Sample Chapters
ACT ONE

Turnaround, n., 1. (road), a type of junction which enables traffic heading in one direction to efficiently turn around and head in the opposite direction. Sometimes used as a synonym for cul-de-sac.

2. (music), in jazz or blues, a term referring to a passage at the end of a section which leads to the next section.

3. (film industry term), the process where the rights to a project one studio has developed are sold to another studio in exchange for the cost of development. Often used as jargon meaning the death of a project.

1.



The computer monitor was sleek and black, a brand new Dell LCD flat panel upon which a browser window showed a woman clad in a studded leather S&M harness, surgically augmented breasts hanging like overripe fruit. The woman was nearly naked and kneeling, framed from chin to the taut rise of her hips, all pale skin and blood red lips and dark fat nipples, tiny waist and pierced belly button, radiating wanton sexual excess. Her neck was thrown languorously back, face obscured by a tangle of thick black hair. The image was enlarged until the individual pixels became an oscillating connect-the-dots simulacrum of reality; as her torso thrust up and down a plume of smoke uncoiled from her lips and she moaned an erotic mantra.

I just want to smoke… and fuck… and smoke… and fuck….

Eric Best leaned forward in his Aeron chair as another woman came into frame behind the first: this one older, indoor tanned, and bleach-blond, snaking black latex-clad arms around the first woman’s waist and gliding up across her breasts, a lit cigarette in one hand. As she brought it to those wet red lips the first woman sucked and thrust more deeply, quickening her carnal pace.

I just want to smoke… and fuck… and smoke… and fuck….

Eric watched, sharp eyes dully focused. He’d seen enough. As the digital bims went at it with ersatz abandon he moved his mouse, scrolling the cursor over to the far side of the screen, where a list of search terms was displayed for the website HOTSMOKINGSLUTS.COM. Next to each word were checkboxes marked approve or deny. Eric clicked down the list.

FETISH: APPROVE… SMOKING: APPROVE….DILDO: APPROVE… MARLBORO: DENY…

Eric’s right hand clicked the mouse again and the digital bims disappeared in mid-fuck. He leaned back in the chair and pulled off his earbud headphones, surveying his new domain: beside and around him some three hundred other intrepid souls pounded out their own tasks in Search Engine Optimization, computer keyboards clicking like plastic Chiclets, counterpointed by the dim tinny din of a dozen iPods playing different songs, snatches of low conversation, the palpable hum of an open hive in full day shift stride.

The room was vast and softly lit in ergonomically perfect permanent twilight, the windows tinted to better to minimize eye-strain; the glow of hundreds of similar monitors pulsed like the lights of a miniature city. The computers were all mid-level state of the art workstations; an ergo expert had come in the morning to measure Eric for his own Aeron and stave off the encroachment of productivity-sapping Carpal Tunnel Syndrome or lower back compression, typical injuries in this line of work. Eric had to admit it wasn’t bad as day gigs went, if you were willing to unplug your frontal lobe and just roll with the Zen of it all. But there was still the gnawing discontent of his status as a temp digital wage slave, and happy surface trappings aside the whole thing felt like business casual by Kafka, Orwell with free Starbucks.

Eric hated every bloody second of it. And it was only his third day on the job.••• Outside the LA sun was blindingly bright as Eric stood and smoked, sipping the lukewarm dregs of his coffee. Before him people hustled in and out of the entrance, yapping into cell phones and keying their crackberries in a ceaseless swarm of energetic commerce.

Eric leaned up against the wall near the foyer fountain cum Koi pond and caught a glimpse of himself in the building’s smoked glass façade – a forty-ish 21st century peon, thinning hair cropped short, one ear pierced, decent bone structure but his body starting to paunch. He still carried himself with a modicum of hipster style and his face, though careworn, still retained some semblance of the confidence he had felt in his former life.

If no one looked too hard or cared too much, which most didn’t, he could front himself as still in the game, or at least deep in thought. But in all Eric felt like a man being slowly squished into the earth by some great unseen weight, the collective tonnage of his personal failures rattling behind him like the chains of Marley’s ghost. He hoped they didn’t disturb the Koi.

Eric glanced at his watch, a big tanky Diesel bought with residuals off his last movie, a piece of shit made-for-TV extravaganza about tsunamis hitting a surf competition that he wrote in ten days about a million years ago. It was a total goof to him at the time and the producer hired him because she knew he could deliver in a tight crunch, and the network was racing to slipstream the movie into the buzz between two big budget studio films also, imaginatively enough, about tsunamis.

Such was the inbred wisdom of Hollywood, where most projects gestated for ages or died en utero as their better fed kin toddled off to terrorize the megaplexes, killing the minds of millions, one brain cell at a time. Eric had worked with the same producer for three years on adapting his first novel and they still hadn’t gotten it made; this turd rocketed through development and into production so fast Eric could only laugh his way to the bank. One more blip on the collective radar, another credit on imdb.com, another job well done and a nice chunk of change to fund the greater good of his life.

But that was a long time ago. Old enough to carbon date. Like Eric. And now here he stood: on break from a twelve-buck-an-hour stint as an “SEO Specialist” for one of the lesser search engine companies, with two minutes to go before his next training session.

“Hooyah!” Eric muttered as he stubbed his smoke and tossed the coffee. He wasn’t being ironic; he now worked for HOOYAH!, the company’s name etched into the glass of the double doors, neatly bisecting it between the HOO and the YAH! Eric walked toward his reflection, smiling a thinly veiled grimace. Then the doors hissed open and his reflection parted as he passed through, heading back inside.

2.



The name on the door under the sign for the CALIFORNIA WELLNESS CENTER read GABRIEL LOEHMAN Ph.D. Eric was inside the little West Side office, doing his customary forty-five minute angst-o-rama, the ritual disgorging of his latest round of soul bile. Trying to level it off just enough to not leak onto the carpet.

“So how’s the new job?” Gabe asked, sitting back in his chair and sipping a coffee. “Fabulous,” Eric said. “It’s a cutthroat silicon sweatshop where every keystroke is monitored and every human resource squeezed to the last bloody drop, and I want to gnaw off my own arms to get out of there. But the coffee’s good.”

Gabe smiled; he was in his fifties, bespectacled and genial, and as shrinks went Eric found him refreshingly un-shrinky – their sessions were less therapy than a running mutual dialogue on the absurdity of life. When Eric’s WGA coverage had run out Gabe had gone sliding scale, charging him twenty bucks a session; when even that became problematic they made a deal for a complete set of Eric’s books to add to Gabe’s ever-expanding library. Finally Gabe stopped charging altogether, saying he just liked the conversations.

“And you and Paige?” he asked.

