I do what she says, because Lore. It helps that she saved my life and everything, but honestly it’s more just Lore Lore Lore that draws me in.
She leads me around the room, introducing me to people like we’re old friends. “Miranda, I’d like you to meet Angus. Angus Farrow. Francois, this is Angus.” A few eyebrows cock up, and once or twice I can see people hesitate to shake my hand. But most of them are super gracious, because it’s Lore looking them in the eyes.
The ones who hesitate: is it because of that word, beamer? Do they think there’s something wrong with me? Something grotesque, even? Lore, you know what that is. Or is it just weird that Lore is hanging out with someone so young? I snuffle a little—there’s a murk to the air, a charred-flower smell—and fight an impulse to wipe my nose with the back of my hand.
“Angus Farrow!” a woman named Nina says, smiling a little too hard from a face that manages to be attractive at the same time that it’s pinched and elven. “Was he always this handsome, do you think?”
I cringe, but Lore just smiles. “Angus is a beautiful young man,” she agrees, and then turns to the next person with a blast of vivacity.
The hors d’oeuvres are delicious, it turns out. I get a heaping plate and wander around looking at the art. I can tell it’s great, and if it was anybody but Lore beside me I’d feel pressured to come up with smart things to say about it. But because Lore, it feels safe to just say, “That’s so cool!”
“Isn’t it?” she says, and her smile is so warm I feel like I made an insightful observation.
After a while she gets into a deep conversation with a very old, wispy, snow-white guy, the kind who delivers portentous wisdom in a snail-speed drawl, and it seems awkward to stay glued to her side. There’s an open doorway to another room, and maybe there’s more art in there. I’ll just gaze at each piece studiously and pretend I don’t notice anyone giving me funny looks.
So I step through. There’s no one else in here. And maybe the room itself is one big art installation, because the white walls, and even the floor and ceiling, are shaped in swooping curves and have this pearly glow to them, a shimmery translucence. There aren’t any of those awesome assemblages hanging in here, but there is a black booth at the back, kind of like an old photo booth, with a black velvet curtain covering the front. The curtain is so long that velvet pools on the floor in a tidal swirl, like darkness that could suck you in forever.
There’s a lot I don’t understand. But I’m not such an ignoramus that I can’t recognize art when I see it. I walk over, lift back the curtain, and seat myself on the tiny black bench with my plate of fancy cheese and spicy tuna rolls balanced on my knee. The curtain drops back into place and I’m in absolute dark, but it doesn’t feel like the merciless solid darkness that comes when the lights die back at the warehouse. Instead it’s a sensuous, rushing flow, like velvet transformed into a slow black wind.
A screen winks to life in front of me. I wish Geneva were here to see this.
It looks like an old black-and-white movie, and right away I think of the scene that flashed in my mind as I stood on the threshold: Detective Angus facing off with the murderer under a smeary noirish night. But the feeling of what I’m watching has a harsh realism that’s nothing like my dreamy, stylized gun battle.
It’s pretty straightforward: a young blond guy, roughly my age, is walking down a gritty street in the kind of huge-collared shirt they wore back in the seventies. Even though he’s good-looking and healthy and sleek, it’s obvious at a glance that there’s something off about him. A mush of cruelty and confusion wrapped in a flawless skin. Up to no good. At first I’m just impressed by the filmmaker’s skill; like, how did they make a character with such an open, pleasant expression convey such evil?
Then something happens, some incredible telescoping trickery, and I’m in two different scenes at once. I don’t know how they’re doing it, because it’s nothing as crude and obvious as a split screen. Instead I’m simultaneously hovering over the boy in the street and also watching a girl putting on makeup in her bedroom: a very her-ish girl, with a witchy sweep of what I somehow know is red hair. She’s getting ready to meet the blond boy, that’s clear, and I want to tell her, Don’t do it, don’t go anywhere with him! Listen to me, Vanessa. He’ll do something terrible to you.
That’s her name. Why do I feel like I know her?
Shit. It’s like I’m not watching a video at all anymore. Instead it’s as if my mind has been swept from my body and sent tumbling like a flock of birds through that black-and-white world. Some kind of virtual reality technique? It’s that or—or it’s something it shouldn’t be. Vanessa slicks on her lipstick, and I feel the silky interface where the pigment glides onto her lips. The blond boy walks closer to her apartment, and his footsteps drum up my legs. He’s going to kill her, and no matter how I thrash and scream I can’t get enough reality of my own to make her hear me.
Then my mind splits again. There’s a third character in the scene: a dark, beautiful woman. It takes me a second, but then I realize I’m looking at a young Lore dressed in close-fitting black pants and a turtleneck. Is Lore a professional actor? I’ve never asked what she does, and she definitely has enough presence to be some kind of star. But this seems like something stranger is going on.
I watch her standing in a doorway, watchful and still. Then she raises one hand and steps out into the street, half a block behind the boy. She’s stalking the stalker, and relief surges through me. Please, Lore. Please. Vanessa is already adjusting a broad-brimmed hat at a sultry angle, giving herself one last look in the hallway mirror before she steps through her front door. Lore, warn her! Any moment now she’ll meet him on the corner there, right in front of that diner, do you see it? And then it will be too late.
“Angus,” the young Lore calls, and I jump. But she’s not talking to me.
It hits me that until now this thousand-dimensional movie has been perfectly silent. No music, no one calling out in the background, no hiss of wind. The instant Lore’s finished speaking my name, the silence closes in again.
The blond boy turns. His lips move soundlessly, but I can tell by his faint sneer that he’s saying something insolent. I’d like to slap him.
“You don’t remember me, then,” Lore says, and somehow she’s closed the distance between them instantaneously, as if she’d caught some undetectable slipknot made of space. “I can imagine that I didn’t make much of an impression. Your focus was elsewhere. But can you recall Claire?”
