"Am I under arrest? Do you have a warrant?" John asked.

"No. And we don't have to go through that if you agree."

"John, it's my property," said Ivan. "Go right ahead, guys."He looked in the back seat. The white towel around his neckdropped onto the gravel driveway and he didn't pick it up. "John-O, there's a G.o.ddam Susan Colgate parade float in theback seat of the car-you made this?"

"Did you make the shrine in the back seat?" the cop asked.

"No. I bought it from the kid at West Side Video. I think it'sone of those campy queer things."

At this point Doris came out of the house, cloaked inshawls, her bunned gray hair a porcupine of flyaway hairs. "Oh Christ-it's my mother."

"Morning, darlings. Oh my-the fuzz."

"The fuzz?" said John."I'm merely trying to be contemporary, darling. Officers- has there been a crime?"

There was mild confusion. A police photographer andforensics expert went over to the car. Ivan went back up to histreadmill and John phoned Adam Norwitz. "What the f.u.c.kis going on, Adam?"

"Susan's gone AWOL. She had a sixa.m. makeup call for aShowtime Channel kiddy movie and she didn't show up. So theproducer phones and screams at me, and I go racing from my gym straight to her house and the doors are all open. There'sn.o.body there, but her car's still out front. The coffeepot was still on, but the coffee was like tar, like it'd been on for twenty-fourhours. So I called the cops. You tell me what's going on. I nearlyhad to donate my left nut to science to get her that stupid parton Showtime, and she f.u.c.ks it up."

"Compa.s.sion, Adam."

"Yeah, right. Is she doing a project with you? Is she jumpinginto a bigger pond now-no more time for the little fish?"

"How can you make this woman's disappearance aboutyou, Adam?"

"Spare me the melodrama."

"Did you call the hospitals or anything?"

"That's the cops' job."

Adam knew nothing. The police knew next to nothing. Johnrefused to panic. Susan could be out on a tequila jag or maybe she was whipping one of those creepy Brit directors with birchfronds. She's not that type, he thought. He sucked in a breath, thenphoned Ryan to buy the script.

Chapter Sixteen.

Their first flop was a love story: The Other Side of Hate. Nothingabout it came easily. To begin with, Angus, in the final depress-ing stretch of prostate cancer, told him the t.i.tle was wrong."John, 'hate' is a downer word, and it doesn't matter if youmake Citizen Kane, a t.i.tle like The Other Side of Hate is box office poi-son from the word go."

Doris had other concerns. "A love story? You, darling? Justkeep making things that go bang and you'll be hunky-dory."

"You don't think I can do a love story?"

"That's not it, darling. Love stories need to be made by . . ."

"Yes?"

"Oh, I have put my foot in it, haven't I?"

"Love stories need to be made by . . . ?"

"They need to be made by somebody who's actually been in love, darling, and I think I'd better have something very bubblyvery quickly." Over the years Doris's life had devolved intoa pleasant timeless succession of sunny days, clay modeling,bursts of watercolor enthusiasm, gossip with a small clique of "card fiends," and a well-worn path between her front door and the Liquor Barn a few miles away. John saw her twice a weekand she remained a close confidante.

"I've been in love before.""With whom?"

"With . . ."

"Really, darling, it's okay, and doubtless you'll one day findsome lucky young starlet who'll sweep you right off your feet.And until then, keep blowing things up in Technicolor."

"Technicolor? I think I hear Bing Crosby ringing the door-bell."

But John wondered why he hadn't fallen in love. He'd beenin l.u.s.t and in Jike countless times, but not something that madehim feel like a part of something bigger. The energy from hisfilmmaking-as well as filmmaking's rewards, the deliriumof excess-it all conspired to mask this one simple hole inhis life.

It seemed to John that people in love stopped having the personality they had before love arrived. They morphed into generic "in-love units." John saw both love and long-termrelationships as b.o.o.by traps that would not only strip him ofhis ident.i.ty but would take out the will to continue mov-ing on.

But then again, to find somebody who'd be his partner on theride-someone to push him further. That's what he'd held outfor. And as the years went on, the holding out got sadder and more solitary. He began to hang out with people younger thanhe as older friends drifted away. But even then he sensed the younger crew were contemptuous-That f.u.c.ked-up old w.a.n.k whocan't even get himself a girlfriend. He lives in a house like a nuclear breeder fa-cility. Sure,he has. .h.i.ts, but he always takes his mom to the premieres.