“Um let’s see,” Eric began. “She was up my ass when I wasn’t working and now she’s up my ass because it isn’t good enough. I’d call that progress…” Gabe nodded ruefully as Eric continued. “I keep telling her it’s not like I’m turning down all these fabulous opportunities – it took me nine months to even find this, and I’m a fucking temp! The economy sucks and it feels like after everything I’ve done I’m pretty much unemployable.”

“And she resents that…” Gabe said.

“Not that. Me,” Eric said flatly. “Me, I’m thrilled.”

Eric sighed and leaned back in his chair, his legs splaying out. “I had to convert my credit list into a resumé, right?” he said. “Okay fine, I can do that – hell, I rewrote resumés for her and half her friends. But how do you explain why you haven’t had a real job in twenty fucking years? It’s easier to tell an interviewer I was in prison than try to explain what I’ve done with my life.”

“But you did a lot,” Gabe countered.

“And where is it now?” Eric laughed. “That’s what Paige always comes back to. Look where it got me. It’s like it actually counts against me. I went for a position as a copywriter with an ad agency. This human resources dweeb looked me right in the eye and said, you’re too old. I’m forty-three!”

“Human resources,” Gabe smiled. “That term always gets me. Like they’re actually interested in humans.”

“Oh they’re interested,” Eric said. “Interested in carving people up for parts to feed into the corporate Borg. I remember when I was back in college the government reinstituted the draft registration. Not the draft, just the registering part.”

Gabe nodded; he was a full-on Boomer and remembered it well. “I had just missed the cutoff age by six months, right?” Eric continued, “And I saw this political cartoon with this herd of cows and this guy was drawing dotted lines on their torsos. One cow looks at the other and says, don’t worry they just want to know how much meat is available.”

Gabe laughed at that one; Eric just shook his head. “I’ve done a lot of shit work in my life,” he said. “Drove trucks, worked warehouse, security guard, dishwasher, crawled under fucking trailers installing cable TV. When I was in college I worked graveyard at the old Boston Herald, just me and fifty tons of newsprint and a couple of hundred rats. It’s not about that…

“But how do you explain to a supervisor who’s sitting there dreaming of quitting his shitty job one day to write his big novel or screenplay that you want to crawl back into his world? I feel like, and here I sit, the death of your motherfucking dream…” Eric leaned forward, head resting on his hands, staring into some inner abyss.

Gabe switched gears.

“What about that new project you were talking about?”

“Still in development hell,” Eric said. “Except it’s free hell now. Marty wants more rewrites. Just doesn’t wanna pay for ‘em.”

Gabe nodded; he had a number of industry clients and the story was commonplace. Working in film meant working with Guild writers; the rules were clear. But everyone knew you had to do what you had to do to get a project greenlit, so secret courtesy drafts were standard issue. Small stuff: a tweak here or there to fine tune things, like getting your car detailed. Somewhere along the way the courtesy became an expectation, and the expectation became an unspoken requirement, just as the range of what was required expanded to full-blown page one rewrite and re-defining the entire concept. Somewhat akin to taking your Camry in for a wash and expecting a Maserati to come out the other end.

It was totally against the rules and if a signatory company got busted for it the Guild would come back hard on the writer’s side, but they’d only know if the writer reported them. Which was a great way to never work with that producer again.

“I don’t know,” Eric sighed grievously. “I don’t want to be a pussy about this. I never expected any of this to be easy. But does it have to be this goddamned hard?” Gabe just nodded and smiled, but Eric wasn’t. “Seriously,” he went on. “When I sold my first book it was great but I didn’t trust it. The publishers wanted more, I did more. Five six seven books and it’s all good but I still don’t trust it. Then I got my first feature; then TV opened up. I’d work on anything I could wrap my brain around, I hoped I was being smart about all of it and for a while it was working… I was working, anyway. I actually thought, okay, if one’s down at any time, even two, there’s still another to fall back on. But what do you do when all three collapse?”

Eric spied one of his books on Gabe’s shelf and picked it up. “The sick thing is, I’m think I’m better at what I do than I’ve ever been, and I’m worth less for it.” He held the book up and shook it. “Did words fall out of this and I just didn’t notice?

Gabe said nothing, letting Eric spew. “My last book I’m ready to make a new deal, you know, like we’ve always done? Then my agent finds out the entire editorial staff was force marched into a meeting and told, don’t buy anything for the rest of the quarter. The publisher had just merged and they were all freaking out ‘cause more layoffs were coming. Every one of them has what, a dozen writers on their list? So my editor asks her boss, what do we do? You know what he said?”

Gabe shrugged. Eric leaned in. “Look busy,” he told him.

Gabe shook his head. Eric continued. “Two weeks later they announce a deal for ten million dollars with some chick who fucked the head of a Senate subcommittee on decency,” he said, “and they were running a call girl service out of his townhouse.”

“Ah,” Gabe smiled; the whole world had seen that one, disgorged from the glowing 24-7 maw of the cable news feeds, and it was just the way of the world. Eric glanced at his watch; his time was almost up.

“I keep trying to think my way out of this,” he said. “but it’s like my thoughts are running in these tight little toxic circles, like a rabid hamster wheel in my head. I keep telling myself if I just go deeper I’ll find the answer. But I don’t see a good end to any of it anymore.”

“Any of what?” Gabe asked.

“It. Me. The puzzle of my stupid fucking life,” Eric said.

Silence. Gabe thought for a moment, then sat up in his chair. “I want to give you something,” he said, reaching into his desk drawer and handing Eric some crinkly foil-backed plastic packets. Eric squinted at the label, the drug’s name rendered in flowing baby blue type.

“Synethstra?” he said skeptically. “You wanna put me on anti-depressants?”

“Next generation of SNRI,” Gabe explained. “Basically a new class of serotonin-norepinephrene reuptake inhibitor. It’s powerful but subtle, fast acting. Just to level out your brain chemistry a bit.”

“I dunno, Gabe,” Eric said warily. “I’m kinda not into the better living through chemistry thing?”

“Except for caffeine, nicotine and alcohol?” Gabe shot back.

“Those are a food group, though,” Eric conceded. Bastard knew him too well. Gabe stood and waxed serious. “Neurotransmitter proteins are kind of like oil in your brain’s engine,” he said as he took out his Rx pad and scribbled. “Extended periods of stress burn them off. I think you qualify.”

“So you’re saying my mental dipstick is dry?” Eric said, getting up.

Gabe handed him the scrip. “One a day, with food. Watch your alcohol intake, get rest, and quit smoking already, will ya, guy?” he chided. “You have any problems, let me know.”

“Anal leakage,” Eric mumbled. “Erections lasting more than four hours…”

“That would be a high class problem,” Gabe said.

•••

Eric hit the street and lit a smoke, looking at the sample packets Gabe had given him. Synethstra, 12.5 mg. He sighed. He had to get home, unpack. Make dinner. Write. He had another notes meeting with Marty in the morning.

