A grim place during the day, the Lazarus at night is smoke and shadow and a few hot beams of light, and the music pulses through him. It feels a little like a dream, but of course it’s meant to—Kayla had explained how it’s essentially a machine for getting men to pay for worthless things. Blue light plays over the girl on the stage and as his eyes adjust he sees that the darkened room has more gangsters than usual, and he wonders if the house figures they’ll spend whatever they have on booze and girls, and never mind the fighting, or if that’s just how things are going now. He stands against the wall, out of the way, sees the waitress take him in, waver, dismiss him. On stage, the dancer, blinded, stares out across the tables and smiles emptily—he remembers that Kayla said they can’t see a damned thing, how it’s a kind of privacy. In the hard light he can see every hair and mole on her body, which, in its detail, is somehow inhuman, less like flesh than a map, and then the song ends and Kayla totters onto the stage in just her heels.
She looks so thin. The motion of her hips is apparently ecstatic but he knows she’s bored and trying not to show it. He’s held those hips, seen that face transported, as someone has held all of them, he supposes, and in fact it’s nothing special—there were boys before him and there’ll have been boys since. In the blue glare she’s almost an abstraction, her flesh become spirit like the women on the screens, but then the spotlights narrow and find her tattoos of angels and serpents and houses burning down—she never would explain them, but had said they were a mirror of her life.
*
He waits in the alley by the staff door. “I’m guessing this is your girlfriend,” the ghost says. “Maybe someone you want to say goodbye to. I already told you how dumb this is so be sure she’s worth dying for.”
He says nothing, hunching his shoulders as the rain runs down his neck. The ghost says, “Not that it’s really my business, but I knew a lot of girls like that in LA. Hearts of gold, supposedly, and all saving up for college, but from what I saw they’re mostly just wrapped up in their pain. Little honor, less sense, no thought for the future. But I’m sure this one is different.”
“So how did you get locked up in a house?” he asks, trying to remember how long Kayla’s shifts are. He’s relieved that she hasn’t moved away—she used to say that the city was claustrophobic, that she’d come there to be free but it was suffocating her, that if she could ever get the money together she’d go north, maybe learn to breathe again. This had worried him, when they were together, until he’d realized that she quickly spent whatever she got, managing somehow to be even poorer than he was.
“It’s a long story,” she says, and then falls silent, so he says, “Okay, what were you doing in LA in the first place?”
“Starving, mostly. Trying to get a career worth advancing. Not a good time, though in retrospect I had a certain freedom. I stayed away from the drugs, but I hardly remember it at all.”
“Tell me,” he says, so she won’t ask him questions.
“I didn’t know a soul when I got there. I slept in my car the first month and washed up in the showers at the beach. I knew girls who had gone there before me but after a few emails they always vanished, even though I spent hours looking for them on the web. I met a lot of girls who’d gone there to be actresses but most were just pretty, with no skills at all, and they mostly ended up doing sex work, or worse—the violence was just getting bad, then, and people hadn’t gotten cautious. The ones who weren’t awful mostly had some kind of conservatory training, which I sure didn’t, but it didn’t matter, because I’d always had a talent for being someone else. When I had nowhere to go, which was most days, I’d go where people were, the bars and promenades and the lobbies of hotels, and sit there nursing a vodka, watching people, letting them bleed into me.
“It was just a trick of being open, like leaving a blank space inside me for their essences to fill. And once I had them I could impersonate them, in fact I almost had to, like what I’d seen had to work itself out. I tried to fool people, being someone I wasn’t, even when I didn’t look the part at all, and it almost always worked, because people would find a reason to let it work. They said it was spooky, like watching a shape-shifter. It wasn’t a good time. The only thing that made me happy was being someone else.”
“Did you get anywhere?”
“No. At least not at first. It was maddening. Part of it’s the place. At night you can see the lights in the big houses in the hills, and the life you want is right there, but might as well be in another country, and the people who have what you want are staring down from all the billboards. You keep trying, chasing down auditions in dismal industrial parks on the fringes of the city, and promises are made but every opening is illusory and their words have no substance. I got an agent, for a while, but he couldn’t do anything for me, or for anyone, in fact he was barely an agent at all, was trying to break in as hard as I was. His stock in trade was the impression of reality. There are real agents, but they don’t take calls or email from outsiders, and I’d never met one, or even met anyone who had, and it started to seem like they were just part of the mythology. It was like two cities, one within the other, and no bridge between them, but then I started to get little parts—third-tier Danish phone games and unfunded pilots for direct-to-web series—and I realized that in fact the cities are concentric, and innumerable, and as you advance inward from the periphery you get no closer to the core, and as hard as you try you always end up back in the bars, pretending to look at your phone while the essences accumulate.”
“Do you have my essence?”
“Maybe,” she says, almost laughing.
“So who am I?”
“Well now. I hardly like to say. But you move, as our large friend would say, like a mantis, or as I would say like a dancer, though that’s not a comparison you’d like. You’re part scholar, in your way, and part wild animal. I get the sense that you spend a lot of time alone.”
“If you know me so well, then what am I going to do?”
“What you need to, I’m guessing, though with every second we wait here there’s a better chance I’ll have a close-up view of your blood pooling on the pavement, so maybe you could find a way to hurry up.”
*
When Kayla comes out of the door she’s wearing a man’s coat cinched tight. She’s still in her makeup, so thick she looks like an actor in those Japanese plays.
He’s afraid she’ll be unkind but when she sees him she embraces him, an embrace he holds a beat too long, but as she pulls away she gives him a kiss on the cheek. “You look great. Are you waiting for me? You’re waiting for me, aren’t you. It’s sweet of you but you can’t do this, okay?” she says in her little girl’s voice, and he breathes in her sweat, the stale cigarette smoke; her pupils are pinpricks in the alley’s little light.
“I don’t mind,” he says, wet with rain, suppressing his shivering. “How about I walk you home.”
“You should have called.” He didn’t because she never picks up, but doesn’t say so.