hour.

Arthwright's secretary was busty but otherwise scissor-thin; gold mascara around eyes glamoured by blue-tinted contact-lenses.

She had a gold streak in her feathered blue black hair and a New Age crystal on a gold chain around her slender neck.

"Hi, I'm Tom Prentice…"

She glanced up from her work station with a brief but professionally sunny smile. "Go right on in, Tom, he's expecting you."

Tom, she said, though she'd never met him before. Fake intimacy. Welcome back to Hollywood.

Arthwright was, of course, using a speaker phone. He sat tilted back in a swivel chair with his faded black cowboy boots on his antique, leather inset desk, his brown leather suit jacket buttoned up in the excessive air conditioning. His long, curly brown hair was tied with rawhide strips into a small ponytail; his sharp-featured boyish face didn't tan very well, so his nose and cheeks were always a little burned. Lines at the corners of his eyes, and the beginning of a double chin, told the truth: he was no more the enfant terrible journalists had made him out to be just a few years before. But he was hot with a string of hits, taking first and third place in the Summer Box Office, rentals going strong on the new release. Everyone wanted into see him, everyone had a pitch for him, and Buddy probably had to use up a favour to get Prentice the meeting.

Prentice felt like he had been smuggled in, like a spy. The Spy Who Came In From The Out List, he thought.

Arthwright winked, gestured at a chair. Prentice sat stiffly, trying not to be obvious about wiping his damp palms on his jeans.

It was wrong to be here.

"If your client doesn't want to deal, he doesn't want to deal," Arthwright was telling the phone, not missing a beat. "I'm not going to give him control. Whenever I give up creative control the damn thing just doesn't work. He can have an extra fifty out front. That's the best I can do."

Prentice was embarrassed. Made to wait out a negotiation carried on in front of him as if he weren't there. But in fact part of it was probably Arthwright flashing power at Prentice. It didn't matter that Prentice was a relative nonentity. The demonstration would be something Arthwright did compulsively.

Prentice tried to look interested in the office decorations. Framed movie posters on the walls, going back fifteen years to some of Arthwright's earliest: The Hellmakers, an old Lou Kenson western vehicle; The Grafters, the expose that had given Arthwright a veneer of respectability; Warm Knife, his mega hit thriller. The teaser read: Keep the knife under the pillow. It'll be warmer that way…

Prentice stared at the poster for Warm Knife. Thinking: We're a sick bunch of flickers, all of us.

"Creative control stays right here," Arthwright was telling the speaker phone. Turned sideways from Prentice, looking as if he were talking to the air; like Jimmy Stewart talking to Harvey. "If I need to, I can get Hagerstein. She's damn good."

Arthwright took his long legs down and spun his swivel chair around once, in an absently playful way, as he waited for the ultimatum to sink in.

"Zack, get real" A crackly female voice on the speaker phone. That'd be Doll Bechtman, Jeff Teitelbaum's agent. Prentice and Jeff had gone to NYU

Film School together; had chased girls and made pretentious 16 millimeter student films together. Prentice decided he was going to have to look Jeff up.

Evidently Arthwright was arguing with Doll Bechtman about Jeff. Prentice had met Doll once; a middle-aged woman with a look like Betty Crocker and a style like Roy Cohn. A barracuda, Jeff called her gleefully. The tougher she was, the better he liked it. It appeared she'd met her match in Arthwright. But she kept on: "I'm telling you, Jeff has good instincts. This Hagerstein woman cannot write an action picture. It'd be a joke."

Jeff, Prentice mused. Arthwright was fucking Jeff Teitelbaum out of creative control on a movie? So what else was new.

'Then tell Jeff to compromise a little, work with us, Doll. Look, I got someone here. You talk to Jeff."

"I'll get back."

"Sure, okay."

Arthwright swivelled to the phone and hit the disconnect. He cocked his head impishly, grinned at Prentice, and said, "Tom. Long time no see."

"Yeah. I've been holing up in New York." Prentice had only met Arthwright once, briefly. Arthwright probably didn't really remember the occasion.

Prentice toyed with the idea of asking what Sunrise had cooking with Jeff. But, even though he was undoubtedly supposed to hear Arthwright throwing his weight around on the phone negotiation, he wasn't really supposed to listen to the details. He didn't need to ask, anyway, when he thought, about it. Arthwright was co-producing A Cop Named Dagger II for Sunrise; Jeff had conceived and written the first A Cop Named Dagger picture. Chances were, he was supposed to do the screenplay again but was holding out for creative control. Something few writers got till they became a "hyphenate" – writer-director, a writer-producer. Usually he had to be a Player, a guy who could command points of the gross profits. Jeff wasn't there yet.

Why the hell did Jeff want to hold out for creative control over an action picture? But come to think of it, Jeff thought action pictures could be high art.

Arthwright checked out his watch, and said, "Glad to see you back in town. What have you got for me?"

Arthwright wanted the pitch now. It was do or die. "What I've got is…" Prentice spread his hands – and then stepped off the cliff into space. "… a comedy with a strong drama backbone, a twist on buddy pictures." He could see Arthwright's eyes glazing already. Another buddy picture. Prentice went on hurriedly, "A lady cop walks a beat in San Francisco. She walks it alone, in a tough neighbourhood. One day she gets a new partner – a rookie, a kid who ignores her eight years on the force and thinks he's hot shit, compared to her, because she's a woman and he can't take a woman seriously as a street cop. The humour'll come naturally. She's going to learn he's not the asshole he seems, deep down; he's going to learn she's a good cop and that he's got a lot to learn."

