“I can’t get through to Mr. Berenbaum right now,” he said. “When that changes, you’ll be the first to know.”
“He invited me here,” I said. But even as I spoke, I could feel a Borderline paradigm shift. Without a stable sense of identity—something most people have mastered by the age of four—it becomes very easy for other people to tell you who you are just by the way they treat you. As I stood there, in my own mind I was becoming what he saw: a crazy and slightly scary woman with delusions of importance.
I frantically did a mental replay of the conversation I’d had with Berenbaum earlier, trying to reinterpret. I wasn’t really supposed to have his number in the first place; I shouldn’t have called him. His delight in hearing from me could easily have been faked. But he had specifically said that I should come to his office. I was right and the security guy was wrong. Right?
I pulled out my phone—painfully aware of how cheap and obsolete it looked—and dialed Berenbaum’s number myself. His assistant answered.
“Hi, Araceli,” I said, feeling a moment’s delight that my slippery brain had held on to her name. In Hollywood, knowing the assistant’s name is crucial. “This is Millie with the Arcadia Project again.”
“One moment please,” she said politely.
I turned to give the security guard a glare, but he wasn’t paying me the least attention.
After a few moments, Araceli came back on the line. “He doesn’t seem to be available right now. Can I give him a message?”
I stood there, disoriented, starting to dissociate a little. Dissociative episodes are a Borderline thing that happens under maximum stress; you just kind of check out, leave yourself. My brain damage didn’t help matters. In that moment if she had asked me my name, I couldn’t have given it. I didn’t understand what was happening, why I had taken a taxi to the Warner Bros. lot, why I was now going to have to take a taxi right back home. I chewed my bottom lip, furious at myself for losing it now of all moments.
“Do you have a message for him?” she prompted again.
“I . . .” I struggled to assemble words. “I’m outside. At security. They won’t let me in. He said for me to come.”
“Can you put me on with the security guard, please? Tell him Araceli wants to talk to him.”
I approached the guard again and held the phone out to him. “It’s Araceli,” I said.
The beginnings of an I’m in trouble look came into his eyes and gave me a flutter of hope. He looked at the phone as though it were a rotary-dial antique, then took it from me and grunted a few monosyllables into it. Glancing at my prosthetics, he said, “Yes,” in a tone of deep chagrin. Then, crisply, “I’m on it.” He hung up the phone and handed it back to me.
“Well?” I said, still too shaken to be smug.
“Go on through,” he said.
I was so relieved that I forgot how very far away Berenbaum’s office was, and that I didn’t quite remember the way there, until I was all the way at the intersection of four enormous soundstages. I knew the general area of the lot where his office was located, so I kept hobbling along in the right direction until I spotted another security guard, a black guy with a sprinkling of white hair. Once he spotted me approaching, he moved to meet me halfway.
“I’m supposed to meet David Berenbaum,” I told him, “but I can’t remember exactly where I’m going.”
“Let’s see if we can get you a lift,” he said. He called in his location on the radio. “Got a young lady here with a cane, en route to DSB on foot.”
I couldn’t hear the response, but he laughed out loud and said, “I’ll bet!” He put his radio back on his belt. “Just sit tight a minute,” he said to me.
“I could kiss you,” I said.
“That won’t be necessary.”
“What’s your name?” I asked him. “I want to tell Mr. Berenbaum how helpful you were.”
“I think he can see for himself,” he said with a smile. He pointed over my shoulder, and I turned; a golf cart was approaching. Its driver had an unmistakable head of white hair. The sight of him was like daylight pouring through clouds.
“Millie!” said Berenbaum as he stopped the cart by the curb and got out. “I’m so sorry. Minor crisis in editing. Please tell me you didn’t have to walk far.” He took my hand and held it solemnly for a moment. His grip was firm, his hand soft in that old-man kind of way.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Exercise is good for me.” I didn’t mention the cuts under my silicone prosthetic socket, which were starting to smart a little.
He moved to help me into the cart, then stopped, suddenly boyish. “You want to drive?”
“Is it . . . I mean, do you think I can, with my . . .”