Ivan was less doubtful than Doris about the fate of The Other Side of Hate, but during the production cycle he was sidetrackedby an onslaught of collapsing real estate deals in RiversideCounty, and wasn't able to a.s.sign himself fully to his usual pre-production grind of rewrites, casting changes, and cleaning up John's well-intended messes. The director and the lead actressdiscovered they were sleeping with the same script girl and sub-sequently refused to listen to each other. The male lead testedpositive for HIV two weeks before shooting and arrived on theset with a new and medicated personality greatly at odds withthe cavalier froth demanded by the thirteenth and final scriptrewrite. The grimness continued through the dailies, throughthe storm that bulldozed a third of the Big Bear location set andthrough John's initiation into the world of crystal meth on theeleventh day of shooting.

After a profoundly dismal test screening in Woodland Hills, Melody said to John, "John, I know you meant well by this film,but if you want to do the right thing, go out and buy a can ofglue and stick it onto the back of the negative and sell the whole thing as packing tape."

"Mel!"

"Johnny, don't be a r.e.t.a.r.d. It's c.r.a.p. Burn it."

"But it's tender-lovely . . ."

"Please. Don't even put it on video. Don't even dub it intoUrdu. Burn it."

Angus died shortly thereafter and Doris came unglued. Theyhadn't been lovers for decades, but he'd been her good friend. She lapsed into a cloudy fugue. Ivan inherited the estate andDoris stayed in the house.

The Other Side of Hate was released after John ignored whatproved to be sound advice from Melody.

The film was violentlythrashed by media organs with the glee of vultures who havelong awaited the giant's first fall. It died on opening weekend, taking in just under 300K, close to the amount John spent on under-the-counter pharmaceuticals in any given year. There were the inevitable industry backlash rumors that the goldendays of Equator Films were over. Some viewed the film as aburp, others a death cry. John and Ivan were unable to rustle upeven the faintest, most vaguely kind word from a 200-watt ra-dio station in the middle of Iowa. ("Slightly amusing!" KDXM,La Grange, Iowa.) Nothing was salvageable.

All eyes were on the next film, The Wild Land, a historicalsaga set in early-twentieth-century Wyoming.

The script was adapted from a best-selling novel by a two-time AcademyAward-winning screenwriter.

The cast was six of filmdom'smost in-demand stars, all of whom got along famously with thePalme d'Or director. It came in on budget, with a sweepingmusical score, and when it came out in theatrical release, it...flat-lined. It garnered none of the venom and acid of The OtherSide of Hate. The film simply vanished, a. response more deeplywounding than any of Hate's hatchets and chain saws.

After TheWild Land, John and Ivan had a dozen films indevelopment. Time pa.s.sed. Studios mutated and merged andvanished and some were born. j.a.pan entered the arena. Tasteschanged. New audiences evolved. The men had lost theirfooting.

John completed construction of his high-tech f.u.c.k-hut,which had been ongoing for five years. He tried to clean up hissubstance act, and lost entire years at a time in the effort, the very name Johnson becoming industry shorthand for slippingand lapsing and falling. He lost interest in making movies.His world narrowed and his circle shrank. John began to feellike some old mirrors he'd seen in Europe, at the once-grandold palaces, the gla.s.s that had slowly, fleck by fleck, over the years shed the flecks of silver that had made them originallyreflective.

"Oscar season again," sighed Ivan. "Is it March already?"They were in the back seat of a car, being driven to Century Cityfor a morning legal meeting. Ivan was immaculately dressed and his skin had the shine of eight hours of drugless sleep. John'sface looked like a floor at the end of a c.o.c.ktail party.

"What are we up for this year?" asked John.

"Don't be facetious, John."

John was doing lines of c.o.ke from a small oval of safetygla.s.s he stored in his attache case. He noticed Ivan give him aglower. "So what is your point, Ivan? I've got to stay awake. Youknow lawyers. .h.i.t me like animal tranquilizers." Ivan waited.

A flatbed loaded with jumbo gold statuettes was headed offto the venue-a tourist's dream photo. The truck paused besidethem at a light. John caught Ivan eyeing the statues. "No, no, no,Ivan. I can see that 'I wish we had an Oscar' gleam in your eyes.Well, forget it. Oscars are for freaks."