Eric popped a tab out of the packet and swallowed it. What the hell, he thought. Any port in a storm….

3.



Eric pulled up in front of the Seascape Apartments shortly after six, backing his 96 Nissan 300Z into a curbside slot. The car was a shadow of its former self – a sleek silver 2+2 sportster now showing its age. Eric bought it years back on a whim, his reward for being tortured by a thriller he had worked on about a burned out tattoo artist to the stars and a serial killer collecting human pelts of her work. It was arguably an intriguing idea at the time and was also one of the easiest gigs he had ever scored – one chattily intense lunch meeting and Eric was hired.

It was only afterwards that the migraines set in – endless meetings trying to beat out the outline with execs who could not decide what they wanted but knew whatever it was Eric had just come up with wasn’t it; endless drafts trying to flesh out the character and give her the requisite darkness and torment only to have it scraped off in the next notes meeting. When Eric had spotted the Z on a South Bay lot he had bought it on the spot, trading in his older but pristine Toyota Supra and getting hosed on the value, but he didn’t care – he could afford it, he loved this car and had always wanted one.

Maybe it was his middle class upbringing or middle-brow tastes but Eric had never cared about the Beamers, Mercs or Porsches that were the wet dreams of upward thrusting industry types, he just liked what he liked and thought the Z was cool – low and lean with lines like a shark. It had a flawless leather interior and Bose sound system, T-tops and a twin turbo, it was destined to be a classic and had been pre-owned by some Asian woman who must not have weighed enough to crease the driver’s seat. Eric happily drove it away thinking, hate this project… love this car, and had babied it for years.

The movie never got made. Now the car’s paint was faded and it leaked fluids; the driver’s side door handle was broken and Eric couldn’t afford to fix it, the tranny was slipping and he couldn’t fix that either. And God help him when the head gasket blew, which he knew it was soon to do.

He popped the hatch and pulled out a heavy cardboard moving box marked BOOKS, hauling it into the complex.

The Seascape was a tidy little courtyard building some three blocks from the beach, nestled on a hill in the Avenues just off Palos Verdes Blvd. Couldn’t see the ocean but you could smell it. The building itself was circa 1950s and originally housed personnel from a nearby military base; it was later converted to private units and recently renovated with granite counters, new cabinets and appliances, Berber carpet and ceiling fans, the better to jack the rents and lure in higher-paying tenants.

But the beach chairs by the other units’ doors signaled that this was perhaps more of a community than the faceless Pasadena yuppie warren Eric and Paige had previously called home, which had condo’ed out from under them at exactly the wrong time in Eric’s downward career trajectory and added another twelve tons of emotional debris to their marital discord.

And the layout of the courtyard, with all the units facing inward, was such that one might actually get to meet one’s neighbors, if one wanted to. Their unit, number 26, was cool and airy, and the courtyard had the kitschy charm of a funky beach hang. When Eric and Paige had first seen the lush tropical vegetation and little kidney-shaped pool he felt a sense of ease, like this might be a good place to live, to write. To rebuild his career. And maybe their lives.

“Hi neighbor!” Eric heard a cheery voice and looked up to see Marin and Bob, two of the friendlier denizens, sitting at their customary perch at top of the stairs and taking in the evening air.

“Hey Marin… Bob…” Eric said, pausing and putting down the box. Bob looked over and smiled a squinty smile, nodded yo.

“Still moving in?” Karen enquired. “Wow you guys have a lot of stuff…”

“This is the last of it from storage,” Eric explained.

“Yeah,” Marin nodded knowledgably. Bob squinted and said, “Man, I hate moving.” Marin stood and shifted in her fuzzy slippers, tossing back long auburn hair. Eric had met them as he first moved in three weeks ago and every night since. They were a twenty-something slacker couple who lived in the first unit on the second floor, one of the few remaining “pre-models”, not yet renovated, and they had been there for years. Bob was a marginally employed emotionally stunted surfer stoner while Marin held sway as the reigning worker’s comp queen of the courtyard, chain-smoking and sipping box wine as she continually kvetched about her back injury from once working at Trader Joe’s. Eric found them alternately amusing, eccentric, and vaguely irritating.

“How’s your back?” Eric asked.

“Oh you know,” Marin said, “they’re still jerking me around on my surgery.” Eric nodded; in the last three weeks he’d heard about it maybe twenty times. “Hey!” She brightened. “I met your wife… Patty?”

“Paige,” Eric corrected.

“Right, Paige,” Marin said. “I’m terrible with names. Never forget a face though. She’s really pretty. What does she do?”

“She works at a big firm downtown,” Eric said, then added, “I usually work at home.”

“Oh really?” Marin chirped. She lived for this kind of info. “What do you do?” “I’m a writer,” Eric explained, “though lately I’ve been doing some consulting for an internet company.” As lies went it was palatable and marginally face-saving, and judging from Marin’s nodding acceptance it worked just fine.

“I wondered!” she said. “What kind of stuff?”

“Books, movies, TV,” Eric said. “Horror, thrillers, anything twisted or sick.”

“Wow,” Marin said. “I see the lights on in your place at night and it looked kinda creepy. I told Bob, what does he do? Didn’t I Bob?”

“Yup,” Bob nodded. “Anything I might have seen?”

“Maybe,” Eric replied. He always hated that question. How the hell did he know what she might have seen? “Had a couple of bestsellers, did one of the Frightmare! movies.”

He nodded to the box of books on the stairs, but it was the Frightmare! reference that piqued their interest, not the 1974 Peter Walker film but a later and hugely successful franchise about a crazed maniac clown who had died in a vigilante acid bath and his mutilated undead spirit came back to kill teenagers in their dreams. The original was a low budget box office surprise and scary as hell, but as it took off the series eventually winnowed down to the horror equivalent of Count Chocula as the studio strip-mined every last ounce of cash off the concept.

Eric had done one of the middle sequels, Frightmare 6!: The Dream Tool. Got the gig by pitching a new twist on the mythos hinging on the Jungian collective unconscious and how the inner doorways of perception could swing both ways, allowing the heroine to enter the madman’s dreams to defeat him.

Eric did the first draft, and seven other writers later it became somewhat less than that. Something about an amusement park and a killer baby.

But the brand name still had flash cred: Frightmare! was a theme park ride now, and even the most baked halfwit could invoke the trademark cackle of the clown killer, one of the only lines of Eric’s contribution that survived the final cut.

Which Bob now spontaneously did. “BWOOhahahh are we having FUN yet???,” he croaked, cocking his head toward Eric, who smiled and looked away. “Cool, you wrote that?”

“Yeah,” Eric said, less fake humble then vaguely embarrassed. “A while ago.”

