SUMMER 1979
She drove up through the Cahuenga Pass and into North Hollywood, along the broad boulevards lined with burger joints and gas stations, billboards at every intersection, Abogados de Accidentes and Solarcaine; Cheap Trick Coming to the Fabulous Forum. The afternoon was hot and tinder-dry. On the valley’s far side, plumes of gray smoke rose from the mountain peaks as if from a row of chimneys. The radio news said the fires were getting worse.
Zack’s phone number was still out of service. They’d fought about this the last time they spoke—his tendency to disappear for weeks at a time, to a convention or on a film-searching expedition, or off the map entirely, when he disconnected his phone and refused to answer his apartment buzzer. She told him to call when he was going away so she wouldn’t think he was being held in a dark basement by the FBI, and sometimes he did, humoring her, but more often he didn’t. Then it was Jess’s turn to go silent, fed up with her one-way effort in the relationship. But before too long he’d do something thoughtful, appearing on her birthday with a supermarket cake or inviting her to a screening in town. She’d cave and they’d restart the cycle. It frustrated her to no end but she couldn’t break loose. She was still his little sister.
He was twitchy and nervous even before their parents’ accident, but his work had made it worse. She was always surprised when she went to one of those screenings—a lost classic at the Egyptian Theatre or a private showing at a client’s house in the hills—and saw him interacting with other people. In the right mood he could be charming, and all those hours watching movies had made him a good storyteller.
Sometimes he came to one of her pieces, but they never talked about the work. They talked about mechanics: materials she used, the building process. They skated along the edges. She had no idea how he felt about any of it. She was afraid to ask, worried that his judgment would shut her down. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did, stirring up guilt she had never exorcized. Zack stopped drawing after their parents’ death, but for Jess it was an opening. He had been the artist, then she took his place.
The gallery attack seemed to confirm his worst fears—a late-night assault from out of the blue. He grew even more secluded. Jess wanted to think Zack was internalizing his concern for her because he didn’t know how to show it, but she didn’t know if that was true. Maybe he was being selfish, neglecting her pain in favor of his own paranoia. Either way, it suited her. He didn’t ask when she was going to get over her fear and rejoin the world. He already knew the answer—part of her never would. Once or twice a week they talked on the phone deep into the night. Usually, they watched movies this way. One of them called when they found something on channel 2 or 11, and they watched and commented, Zack giving movie history context and Jess marveling at or deriding the use of light and space. Those nights, sitting in front of her TV with the phone cord stretched out from the kitchen, her brother’s voice in her ear, Jess felt, at least for a little while, safe.
His building was a long stucco two-story that butted up against the back end of a second-run theater. The apartment was cheap, owing to the dicey neighborhood. Jess was sure he could afford better—some of the films he sold went for high prices—but the seediness of the location suited Zack’s vision of himself as a hunted man, a character from his beloved crime pictures.
She couldn’t remember if the intercom worked. Pressing the button, she squinted up to Zack’s window. Nothing but a bright white rectangle, reflecting the day. Then the speaker cleared its throat and she heard Zack, slightly distorted, a movie robot’s tin-can voice.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
“What?”
“It’s your sister, Zack, open the door.”
A pause, then a loud buzz and the clank of the dead bolt falling away. Jess pushed the door open and started up the staircase. She carried Ruth’s Beethoven sonatas under her arm, a peace offering after their last argument.
When she was halfway up Zack appeared on his landing, looking even more disheveled than usual. He wore a striped bowling shirt and clashing shorts, scratching the top of one socked foot with the toes of the other. He had put on weight. His face was fuller and his belly pushed against the seams of the fabric. He pulled at his goatee, a nervous habit indulged ever since he had been able to sprout facial hair. Jess always imagined that Zack thought the goatee made him look like a South American revolutionary or a French intellectual. He considered himself an amalgam of the two, minus the politics. His only ideology was cinema, but his faith was as deep and defiant as that of any true believer.
She was about to call up to him when the movie soundtrack boomed next door, filling the stairwell, a low throb Jess felt deep in her chest.
“Did you call?” He sounded put out that she had arrived unannounced.
“The number’s dead,” Jess said, reaching the step below the landing, catching her breath. Too many cigarettes, not enough exercise. “How are you?”
“Busy. In the middle of a few things.”
“Can I come in?”
His face tensed. She was disrupting his routine. Jess thought of how good it once felt when he had included her in his plans and projects. Those Somerville summers on their front porch, drawing mazes for her to work through or asking her to hold a handful of pipe cleaners as he twisted them into a complex armature, branching like a spiderweb.
