No one knew where to look.
And as I watched this in a dream, I saw that underneath the paint was the green-striped wallpaper that had covered the walls of the house in Sherman Oaks.
When I whispered to myself the words “I hear you” the house was again plunged into darkness.
Outside, I stood on the lawn, dazed, muttering to myself.
Outside, Dale and Sam were pacing the sidewalk excitedly, talking into cell phones, recounting what they had seen to the rest of Miller’s staff.
Outside, Miller tried to explain a situation to me.
It involved a ghost who wanted to tell me something.
It involved a demon who did not want this information imparted to me.
There were actually two forces opposing each other within the house.
It was fairly simple. Yet what Miller defined as “simple” did not apply to anything in my life.
But I didn’t believe in my life anymore, so I was forced to accept this as if it was standard.
Outside, on the lawn, Miller was chain-smoking.
Miller tried explaining things but you wouldn’t listen.
You just said, “Get rid of it.”
You were standing in one place.
You weren’t aware of anything.
You didn’t admit that the words you’d whispered made the thing dissolve into ash.
You were thinking that you would come back later in the afternoon.
You were thinking of burning the house down.
“The house will need to be fumigated,” Miller was saying.
It would need to be fumigated because the spirits could enter any living thing in the house—and this included any animal or insect life—in order to continue their existence.
After the fumigation it would take twenty-four hours to set up the equipment required to cleanse the house. The entire process should take less than two days.
But what was happening after the fumigation? Had I missed something? Did any of us still exist? What world had I moved to? What was occupying my mind?
“What will happen after the fumigation,” Miller said, lighting another Newport, “is an exorcism.”
I had started making a plan.
“Mr. Ellis, I’m curious about something.”
I did not know that my plan was coinciding with Miller’s.
“Was your father cremated?”
I was going to travel, and I nodded my answer.
“Where are your father’s ashes?”
I was going to fly across the country.
“Did you spread them according to his wishes?”
I was shaking my head silently, because I understood what Miller was saying.
“What were you supposed to do with them?”
I was going to reorganize myself.
“Mr. Ellis? Are you here with us?”
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8
28. Los Angeles
A security guard at the gate checked my name before I drove up the winding road that led to a house the size of a hotel and made entirely from glass at the top of Bel Air. After a valet took my rental car, I stepped into a party where an old girlfriend who was wearing fake eyelashes and had married a billionaire called out, “Hey, gorgeous!” when I entered the room, and we talked about old times and movie people and what she was doing with her life (“I rock” was all I could ascertain), and since guests seemed to be avoiding me because of my battered face I just moved on until I was standing in a library filled with leather-bound scripts and golden retriever puppies were stumbling around everywhere and I found an issue of next week’s National Enquirer in a bathroom and there was a framed poster in the eldest son’s room of two words in huge red block lettering (GET READY) and there was the actress who had costarred in the movie that Keanu Reeves and Jayne made back in 1992 and we had what I felt was an inappropriate, if innocuous, conversation since we had never met (“Jayne left the set for a couple of days to be with you. Someone in your family had died, right?” “Yeah, my dad”) and then Sarah’s father—the record executive—showed up and seemed shocked to see me (I wasn’t shocked by anything since I wasn’t reacting to anything) but then he asked about Sarah and listened haltingly as I told him how great she was doing and even though the record executive kept promising me that he wanted to see his daughter there would always be another “setback” to keep him away but he added not unhopefully that Sarah was always “free” to visit. Seated at the large dining table were wives from Pacific Palisades with a few key members of the Velvet Mafia and Silver Lake hipsters and couples from Malibu and a good-looking chef with his own reality show. Conversations began as the food was served: the second house in Telluride, the new production company, the frequent trips to the plastic surgeon, the tantrum so violent that the police were called, all the exertion that led nowhere. I listened to it all, or imagined I did. There were too many words I didn’t understand the meaning of anymore (happy, cake, jingle, preen), and I was so over this world that it made no impact on me: the number of explosions per scene, the movie that took place in a submarine, the script that lacked a sympathy portal, the S&M dalliance with an underaged hooker, f**king the prom queen recovering from implant surgery, the screaming rockets, the washboard abs, the sex on the air mattress, the Vicodin binge. And then the conversation took a more sober route when talk of a certain movie came up: if it didn’t gross over a billion dollars, the certain movie would lose money for the three studios financing it. After that, the pointlessness of everyone’s enterprise hung placidly over the dinner. And soon you were noticing that the facial surgery had rendered so many of the women and men at the party expressionless, and an actress kept wiping her mouth with a napkin to stem the drooling after too much fat had been injected into her lips. A giant cactus stood blocking a downstairs hallway with the words “believe the skeptics” scrawled in black across its green skin, and as storytelling resumed I wondered how you could ever get past the cactus. But then I realized I was concentrating on that only because I wondered who was going to listen to my story? Who was going to believe in the monsters I had encountered and the things I had seen? Who was going to buy the pitch I was making in order to save myself?