“Hey now,” says the ghost. “Wake up, okay? Wake up. You’re having a bad dream. Hush now. People will hear you.”
He returns to the present, though he knows the dream will be there if he closes his eyes. “I’m fine,” he says, blinking, waking up fast; he tries to think of a question to ask. “Tell me about Los Angeles. How you broke in, if you did.”
“Well, that’s a story,” she says, and he wills her to keep talking; her voice is hushed and intimate, a private voice, and he lets it envelop him, feeling almost like she’s talking to herself, like all these words have been pent up and waiting. “It was the day the LAPD officially disbanded. Not that it really mattered, as the emergency administration was already in place, but it felt like the end, and capital was fleeing the city, and I was on the verge of giving up. I was with my friend Sonia, that day, and she was taking my picture in what had been downtown Santa Monica. An aesthete, was Sonia. She kept saying how the light loved me, how I was so perfect I almost disappeared. The low waves broke behind her, washing the street, the white foam dissolving on the crumbling asphalt. She said she was making a record of the city’s last days. You’d think people would be scared, but most of them were just giddy—there were celebrations that day, and riots, and they were expecting fires. The sun was just setting when the first fireworks went off over the water, the sails of the yachts illuminated in the flashes, and the concussions ricocheted off the wall at my back, and I smiled from my emptiness as her camera strobed.
“The wind brought sparks that blinked out in the surf and Sonia said, ‘It’s starting.’ I looked up toward the hills, saw grey columns of smoke rising. I looked back, was blinded by more flashes, and as the sun set the fireworks began in earnest, bursting over the water, their reports a continuum, their light showing Sonia, intent on her camera, absorbed in her imagery.
“So much beauty, she said, as things come apart. I thought of the massifs of dirty white smoke that filled the skies when I drove west on the road through the fires on the plains. How the fire lit the night. They’d said it was the last fire, on the radio, that the ecology was changing, had changed, that the plains were desert now.
“She had a car, a drone, armored, a hand-me-down from her father, who used to be a famous director. I was falling asleep but Sonia got excited when she thought she heard a bullet ricochet off the hull. As always, she had pills. I remember picking them off her palm, the muted colors like codes or flags or the neon light of cities. I swallowed them dry and my mind flared, then darkened.
“I wouldn’t have said anything, without the pills. I’ve forgotten most of it, thank god, but the gist was that I didn’t have the money to survive, or to leave, and her father was rich, and I would live anywhere, and maybe he could use me in something, she knew how the camera loved me, and at some point I saw she’d stopped listening, was staring out the window at the smoke in the sky. She was sorry, she said, but her trust was nearly depleted, and her father had lost his money when the markets fell—they kept up appearances but there wasn’t much left.
“When we got to the yacht I took more pills. I felt like I’d fallen into my own private film noir. It was a party, mostly her father’s friends. It was dark, on the yacht, I don’t know why, just a few candles burning. From the prow I watched the city lights recede.
“She introduced me to her godfather, but a wall had come down between me and the world and I made the decision to slip over the side. I had a water glass of vodka and the water was warm and I thought it might be pleasant, and I thought I might not notice it at all, and the world seemed flattened, somehow, the fireworks’ nebulae almost close enough to touch, and I wondered how they’d look as I drifted down toward the reef. A beautiful death, I thought, one that might become a story.
“But Sonia found me and took the glass from my hand and brought me to the back of the boat where she said there was someone I needed to meet. It was very dark and at first I didn’t see him, he was sitting so still. Sonia whispered in his ear and left and he asked to see my face so I used the light from my phone though I couldn’t bear for him to look at me, and I knew my fear would show, so I became someone else, which allowed me to be present and to smile charmingly when he told me I was beautiful.
“He said, ‘Sonia tells me you desire entrée and will take extraordinary steps to get it,’ and though his voice was cold I sat on his knee and held my face inches from his but he said, ‘No. Not that. Not just that. It’s actually much more than that. I consider it my duty to lay it out clearly.’
“He said he needed my memories, that he’d use them to make me a new kind of star. I’d have to get surgery so they could put in an implant to harvest them. He said that it was dangerous, that some of the patients didn’t last long, but if I wanted to risk it he’d open every door for me. He said some of the implants helped you remember things, but mine wouldn’t, because he wanted me to be normal.”
“How was a memory implant going to make you a new kind of star?” Kern asks, because she seems to have lost her flow.
“He told me not to worry about it. I didn’t want to press him, but I thought maybe it was some way for an audience to feel what I felt directly.” Kern imagines strangers watching his own thoughts, their reactions veering between boredom and disgust. “I didn’t mind so much,” she says. “It’d just be another way of acting. Acting is always like being totally naked, if you do it right.”
“So what was your answer?” asks Kern.
“I said yes. Of course I said yes. Are you sure you want to hear this? I don’t have anyone else to talk to and I’m afraid I’m rambling on.”
“No. Talk. Please,” says Kern, eyes closed, drifting.
“His assistant was with him on the yacht. She was also his girlfriend, or at least wished she was. I knew she loathed me like only an older, plainer woman can loathe a younger, prettier rival, and that she resented being a cliché, but what scared me was her pity.
“That night he took me up to his beach house in Malibu. I never said goodbye to Sonia. Later I heard she’d died. On the drive up the coast I had to tell myself to be careful about hope.
“His house was down a canyon, right on the beach, miles from anything, made of a sequence of interlinking glass boxes. One of the boxes was his bedroom, the damp sand layered knee-high against the glass. He asked me to undress and walk around, like I was there alone, but first I wanted him to turn off all the house cameras.