“Whoa, so you’re sorta famous!” Bob said.

“Yeah,” Eric smiled and chuckled a sigh. “Sorta.”

4.



It was almost seven thirty when Paige came home from work. Eric had busied himself unpacking boxes, cleaning the kitchen, and starting to cook dinner. His culinary expertise was utilitarian at best: grilled chicken, rice, sautéed vegetables.

It wasn’t that he totally sucked at it but rather that he did it without any real love for the task; food was fuel best served simple and when deep in deadline Eric often forgot to even eat. Paige on the other hand was the better cook but a fairly terrible housekeeper; in the earlier days of their marriage the duties divided along relatively easy lines – Paige cooked, went to school and worked retail; Eric cleaned the apartment, made the bed, did laundry, maintained the cars, took out the trash, and tended to all other and sundry “manly” tasks, i.e., anything too onerous or disgusting for Paige to want to deal with… and paid the bills, as he wrote fulltime to support them both.

The domestic disparity wasn’t something he had dwelled upon – he had lived on his own for years before they met, and had to do it all anyway when he was a divorced bachelor. But as the power balance shifted, it did start to grind.

And shift it did -- as fate would have it, Paige’s graduation from UCLA in the fourth year of their union marked the ascent of her personal career star just as Eric’s began its seemingly inexorable and meteoric descent. Her first real job at a Pasadena firm brought the mix from roughly ten percent of their household earnings to thirty in the space of a year, just as his began sliding downward; two years later she jumped to a bigger downtown firm, with a concurrent salary bump that made them fifty-fifty, and the year after that she took the lead. It made neither of them happy, though as it turned out for completely different reasons.

“Hey babe,” Eric said as Paige came through the front door and set down her heavy leather attaché.

“Hi.” Paige hung her Pashmina scarf on the rack behind the door and then went over to put her Blackberry in the charger on the desk. Three weeks in and their new home look almost settled within the first four days; Eric was good at moving and had done pretty much all of it himself, hauling a load a day in Paige’s old 4Runner and unpacking each room as he moved it, then getting a U-Haul for the big stuff. By the time he was done the new place already looked lived in; only his office in the second bedroom was left to fine-tune.

Eric came around the counter and they exchanged a perfunctory kiss. “How was your day?” he asked.

“All right,” she said. “What’s for dinner?” She looked at what was on the stove, gave a little shrug that either meant okay or oh god not again, and headed off to the bedroom to change her clothes.

Eric put the food on the big pine table just off the narrow kitchen, uncorked a bottle of Two Buck Chuck for her and grabbed himself another beer as Paige came back in, dressed in comfy sweats, long brown hair pulled loosely back and held with a couple of hand-painted chopsticks. She still had her makeup on. She was a pretty woman, slender and meticulously accessorized at all times, but her features were starting to take on the distinctively downward tilt of someone deeply dissatisfied with life. Her own, certainly. But more so, his.

They sat down to eat; Paige riffled absently through the mail, their silence punctuated by an episode of Law & Order playing low and unwatched on a Vizio plasma on the living room hutch. “I got you a present today,” she said. Eric looked at her and Paige continued, “I put you on my life insurance policy at work.”

“Wow,” Eric said, thinking how romantic. “Thanks.”

“Well I need some kind of security,” Paige said. “God knows you’re not getting any younger.”

“No, it makes sense,” Eric agreed. “That’s fine. How much?”

“A half million dollars,” she said. “I would have gotten more but you’re over forty and you smoke.”

“I’m worth more dead than alive,” Eric muttered jokingly. “Woo hoo.”

Paige was not amused. She finished eating, pushed the picked over plate away, poured some more wine, and lit a cigarette of her own from his pack on the table. Paige was a social smoker, usually at parties or when she was having a glass of wine, but when she lit up at home Eric instinctively braced himself.

“How is the job?” she asked.

“It’s all right I guess,” Eric said, trying to, if not muster enthusiasm, at least not paint a fresh laser-dot on his own forehead. “The supervisor keeps saying they’re going to hire someone full-time out of my group.”

“Well you should go for it, it’s better than nothing,” Paige replied. She knew full well that if that happened he’d make twice what he did now and half what she did, if even, but still. “When will you know?”

“When they decide, I guess,” Eric told her, getting up and squeezing past her to grab another beer from the fridge. “I’m not exactly on a need-to-know basis.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” Eric said, feeling the conversational gears shift. “It’s just that they don’t exactly tell the temps when they’re going to do what they’re going to do. It keeps us motivated.”

“You’re not motivated?”

“I didn’t say that,” Eric defended. “I’m there to do a job so I’m doing a good job at it, but it’s not like I love the fact that I’m there in the first place!”

“Well how do you think I feel?” Paige said. “I need some help around here!”

Eric cleared away the plates, rinsing and loading them into the dishwasher. He knew that neither prior support nor current domestic duties counted toward her principal concern, which he all too keenly shared.

On the TV Detective Lenny Brisco was cracking the case; Eric vaguely wondered if when he was done Lenny might solve the caper of Eric’s murdered career. Paige went back to riffling mail, pulled out her laptop and started paying bills online.

“What’s going with your project?” she asked. He knew what she was really asking, which she then did. “Is he going to pay you yet?”

Eric sighed. “Meeting with Marty tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll know more then.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Like you did with the option?

“That’s not fair,” Eric said, but thought, ouch. As he loaded the washer he flashed on the original meeting for his project; he hadn’t worked with Martin Blumenthal in several years but then Martin called Eric, asking about the availability of the rights. They met for lunch in Chinatown, Martin talking of his passion for the material and picking up the tab, and on the ride home Eric felt cautiously elated: a lunch like that meant a deal and he was waiting for the callback from his agent to discuss terms. On the way out Martin had graciously offered to order something to take home for Eric’s wife but Eric had declined; later Eric had mixed his leftovers into that evening’s stir fry, and Paige had noted it was unusually tasty for something he had made.

The call came as they chatted furtively about what the option might be, upfront money which could range from a couple of thousand to five-figures or more, against a six-figure purchase price; they felt a guarded optimism buoyed by a sense that their long storm may have finally passed.

Then the phone rang. Paige had watched as Eric listened and left the room, the blood slowly draining out of him. When he came back she asked, what did he say what’s the option?

Eric had nodded to her plate. You’re eating it, he told her.

The lunch was the option. There was no upfront money, only the promise of a little a little later, and a lot a lot later… if the movie got made. If Eric had leverage he might have been able to use it, hold out or walk away until the terms improved. But he didn’t, so it was that, or nothing. It was as good as it got.

The “freebie” term was short with a paid renewal, the execution price was still respectable, not huge but it would pay back for the last long downward drought… once the cameras rolled. Eric had swallowed his pride and agreed; months of free work later Martin did renew, and a check for five grand finally graced Eric’s doorstep as the project moved glacially toward that mythical six-figure payday. It was a personal victory of sorts but the money burned off like spit on a hot griddle.

