Los Angeles by Peter Moore Smith Page A

World?
Could that be me someday? Was he the same person as the
Angel?
Could
World
be a verb like
Love?
    Inside the books was tiny black type that was way too official and grown-up to understand, and by the time I was old enough
     to actually read something like that, I had realized that these books were only props left over from the set of a movie my
     father had made and that no one in his right mind would ever actually read them.
    Angela and I were currently inside our building, climbing the stairs. She was ahead of me, holding my hand and pulling me
     up each concrete flight. Now we moved into my apartment and she was slipping her shoes off. “Maybe I should take a shower,”
     I said. I was shaking, the skin of my whole body tight against my skeleton. It was like I was cold, my teeth chattering.
    “Come with me.” She pulled me into the bedroom. “Come with me, my
Angel to Love.
”
    ______
    I slept through what remained of the migraine and woke up just as the sun was descending, casting its last light over the
     western sky. Minutes later, I showered, dressed, and jumped in the Cadillac, making the short trip from Hollywood Boulevard
     to Sunset. At the Mask, the bouncer sneered and tried to stamp my hand. “What’d I tell you?” he said. “Everybody comes back.”
     It had been two days now since Angela had disappeared, two days in which I had contacted the police, searched her apartment,
     questioned her old neighbor. In two days, I had virtually run out of options. I knew it was unlikely I’d find her here, but
     I thought
somebody
had to know
something.
    “I’m looking for Cassandra,” I said, giving him my ten dollars. “Is she working tonight?”
    He shrugged, peering sarcastically up and down the Sunset Boulevard sidewalk. “You see anyone named Cassandra out here?”
    I pushed my new asshole glasses up onto my forehead and entered the darkness.
    Inside, laser light refracted through the air, cutting the murky atmosphere and transmuting the faces of patrons and dancers
     into fanged, leering gargoyles. The music, as before, was dirgelike, molten rock, unrelenting, unvarying, probably ImmanuelKantLern
     again. It was the same DJ in the booth again. Wearing his huge silver headphones and dark wraparounds, he hovered over the
     turntables like a demented scientist over an evil experiment. The dancers thrashed in their squalid pools of hazy light as
     if in slow motion. On the front stage, a tall woman with dark skin and a platinum wig gyrated crudely, her hips swaying hypnotically,
     while on the other, a prototypical blonde with long, tapered limbs peeled off her dress. Her eyebrows had been shaved, I noticed,
     then re-penciled at a contrived angle. The place was crowded with men — men in groups, men alone, men in pairs, men laughing,
     brooding, glowering… I looked around for the waitress who had served me those Pellegrino’s the last time and discovered her
     offering a tray of sodas to a group of agitated, underage boys. “Excuse me,” I said, approaching.
    She wore the same purple minidress as before, but this time her velvet mask was pulled down. When she observed me through
     the almond-shaped slits, her eyes were cold.
    “Remember me?” I asked.
    “Pellegrino, right?” She flashed an icy smile and started to walk away.
    “Actually” — I had to shout over the searing music — “I was looking for Angela.”
    Too quickly she said, “Angela isn’t here.”
    “Do you know where she might be?”
    “No,” she said, already walking away.
    “She’s missing.”
    The waitress stopped and turned around. Across her face glimmered a look of what I hoped was concern, but because of the mask
     I couldn’t be sure.
    “I live next door to her,” I went on. “She called me, and I could tell that something was wrong.” I decided not to mention
     my theory about human voices and the dark. “And then I lost the connection.”
    “She hung up on you?”
    “No. It just —” I wasn’t