It sounded stupid to Prentice in his own ears, just now. It sounded vague and fatuous.

"Uh huh." Arthwright managed to seem half interested. "Might be a little predictable. Familiar."

Come on, you son of a bitch, Prentice thought. All your fucking movies are predictable. Out loud he said, "It's a question of how it'll be carried off. They're on foot, they're part of the neighbourhood, and walking a beat is different to being in a cruiser, gives them a feeling of family with the people' they protect. And there'll be some plot twists. I've got an outline right now, hasn't got all the plot points but it's basically there. I see it as having the appeal of Alien Nation – only it's funnier, and it's men and women. Men and women are alien to one another when they're thrust into this kind of situation. We play it for laughs." Alien Nation? A pretty dumb comparison. Get your shit together, Prentice!

Prentice waited. He'd shot his wad, he decided.

After a moment of staring glaze-eyed at a Grammy on a shelf of otherwise mostly minor awards – he'd started out in record production – Arthwright nodded sharply, but contradicted the nod by saying, " Broken Windows didn't work out too well. That was a cop thing too. Might be hard for me to sell you after that."

Meaning sell him to the Studio. Convince them to do it. Which was bullshit. Arthwright could do what he wanted, now, if he really wanted to do it.

What had he said? A cop thing too. Like A Cop Named Dagger, like Broken Windows. Cop Things, everything seemed to be Cop Things.

" Broken Windows was a straight ahead drama," Prentice pointed out, hoping he didn't sound desperate. "Not my forte. I shouldn't have tried it. I can't pull it off without comedy in there too. That's where I shine. I had two hits." And a flop, and one so-so. "And you might point out to the studio that Broken Windows wasn't really a cop thing. It was about burglars, it was mostly from their side, so it was a problem of antiheroes. This wouldn't have that problem."

His back was sticking to his shirt with sweat. When you had to apologize and explain, backing and filling, it wasn't going to fly. Shit.

Arthwright said, "Okay, well, have Buddy messenger the outline over to me and I'll take a look. Has this baby got a name or are you just calling it Junior?"

Prentice laughed nervously. "I'm calling it Tenderloin Seven right now. It's set in San Francisco."

'You're from San Francisco originally, aren't you?" Arthwright asked abstractedly, standing. Standing up was a way of telling him he was expected to leave without actually having to say it.

They shook hands. Prentice said, "I grew up in San Francisco. How'd you know I was from there?"

"The 49ers shirt might have done it," Arthwright said, letting his hand drop, grinning.

"Oh yeah. I forgot to change back to the Clark Kent suit."

Arthwright faked a chuckle. He was checking his calendar, as he added, half to himself, "And Amy mentioned it."

Prentice stared. "Amy? My wife Amy?"

"Uh huh. I -" Arthwright looked up at Prentice blankly. Hesitation. Just a fraction of a second. Arthwright hadn't meant to bring this up, apparently. "She was out at a party in Malibu. Judy Denver's place. I talked to Amy a little. She had a high opinion of you. She was a sweet girl."

So Buddy had told Arthwright that Amy had died. Unless he'd heard it somewhere else.

Had he got the appointment out of charity, because of Amy's death? Christ. I'm climbing on Amy's body.

And Amy had met Arthwright. And Arthwright was working with Jeff. The world wasn't just small, it was cramped.

''Yeah. Yeah, she was… a sweet girl," Prentice managed.

"Yes. Well. I've got a late lunch…"

"Right. I'll ask Buddy to get that outline to you. Take it easy."

"Whenever I can. Talk to you later, Tom."

Prentice hurried out, as Arthwright left instructions with his secretary.

Outside, the day seemed brutally warm after the over zealous air conditioning. But he strolled round a little, thinking. Suppose the deal with Arthwright didn't come off? What then? Arthwright had been discussing Jeff Teitelbaum. By God, Jeff might just be able to help him.

Prentice paused to frown up at one of the tenement facades. All the sets looked familiar – but this one seemed to jump out at him for recognition. Maybe it had been used for A Cop Named Dagger. Jeff had sent Prentice a polaroid, a shot of Jeff posing on the set of Dagger, peeking around the edge of one of the false fronts; the fake bricks on the front were spraypainted with equally fake graffiti. But the polaroid's angle revealed the raw-wood supports holding up the false fronts from behind, and in the picture Jeff was crouched in the shadows, peering around from the real world into the make-believe world, leering at the female lead, Zena Holdbridge.

A couple of months earlier Jeff had sent Prentice a postcard from Maui. Jeff was the kind of guy who sent you post cards from Hawaii of topless girls stretching out in the sand, under a printed caption that read, Great View From My Hotel! Jeff getting off on the baldfaced kitsch of it all.

The sun was beating on the back of Prentice's neck as he made his way back to Lou Kenson's parking place. By the time Prentice reached the car he had the start of a good, strong headache. Inside, the car was a vinyl-reeking cauldron of heat from having baked in the sun, trickling an instant sweat down Prentice's back.

"Fuck it, I'm gonna punch another hole in the ozone layer," Prentice murmured, turning on the air conditioning.

Driving out of the studio, Prentice tried to evaluate the meeting and came to exactly no conclusion. Arthwright hadn't jumped for it, but that didn't mean it wouldn't go anyplace. He'd been sort of encouraging – but as people said at WCA parties, Hollywood was a place where you could die of encouragement.

As usual, after a meeting in the Industry, Prentice had no idea where he stood, at all.

