SUMMER 1979
The house was deep in Laurel Canyon, a rustic, sun-drenched Craftsman coming into view as Jess topped a winding wooden staircase. A mutual acquaintance, a gallerist Jess hadn’t spoken with since the attack, had given her the address. Voices carried from behind the house, laughter and conversation mingling with the barrelhouse bounce of Neil Young’s “Are You Ready for the Country?” A soft summer evening in a beautiful place. Alex and Christine were married somewhere around here. Jess hadn’t been invited then, either.
She followed a flagstone walkway to the back of the house. Two dogs bounded out from around a corner, low-bodied collies, circling, licking Jess’s fingertips as she reached a large patio. There were maybe fifteen people enjoying cocktails, chatting, nodding to the music. Some of them looked vaguely familiar, from magazines and album covers, maybe, actors and musicians. A long table was set for dinner, decorated with vases of sunflowers and freshly cut lavender.
A handsome, bearded man with a long swoop of dark hair was in the middle of a story, gesturing, pausing for laughs. He looked familiar, too. A movie director, Jess thought. He noticed Jess and nudged a woman in a flowing paisley-print caftan and floppy sun hat. When the woman turned, Jess saw the confusion on her face, then the disbelief, then the fear. Vulnerabilities she hadn’t shown two years ago, behind her camera in Jess’s studio.
Laura Lehrer excused herself and crossed the patio. The dogs ran to meet her.
“You were there,” Jess said. “Inside Zero Zone.”
“I can’t do this right now,” Laura said, her voice low, her face tight, suddenly at odds with the breezy ease of her outfit. She stopped in front of Jess, trying to block her from the guests.
There had been moments over the last two years when Jess’s fear twisted to anger, with Laura Lehrer as its target. Many times she had reimagined that day in her studio, a new version of events where she pushed back at Laura’s questions, standing up for herself and her work. That indignation surged now, validated. Jess refused to hold it in.
“You set me up,” she said. “That wasn’t an interview, it was an attack.”
Over at the gathering, someone picked up a guitar and strummed along with the record.
“It’s been two years,” Laura said. “I’ve moved on. I hoped you had moved on, too.”
Jess took off her sunglasses. For the first time she wanted someone to see her scar.
Laura pressed her lips together into a thin, tight line.
Jess said, “Does it look like I’ve moved on?”
“Honey?” the bearded man called over. “Who’s your friend?”
“Please,” Laura said to Jess. “If you come back tomorrow, we can talk through this.”
“Isabella Serrano is missing,” Jess said. “Her parents are afraid—I’m afraid that she’s in trouble. That she’s trying to find the other people from Zero Zone.”
Laura’s face fell. She looked like she was going to be sick.
“Laura?” The man was concerned now, taking off his sunglasses, squinting toward Jess.
Laura looked down at the flagstones and called back without turning. “I’ll be right there. Can you go in and finish the salad?”
Unconvinced, he took a step toward them, but then there was an eruption of cheers and the party’s focus shifted to the open French doors at the back of the house. Someone new had arrived. The man smiled and headed inside, arms open in welcome.
“You were with them in the room,” Jess said. “Do you still have the film?”
Laura shook her head. “I destroyed it.”
“How?”
“I burned it.”
For a second Jess was on the sidewalk outside her front door, standing in Christine’s shoes, watching herself lie about the Zero Zone photographs. She felt a new respect for Christine now, showing such patience in the face of obvious bullshit. But Jess didn’t have that kind of time.
“Laura,” she said.
Laura didn’t move, as if hoping she could stay still enough for the moment to pass without her. When it didn’t, she looked up at Jess and nodded.
Jess said, “Show me.”
Laura went inside to speak with her husband, then led Jess out to a guesthouse set within a thicket of tall evergreens. It was an airier, neater version of Zack’s apartment, with shelves of film canisters and framed posters of recent big-budget hits, each with the same director listed at the bottom, the bearded man from back at the party—his name and face clicked together now in Jess’s mind. A flatbed editing table sat in one corner. Jess had seen her filmmaker friends use something similar, looping film around the table’s spools and rollers until the image appeared on a small hooded screen at the back of the machine.
Laura moved around the room, pulling the blinds closed. The room darkened a little more with each window covered. Jess stood by the editing deck, a small acidic knot growing in her stomach, a feeling of rising panic as Laura sealed them in.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jess said.
“I was going to. That’s why I wanted to speak to you, to confront you. But you cut off the interview before I got to it. And then we didn’t meet again the next day to finish.”
“I was otherwise occupied,” Jess said.
A burst of laughter carried down from the party.
