“What do you want, Griffin?” she asks again, sighing, drying her hands. “Do you want Mexican, Griffin?”

Griffin looks up, startled. “Mexican? Yeah, babes. Salsa? Some chips? Fine with me.”

I open the door, move out onto the patio.

“Hey, dude, close the fridge,” Griffin says.

“You do it,” I tell him.

“Your dealer called,” Mona says to me.

I nod, don’t bother shutting the door, walk down the steps back onto sand, thinking of where I’d rather be. Mona is following me. I stop, turn around.

“I’m going to split tonight,” I tell her. “I’ve been hanging out here too long.”

“Why?” Mona asks, staring off.

“It’s like a movie I’ve seen before and I know what’s going to happen,” I tell her. “How the whole thing’s gonna end.”

Mona sighs, just stands there. “What are you doing here, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you love her?”

“No, but so what?” I ask. “What would that fix?” I ask. “If I did—that’s going to help?”

“It’s just that everything feels like it’s on the periphery,” Mona says.

I walk away from Mona. I know what the word gone means. I know what the word dead means. You deal with it, you mellow out, you head back to town. I’m looking at her now. Madonna’s still playing but the batteries are running low and her voice is all wobbly and far off, spacey, and she’s not moving, doesn’t even acknowledge my presence.

“We’d better go,” I say. “The tide’s coming in.”

“I want to stay,” she says.

“But it’s getting cold.”

“I want to stay,” and then, more weakly, “Need some more sun.”

A fly from a batch of seaweed lands on a white, bony thigh. She doesn’t slap at it. It doesn’t go away.

“But there’s no sun, dude,” I tell her.

I start to walk away. So what, I mutter under my breath. When she wants to come in, she will. Imagine a blind person dreaming. I head back up toward the house. Wonder if Griffin will stick around, if Mona made reservations for dinner, if Spin will call back. “I know what the word dead means,” I whisper to myself as softly as I can because it sounds like an omen.

13

AT THE ZOO WITH BRUCE

I’m at the zoo with Bruce today and right now we are staring at dirty-pink flamingos, some standing on one leg beneath a hot November sun. Last night I drove past his house in Studio City and saw the silhouette of Grace glide by the giant video screen that is placed in front of the futon in the upstairs bedroom. Bruce’s car was not in the driveway, though I’m not sure what that means since Grace’s car wasn’t there either. Bruce and I met at the studio my father is currently running. Bruce writes for “Miami Vice” and I am now a fifth-year junior at UCLA. Bruce was supposed to leave Grace last night and it’s obvious today, right now, that he hasn’t made the move. We drove over the hill to the zoo pretty much in complete silence except for the new salsa band on the tape deck and Bruce’s comments about the quality of the sound accompanying the silence between songs. Bruce is two years older than me. I am twenty-three.

It’s a weekday, late on Thursday morning. Schoolchildren walk by, forming crooked lines, while we stare at the flamingos. Bruce is chain-smoking. Mexicans with the day off drink cans of beer concealed in paper bags, stop, stare, mumble things, giggle drunkenly, point at benches. I pull Bruce closer to me and tell him I need a diet Coke.

“They sleep like women,” Bruce says, about the flamingos.

“I can’t explain it.”

I notice that there are literally hundreds of elementary-school children, holding hands in pairs, passing by us. I nudge Bruce and he turns away from the birds and I’m laughing at the size of the mass of children. Bruce loses interest in the confused, smiling faces and points at a sign:

REFRESHMENTS.

Once the children are out of my range of vision the zoo seems deserted. The only person I see on our walk to the refreshment stand is Bruce, up ahead of me. It is so empty in the zoo that someone could get murdered and no one would notice. Bruce is not the kind of man I usually go out with. He’s married, not tall, when I reach him he pays for my diet Coke with the change he kept from me for parking. He complains about how we can’t find the gibbons, something about how the gibbons have got to be around here somewhere. This means that we aren’t talking about Grace but I’m hoping that he will surprise me. I’m not asking anything because of how disappointed he seems about not finding the gibbons. We pass more animals. Hot, miserable-looking penguins. A crocodile moves slowly toward its water, avoiding a large dead tumbleweed.