Los Angeles County Juvenile Detention Facility

Cutting himself worked best. That's what Mitch had found out that morning.

It wasn't a store-bought knife. It was a shiv made out of a shiny metal piece torn from the frame around a steel mirror, some alloy of tin and aluminium maybe. The mirror was metal instead of glass to keep them from breaking it, but working at the frame, day after day, Mitch's room-mate, Lonny, had bent the frame section, creaking it back and forth, till finally it snapped off diagonally. Making two blade-shaped pieces. Lonny'd sharpened them on a rough piece of iron pipe in the bathroom fixtures; kept one shiv, gave Mitch the other, for protection. The. base of each blade was wrapped in multiple thicknesses of torn towels to make a knife grip.

Mitch was in Juvie Hall, sitting on the floor, in the room he shared with Lonny. He was in for possession of one little vial of hubba. Crack cocaine. He was alone in the room; Lonny was out in the exercise yard. Their room looked like a small dormitory unit, with two-tone walls, orange brown near the bottom and light orange above shoulder level. Tube lights in unbreakable ceiling fixtures. Thick metal mesh over the window. Chickenwire-glass observation window centred in the door. The door was closed and Mitch was on the linoleum floor just to one side of it where they couldn't see him if they just glanced through. They'd think he was out playing basketball with the others.

Maybe he should have gone down the hall to the bathroom to do this because of the blood. Drip it in the toilet. But he couldn't. He had to do it now. He dug the crude knife deeper into the meat of his upper arm. It didn't hurt at all. He could feel their happiness, and the sweetness, the reward syrup, in his groin and spine and head.

Blood runnelled down his arm and pattered onto the floor. It wasn't a knife, to him, it was a probe; a sensor.

Mitch Teitelbaum was seventeen, tall and lean like his brother Jeff; with quick, dark eyes like Jeff but without Jeffs vulturine face. His nose was smaller and his cheekbones flatter. Jeff had a small beard; Mitch had tried to grow a mustache, but what came out was about twelve long, curly black hairs with nothing in between them. "Looks like dog whiskers," Eurydice had said, so he'd shaved it off. He'd shaved it off about two days before he met the More Man and he wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd met the More Man.

Six weeks? Two months? Since, anyway, a day after the last time he'd seen Jeff. Long time since he'd seen Jeff. Long time since he'd seen Eurydice and her brother, Orpheus, too. She had a little sister named from another myth, Aphrodite, maybe one of the ugliest little girls he had ever seen. But Eurydice, she was the prettiest girl he knew personally, and sexy – and when a black girl is sexy, Jeff used to say, she was sexier than a sexy white girl, and Eurydice could make you breathe hard just by shifting her weight from one foot to the other. And he'd gotten some off her, too, that was the unbelievable thing. When the More Man was done he was going to have to go and find her. She'd been real patient with him. "Everybody got to have a first time," she'd said.

His thoughts drifted on a slow current of the head syrup, teetering and turning like the wax cups he and Jeff used to launch on the culvert-wash that was the so-called "Los Angeles River". The head syrup was not a drug. It was just his name for a feeling. He had tried to tell Lonny about it, and Lonny had thought it was a drug because the words "head syrup" sounded like it. But no: it wasn't, no way. It was more like a radio station.

He had peeled off his Iron Maiden t-shirt – it lay beside him with the iron-masked face of the metal band's symbol all wrinkled up and horribly distorted with its crumpling. He stared at it as he began on his left pectoral. He thought he saw the face on the t-shirt cock an eye at him and move its mouth like it was giggling. After a minute he looked back at his chest, watching as he methodically dug the knife into himself, observing as coolly as a man shaving or squeezing a pimple, that kind of half focus and meditative distance. All the while plowing the ragged blade-edge into the soft white skin, wishing he'd built himself up more so there was more muscle to get into. Push, push, the skin and muscle and fat tissue of his pectoral resisting the blade, it was like trying to cut open a package that was sealed in heavy plastic, the stuff stretching under your letter opener. Push. Punch. It broke through, the blade jabbing out under his nipple, red blood arcing and – for a moment he felt some pain.

Oh, shit, how did I get here and what am I doing?

But then the head syrup came back, the pain vanished, and he relaxed. Jerked the blade loose, and jabbed it through his jeans, deep into the meat of his skinny thigh.

He was not on drugs. He was not insane. He felt no pain at all.

Culver City, Los Angeles

"I haven't seen ol' Mitch for, oh, six or seven weeks," Jeff said, around a mouthful of Doritos.

Tom Prentice and Jeff Teitelbaum were watching the Dodgers get their asses kicked by the San Diego Padres. They were sitting on a sofa-futon in Jeff's second story apartment, near the open French doors onto the balcony. The room smelled like stale cigar smoke; Jeff had trotted out the cigars when Prentice showed up. Jeff liked smoking cigars with his friends because it was playing at "Guy Stuff." Guy Stuff was a joke and very serious with Jeff, both.

In the background were laughing squeals and taunts from the swimmers in the complex's swimming pool; the sounds of splashing, a teasing underscent of chlorine. It was a high security "singles" apartment complex, with security guards at the gate and TV cameras and its own hot tub spa and weight room and sauna and game room.

