“My dad doesn’t allow us to have guests. He’s at his studio now. He’s a musician. Classic rock. Terrible shit.”
The cottage was small and damp. Chris plugged in an electric heater with frayed wires. It smelled like a burned animal. He pulled out a box hidden beneath one of the floorboards, took out a bong, and loaded it with weed. There were spiderwebs on the ceiling and a branch of wild laurel had squeezed its way into the room through a cracked floorboard. There was a mattress in the corner, a guitar, a beanbag, and a pile of CDs and tapes stashed neatly under the window. Next to them was a framed picture of Neil Young. He was standing next to a younger man with long brown hair similar to Chris’s. They wore slightly torn T-shirts and had big smiles on their faces. Both held beers. I noticed they were standing in the same echo spot where Chris and I just were. The amphitheater was brand-new, though, no chipped bricks. There were musical instruments in the background.
“This is here?” I asked.
Chris smiled. “A long time ago…That’s my dad. He was a studio player for a couple of Neil Young’s albums. They used to jam a bit out here. My twin sister and I would put on plays for them.” He chuckled. “We asked for lots of money after we performed because Dad told us Neil was famous. To us he was just Neil.” Chris turned the frame over and looked me in the eyes nervously. After his initial bold approach in school, he was now timid and didn’t know what to do with himself. He kissed me abruptly. His lips didn’t know when to part and when I didn’t kiss him back, he pulled away and glanced nervously at his wrist to check the time. He offered me a bowl of his famed pot.
“Yes, let’s get some air,” I suggested. I took his sweaty palm and guided him out the door. We climbed up the slope, past the main house toward the top edge of the garden, and curled into a hammock that hung between two trees. We smoked in silence. Eucalyptus trees shot up behind the fence in the neighbor’s yard. Their silvery leaves hovered over us, releasing a minty scent that crawled into our nostrils. I loved that smell. I had begun to associate it with certain good parts of the city, the parts where the natural order of things wasn’t just restored but was a constant, a steady state. A spongy green moss carpeted the bottom edge of a wooden fence. Stoned, I stared at its microcosm, noticing the minuscule strands that composed the whole. Each green crevice looked like a portal that could open into a magic world, funneling beings from the valley into the canyon, out to the sea on the other side.
This was Topanga, still and solemn and unscathed by the city. We had driven through that canyon coming back from the beach when our grandmother went topless and my parents were fined for nude sunbathing. I had felt peaceful inside the canyon’s womb. She was there and had been for a long time. I felt welcomed in a place of rest. I smelled the new air and looked up. No Valley fog, but solid blue colors, rapacious birds soaring in the sky.
“I like being up here,” I said. “The natives were right to call it ‘the place above.’?”
We swung lazily in the hammock. Chris crawled toward me and put his arm around my sun-warmed shoulders.
“That’s what everyone here likes about it. Feels like you’re on top of the world.”
I nodded. I sensed time slipping off the edges of my body and it felt good.
“It makes sense that you’d like it,” he continued. “Europeans settled here first. It reminded them of home. My sister and I used to sneak into the old celebrity holiday cottages in the mountains. Some have been rebuilt, but you can always tell when something belonged to a star. There’s a different smell.”
He shifted his position, keeping a vigilant eye out for what was happening in the main house below. I hooked onto the sparse roots crawling out of the earth and pulled the hammock back toward the fence. A warm breeze began to blow behind my neck and down my legs, pouring in from many directions at the same time. It breathed on the corners of my eyes, electrifying my hair. I listened to the sounds of the canyon and felt, for the first time, I had been granted access to that magic LA feeling Max had tried to explain to us when we first arrived, that ungraspable, comforting light: the luminous unseen. It was what in Hollywood translated to a sudden stroke of luck, something divine and invisible that could heal you instantly from pain, smog, and rejection. I was so hungry for it that I opened my eyes wider, hoping I could extract its essence and store it inside me, somewhere between the layers of my rubber suit. I pushed the hammock against the fence. With every swing I inspected parts of that luminosity and tried to bask in it. I smelled new air and looked up at the blue sky. But the moment I tried to capture that feeling, the light faded. Objects returned inside their contours and the luminous unseen was gone. “If you look too hard it disappears,” Max had said. And he was right.
I retracted into the earth and considered our positions. The top of the hill pointed west, into the canyon and toward the ocean, while the lower part and front of the main house faced east over the Valley, creating an imaginary line with Woodland Hills and the mall where nine months earlier Arash had been shot. We were swinging between two worlds and Chris’s house was in the middle. The back fa?ade was slanted upward inside the canyon, high above the city, severed from the Valley, levitating toward “the place above,” while the front aimed at the flat roads of the San Fernando basin and the dim parking lot of the Woodland Hills Mall. Echoes of gunshots reverberated in the living room. The smell of butter-infused popcorn stunk up the kitchen. The floor-to-ceiling windows were eyes, the front door a gaping mouth, aghast in front of the spectacle of blood. Inside Chris’s house I heard silence followed by gunshots. Through the windows I saw Arash scramble on the floor, screaming for help.
“You don’t gangbang? Well you do now,” I said out loud, swinging us back out on the hammock.
Chris nuzzled into my neck. “What did you say?”
“You do now,” I repeated.
It hit me then, with my fingers still clasped on the earthy roots, that I had not yet given myself the time to let those words sink in.
“It’s what that guy told Arash before he shot him. I read it in the newspapers,” I said. “You knew him, right? He told you about us?”
Chris shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t think about that shit now,” he said.