Zack was the artist, she had told Laura Lehrer years ago, and the filmmaker had asked, What were you?
She had been his apprentice, his shadow, and that had been enough for her, until it wasn’t.
Jess took off her sunglasses. He looked at her scar and then quickly away. The physical proof of the attack usually made him even more uncomfortable around her.
His apartment was dark, shade-drawn, and smelled of sweat and dust and the vinegary tang of old celluloid. Metal film canisters sat in tight rows on shelves and stood in high stacks against the walls. The front room was large—actually the living room and a bedroom combined. Right after he moved in, Zack had knocked out a wall between the two, creating a space long enough to throw an image. A screen hung down at the far end, a dim white apparition in the dark.
Zack sat on a stool at a large butcher-block table covered with tools and metal parts. A half-dismantled projector stood open amid the disorder, lit by a single desk lamp. Holding a pair of needle-nose pliers, he leaned in to the body of the machine, carefully threading a wire behind gears.
Jess held up the records. “I was listening to these the other day and thought you might like them.”
“I don’t have a record player.”
She turned to take in the surrounding hoard of machinery. “You’re kidding. Then I’ll take them back.”
“No, it’s fine. Leave them.”
She set the records on a shelf full of cardboard Betamax boxes. Over the last few years, videotape had become an increasing part of Zack’s business. He’d resisted at first—he’d told Jess many times that tape was a shitty substitute for film—but the ability to record TV programs won him over. Unsurprisingly, he’d become obsessive about it, taping late-night movies and cop shows along with hours of TV news.
The apartment rumbled a bit with the sound of the movie playing in the theater next door. Zack didn’t seem to notice. Jess imagined that it was background to him now, a comforting wash of sound and vibration, the feel of movies all around him even when he wasn’t watching.
“What are they showing?”
His eyes stayed on his work. “The China Syndrome. Have you seen it?”
“I haven’t gone to the movies in a while.”
“It’s about a nuclear accident. Kind of like Three Mile Island. Lots of screaming and sirens.”
“I was downtown the other night,” she said. “They were showing Border Incident.”
“The Million Dollar Theatre. That wasn’t my print. They asked for it, but I told them they were crazy. Their projector’s a fucking lawn mower.”
She thought of his old room above Aunt Ruth’s garage, the small gaggle of the professor’s friends who came to watch movies. She wondered who Zack saw these days, if anyone came up here or if he was always alone.
She had rooms like this now. She held off for years but had finally succumbed. Instead of pulling him out, as Ruth had asked, Jess had followed his path into isolation.
“I was hoping you could show me something,” she said.
“I don’t really have time for a movie.”
“Not a movie. News footage.”
“Of what?”
“Zero Zone.”
He leaned back from the projector but kept his eyes on the gears.
“I thought you didn’t want to see that.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“It’s something I made,” she said. “And people were hurt there. Someone was killed.”
“That’s not your fault.”
“But I shouldn’t have looked away.”
Zack set his pliers on the table and looked up at her, finally. She wondered who he saw. Probably the same scared, haunted woman she had seen in the mirror at the Mexican restaurant with Vince. The same terrified girl standing at the top of the staircase on the night of their parents’ accident.
“Do you still have it?” she said.
He made a face, a comically sheepish twist of his mouth. It was a ridiculous question. What had he ever thrown away?
The apartment’s second bedroom was filled with more videotapes heaped on shelves and stacked in unstable towers on the floor that looked like stalagmites or pillars from some ancient ruin. Zack maneuvered his bulk around them expertly. Each box was labeled in black marker with the jagged, impatient handwriting that hadn’t changed since he was a kid. NYC Blackout, Unabomber, Death of Elvis. Jess sat on a small love seat while Zack scanned a shelf.
“Local or national?” he asked.
“Your choice.”
Two TVs sat side by side on a dresser, each with a videocassette machine on top. Zack pulled a tape from the shelf and fed it into one of the machines, then switched on the TV below. The picture rolled in a liquid waver, fuzzy-edged and discolored, then settled into a local newscast. An anchorman with a perfect helmet of hair spoke to the camera. Over his left shoulder, a small rectangle showed another image, a still photo of Zero Zone. Jess’s spare concrete room was a dark silhouette against a brilliant sunset.
The anchor said that a small group of hikers were inside this art installation, refusing to leave. Temperatures were expected to reach triple digits over the next few days, and the woman responsible for the room, Los Angeles artist Jess Shepard, had told the owner of the property to call the authorities.
