-It's not really my birthday.

-I figured that out already, Ghee.

-How?

-Because you wouldn't waste your birthday talking to me, a stranger. You'd spend it with friends.

-If I had any.

-Everybody has friends.

-Not everybody.

-Some people even have too many friends.

-Agreed. How about that drink?

Violet shook her head. -I don't need another drink. I need a cigarette. You want to go have a cigarette with me?

-I don't smoke. But I'll watch you smoke.

-Okay.

Outside, the light had followed its usual progression from gray to dull orange, the color of night in Los Angeles, and Guy trailed Violet around the side of the building so as to be away from the bustle of Vermont Street. Violet pulled out a yellow pack of cigarettes from her small black purse, but before she could use the matches from the bar, Guy leaned in and kissed her.

-You kissed me, said Violet, touching her fingers to her lips.

-Sorry.

-We hardly know each other.

-That's true.

Violet snorted derisively. -Let's go to a different bar, she said.

-Okay. Are you driving?

-No. I came with a friend.

-I'll drive then. Do you need to tell anyone you're leaving?

-No. Do you?

-No.

-Can I drive your car?

-Baby, you can ... actually, no. It's better if I drive. My car's kind of touchy.

-Me too. Violet tossed her unlit cigarette on the ground and dropped to her knees, fumbling at Guy's zipper.

-No, stop. Someone might see, protested Guy.

-That's the whole point, whispered Violet into Guy's ear as he pulled her to her feet. Her tongue darted quickly into the folds of his outer ear.

Guy pulled her close and tried to kiss her again. Violet turned her head away.

-Where are you parked? she asked.

It was approximately at that moment that Guy fell for Violet, fell hard, fell for good. It's not right to say "fell in love" because it's not clear that either Guy or Violet was capable of love as commonly understood, which would require a certain degree of selflessness, however slight, that may have been beyond the abilities or at least inclinations of both. But Guy was, whatever else, enormously enamored.

What Violet felt was more difficult to determine, because Violet hated showy emotions, but it was clear that she liked Guy, maybe liked him a lot, or so it seemed to Guy, who did not wish to examine or question further his luck.

Violet was the sort of girl who seemed to exist to inspire infatuation. She did this intuitively, without trying, by obscuring her true intent and radiating, at every moment, a kind of pure possibility-promise in human form-that could not and did not fail to attract both the best and the worst kind of man. She took all comers, without discriminating, without judging, for reasons that she preferred to keep to herself, and most of her lovers did not care to question. Because behind that facade of possibility lay a steel curtain of Do Not Enter. Not physically, of course, because that was the easy part, requiring only physical desire and a fear, if you can call it that, of being alone. But emotionally, Violet was remote to an extreme not usually seen in a human being. Almost not actually present, which for anyone interested in a sustainable or long-term relationship-and there were many, some of whom would have left their wives, children, houses, and vital organs behind for her sake-proved an immovable force.

Occasionally she formed attachments, however: men she liked more than usual, and whose companionship she enjoyed outside of the realm of s.e.x, so long as they did not violate any of her inscrutable and often capricious rules. The first and foremost of which, as Guy would eventually learn, was, Do not ask me any questions about myself.

The Echo Lounge was only a two-minute drive from the Smog Cutter, but almost as soon as Guy pulled out of the parking lot, Violet reached for his crotch.

-What are you ... he began, then trailed off as Violet shifted in her seat and bent over his lap.

-We don't really have time, he protested meekly. -We're practically there already.

-Just keep driving, said Violet, without looking up.

-Okay.

Guy kept driving, on unfamiliar streets, panicking whenever he pulled up at a stoplight, as if anyone in an adjacent car was interested in what was going on in his, or would be even if they knew. Los Angeles by its nature attracts only the most self-absorbed inhabitants from all corners of the globe-in other words, if it wasn't happening to them, personally, or at second best to a very famous person, then it wasn't happening at all. The process took all of ten minutes, after which Violet sat up in her seat, licked her lips, and smiled broadly.

-Let's get a drink, she said.

-Okay.

15. GUY AND BILLY DISCUSS PROCEDURE IN RE: PLAN CHARLIE SITTING IN THE PROBABLY STOLEN MINI COOPER IN THE PARKING LOT OF THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING PLACE MERE MINUTES BEFORE THE ACTUAL FIASCO.

Are we clear vis-a-vis procedure? asked Guy.

-I'm not even sure I know what that means.

-I mean, do you know what you're supposed to do?