Jeff's living room was undecorated except for a Norman Rockwell print of a small, rosy-cheeked boy with a fishing pole proudly holding up a string full of fish, only Jeff had cut out small men's magazine photos of naked girls and pasted them on over the fish: a small boy proudly holding up a string of naked girls. On TV, a couple of baseball players drank Budweisers with Phil Collins, and then the game came back on. Fernando was on the mound, but his arm was cold today: Martinez was up to bat and whack, he drove a line drive out past third base for the eighth goddamn Padres run of the game and it was only the top of the fourth inning. Prentice was doing his best to space out completely on sports and Tecate beer, because it was the way he got out of his head. Amy was in his head, and it was too crowded in there for both of them.

He didn't want to hear about Mitch, either. Jeff's little brother, nine years younger, always screwing up. Jeff's parents divorced when Jeff was ten and Mitch was one, and Jeff had gone to live with his dad, who worked for the NRA lobbying against gun control, and Mitch had gone to live with his mom, who was "a whiner," Jeff said, "and a sponge." Prentice had never heard Jeff say anything good about her. She'd been the one to leave; maybe Jeff was forever mad at her for abandoning him when he was ten.

Jeff hadn't seen Mitch for years, because his parents hated each other and his mom ducked out on the visitation rights. Then Mitch turned up at Jeff's door, two years ago, run away from their mom's new boyfriend. "A real asshole" was the extent of his report on the guy. So Mitch had moved in with Jeff, and Jeff had taken care of him through various traumas, most of them drug-related, for two years, "Trying to straighten the kid's head out", and then, bingo, he'd disappeared. Phoning to New York, Jeff bent Prentice's ear endlessly about Mitch; Prentice had heard all the Mitch stories. He didn't feel like hearing any more, especially now when he was trying to think about nothing but baseball. The stately jumble, the clunky Zen of baseball.

It wasn't working very well. He couldn't keep his mind on the game. He was remembering the first time he met Amy. The experience summed her up…

He was in a New York cafe on a wet October day, lunching with Gloria Zickurian, a book illustrator. Cabs the same yellow as adult bookstores rippled as they passed the rain-streaked window. Prentice and Gloria drank cafe lattes and ate salads and cheese croissants. It was a date, more or less. More for Gloria, Prentice thought, and less for him. Gloria was pretty in a wistful, slightly weak-chinned way. She had big, dark eyes and curly black hair allowed to tousle wispily around her red beret. She wore a rust-coloured, gypsyish dress with a gathered bodice that displayed her cleavage in a way that made him think of bread dough.

She was proud of the little cafe she'd picked on Central Park west, a yuppie coffee shop with Santa Fe style decor, specializing in salads, or "salades" as the menu had it, and she talked of discovering it until Prentice dutifully said, "Yeah, it's a great little place." Then she launched into an interminable complaint about having been asked to illustrate a line of science fiction books, a field she knew nothing about, resulting in her attendance at science fiction conventions, "where a lot of married fat guys with homemade swords and wide belts and medieval hats" made clumsy passes at her. She bitched about the abysmal taste in cover art at the paperback house she was working for. She droned a bit, when she was nervous, nasally stretching out the syllables; afraid of gaps in the conversation. The gaps, Prentice thought, were his favourite part, at this point.

That's when Amy slammed through the cafe doors, wearing a Walkman and the only miniskirted raincoat Prentice had seen this side of 1968. Amy was willowy, with a kind of blueblood prettiness that would only have been blurred by makeup. Her hair, hennaed cedar-red in those days, was pinned up so you could see the sweep of her long neck. Her earrings were little onyx bats.

Amy paused just inside the doorway, looking around with quick movements of her head, taking her time putting the Walkman in her pocket, closing her umbrella, letting everyone get a good look at the sweep of long legs in their dark purple pantyhose.

Spotting Amy, Gloria stiffened, looking as if she wanted to bolt, then sagged with a kind of polite despair when Amy spotted her and made a bee-line for the table. "Glorie-uh!" Amy chirruped, going on with machine gun rapidity, "I knew you'd be in one of these grotty places, where everything costs at least two dollars too much. Gloria, I have great news."

"This," Gloria said wearily to Prentice, "is my roommate Amy Eisenberg. Amy, this is Tom Prentice."

"God it took you long enough to introduce me, ooh he's a big one isn't he, I didn't think you liked big ones, big men I mean, I mean big physique"

Gloria stammered, "Amy – did you, uh, need something?"

Amy kept her eyes on Prentice as she talked, looking him up and down. He smiled as neutrally as he could. Her wet umbrella was leaning against his chair, dripping on his pants leg. "Your address book, sweetie. I need Polly Gebhart's phone number, I lost it -"

Gloria snatched up her purse, yanked it open, muttering, "Why don't you get an address book and organize yourself, Amy?"

Amy took the address book. "I going to, I have to now, that's my news, – there's a producer who's hot for me, for me as an actor I mean -" She made a conscious policy of pretending to stumble over sexual innuendoes, Prentice later learned. "- and he's having me do a call-back, it's for an off-Broadway show, a really happening show that half of Hollywood is trying to get the rights to -" She turned abruptly to Prentice, as if thunderstruck. Looking at Prentice but speaking to Gloria. "Hey is this that screenwriter you told me about that you were -?"

"I'm only barely a screenwriter," Prentice said modestly. A kind of pseudo modesty that was really a way of confirming his status. "Just one credit." He'd just had his first script produced, Fourth Base. First script? First one he sold. Fifth one he wrote.