"You can't honestly believe that, John."

"Oohhhhh, look at me-I've got a little statue for being thisyear's token Brit, or this year's on-screen hooker with a dis-ability. Oohhhhh, look at me-in twenty-four hours n.o.body's go-ing to remember my name. Oohhhhh, the studio can put lots oflittle Oscar's all over ads for my movie-not simply Oscars butOscars with the little trademark 's up on top: Oscar's." Hechopped up a crystal. "Oops-excuse me, I forgot to put the at the end of it. Off to Alcatraz we go."

"John ..." Ivan adapted his baby-sitting voice. "Go easy on thatstuff. The guys we're meeting are ball-breakers."

"Oscars..." John began to mumble, not a good sign. Ivan be-gan to brace himself for a crash-and-burn morning, and down-graded his expectations for the upcoming meeting accordingly.Ivan, like John, had been seduced by the rewards and extremesof filmmaking, but unlike John, he wanted a traditional life now. In his mind he was "officially disgusted" with his life upto that point. He was "officially through with carousing" andwas HOW ready to begin "officially looking to settle down." And 43O.

it was at this point that he saw Nylla, at the foot of an officetower, tears trickling down her cheeks, swaddled in a printedsilk scarf that fluttered over her right shoulder. Running upher neck and into her cheek was a mottled scar leftby a mas-sive jellyfish sting from off the Australian coast two years previ- ously. Its trace had nipped her acting career in the bud. Hernew agent, Adam Norwitz, had seen her jellyfish scar a monthbefore and had finally succeeded, just minutes prior to her ap-pearance on the sidewalk, in breaking her spirit. He convincedher that the scar would keep her out of work, "unless you want to do soft p.o.r.n, in which case a scar like yours could be adefinite a.s.set."

Ivan stared at her silk dress, patterned with gardenias, flutter-ing in a warm wind, and he felt sorry for her. Meanwhile, be-hind him, John's sinuses and lungs clapped and glorted. Ivanwatched Nylla chew her gum. She removed it from her mouth,and instead of flicking it onto the hot concrete, took a small pa-per from her purse, and placed the gum inside the paper, andtucked the result in her purse. It was the cleanest thing he'd everseen anybody do.

"Look, she's crying," said Ivan, entranced, as though witness-ing the world's smallest rainstorm. He got out of the car.

"Ivan," John said, "isn't the meeting in the next tower over?"He heard Ivan ask Nylla if she was okay, and then say to her,"Can I help you out here? I'm Ivan. I'm on my way to a meet-ing, but I saw you here and . . ."

She said, "Oh G.o.d, I must look like an idiot."

"No you don't. Not at all. What's your name?"

"I'm Nylla."

"That's a nice name."

"It's spelled N-Y-L-L-A. My father came to the States fromEurope after the war. He wanted to name me after New YorkState because the States had been so good to him. My motherwanted me named after her mother, Bjalla. And there's theresult."

"I'm Ivan.And they were married six months later.

Chapter Seventeen.

Eugene Lindsay, Ford dealer of the G.o.ds, was alone in bed mak-ing a list in a small notepad: No. 63: You can get almost any food you want at any timeof the year.

No. 64: Women do everything men do and it's not thatbig a deal.

No. 65: Anybody on the planet can have a crystal-clearconversation with anybody else on the planet pretty wellany time they want to.

No. 66: You can comfortably and easily wake up in Syd-ney, Australia, and go to bed in New York.

No. 67: The universe is a trillion billion million timeslarger than you ever dreamed it would be.

No. 68: You pretty well never see or smell s.h.i.t.

He was writing a list of things which would astound some-body living a hundred years before him. He was trying topersuade himself that he was living in a miraculous worldin a miraculous time. Having taken early retirement from his job as a local TV weatherman, he'd subsequently retreated fora decade inside his mock-Tudor house in Bloomington, In-diana. He made art from household trash and watched TV He jotted the occasional thought in his notebooks, such asthe evening's list. And in his bas.e.m.e.nt he used a Xerox 5380 console copier and a CD-ROM-based computer to execute farmore elaborate mail scams than he had ever dreamed of in theeighties.