A look comes over his face that amazes me, because it reflects the kind of inner teetering I feel way too often. Knowing and not-knowing, reality and unreality, jostle back and forth so quickly that they blur into a single unbearable vibration. When he replies this time the sneer is gone, and he only manages a few silent words. His eyes are wide with dumbfounded pain and just inches from Lore’s.
“I don’t always find you in time,” Lore tells him. “But when I do, you will remember her.” With that, she rests her hand on his forehead. The gesture looks gentle, like someone brushing away a child’s nightmare.
It doesn’t feel that way to him, though. The pain on his face tightens into a hideous leer, as if his mouth were twisting into an inward vortex. And, God, I feel it too: a whirling void in my throat dragging me into nothingness, one shred at a time. It’s like the sensation of those sidewalk cracks chewing on my mind, but even sharper, deeper. He might be screaming, but his voice has been canceled. Vanessa, meanwhile, is standing over by the diner looking annoyed.
It takes me a second to get it. Lore is murdering that boy! That other Angus. And I guess maybe he deserves it, but couldn’t she have found another way?
I fall out of all the images at once, or they drop out of me. I’m back in the velvet darkness of the booth. Panic thrashes in my chest and I topple sideways, out into the spill of fabric on the floor, scattering my tuna rolls as I go. Maybe the party is winding down, because the white walls aren’t curved and glowing anymore. They look like gallery walls anywhere, boxy and blank.
People are still laughing and chatting in the next room, but it sounds like most of them have gone. Funny, but I didn’t hear them the whole time I was in the booth either. The silence consumed even their voices, though you wouldn’t think a curtain could be so soundproof.
I’m fine. It was just a movie.
But I want to go find Lore, and ask her—what? To hug me?
“Angus! I was just looking for you. I’m about to take off, and I thought you might like a ride somewhere.” Her warm brown eyes are on my face the instant I step into the main gallery, and it makes me forget how afraid I was of her just a moment ago, when I felt the touch of her hand on my brow. Just a movie, okay?
“I was in the video booth,” I say. I’m not sure how to broach the subject. “Um, I didn’t know you were an actor? You were really great.”
Lore cocks her head. “That booth is playing a variety of old recordings. Which one did you see?”
Oh, God. Do I have to talk about it? “It was the one with the blond murderer? He was after the girl—the girl with the big hat.” For some reason I’m too ashamed to admit I knew her name. “You came after him and killed him first. I mean, the character you were playing killed him. And you called him Angus. But he didn’t look anything like me, so the name must have been a coincidence?”
“What else could it be?” Lore asks, though her tone seems a little off for a rhetorical question. It’s more like she’s actively pondering other options, so I’m relieved when she doesn’t wait for an answer. “And how did you feel, watching it? Did you think my character was justified in what she did?”
Oh. “I mean, you—she—did it to save that girl? So I understood? But I also wondered if you really had to use violence. If there could have been other options for stopping him.”
“Such as?”
“Talking to him, maybe?” It sounds ridiculous when I say it. That blond boy exuded wrongness. I felt the savagery latent in him the instant he walked onto the screen. What good does it do, to talk to someone like that?
“I suppose my character could have tried that, as long as she was prepared to gamble the girl’s life on the conversation’s outcome. But what if she was looking for guaranteed results?” Lore sounds amused, and somehow I’m not finding it funny at all. “Let’s get you home, Angus. It’s getting late.”
She slips one hand through my arm and leads me out of the gallery, calling a few last goodbyes to her friends. I’m not sure how smart it is to trust her, honestly, but at the same time I can’t help it. The tilt of her voice, like a boat on a swell, when she said my character lingers on in my head. The chain holding her pendant galls my neck.
“Lore? I’m thinking maybe I should leave town? I just—things went really wrong for me tonight, and I don’t know if I can handle going back there.”
The idea of leaving jabs me with panic. Even if Geneva won’t talk to me, the urge to stay as near her as possible charges every synapse of my brain. Leave town? What am I talking about?
We head halfway down the block to her car, and I get in the passenger seat with the faintest tremor coasting through my knees. But it’s Lore, already. She’s slipping off her intimidating party shoes and pulling soft black flats out of her bag, so I get a chance to study her face without her looking at me. Every facet of her brow, the way the ambient light rests on her eyelids like gold coins, tells me that she knows all about my kind of reality.
“There’s something you’re afraid of.” We pull out into the empty street, drive under the dandelion puffs of lamplight. “And you’re telling yourself that, by leaving Carmen’s, you can leave that something behind.”
What is she implying? “Yeah.”
“And yet you already know that you can’t escape so easily. What’s really troubling you?”
“I—it’s pretty hard to explain?” Lore waits, so I try. “Sometimes I feel almost like my life began when I found myself in front of Carmen’s warehouse, and that wasn’t even two weeks ago. And sometimes I feel like my memories go back and back and back until they aren’t even mine anymore. Like smears sinking into a wall, maybe, but I can’t see through it? Just these weird scribbly traces show where they’ve been.”
“A palimpsest.”
I’ve never heard that word before. “If you say so.”
Lore nods gravely—that trick she has of treating me like my thoughts matter. Her brown hands are tight on the steering wheel, worn and strong and big-knuckled, but with something elegant even in their weariness.
“And where do you suppose those traces come from? More to the point, where do you suppose they lead?”
“I’d have to smash through the wall to find out.”
“So you would,” Lore agrees. “But thanks to the efforts of a certain friend of yours, the wall is already cracked.”
I see too late that only one of her hands is still on the steering wheel. The other is drifting up, almost to my brow now, her fingers already warming the air around my temple.