Jess felt her chest joggle when the anchor said her name. For two years she’d believed that ignoring and denying kept her hidden, like a child who thinks she disappears when she covers her eyes. But of course she’d been a central fact of the story all along.
The rancher, Lincoln, appeared on-screen, a cigarette in his tight mouth, a microphone pushed toward his face. He was angry and concerned. He believed there were four people inside the room, though he couldn’t be sure. Hippies or dropouts of some kind. The sheriff had had no luck talking with them and threatened to knock down the door. That was when one of the hippies, a man, said that they had a weapon inside, to be used if any violence was enacted upon them. That was how this man put it, Lincoln said. Those kinds of words, like out of the Bible.
A different newscaster was on-screen now, a high-haired blond woman speaking in grave tones. A negotiator had arrived from Santa Fe. This was another night, another station. Zack had edited the footage together. There were no commercials, no other stories. Jess wondered how long he had worked on this tape, how many times he’d seen this footage. She remembered the nights of the standoff, alone in her dark apartment, on the phone with him while he watched his TVs. She hadn’t wanted him to describe what was happening, but she’d needed him there, absorbing the awful news, just as he’d answered the phone on the night of their parents’ accident, a bulwark against the full force of the disaster.
He never said much those nights. Jess just heard his breathing and the muffled voices of the newscasters, a few mechanical clicks in the background. Zack pressing buttons. Even then she knew he was recording.
There was a wide still shot of Zero Zone in a golden dusk, what Jess thought might be a photograph until there was the slightest movement, a bird crossing the top of the screen. The image held for a long time. Jess tried to imagine what was happening in the room, what Isabella saw or felt. She wondered if it was anything like what she had seen, that initial waver of light that seemed to speak to her grief for Alex, the inexplicable loss made physical. A vision that had led her to the impulsive and illogical act of building a room in the desert.
And then the footage jumped, the camera shaking. The cameraman was running. Police officers passed and charged ahead. There was a loud pop, a weapon fired, a cloud of gas rising just outside the room. Another pop, another cloud. Police shouting, Move move move. Spotlight beams appeared, finding the edges of the room, the dark openings in the walls. The cameraman stopped, but the police continued on, guns drawn, sprinting toward the distant room. Night was falling fast. Jess squinted at the screen. The police reached the door, shouting, weapons raised, and then they fired, quick loud shots, bright muzzle flashes leaving white stains on the video, smearing as the cameraman adjusted his angle. The police disappeared into the room. More shouting. The spotlights found them again, reemerging. Two police officers led a long-haired man out, his hands pulled behind his back. Then two more officers helping a woman. They all stepped over something as they came through the doorway. A body. The camera zoomed in, blurry, then back out. Another couple of officers now, struggling to get through the door, pulling someone, Isabella, screaming and kicking, thrashing to get free of their grip, her body twisted back toward the doorway.
Another cut. A succession of photographs on-screen. An older mug shot of a stocky young man, Danny Aguado, described as the leader of the group, killed by police during the raid. A second mug shot, the long-haired man, his face pebbled with growths or tumors. Tanner Helm, the newscaster said, an accomplice at first, then held hostage by Aguado, with the others. A photograph from a casino floor, a young woman with pretty, tired eyes: Martha Reed, a Las Vegas cocktail waitress. There was another hostage, the newscaster said, who they would not identify because of her age. A runaway who had come to the room with Miss Reed.
The screen went black. Zack reached down and switched off the TV.
“I need a minute,” Jess said.
“Okay.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah.”
She wanted a drink. She wanted a cigarette but knew she couldn’t smoke in Zack’s apartment. Celluloid was highly flammable. She often worried about him in here, a stray spark from one of his machines setting the rooms ablaze.
Jess said, “Isabella Serrano is missing.”
“I thought she was in jail.”
“She wasn’t in jail, Zack. She was sixteen when this happened.”
“Whatever they call it. Juvenile detention.”
“Her mother thinks she’s trying to reconnect with these people.”
“What are you going to do?”
Just a few days ago, Jess had called Zack hoping for an answer to this question. Expert advice on how to disappear. Now, she took a deep breath and said, “I’m trying to find her.”
“What? Why?”
“Because she needs help.”
“Let her parents help. Or the police. She tried to kill you.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Then what the fuck was she doing?”
Jess looked back at the blank screen, feeling the ghost of the last images, the police tearing Isabella from the room.
“I don’t know. I don’t think she knew. But I can’t leave her out there again.”