"Amy, if you've got what you need," Gloria said, brightly "we -"

"Don't you listen to her," Amy said to Prentice, "it's her quaint way of asking me to join you. But only for a minute." She pulled a chair from the next table, and sat herself on it with the air of a guest on a talk show who's just been asked to sit and tell the host what her newest project is. "This is my first real break, this part in Sweet Fire, but I did that thing at Summer Stock with Julie Christie, you remember that, Gloria?" Gloria, who had sullenly lit a cigarette – she was one of those people who saved smoking for expressing anger – nodded briskly and blew smoke at the window. A waitress caught Gloria's eye and shook her head, and Gloria stabbed the cigarette out in her coffee cup. Amy hadn't waited for Gloria's answer. She went breathlessly on, "- And I think the Connecticut gig got me this job because Ervin – Ervin's my agent, Tom – Ervin got this producer a videotape of me working with Julie Christie, who played my mother… Maybe I'll just have a capuccino." She grabbed the waitress's apron as the woman sped by, smiled sweetly into the glare this got her, and said, "Could I have a capuccino with lots of chocolate sprinkles? I'd be infinitely grateful. Thanks."

Gloria groaned and didn't bother to muffle it. Prentice shrugged and winked conspiratorially at her, as if to say, We'll wait her out and then we'll get back to our lunch.

But Amy stayed for an hour, giving a sort of informal resume of her bit parts and commercial walkons and her part-time gig as a back-up singer in a rock band (surprising Prentice by mentioning that she played the accordion with them, too). She was too amusing to be tedious, but then Prentice's viewpoint on that might have been muddled by the sheer erotic magnetism Amy gave off. She could be quite funny, too, and despite everything, he was glad she'd showed up.

Finally Gloria had to go to a meeting with the director of an art department. Prentice paid the check and they put on their coats; Prentice opening his mouth to offer Gloria a drop-off from his taxi, when Amy said, as if just thinking of it, "Tom, I have to walk through Central Park to go to my agent's office and – and I'm kind of scared -"

"You scared you might hurt someone?" Gloria said, with savage sarcasm. "Amy, it's broad daylight, Central Park is perfectly safe now."

"It's never safe, don't give me that. I thought if Tom wanted to walk me -"

''We could drop you off in the cab," Prentice said. "It's too rainy to walk."

That wasn't the graceful way out after all, because once they were in the cab Amy and Gloria jockeyed to see who would get dropped off first. Gloria had to give in: her office was on this side of the park.

When she got out of the cab, she slammed the door. "Gloria takes life too seriously," Amy said, and laughed.

By the time Prentice had dropped her off at her agent's building, he found he'd asked her to go to a jazz club with him that night. And he'd begun to suspect that she was loaded on something.

When he picked her up to take her to the club, she offered him some of the drug. She called it "X", which was short for Ecstasy, also called MDMA, a neurotoxin variant on speed that produced animated friendliness in people. In Amy it only made her more the way she already was when she was in her hypomanic stage.

Amy was manic depressive. She preferred the term "Bipolar". Something the hospital in Culver City had completely failed to diagnose.

Now, remembering that wet day in New York, and her astonishment the same night when he'd told her he didn't take drugs and didn't want any X, he thought: Yeah, it was probably drugs. Some other drug, like Buddy said, probably crack, methamphetamine, or some new designer drug that ate her up. Left a mummy in a file drawer.

But there was something else, too. Some one. Who gave her a Gold Card and two hundred dollars. She hadn't been working, he knew that for a fact. Someone. Some son of a bitch. Some bastard.

Probably some goddamn producer.

LA. County Juvenile Detention

Lonny went yelling for' the supervisors, the first time he ever went to them for anything, trying not to cry and trying not to be sick, bringing them back to the room, swearing at them for their slowness. Showing them Mitch.

Mitch was just sitting there. Sitting awkwardly, legs out-thrust like a baby, his face infant-innocent: a baby sitting in a pool of blood. Red strings hanging out of the ragged openings in his left arm – pieces of muscle. Leg sawn open and in one place you could see the bone. Mitch shaking and still working at himself, the knife carving his right thigh, working its way up, getting close to his groin. Mitch smiling distantly, as his eyes went in and out of focus, pupils widening and shrinking, widening and shrinking. And then he saw Lonny and the guard and his connection was broken and he stopped cutting himself, and said, "Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh fuck it's starting to hurt. Oh no."

But he didn't take the knife out of the wound.

Culver City, Los Angeles

"God Dammit did you see that!" Jeff shrieked, making Prentice jump half out of his seat. "He had it, he HAD the motherfucking ball and he DROPPED it!"

Prentice slumped back in his chair, and cracked another beer. "Yeah. He probably feels bad 'cause he can hear you at Dodger Stadium, too, Jeff."

Had the ball and he dropped it. It was beginning to sink in to Prentice: he blamed himself for Amy's death. He'd dropped the ball.

He'd' known the relationship was going to go somewhere the third time he dated her. The first date had been convulsively sexual; the second time a bit rocky, both of them defensive, unsure, her manic jitteriness making it worse.

After the second date, parting with a brittle politeness, Prentice didn't think they'd see each other again. He'd told her she was childish to talk about herself all the time; she'd said his conversation was nothing but jokes, and she had to talk about something real.

But two days later she surprised him, again, by inviting him over for dinner. Very sweetly. Another mood swing maybe. Get into a relationship with a girl prone to wild mood swings and you were, to paraphrase President Bush, in deep doo-doo.

But he went. She was a good cook, though afterwards her kitchen looked like hurricane wreckage. And she left the mess for two days. The stir fry was great, her raspberry mousse was exquisite, but before he'd quite finished it she pushed the little table aside, strode across to him, and straddled his lap facing him. Reached down for his zipper. He could taste mousse and brandy on her tongue. She wasn't wearing panties.