“Does your husband know about any of this?” Jess asked.
Laura finished with the blinds. She shook her head. “He wouldn’t understand.”
She looked much older than when Jess last saw her. Dark patches hung under her eyes; a deep furrow ran down the center of her forehead. Jess knew that look: wary, insomniac, wound too tight. The body’s instinctive constriction, trying to smother a secret.
“How did you find Zero Zone?”
Laura took off her sun hat and set it on a chair by the editing deck. “My boyfriend at the time heard about this hike. Our relationship was cratering, and this was an attempt to save it. I brought my camera and tape recorder. Before the recorder died in the heat, I interviewed some of the people we met along the path. Some were dropouts or college kids walking for the first time, other people, older people, had been coming for years. They had different reasons for their pilgrimage, but they had one thing in common. They all spoke about a room that appeared in the middle of the trail.”
Jess thought of her own walk, her inability to engage with anyone she saw along the way. She had stumbled forward alone, looking for something—anything—to help her shake loose from the hole Alex’s death had made in her chest. And then she’d found the military base, and the rancher, and that flicker of light that felt like a signal.
“The room was empty when we arrived,” Laura said. “My boyfriend was disappointed. He didn’t see anything special about it. Neither did I, to be honest. I was hot and bored and thought everyone we had met was simply seeing or feeling what they wanted to. The whole experience felt like a fraud.
“But then,” she said, “two men showed up. And then two women. And all of a sudden it was as if these puzzle pieces moved into place. One of the men, Tanner, started talking. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m not a religious person. But it was like he was able to see inside me, inside all of us. As if he understood a need I’d never been able to name. And then Isabella started to see things.”
“What did she see?”
Laura stared at Jess, considering, then disappeared into the other room. Jess listened for the party, but it had gone silent. She had the strange, illogical feeling that everyone at the main house had left, that she and Laura were alone. That knot in her stomach rose into her chest. She struggled to push it back down.
Laura returned, holding a small cardboard box. She lifted a reel of film from the box and fixed it onto one of the spindles on the editing deck. Carefully, she threaded the film over the rollers, passing it through a small metal gate by the screen, then looping it around an empty take-up reel on the other side. She reached for a switch near the screen, then paused, breathing hard through her nose, as if trying to summon the courage to continue. Jess waited with her.
Finally, Laura flipped the switch. The small screen began to glow.
The dark room and then the light, projected: another dark room. An abstract image, black at the left edge, brightening to a thin stripe of pale orange on the right. The underexposed frame was in frantic motion, swimming with grain. Then another movement, sudden and surprising. A dark figure standing. Isabella. Jess recognized her posture from the gallery attack, slightly rounded, slump-shouldered. Isabella backlit with orange light, moving through the grain as if underwater. Jess heard that bell again, the clean, single-note peal she first heard years ago looking at Agnes Martin’s grids. It sounded once in her head and then sustained, slowly fading. The clear tone of recognition. Jess in the Guggenheim; Jess underwater, eleven years old, drowning; Isabella in the last of the day’s light, moving toward the center of the room.
Isabella turned and her face caught the light. It was obvious from her expression that she felt she was in the presence of something awesome, fearsome, wondrous. Her eyes widened, her mouth opened. She looked so young. She was young, only sixteen. Her skin was smooth, unlined, gleaming with sweat. Her eyes were clear, even through the grain. Slowly, she approached the center of the room, what she saw there, lifting her arms as she approached. She flinched from perceived heat, squinted from a brightness unrecorded on the film. But still she looked bravely into its face, reaching with trembling hands.
There was movement now at the edges of the frame, other bodies following, but Jess couldn’t take her eyes from Isabella. The longing in her face, in her body. Jess had never seen such longing before. Had she ever felt it? Isabella stretched forward, arms open, and Jess found her own body mirroring, pulled toward the screen.
But there was a rupture. Whatever Isabella had seen disappeared or turned its back, denying her. She reached after it, dropping to her knees. Her body shook, her face soaked with sweat and tears. She pounded her fists on the concrete floor.
Jess covered her mouth with her hand. She wanted to look away, but she had looked away for too long. She wouldn’t allow herself that retreat.
She watched the girl on the screen, her unbearable loss.
“You’ve shown this to others,” Jess said.
“Only a few times. I thought that I could make sense of what happened in there. That if others watched, I wouldn’t feel so afraid. But seeing it again only made things worse.”
Laura sat on the edge of the editing deck. The only light came from the film’s last image, still frozen on the screen: Isabella on her knees, broken and bereft. Laura flipped another switch and the film turned slowly in the other direction, rewinding. Isabella was pulled backward, forced to return again to the beginning of that moment. Trapped in the room.
