"I don't know. Soon. A couple of days."
"Are you okay?" I ask. "You seemed kind of freaked out yesterday."
"No, I'm better," she says. "I'm okay."
To placate me she kisses me on the mouth. "I had a nice time," she says, stroking my face, and the sound of the air-conditioning competes with the big smile and then the smile and the cool air become in the drift of things suddenly amplified, almost frantic, and I pull her toward me onto the bed and I press my face against her thighs and inhale and then I try to flip her over but she gently pushes me away. I lower the sheet, revealing my hard-on, and she aims for levity and rolls her eyes. I can suddenly see my reflection in a mirror in the corner of the bedroom: an old-looking teenager. She gets up and scans the room to see if she's forgotten anything. I reach for the camera on the nightstand and start taking pictures of her. She's staring into a Versace bag that had once been filled with packets of cocaine, the other thing that had fueled so much of the sex, the thing that helped make the fantasy seem much more discrete and innocent than it really was, the thing that made it seem as if the desire was reciprocated. "Could you call the valet and have him bring my car up?" she asks, frowning as she checks a text.
"I don't want you to go."
"I said I'll be back," she murmurs absently.
"Don't make me beg," I say. "I'm warning you."
"Even if you did it wouldn't work." She doesn't look up when she says this.
"Can I come with you?"
"Stop it."
"I'm imagining things."
"Don't."
"I'm imagining there are many versions of this event."
"Event? I'm going to f**king San Diego to see my f**king mother."
"Neither one of us wants to admit that something's wrong," I murmur, snapping another pic.
"You just did." She briefly poses. Another flash.
"Rain, I'm serious - "
"Stop turning this into a drama, Crazy." Again: the sly smile.
"Drama?" I ask innocently. "Who? Me?"
The last thing she says before she leaves: "Will you make sure I get that callback?"
The digital billboards glowing in the gray haze all seem to say no and the poinsettias lining the median at Sunset Plaza are dying and fog keeps enveloping the towers in Century City and the world becomes a science-fiction movie - because none of it really has anything to do with me. It's a world where getting stoned is the only option. Everything becomes more vague and abstract since every desire and every whim that had been catered to constantly in that last week of December is now gone and I don't want to replace it with anyone else because there's no substitute - the teen p**n sites seem different, repainted somehow, nothing kicks in, it doesn't work anymore - and so I re-create almost hourly in my mind the sex that happened in the bedroom over those eight days she was here and when I try to outline a script that I've been lazy about it comes out half sincere and half ironic because Rain's failure to return calls or text back becomes a distraction and then, only three days after she leaves, it officially becomes an obstacle. The bruises on my chest and arms, the imprints from Rain's fingers and the scratches on my shoulders and thighs, begin to fade and I stop returning various e-mails from people back in town because I have no desire to gossip about Kelly Montrose or dis the awards buzz or hear about people's plans for Sundance and I have no reason to go back to the casting sessions in Culver City (because what I want has already happened) and without Rain here it all dissipates entirely and the calm becomes impossible, something I can't control. And so I find myself in Dr. Woolf's office on Sawtelle and the pattern that keeps repeating itself is again pointed out and its reasons are located and we practice techniques to lessen the pain. And just when I think I'm going to be able to deal with everything a blue Jeep with tinted windows passes me on Santa Monica while I'm crossing the intersection at Wilshire. An hour later I get a text from a blocked number, the first in almost eleven days: Where did she go?
Rumors of a video of Kelly Montrose's "execution" - that it had been circulating on the Web and seen by "reliable sources" - spreads within the community early one morning in the first week of January. There was supposedly a link somewhere that led to another link but the first link had been pulled and there's nothing to find except people on various blogs debating the video's "authenticity." Supposedly there was a headless body in a black windbreaker hung from a bridge, a bleak desert lined with scrub brush beneath it, police tape whipping in the dry wind, and someone else wrote that the murder was set in a "laboratory" outside of Juarez and someone else countered with certainty that the murder was committed in a soccer field by men wearing hoods and someone else wrote No, Kelly Montrose was killed in an abandoned cemetery. But there's nothing to substantiate any of it. Someone posted a picture of a severed head grinning broadly from the passenger seat of a bullet-ridden SUV but it isn't Kelly. In fact there are no shots of him being pulled along a highway bound with rope, no close-ups of skin being peeled off a face, no shots of a pair of hands being amputated while mariachi music is scored over the images, and after the excitement peaks and the justification for the gossip surrenders to reality the rumors about the Kelly Montrose clips fade into a twilight stage.