The first time they made love, that particular night, was a prolonged spasm, starting on the chair and ending on the rug. But when it happened again, in bed, it began languorously, and veered into an ecstatic mutual searching. He quickly learned to maintain a steady, pistonlike rhythm, once he was inside her, to counterbalance her bucking and thrashings. It was exactly what she needed, his rigid organ the axle for her wild torquing, and it brought them to that rare confluence of desire, mutual orgasm. In the moment of orgasm, the timing was right: they both flung their emotional doors open; they opened their eyes and saw one another. Knew fleetingly that until that moment, their skilled and very modern sexuality had been only a way of using.

Suddenly, all the pretenses were dropped, and isolation was gone, and they embraced for the first time: the first time it was real.

"Jesus Christ," he breathed, amazed at the intensity of his feeling.

After that, she didn't have to talk about herself, her outsized ambitions, the people who'd "validated" her. At least, not so much. They could sit quietly in the windowseat, holding hands, talking sometimes and sometimes not. Watching people on the street. Both of them perfectly happy. And he'd thought: Finally. I can stay with this one.

For twelve years, since he began dating at eighteen, he'd never had less than two girlfriends at once. It was a constant juggling act. And he was constantly on the look-out for more pins to juggle. Knowing all the time the performance was commanded by some undefined insecurity. Completely unable to fight it; and maybe having too much fun to want to fight it.

But, now and then, he felt the lack, too. No commitment meant no real closeness.

Amy's sheer intensity had overwhelmed his insulation. Maybe something more: some quality of underlying familiarity about her, as if she were someone he'd always known. It made him feel close to her at the roots of his personality.

And it felt good that she needed him deeply. He was a writer, a humourist, a freelancer, something of a rake, but compared to Amy he was as stable as the Rock of Gibralter.

It took time, though. The morning after that third date, Amy was resoundingly depressed. "It's not you," she said, huddled in a corner of her bedroom with a cup of coffee. "It just happens. It just comes. I'm up and then I'm down. It takes me a long time to talk myself back up again…

Prentice had talked Amy into seeing a psychiatrist. It wasn't easy; she wouldn't consider it at all when she was up – and when she was down she was sure that therapy would turn out to be a dead end, "Like all 'solutions"'.

They gave her medication and it worked. She stabilized, without losing her vivacity. Prentice felt safer: he asked her to marry him. They moved in together; had a small, informal summer wedding on the roof of his apartment building. People in t-shirts, drinking wine on the roof of the adjacent building, applauded and yelled "Go for it!" when he kissed her. Amy had laughed and yelled at them to come over for champagne.

She stayed on the medication until the last three months of their marriage. Until then, everything went swimmingly. She was getting some work in an independent film production shooting in New York. He was riding high on the good box office for Fourth Base. Everything was great. Amy was growing up. She could go hours without talking about herself sometimes, and she wasn't compulsively competitive with other women. And then at the bottom of the emotional ninth inning, Prentice dropped the ball. He had an affair with Nina Spaulding, a rather pretentiously arty and very full-figured young dancer, and Amy found out. Maybe on purpose, Nina left an indiscreet message on the answering machine. Amy's fragile self esteem couldn't take it. She went off her meds and back on the wrong kind of drugs. Three months later, three months of near constant argument with Prentice, and she left him: and left New York for L.A…

The ballgame on Jeff's TV was winding up. The Dodgers were doomed. With the fickleness of the L.A. sports fan, Jeff swore at them, gave the screen the finger, threw Doritios at a shot of the Dodger's pensive manager. "The hell with you lamebrains! You had the playoffs and you let the Padres, my God, the Padres take it from you, do you know what kind of average those guys have got? It's fucking humiliating."

Prentice got up to pee. All that beer. He called out from the bathroom, "You don't have to watch the game to the bitter end, you know. Maybe there's some basketball on. Or, I don't know, backwards speed-skating or something. Check ESPN."

"No, I got to see how bad the humiliation is. Whether or not I should go so far as to wear a bag on my head for being a known Dodger fan."

Prentice came back into the living room and did a couple of kneebends. He'd been sitting down too long. Outside, twilight was whispering into evening. The noise from the pool was almost gone. There were other television sets faintly audible through the walls, mumbling softly to themselves in news anchor cadences.

Another beer commercial came on. Jeff stood up and went to the French doors, stared out at the frayed ends of the tangerine ribbon of sunset, visible above the opposite roof. It was a clay-tile roof, on the imitation-Spanish-style apartment building beyond the pool. Identical to his own building. "Goddamn that kid, too".

Prentice sighed. Okay, maybe if he listened to the latest on Mitch, it'd distract him from thinking about

Amy. "When was the last time you saw him, you say?"

"Six or seven weeks. I mean, I could've called the cops, do a missing persons thing, but he's not really missing, exactly, because he said he wanted to go off on his own, make his fortune, like, and he had a chance to sing in some rock band that was going to get a record deal…" He shrugged.

"He's too young to 'make his fortune, like', Jeff."

Jeff was a silhouette against the windows now, his back to Prentice. But Prentice could see his shoulders stiffen. "You telling me I shirked my responsibility?"

"I'm not really qualified to be selfrighteous about responsibility to people," Prentice said. Seeing a mummy in a file drawer.

"No, you're not. But maybe I did blow it, I don't know. You know what? I think I liked the kid looking up to me. I was mad when he thought he could do without me. So he moves out and – I just wanted him to come home on his own."

"With his tail between his legs."