Jess turned away to the shelves of canisters lining the walls. Her anger at Laura was gone now, evaporated in the face of Isabella’s anguish.
“Do you still make films?”
“I haven’t touched a camera since I heard about your attack,” Laura said. It seemed as if she was going to say more, but then she shook her head. “My husband works enough for both of us.”
Jess could see that Laura had run from Zero Zone, too; they had simply fled in opposite directions. They had both abandoned their work. But where Jess had shut herself away in her apartment and studio, Laura hoped for protection here, nestled in the canyon with her husband, dinner parties on the patio, friends and noise and light. Different illusions of safety.
The film finished rewinding, spinning alone now, its loose end flapping with each turn. Laura switched the machine off. The screen’s light faded slowly, as if falling.
“I should have tried to talk to Isabella, to get her out of there,” Laura said. Her voice was lower now, shakier. A confession in the dark. “I could see that Martha was trying to protect her. But something was keeping Martha there, too.”
“But you got out.”
“My boyfriend dragged me out.” Laura’s breath quickened. Her fear had returned. “Otherwise I would’ve stayed, too. He has that power.”
“Who?”
“Tanner. The police were wrong. They thought they killed the man in charge. They believed Tanner’s story.”
Jess remembered the mug shot from Zack’s news footage, Tanner Helm’s eyes, intense and unapologetic, staring back into the police camera, Zack’s TV screen.
“I still have dreams when I’m back there,” Laura said. “I hear Tanner’s voice. I wake up empty, because I’m here and not in that room. It’s like wishing for a sickness. But he makes you believe.”
She stood, quickly, as if trying to escape the memory. At each window she pulled the blinds up, desperate for the waning daylight.
“He was using Isabella,” Laura said. “She was the key to what he wanted.”
She looked back at Jess. Her body shuddered as she spoke.
“You can’t let him find her. If he finds her again he won’t let her go.”
Jess stood outside the gallery on Sixth Street, its broad windows lemon yellow in the last of the day’s sun. The color was muted, though, darkened through her sunglasses. She took them off. She wanted to see the full color. Her vision crowded with dark floaters and spots, white pinprick bursts. She blinked and shook her head to clear them away and then stopped. Two years of fighting had done nothing. Stop fighting. Just look.
A tall, colorful figure appeared in the window, and then a young woman in a bougainvillea-pink dress pushed through the gallery door, smiling politely at Jess as she passed. The room’s breath slipped outside along with her—the slight musty dampness of the concrete floor, the sharp tang of a new coat of paint drying on the walls. Gabe was right. She had forgotten what that smell once promised, the thrill of entering a gallery, the work she might find. She hadn’t been inside a gallery since the attack. These rooms and the art within them always gave her the courage to pursue her own work, her own questions. She hadn’t realized how much she missed that feeling, how much she had allowed to slip away.
Another young woman sat behind a desk at the other end of the gallery. She looked up and smiled when Jess entered. The paint smell was stronger now. Jess walked to the wall bisecting the room, where she and Anton had stood that night. The walls were bare.
“We haven’t hung the show yet,” the woman said, her voice echoing in the empty room. “We open Friday, if you’d like to come back.”
Jess looked across the gallery floor, through the crowd that once stood there, then to Isabella approaching from the doorway. Jess saw her again now. This wasn’t surprising. Laura’s film had left her raw and open; receptive, maybe. And this was always one of Zack’s assertions, back when he filled his notebooks with branching networks and mazes—that every moment existed simultaneously; that time wasn’t a path going forward but a field that stretched in all directions, infinite and equal.
She saw the crowd jostle and part. She saw Isabella holding her metal canister, her wand.
Jess had replayed this moment so many times, wishing for another chance to cover her face or yell for help before Isabella lifted her wand and pulled the trigger. That night it all happened too fast. But here, now, Jess could scream or run or drop to the floor and curl herself into a tight safe ball. She could cover her face, changing history, the sounds of chaos and tumult all around her as Isabella was disarmed and subdued.
“Ma’am?” the woman behind the desk asked. “Is everything all right?”
Jess pressed her hands against the wall at her back. It was still tacky with new paint. She looked at the pads of her fingers, the thin white swirls filling her fingerprints. Even if she could return to that night at the gallery, she would only be able to spare herself. Isabella would remain trapped there, suffering alone.
Jess looked out at the crowd, at Isabella, and felt the familiar fear rushing in. She let it wash over her; she let it pass. Then she stepped out into the room, toward that crowd, turning to stand beside the girl who moved through.