-Yes.

-And you're okay with it?

-I'm not not okay.

-Billy.

-I suppose you could say I have a few moral qualms. Still.

-Still?

-We're stealing money that belongs to someone else.

-We're not stealing the money. We're reifying the money.

-No matter how many times you say that ...

-Reification is a perfectly valid process, as long as its use is intentional. Money, as a thing-in-itself, does not exist. It's an extended metaphor for a complex system of commodity exchange. Thus, to think of money as "belonging" to someone or something is a pathetic fallacy, in the literal sense. It's our job, as self-appointed stewards of the language, to liberate money from its normative bonds. There is no quick-and-easy shortcut. I wish there were. We have to go in and actually do it. Hence Plan Charlie.

-I thought you just needed cash to fund the prototype for Pandemonium and your a.s.shole brother wouldn't loan you any.

-There's that too. But he's not an a.s.shole. It's not your place to judge. You don't judge a blind man for his lack of vision.

-Usually not. But what if he stabbed both of his eyes out with a fork?

-Why would you ... why would you even say that?

-Wasn't there a Greek tragedy about a guy who clawed his eyes out with like his bare hands?

-Tell it to your therapist.

-He's the one who told me. Couldn't sleep for a week. That's a disturbing image to plant in a five-year-old's brain.

-It's almost time.

Billy opened the glove compartment, carefully removed an object in a filthy, oil-stained rag, carefully unwrapped the rag to reveal the glistening shaft of a handgun.

-You sure this is fake.

-Here's the thing, Billy. I've planned every aspect of this operation within an inch of our lives. Some would say I've overplanned, but I don't believe you can overplan, I don't believe you can be too prepared, it's just the way I operate. Do you think, can you imagine, in the vasty dim cobwebbed caverns of your brain, that I would neglect something as absolutely crucial as ensuring that you were equipped with a weapon that in no conceivable way could be used as a weapon, because to do otherwise would be to court certain death?

-So you just a.s.sumed.

-The man said it was fake. Like I'm gonna check?

Billy lifted the gun in his right hand, measured its heft in his palm.

-Kind of heavy for a fake.

-Look, just don't shoot anyone. Okay? I mean, in case. That way it's not an issue.

-It's not like I was planning on shooting anyone.

-Good.

16. SVEN TRANSVOORT AT THE SMOG CUTTER, THE SAME NIGHT GUY MET VIOLET, FIVE MONTHS BEFORE THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO.

She left, right through that door. Didn't even say anything to me, didn't look back. Clinging to that strangelooking fellow. All kissy-eyed and tulip-faced. Does she not know how much that hurts me? Does she not care? Violet McKnight, I love you. I get such joy out of looking after you. Buying you clothes, taking you out to lunch and dinner, lending you cash-as if I don't remember what it's like living from paycheck to paycheck. And the reluctance with which you ask-it breaks my heart. I have to practically drag the words from your mouth, which to be honest I would prefer to do with my tongue, but I agree, it's better to wait, because waiting heightens the antic.i.p.ation, and s.e.x only muddles the emotions. I will wait until you're ready.

Who could not respect the fact that, however much I plead and argue, she refuses to give up her job, despite that the long hours and the stress, which keeps her away from me intolerably long, and delivers her to me too tired to do anything but collapse on my bed? I happily cede you my bed, dear Violet. The couch is fine for me, because it's close to you, but not too close, not so close that we would fall prey to our natural instincts. I need only nearness, proximity, the aura of your umbra, and I understand and approve of your need for s.p.a.ce. When I hear your hesitant knock at my door, late at night, if you knew with what febrile glee I leap from my seat at the dining room table, where I've been writing another of those letters you cherish so much, but that cost me so little effort, because they pour straight from the source of my longing for you onto the page, and open the door to see your hesitant smile-if you knew that, dear Violet, why would you walk out the door of the Smog Cutter, which is a ridiculous name for a bar, in the first place, and in the second place, karaoke?-with a complete stranger, who is first of all obviously gay, though he may not be aware of it, which I find to be a common condition in Los Angeles, without a word of explanation?

The answer is of course obvious: she's testing me. It's true that my jealousy does at times get the better of me, and that jealousy, as Violet once said, is an allergic reaction to the presence of ego. But there are only so many rum and c.o.kes a man can sit and drink by himself, listening to some G.o.d-awful blonde twig butcher Supertramp's sublime "The Logical Song," before he takes it upon himself to investigate your disappearance.