"Sort of. It was stupid. I did call around, yesterday, to find him. Asked some people I knew he used to see. They hadn't seen him in a while. He's got this black girlfriend, Eurydice, I'd like to date her myself. Foxy. She claims she hasn't seen him. Kid could be dead in a culvert somewhere."

"He was doing drugs?" Prentice looked for a light switch. The room was getting darker and darker.

"Sometimes. Mostly not, around here. I don't tolerate it. But without me around…"

"He could be in jail, then. They've been doing a sweep for crack users".

Prentice switched on the light. Jeff turned to face him. Moving in slow motion, he brushed corn-chip crumbs from his small, neatly trimmed black beard, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. His eyes were glassy with unshed tears. "I'm gonna call the cops, the hospitals. See what I can find out." He went to the touch-tone phone on the end table beside the futon, put his hand on it – and froze. "I just thought of something. You know who was maybe the last person I know who saw Mitch? Your ex. Amy."

South Los Angeles

It wasn't a prison clinic, Mitch decided, after he'd been awake for a few minutes. It was a general kind of hospital, and it had the rundown, used look of the public hospital that poor people had to go to, and maybe they got turned away and maybe they didn't.

He felt okay till he tried to move. It felt like he was strapped down with barbed wire. Lay still and it didn't hurt much; move and it tore you up. And it felt, too, that his bones had turned to lead. They were that heavy to lift.

He just had a glimpse of his arm, all stitched with fine black thread, the stitched wound and the skin around it discoloured with orange-coloured disinfectant. He was sewn up like a badly made rag doll, with seams on his chest, his legs, his arm. Had he done his groin too? Had he done the thing he'd been thinking of when he'd lost consciousness: slashed up his own dick?

The More Man had wanted him to do it.

But he'd been drawn into unconsciousness, pulled down into it, and he'd lost the More Man and everything else. Until he woke up in this bed and in this hospital gown and in this pain.

Don't move. Just don't try to move. Because if it hurts much more you'll vomit, and if you vomit you'll move your arms and legs with the convulsion of it, and the pain that would come, then – that was not something to even imagine.

So he lay there, floating in a septic pool of nausea, cotton-mouthed with dehydration, until a nurse came and looked him over, shaking her head with amazement. She asked him how he felt, and he said, "Hurts."

She looked like she was half-Indian, half-Hispanic. She had a Mexican accent. "Chure, I bet it hurts," she said, taking his pulse.

"Painkiller?" he rasped.

"We see what the doctor say."

"Water?"

"You not supposed to have any in the stomach yet but I give you some IV glucose water, you feel better." She set up an IV stand, put a needle in his right arm; she chewed her gum vigorously the whole time. She smelled like cigarette smoke. The glucose bottle fed by a rubber tube into a long needle that bit into the mainline vein of his right arm. She taped it down, and whisked out of the room without another word, probably to grab a quick cigarette in the nurse's lounge.

The bottle ticked out bubbles from its tube every so often, and coolness fed into his arm.

They'd put him in a loony ward, on medication. That's what'd happen, eventually.

He wondered if they'd posted a guard outside, or if the orderlies were supposed to keep an eye on him, or what.

He was sick, disfigured, and he was a prisoner too. They probably wouldn't even let him call his brother, without the juvenile hall authorities giving some kind of approval. His wounds were beginning to itch nastily, as well as burning and throbbing with pain. He couldn't scratch them.

He squeezed his eyes shut, as hard as he could, thinking that he was going to lay here and suffer for a long time.

Not if you don't want to.

"I have to."

You can come with us. We're sending someone to help you come back to us. They haven't got a guard on you right now. You're just a juvenile. You're not important enough. The orderlies are supposed to keep an eye on you, but they're not bothering to. We can get you away .

"Look what you've made me do to myself." Said with more disbelief than resentment. He didn't have the guts to be mad at the More Man. And the more he heared the More Man's voice, the better he felt.

That's right. If you hear me, if you really listen, you'll feel better.

He felt a trickle of the Head Syrup ooze through him, easing the pain a little.

That's all I can give you, until you come. The connection isn't quite there.

"I can't. I can't move."

We're coming to help you.

Terror and giddy anticipation. First one, and then the other. Wanting to yell for someone, ask them to get Jeff, and wanting to go with the More Man.

He knew he couldn't yell for help. He knew just where he was going. He had as much choice about it as a wad of phlegm going down a drain.

"I don't -" Try. "I don't want to -" Say it. "I can't -"

"Is he talking in his sleep?" A man's voice, asking it in a clinical way, almost as if thinking out loud.

Mitch opened his eyes, and saw a doctor, a dark little Paki or Indian dude, eyes just a bit too sunken. Coming in with the nurse. ''I am Doctor Drandhu." Indian accent.

"Painkiller."

"I am not your doctor, so I can't prescribe it. Your doctor's up in the E.R., doing a little cutting and pasting on somebody else. He'll be here soon as he can. I came over from Culver City – I work at the Culver City Private Hospital – because Doctor Metzger – that's your doctor, Dr. Metzger, he said I might have a look at you…" He was talking distractedly as he looked at Mitch's wounds. "Very very nice sewing. Doctor Metzger does good work. It doesn't look like you lost a lot of muscle tissue, so if the nerves are well, you should recover, but you will have some scarring…"

"You got one like this one?" the nurse asked, surprised.

"Two, actually, correct. A young woman and a man about forty. We have just got the man in this morning. Were you taking a drug, Mitch? It's confidential."

"No."

"You are sure? We are not going to tell anyone about it, no."