And that was months ago. And they still weren’t done.

“Not fair??” Paige said, plainly affronted. “How is any of this fair? I work like a dog all day…”

“It’s your career,” Eric countered. “You’re doing what you want to do, you love it there, they love you! But what, when my movie sells you won’t work as hard? You’ll quit? Stay home and bake cookies?”

“You chose this!” Paige said angrily. “What choice do I have?”

Eric bit back his anger, thought what choice do any of us have babe? All the choice in the world. It was deeply ironic to him that for the first years of their marriage they had never fought, only to later realize their wedded bliss neatly coincided with his ever-expanding ability to provide. She had tanked the LSATS and been turned down for law school twice but it was in her blood: Paige had subconsciously redlined their vows until she promised to love honor and cherish for richer… for better… in health.

“You have the choice to not make a hard thing worse,” Eric told her.

“Yeah right,” she said. “You just don’t want to deal with reality!”

“What the hell does that mean?” Eric asked.

“Nobody else lives like this!” she cried.

“EVERYBODY lives like this!!” Eric cried louder and tossed his emptied beer in the trash, grabbing another and closing the fridge door just a tad too hard. “Christ, Paige, the whole damned country lives like this! You think people who have normal jobs don’t worry about losing them?”

He was pacing now, trying to level himself as Paige sat in her chair in the eye of the emotional storm. She finished the bottle of wine, got another, sat and poured another glass, then lit another smoke, blowing an angry plume.

“I think when normal people lose their jobs they get another one,” she said. “they don’t sit around feeling sorry for themselves.”

“And I’m doing… what?” Eric said sarcastically. “I’ve got one project out there, I’m always looking for new ones, and now I work this stupid day gig….”

“Yeah, right,” Paige said. I made more than that when I was in school.”

“I know,” he said. “I was supporting you.”

Eric winced even as he said it. Low blows time. If Paige cared she didn’t show it; she was on a tear now.

“Uh-huh,” she snorted. “Big famous writer. Big movie deal coming. Like with your comic book…”

“Graphic novel,” he corrected bitterly. She snorted derisively. Another greatest hit on Eric’s downside shit list. He had been brought in to adapt a purportedly true life story about a medical examiner investigating serial murders similar to cattle mutilations, that were going unreported by the authorities. Creepy stuff but maddeningly vague. His front work was all on spec, of course – outlines, treatments -- but the goal was to make the movie. It fizzled out.

Then the opportunity arose to do it as a graphic novel, which everyone agreed was a smart play – the San Diego Comics Con had become almost as important as Sundance to the industry, and comics were still being snapped up and converted to big budget popcorn crunchers. And after all, what was a comic book but a glorified storyboard?

Eric made a deal – a pittance at best -- with the upcoming indie publisher, who retained a passive production role in any resulting film. And he set out to write it – going dark and noir in the tone, setting the story in the alien abductee subculture – from legit seekers and tormented souls to the tin foil hat hucksters who conned them -- creating the character of a woman who bumped up against a gruesome crime and it systematically unraveled not just her life but her perceptions, and the very fabric of her reality. Was it a serial killer… or aliens… or the government… or all three?

In the end Eric left the question deliberately unanswered, much like real life. The result was disturbing, moody and mysterious, a portrait of insanity. Which was kinda how he felt while he was writing it.

The book came out with little fanfare: the title’s release pushed back, rumor had it to avoid stealing thunder from another new title from the publisher that actually had just snagged a movie deal. Then it seemingly caught a wave: a young director the studios were enamored with and his equally young producer were interested, seeing less recycled X Files than Jacob’s Ladder meets Seven, as Eric had intended. Managers and agents began doing the byzantine dance to excite a bidding war and jack the price up.

But then at one meeting they dropped the bomb, deftly delivered in a Santa Monica Starbucks – in order to really sell the thing Eric had written they would need to add “layers of value” and “increase the exec’s comfort zones”, blah blah blah. It wasn’t about the quality of the material, they urged. It was the brand name, packaging the deal with just the right elements, priming the lube on the fast track to Dealhalla.

The punchline was, they would of course need to bring in a hit writer. A-list or better. It was nothing personal, they explained, but they just didn’t feel the studios would accept Eric writing the thing Eric had written. But if he would just step back, scrape himself off his own creation, and let them run with it…

Eric was floored. He didn’t freak – this was business, and after so much effort he didn’t want to see it all come to naught. But where Eric wanted numbers there were only adjectives, and everyone just felt it would a bigger sale, a faster deal, and everyone would be… happier… if he would roll with them.

The cold calculus was irrefutable -- if the studios were paying some branded ace a couple of mil to write Eric’s movie, Eric would be able to command a higher sale price for the book -- maybe as high as a half mil, seven fifty? A mil? Light years above his own quote. And it was his material, he could always say no, right?

The catch being, he would have to say yes first.

It went against his every artistic instinct. But Eric knew if he dug in his heels or even opted to spec the script himself and end run the obstacle it would get zero traction from the people tasked to sell it. Eric thought about it, weighed principal against practical. And then…

“Whatever,” Paige said bitterly. “Nothing happened with it.”

“The deal fell apart,” Eric reminded her. “It wasn’t me.”

“No!” Paige countered, adamant. “They didn’t want you!”

“That’s not what they said, goddammit!” Eric insisted.

“Yes it is!” Paige cried, as her frustration crescendoed to the breaking point. “They said the studios wouldn’t even look at it if it came from you!”

“You weren’t there! They said it was about brand names!” Eric shot back, feeling his guts curdle and skin prickle as if it wanted to crawl off his body. “Do you know how hard it is to have somebody tell you they think what you wrote is brilliant it’s just too bad you wrote it? To hear that a studio will throw millions at someone to adapt your own work but it can’t be you? That it’s nothing personal?” He was railing now but couldn’t help himself. “Do you know what’s it like to live with that?”

“I’m sick of this!” Paige said. “I don’t want to live this way! It’s not normal!”

“Well neither am I!” Eric hissed. “When did I ever say I was?”

“That’s just your ego and selfishness,” Paige countered bitterly. “You don’t want to be a man, you don’t want to take care of your family! We can’t buy a house, we can’t plan for our future, we can’t do anything! I deserve better than this!”

“Well like Clint Eastwood said,” Eric muttered, voice dropping low. “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

Perhaps the wrong time to quote Unforgiven. Paige was crying now, valid frustration and self-serving indignation swirling behind her eyes and leaking out to blur her mascara. She looked at Eric, her wide eyes rendered almost clownish, but for the pain.

And then she spoke again.