So I fail the test. Mea maxima culpa, darling. I am human after all, it turns out. A thorough search of the parking lot turns up nothing but the hurried rustling of two lovebirds I accidentally disturb in flagrante, but soon thereafter a car engine starts, noisily, and is that, could that possibly be your silhouette, Violet McKnight, in the pa.s.senger seat of some carbon-belching rust-bucket, driven by the same clearly gay stranger with whom you'd walked out the door half an hour before?

You'll forgive me for stating the obvious: I got in my Prius and I followed you. Which was not an easy thing to do, because you did not appear to be headed anywhere in particular, and in fact kept circling around the same few blocks in Silverlake, where there was not enough traffic for me to keep anything but a discreet distance. Until you stopped at a red light on Vermont, a two-lane road, at last. I cautiously pulled alongside, and at first I didn't see you, dearest. And then I did. And then I didn't. And then I did.

In that moment I became Sven Transvoort. In that moment I became a monster, a caricature, a vengeance-minded machine. In that moment I understood everything about Guy Forget, even though I didn't yet know his name. I understood his cheap appeal, his reckless ways, and the unavoidable fact that he must die. And that I must kill him.

My hatred of Guy Forget flowered in my heart like bougainvillea: fragrant, bright, beautiful, but poisonous as any viper's venom. Obviously, bougainvillea isn't poisonous, but the hatred in my heart-pure neurotoxin. An atomized drop of that hatred breathed in by Guy Forget from one hundred yards away would have killed him instantly. The only problem was, there's no way to extract the poison from my heart without slicing open my chest, and there are some things I am not yet prepared to do in the name of revenge. That's one of them.

I can't think of too many others, however. For instance: things that I am totally prepared to do in revenge w/r/t G.F. would include but are not limited to: setting him on fire, shooting him in the face, and dosing him with incredibly high levels of LSD and leading him blindfolded to the top of the Capitol Records building and then taking off the blindfold and telling him he can fly.

But why deal in theory when you can deal in praxis, is my current motto, so what I did instead was 1) convince Guy Forget that I had invented a form of subsensory Internet coding that cannot possibly exist in any of our eleven dimensions, and 2) help set up the Korean check-cashing debacle and then sabotaged it.

Following the fiasco, I followed the hapless duo, discretely, in a car completely unlike the one I told Guy I would be driving. I watched them stop, and get out, and have a heated argument, and I watched them roll down the hill, and then I got scared and went home.

Oh sure, there's a flaw in every plan, no matter how brilliant or at least inspired and well thought out. I did not foresee that Guy would leave Billy, climb back up the hill, get back in the car, and drive at unsafe speeds toward wherever he thought he could find me-I a.s.sume that's where he was going, though perhaps my ego here overrides my reason-and in so doing crash the car and more or less die, by which I mean suffer damage to his cerebral cortex that effectively ended his conscious existence. I am not responsible nor do I care much about other planes of consciousness on which Guy Forget may or may not be able to function. I am, however, directly or at least directly indirectly responsible for his current comatose state, and I'm pretty sure that makes me an attempted murderer, whether or not he lives for years and years with tubes sprouting from his body like a potato. If he dies, either naturally or via some kind of state-sanctioned euthanasia, I am a murderer. This thought does not trouble me.

The risks one takes in the name of love. The things one does. Crazy, right? Sort of even death-defying. And for something so definitively transient, that pa.s.ses the moment-the actual moment-it becomes realized ...Well, I don't need to tell you good people the foolish feeling that washes over you after you've done something reckless and embarra.s.sing, in the clear light of day, when you've regained your senses.

I do not regret what I did. He had to pay. He had to pay for what he did: he stole my dear, darling Violet, the one human being on earth to whom I offered my unconditional love and support. Stole her as easy as St. Augustine picked the peaches off a tree that did not belong to him, and then wrote a whole book about how sorry he was. Stole her and did not even love her, or possibly did not love her, at least I imagine he did not, because creatures like Guy seem to me incapable of love.

Having said that, even considering Guy Forget separately from his transgressions, dispa.s.sionately, with an open mind, it took me less than five seconds to realize that he was the most evil person on the planet, deserving both of unfettered disgust and the full and undivided attention of my b.l.o.o.d.y-minded revenge.

17. THE TIME GUY AND BILLY GOT IN A FIGHT AND FELL DOWN A HILL, MERE MINUTES AFTER THE KOREAN CHECK-CASHING FIASCO.