Mitch just closed his eyes. Sure, right, just try and explain.

The doctor asked him another question. Mitch ignored him. He didn't even notice what the question was, at first. He was too busy trying not to throw up. He heard it when the doctor repeated it. "Mitch, who were you talking to when we came in? Are you hearing voices?" Mitch ignored that, too. After a few minutes he realized they had gone. But someone else was there. He could feel it.

He opened his eyes and saw the Handy Man. The More Man had sent him.

A little man with red cheeks and very big bright blue eyes and extra-big earlobes like that Senator with the bow tie who ran for president, and not much forehead, and a wide, yellow-toothed smile. He wore an old brown jacket, and a neatly pressed brown shirt, brown polyester pants. His hair was crewcut. He really didn't care much what he looked like, no, not the Handy Man. Just simple and clean, that was the Handy Man. Maybe that's why he didn't have any fingernails.

Panic. "No! I'm not going."

"There no one around," said the Handy Man, in his too-high voice, a midget's voice. He was only an inch or two taller than a midget. "And the ones out in the clinic, well, they're all busy, and I've brought something so you don't have to walk, and something so you don't have to feel any pain." He held up a syringe. "Morphine." He smiled apologetically. ''We would prefer to use the connection instead, but it is broken, so…" He shrugged, and widened his smile.

"Morphine? Oh yes, please."

Let the Handy Man give him the painkiller, Mitch thought, and then he'd refuse to go with him. He'd buzz for the nurse. Yell for help.

But after the Handy Man shot the drug into the IV tube, a warm tide of indifference carried Mitch away and he let the Handy Man bundle him into some clothes and into the wheelchair.

On the way out, as the badly oiled wheelchair squeaked down the hall, he found himself staring hazily at the stitches in his arm. The black wiry stitches stuck out at the ends, where they were tied off, looking like insect legs, insect antennae. Insects burrowing in his skin.

He didn't care. He fell asleep, not caring.

Culver City, Lot Angeles

"You sure you weren't sleeping with Amy?"

"I think I'd probably notice it if I was."

"That's not funny, Jeff. You know what I mean."

"I'm being honest. She came over and said she needed a place to stay for one night. Mitch was pretty dazzled by her. I think his respect for you quadrupled when I told him she was your wife."

They were sitting in Jeff's little office, Jeff on an orange crate and Prentice on Jeff's swivel chair. The orange crate would have collapsed under Prentice. He sat next to the PC workstation, with Jeff's collection of Playboy Calenders from the 1950s and early 60s on one wall, his Japanese robot monster toys, bookshelves made of cinder blocks and raw boards taking up another. They were untidy shelves, with magazines and graphic novels crammed in horizontally over the Penguin paperbacks and Jeff's pulp detective novel collection, each old yellowing paperback encased in a clear plastic envelope. In a closet was Jeff's small but startling gun collection…

They were waiting for the phone to ring.

"She stayed on the futon and Mitch slept on the floor in a sleeping bag. I knew you'd want to get all the sleeping arrangements clear. I tried to talk to her but she seemed really spooked. She said she was trying to make up her mind about something. Said she had a part, or anyway an offer, but she didn't know if she trusted the guy. I figured it was one of these casting couch situations."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Anyway, she didn't want to talk about it. She sat on the futon with her legs drawn up under her -"

"She always sits that way if there's room."

"- and stared at the TV. She watched like four sitcoms without hardly even blinking but she didn't laugh at any of the jokes. She was still on the futon, asleep, when I left for a meeting the next morning. I called home and Mitch said she'd left." He paused, staring reflectively into space as he remembered. "I think I… I was in a rotten mood so I argued with MItch, over the phone, about him finding a job or going back to school. And… when I came back he wasn't there. Left a note, didn't say much. I didn't connect his leaving with Amy. Maybe there's no connection. Probably not…"

"How come you didn't tell me before about Amy being here?"

"Because she asked me not to and because I know how you are. Irrationally jealous. I mean, I never laid a finger on her but I knew you'd grill me anyway if you knew she was here. You could be divorced or busted up with a girl for three years and still be possessive of her, Tom. Even if it was you that dumped her, which it usually was."

Prentice winced. "It's mostly if it's one of my friends. I can't stand the idea of one of my friends sleeping with my ex-girlfriends. I don't know why it should bother me, an ex should be an ex, but…"

The phone rang. Jeff dived for it. "Hello?"

A pause as he leaned vulture – like over the phone, one hand flat on the desk. "Where? Juvenile Detention? Jesus. Which one?" He reached for a pen and a yellow pad. "Got it. Thanks. Thanks Officer, I-" He shrugged, and hung up. ''Cops don't waste time with amenities, just hang up when they're done. He's in JDH, possession of a controlled substance."

"He's in juvenile hall? They'd have to inform your mom or dad if they put him there, Jeff."

"They informed my mom, chances are, but she fucking lied to me about it. I guess she didn't want me to get him out, wanted to teach him a lesson or something."

"Or make sure he went through their drug rehab maybe."

"Maybe, if you want to believe she had decent motivations in lying to me. I doubt it. The bitch. Well, let's go see if they'll let us have him. Maybe I can get custody." Jeff seemed relieved, almost happy.

Jeff was almost out the door when the phone rang again.

It was the cob Jeff had just talked to. Jeff listened, and said, "Well why the hell didn't you -? Hello? Shit." Jeff went into his slow motion mode, moving as if in liquid wax as he hung up the phone, sat down and tugged at his beard. "He was taken to a hospital. He ran away from it. They don't know where he is."