It was a terrible thing when the one you loved could take your worst and innermost unspoken fear, fashion it a finely-honed point, and stab you deep in the heart with it. But they were in combat now, as they had been so many times before. Their verbal thrust and parry were refined by practice and consecrated by time, and Eric had seen and heard and felt them all too many times before. But he had never heard this.

“You have officially ruined my life,” Paige said, flat and matter-of-fact.

It stopped Eric dead in his tracks. He looked at her. “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” she said. She wasn’t looking at him anymore. She repeated, “You have officially ruined my life.”

Eric paused, feeling something buckle in his chest – some deep psychological strut cracked and gave way. He nodded.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “And you have officially broken my heart.”

Paige said nothing. For a moment, silence. Then she got up and left the room.

•••

An hour or so later, Paige came back out. The living room blinds were pulled back; the room was dark save for the glow of the TV and the soft lights from the courtyard outside the picture window. Over the roofline of the building the lights of the Palos Verdes foothills twinkled, distant and serene.

Eric was sitting in the darkness at the kitchen table, a shadow quietly smoking and thinking. The kitchen had magically cleaned itself in her absence, as it always did. And he still had to write tonight.

Paige came up, almost as if to apologize. But instead she said softly, “When are you just going to admit it’s over for you?”

Eric looked up at her as the question hung in the air. Then he stood and looked in her eyes, the darkness masking deep and irretrievable sadness in his own.

“Never,” he said.

5.



Alone in the second bedroom Eric unpacked the box marked BOOKS andneatly put them up on the low bookshelf in front of the windows. Atop the bookshelf was a glowing green plasma light, a flat glass disc shooting little bolts of electricity across its surface like something out of Frankenstein’s lab.

That must be what Marin was talking about, he thought. Ooooh spooky.

The placement of the shelf was part aesthetic, part strategic: it allowed fresh air to circulate but also obstructed the view from outside when he was seated at his desk, and without unduly restricting his own. The net effect was Eric could see out better than others could see in, and a partial view of the L-shaped second floor walkway was possible just by turning in his chair, a full view by simply standing at his desk.

The books were a mixture of mass market and trade paperbacks and hardcovers, a few specialty or small press but mostly mainstream editions, along with foreign editions in French, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Japanese. Alongside the titles the name ERIC BEST graced the covers and spines of each, every one of them not just a labor of love or commerce but an expression of some part of himself. They were his cumulative life experience carved up for parts and rendered in twisted fable and fantasy, vivid nightmares and allegorical excoriations of the human condition, the collected body of his work laid out on a thirty-six inch wide shelf like a tiny morgue slab, or a private museum. He felt some sense of pride from that.

But each one also represented a little income engine, every copy sold churning pennies on the dollar for Eric for so long as they were still in print, and as Eric finished and stepped back to survey the effect he knew those little engines had sputtered and gone silent. Some had been bestsellers, others had merely performed respectably. But every one was out of print.

Beneath the shelf of books lay neat stacks of his scripts, sorted by project –the titles written in black Sharpie on spines along with the dates. Some had been produced, most labored in development hell before seizing up and never seeing the light of day. The time spans ranged from six months to as many as twenty-six on one project, the latter of which then went on to four or five other writers and, last Eric heard, was still rumored to be going into production one day.

Eric turned off the overhead light and let the night seep in; the mad scientist lamp made the his name on the books suddenly skitter and shift, as if they were alive. It was quiet outside and the sound of the ocean was distant but soothing. He could see the lights from the hills over the roofline; just then he heard something and saw Bob stumbling out to join Marin at the head of the stairs, trying to be quiet but holding on to the railing as if the building were sinking, which was per usual for a weeknight past eleven.

Then Bob called back something in the general direction of Eric’s window and Eric stepped back into the shadows. He looked past the other side of the shelf and saw who Bob was talking to.

His next door neighbor was coming home. She was tall and gamine, blonde and quite beautiful, though judging from her body language probably a little tipsy, and from her attire probably coming home from a night out. Her front door, Unit 24, was immediately down the three stairs at the end of his unit and maybe thirty feet away, right at the angle of the corner; if he stood in his office just so it was not so much that he could see it but rather that he couldn’t not see it.

Eric had glimpsed her several times since he moved in, always coming or going, but they’d never met, and he noticed her the way he always noticed beauty – instinctively.

Eric lingered, watching as she came to the door and leaned forward, shoulder length hair falling soft and thick to obscure her profile, her long fingers fiddling with her keys.

“Yo KIM!” Bob called out drunkenly until Marin hushed him.

Kim looked in Bob’s direction and laughed. She said something back that Eric couldn’t hear, but the sound of her laughter was delightful – throaty but sweet, almost girlish. In that moment her head swept around the other way, and Eric stole a glance at her face: blue eyes and wide radiant smile, sensual yet frankly adorable.

She seemed to pause a beat as if sensing him watching. Then the keys clicked and her door opened, and his neighbor stepped inside.

Eric sighed and turned back to the task still at hand, focusing as he turned his attention to his desk. It was big and oak and looked like the bottom half of a roll top, and atop it sat a sleek laptop connected to a large LCD monitor, surrounded by assorted backup drives, hubs and wires, punctuated by winking blue LEDs. It was the centerpiece of his lair and a silicon extension of his brain, his own little digital nerve center, and as Eric fired everything up his thoughts churned back to tonight.

Paige was asleep in the bedroom just down the hall mere yards away, but their emotional distance could be measured in light years. The fight adjourned, they had returned to their respective corners – she to sleep and he to pace and burn, his mind smoldering.

He got a mad flash of The Exorcist, the quiet before the final storm as the priests ascended the stairs to save Regan’s pea-soup spewing soul; young Karras telling the wizened Merrin how he thinks he should bring him up to speed on the phenomena, she seems to exhibit three or four personalities… and Merrin stopping him, saying No. There is only one…

Their fights were like that. There was only the one über mega meta-battle submerging and surfacing again and again like a prehistoric creature, each time whipped harder by frustration and the steady attrition of hope. Eric felt wired and resentful and dead inside, pulse pounding in his throat, innards twisted into a tight little fists.

As the computer chimed and the desktop mounted Eric opened a desk drawer, pulled out a slim flash drive and plugged it into the hub – extra file backup in case of earthquake or other disaster. He carried it with him everywhere. The little packets from Gabe where there in the drawer, too, and tucked back in the corner of the drawer was a sinister black shape: a blocky Llama nine millimeter. Fully loaded home defense, a tool for a job one would never want to do.

Eric picked up the gun. It had other uses too, like for another equally unpleasant task. He closed his eyes and felt its heft in his hand, felt the cool hard ring of the muzzle as it slid up to his temple… then no, to his forehead… then no, to just under his chin. Then he remembered a video clip of a Pennsylvania politician who had been busted in some forgotten scandal – garden variety graft, corruption, his pudgy hand caught in the commonwealth cookie jar – who then blew his brains out at a live television press conference.