His wife, Renata, had years ago moved to New Mexico, where she paid the bills burning herbs for neurotic urbanrefugees. She abandoned decades of starvation dieting, and hadgrown as big as a pile of empties on the back stoop. She woreno makeup and made a point of letting people know it. Whenshe divorced Eugene, she had asked for nothing, which con-fused and frightened him more than a nasty divorce fight wouldhave done.

No. 69: We went to the moon and to Mars a few times,and there's really nothing there except rocks, so we quitdreaming about them.

No. 70: Thousands of diseases are quickly and easily curedwith a few pills.

No. 71: Astoundingly detailed descriptions of s.e.x acts ap-pear on the front page of The New York Times, and n.o.body isruffled by it.

No. 72: By pushing a single b.u.t.ton, it's possible to kill5 million people in just one second.Eugene looked at number 72. Something was wrong-what?He figured it out: b.u.t.tons didn't exist a hundred years ago.

Or did they? What did people do back then-did they pull chains? Turncranks? What did they have that they could turn on? Nothing. Electric lights? Eugene didn't think so. Not back then. He made a correction: No. 72: By pushing a single lever, it's possible to kill five million people in just one second.

He looked at his clock-deepest night-3:58a.m. He droppedhis pen and marveled at his body, lying on the bed, still well proportioned and lean, still dumbly beautiful and betraying noevidence of inner weariness.

His bedsheets felt dry but moist, like the time he lay downon a putting green in North Carolina.

Surrounding him wasthat month's art project-thousands of the past decade'semptied single-portion plastic tublets of no-fat yogurt, theirinsides washed squeaky clean, stuffed inside each other, form-ing long wavy filaments that reached to the ceiling like seaanemones. The finished piece was to go inside Renata's old gift-wrapping room, a concept she'd stolen from Candy Spelling,Aaron Spelling's wife-a whole room devoted to wrapping thenonstop stream of trinkets and doodads from her old gownbusiness.

Eugene had to take his weekly bag of trash out to the curb. Helooked at his clock-3:59a.m. now. He procrastinated andadded to his list: No. 73: Bad moods have been eliminated. No. 74: You almost never see horses.No. 75: You can store pretty well all books ever published inside a box no larger than a coffin.

No. 76: We made the planet's weather a little bit warmer.

Trash time. Since the episode with the crazy pageant motherback in Saint Louis, giving anything away to the trashman wascause for personal alarm. Trash night had never been the samesince. To make his current bag of garbage seem fuller and hencemore normal, he fluffed up its contents and carried the full bag,weighing no more than a cat, down to the front door. Eugenepaused and tightened his robe, which bore the embroideredlogo of the Milwaukee Radisson Plaza Hotel from which it wa.s.stolen during a meteorological conference. He darted out to the curb, lobbed the bag onto the concrete, then ran back tothe door.

On the way back to his room he beamed with a creator's joyat his three pillars made of Brawny paper towel shipping boxes,a trio that filled the front hallway from floor to ceiling. Take that,Andy Warhol.

Cozily back in bed, Eugene heard an unmistakable thump from downstairs. He knew the noise couldn't be a tumblingmound of his art-he stacked his goods in stable piles, theway he'd seen them stacked in museums. Perhaps a racc.o.o.n had snuck in during his brief trash haul. Eugene reached forhis gun in the bedside drawer and released the safety. Seatedon the floor between the wall and his bed, he plotted his strategy.

Then came another b.u.mp from below. Confident and col-lected, he slipped through the Brawny towel box totems. Slid-ing on his b.u.t.tocks, he lowered himself into the foyer, litonly by the candle power of a half moon in the clear sky. He J36.

crouched behind some of the totems and scanned the liv-ing room. Somebody or something was rooting behind a1:4-scale Saber fighter jet made of b.u.mble Bee tuna and Spa-ghettiOs tins.

Eugene swept across the foyer like a cartoon detective.Stealthily he maneuvered to the base of the statue, its wheelsresting atop a plinth built of stabilized Kraft Catalina salad-dressing boxes. He was calm.

He stood up and, with kickbox-ing speed, lunged over to the other side of the base shouting"Freeze!,"

and pointed the handgun onto what appeared to be a drifter-a wino-who yipped like a squeak toy, and cowered against the boxes. Eugene flipped on the light switch, shocking the room and flaring his retinas. "Well f.u.c.k me," he said. "If itisn't Miss Wyoming."

"Put down the gun, Ken Doll."