Not like in the movies, no gruesome slo-mo skull confetti, just a loud pop as he stuck the gun in his mouth and squeezed the trigger, followed by a torrent of blood and brain matter evacuating from his nose and mouth as his flaccid body dropped like a wet sack, drenched in cranial Niagara. And the onlookers all screamed and scrambled…

Eric turned the gun and placed it to his heart. If he held it just so he could squeeze the trigger with his thumb. Just make a fist and boom. Problems solved.

Eric breathed hard, hyperventilating, and glanced toward the window. He had written this before, one of the books on the shelf. He had read forensic texts and gone to morgues to stare into the faces of the dead, to try to glean something from their vacant milky eyes, so he could imagine the moment more fully to render on the page. But the dead told him nothing, so in the end he made it up. Imagining. Trying to feel the end in forward tense.

Eric held his breath and tried to squeeze. Nothing. Somewhere in the synaptic relay from brain to hand the message cancelled out. He just couldn’t make himself do it. Eric sighed and put the gun back in the drawer, then popped another of Gabe’s meds.

His computer chimed; he had new mail. His email was like his phone these days, bearing vexing news or no news at all. He scrolled and deleted the countless Dis.countV.iagra and debt free credit spams, the fun-filled your dream vacation awaits! pitches and sunny horoscopes, the alert notices that his Visa payment was due.

Finally he came to a message from Todd, Martin Blumenthal’s assistant. It read: Eric – sorry have 2 bump tomorrow’s meeting; Marty in Japan, back Sun.. Next Monday at 2? Thx Todd

The news was both aggravation and reprieve: he wasn’t done with the latest notes and could use the extra time. But he knew Paige would shit. It was always like that, first with major letdowns then radiating out to include to the slightest setback, her two first responses to any adverse revelation being oh that’s just great! and I knew this was going to happen! In exactly that order.

Eric opened the script doc and scrolled, as the title page filled the screen.

TURNAROUND Screenplay By ERIC BEST

Eric scrolled further and started to read, letting the flow of what he had written lead him to the jump off point of what he had to do next, like a runner getting a head start before diving off a cliff. He lit a cigarette and turned on the fan, glancing at his notes scrawled on the printout of the previous draft. One scene header was circled twice.

The note read, Change location – too $$$$$$$!

Painless enough, Eric thought. Ah the joys of pre-production – as they inched ever nearer to moving things from page to screen certain realities came into play, and a script whose eyes were bigger than its budget would not see its light turn green.

The INT. PENTHOUSE that was the original home for Eric’s lead had proven too pricey as a location, especially since the story called for it to be firebombed toward the end of Act Two. And Eric’s scene that would require a helicopter tracking shot of the floor to ceiling windows blowing out to rain glittering shrapnel on the unsuspecting city below, while kinetically beautiful on the page, would require a shitload of green screen and CGI and cost a tad over two hundred and thirty thousand, for just that one shot. All of which was totally do-able and would look fantastic.

Just not in a five million dollar movie.

No problem, though: Marty had a new location lined up. Eric called file images up on the bigger monitor, perused the jpgs from the scout. He tapped the keys of his laptop, did a global Find/Change, and INT. PENTHOUSE became INT. BEACH HOUSE. Eric started to type.

INT. BEACH HOUSE – PRE-DAWN Chilly. Dark. Quiet. The Pacific thrums in the b.g., the surf visible thru floor-to-ceiling smoke tint, last vestiges of moon breaking thru obsidian clouds. MATT BLACK catnaps on the low bed, his taut form slung across expensive covers, one foot grazing the hardwood floor.

Eric looked at the clock and concentrated, trying to squeeze out all awareness of his surroundings. That he was dog-tired, sleep deprived, stressed out and buzzed was of no consequence; he had to push back the anxiety and self loathing and endless what ifs of his life to will himself into this world, focus on image and character and flow of language until the edges disappeared and nothing else mattered, and he was just in it.

The keys clicked. The minutes ticked into hours.

And Eric wrote deep into the night.

6.



He came to consciousness by degrees; slithering up from black slumber like a man emerging from a soft dark cocoon – awareness absent identity first, as gossamer shards of the dream tore and fluttered away.

The first glimmer of thought said simply I AM, followed by a moment of searching until a name attached, becoming I AM ERIC .

A slight tingling sensation prickled his skin, and in his ears a dull pulsing sound, familiar but too loud, as the thought completed itself.

I AM ERIC BEST.

Eric opened sleep crusted eyes, his vision blurred and halting. His head pounded with the mother of all migraines. He closed his eyes again.

“Oh fuck,” he croaked. “Oh Christ…”

He tried to lay still, feeling his intestines do a Cuisinart squirm – afraid to move for fear of disturbing the fragile balance. He could sense the dim intrusion of sunlight behind his lidded eyes, and his senses all felt poised on overload. But just as the pounding in his skull began to recede another force summoned up from his guts, and Eric knew he was destined to hurl.

He lurched up and staggered to the bathroom by Braille, retching and coughing. But puke he did not, merely gasping and snarfing for a dreadful beat before turning on the sink and letting the water thunder into the basin. Eric splashed his face and opened his eyes again, waiting for them to figure out how to focus.

“Aw man,” he mumbled, blearily thinking christ all nighters I’m getting too old for this shit. Then his eyes focused, and something seemed very wrong.

“What the..?” Eric looked down. The six pack he had consumed last night was replaced by a six pack he hadn’t seen in years – the one at his waist. Eric blinked, blinked again, reaching through the unbuttoned cotton shirt to feel a set of tanned and rock hard abs. His.

Eric twisted this way and that, looking for love handles which had likewise inexplicably absconded. His body by Budweiser was simply not there; in its place was a Bowflex wet dream, all lean and limber. Eric’s right hand came up to massage his thudding forehead, and he stopped again.

“Huh?”

On his close cropped and thinning pate Eric seemed to have sprouted a new head of hair. Not just hair, but a Sy Sperling Chia Pet on steroids mane, thick as mink and rakishly long.

“Dream. Very weird dream,” Eric mumbled, taking note of his new self in the bathroom mirror. He was barefoot but clad in black jeans and a loose white shirt, which even rumpled and slept in looked ridiculously expensive. His face was his own, though now sporting a similarly rakish stubble. And the bone structure itself seemed enhanced – features chiseled and softly hewn, no bags under the eyes. His eyes. The ones staring back at him from the mirror.

As Eric marveled his awareness expanded to note that the bathroom was not done in hastily installed Home Depot veneers and vinyl flooring but black marble, veined with faint spiderlines of silver, azure and rose. The sink was black and glossy, the glass shower next to the Jacuzzi tub massive and sporting enough nozzles to decontaminate radiation victims.

It was, plainly put, not Seascape Luxury Apartments, unit 26.

Eric stepped out of the bathroom cautiously, tanned feet padding across wide-planked hardwood floor. As dreams went it was sure as hell vivid; his senses were settling, further absorbing his strange new surroundings. The roar in his ears receded and clarified into the sound of waves pounding outside the floor to ceiling windows of the bedroom, distanced only by a thin strip of pristine and private beach. The low slung bed looked vaguely familiar, like the bigger better version of something he had once admired in a Z Gallery showroom. But then so did everything else in the expansive and austere room.

On the floor near the bed was an artful tangle of clothes; some his, then… hers? Eric reached down and picked up a pair of black lace panties, size two. Then sheer stockings, a black bra, a white blouse and gray skirt, all leading like a trail of bread crumbs out the bedroom door. A striptease in reverse.

As his memory jigsawed into place Eric looked back to the artfully rumpled bed and had erotic flashes of tangled limbs, a tumble of thick dark hair, the smooth moonlit play of skin on skin… and then he realized why he recognized his surroundings.

He should. He wrote them.

Eric was dreaming he was in his movie. Logic stubbornly demanded that much. It was weird but in its own way, kind of cool. Eric turned toward the door, following the trail of castoff clothes, and suddenly stubbed his big toe on the sleek dresser.

“Ow! Shit!” he hissed, grabbing his foot and hopping awkwardly. Dreams weren’t supposed to hurt. Suddenly he heard a sound coming from the kitchen – or so he thought. The kitchen?

Yes. He hadn’t been there but he saw it in his mind. As he stepped out into the hallway the sound continued; a low slurping sucking gurgle, strange but weirdly familiar.

Eric followed the sound to the end of the hallway. He smelled something. Olfactory trigger. A luscious euphoric recall.

Eric smelled coffee.

The noise was the sound of a coffee maker. Maybe a Braun, definitely German-made. The scent was rich and dark and aromatic. Eric’s brain was jellied, thoughts and sensations swirling as he tried to piece them together. A lucid dream, where you know you’re dreaming while you’re in it? He’d had them before, this was too intense.

Psychotic episode? Technicolor brain fart? Eric didn’t know and didn’t care. He just didn’t want it to end. Better to just let himself flow with the moment.

Eric stepped around the corner, parsing mental fragments of the woman and the night before…

But the figure that stood on the other side of the kitchen counter was the polar opposite of feminine: hard, swarthy and stocky with pocked skin, black hair pulled back in a braid, muscled arms bulging from a tight white t-shirt. A shoulder rig pinched back his pecs as he poured a steamy mug and slid it across the massive black marble counter.

“Long night, boss?” the hard man said, pouring a cup for himself.

“Uhh…” Eric began, tried again. “Ummm…”

“‘Nuff said,” The hard man smirked knowingly, and turned to look outside.

Eric picked up the mug, felt it hot in his hands, and took a sip. Dark roast, bitter and bracing. It flooded the crevices of his brain; as it did he took in the whole of the room: huge with a vaulted ceiling and furnished in casual cool, the kitchen area opening up into the greater flow of the space. Grey-green surf crashed outside the windows which comprised the entire side of the house; the sky above it hazy with morning marine layer.

The hard man had a tattoo on the back of his neck, four letters inked in Gothic script, two on either side of the braid. T…O… then A…D…

“Toad,” Eric mumbled. The hard man turned.

“Yeah boss?” he said.

“What?” Eric said, then remembered. His name is Toad. Of course it was. Eric knew that. He created him, in his mind, and on the page. Nonetheless, his creation was standing there sipping java and staring at him, expecting a reply.

“Nothing…” Eric stammered, then, “Sorry. Brain fried.”

“No shit,” Toad said. Again with the knowing smirk. “Looks like Trina rode you hard and put you away wet. Or vice versa.”

His voice was gruff with a slight Hispanic lilt, but there was a clear affection there, and even though he looked like he could bend even the buffed Eric into a pretzel he was deferential. Like a wingman. Or a sidekick. Toad nodded to the empty tequila bottle by the sink, the two empty glasses beside it. One of them had a lipstick smear. Eric groaned.

“Giddyup, homes,” Toad laughed, then lit a smoke and tossed the pack on the counter. Eric reached for one and fired it up, but as the smoke filled his lungs he suddenly doubled over, coughing and gasping into the sink. He felt like he’d just inhaled sandpaper.

“Geez, Black, since when you smoke?” Toad said, and Eric remembered: Matt Black didn’t. Only bad guys did. Something about impressionable kids and role models.

Eric looked at the pack: a familiar brand but no product placement. The name said Red Dogs. Matt Black also drank hard liquor, which Eric didn’t. Weird.

“Trina,” Eric croaked and tossed the smoke. “She around?”

“No worries, I got rid of her,” Toad said. “Do me a favor, don’t trust that bitch too much, no matter how good she do you. Use yer big head.”

Toad tapped Eric on the forehead and stepped away. As Eric’s head cleared he knew: this was not a dream. It was… something else. What exactly, he didn’t have a clue. But he knew his script was a hip thriller set in L.A., and here he was, the hip lead.

And he knew something else, too: the next words out of Toad’s mouth. “Wakey wakey,” Toad said. “Big day today.”

Toad tossed Eric a set of keys and Eric caught them instinctively, hand snatching them from mid-air before his brain could even think about it. Toad headed toward the front door, and Eric followed.

As the door opened Eric saw Toad backlit by bright cool light. Just past him in the cloistered driveway sat a midnight blue Acura NSX. Eric’s ride. A black Jag was parked beside it: Toad’s. Toad paused in the doorway, close enough that Eric could smell his cologne. Toad could smell something, too.

“Meet’s at two. Same place,” he said, and sniffed. “Hose off the love juice and strap up, bro. Might get a little bumpy.”

Eric nodded as Toad climbed into the Jag and pulled out, tires biting the hand laid stones of the drive. He listened as it rounded the corner and zoomed up and out onto the Pacific Coast Highway, heading south to the city.

Eric glanced up: the marine layer was starting to burn off, revealing faint patches of clearest blue.

“Really. Fucking. Weird,” Eric sighed, and headed back to the bathroom. As he stripped and turned on the shower the nozzles sprang to life; steam instantly enfolding his naked skin. Eric looked down, saw himself fully revealed.

“Whoa,” he said. Eric stepped into the stinging hot spray.

And got ready for what was already and beyond all imagining, the strangest day of his life.

•••

AUTHOR'S NOTE: 08.10 -- This novel is currently in progress; the screenplay, however, is complete and ready to go. Just sayin'.


daysleeper