Dystopia Read online

  City of Dreams

  It was June when the Royal moved in.

  I knew because high, metal fences started going up, perimeter shrubbery doubled, and two sullen Dobermans began patrolling. Then, overnight, an intercom, numerical keypad and security camera were mysteriously installed, at the bottom of the Royal's driveway, which ran alongside mine. Whenever I drove by, the lens would zoom to inspect me, staring with curt inquisition.

  The Royal was obviously concerned who visited.

  Had the Royal been hurt? Was future hurt likely? Were death threats being phoned in hourly? It seemed anything, however dire, was possible. I was already feeling badly for the Royal.

  I didn't know if the Royal was a him or her. Rock diva? Zillionaire cyber tot? Mob boss? Pro-leaguer? My mind wandered in lush possibility.

  But all I ever saw was a moody limo that purred through the gate and crunched up the long driveway. By the time it got to the big house, the forest landscaping hid it; a leafy moat. I found it all rather troubling. In my experience, concealment is meaningful; trees can be trimmed, the fears which lurk behind them are a different story. Ultimately, one cannot hide, only camouflage. Orson Welles certainly understood this; in Citizen Kane, tragic privilege never seemed so rapturous, nor incarcerated.

  As days passed, I tried not to listen to what went on next door. I'd play jazz CDs, sip morning espresso, scan the entertainment section for reviews, to distract my attentions. But my community is exclusive and quiet, and bird's wings, as they groom, are noticeable. It made it hard to miss the Royal's limo as it sighed up the driveway, obscured by the half million dollars of pre-meditated forest.

  Once parked, doors would open and close, and I'd hear footsteps, sometimes cheerless murmurs; the limo driver speaking to the Royal, I assumed. Russian? Indo-Chinese? Impossible to tell. Then, the front door to the house would slam with imperial finality.

  It went on like that for two weeks.

  I began to think, perhaps, I should be a better neighbor, make the Royal feel more welcome; a part of the local family. Which is somewhat misleading considering the neighborhood is an aloof haven and I barely know anyone. I'm like that; keep to myself, make friends slowly. I'm what they call an observer. Some dive, I float with mask and snorkel. But the instinct seemed warm; welcoming.

  I was also getting very curious.

  I was up late writing, one night, and decided to mix-up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. My new screenplay was coming along well, if slowly, and I thought about love scenes and action scenes as I peered into the oven, watching the huge cookies rise like primitive islands forming. They were plump, engorged with cubes of chocolate the size of small dice; worthy of a Royal, I decided.

  I let them cool, ate three, wrapped the remaining dozen in tin-foil. Crumpled the foil to make it resemble something snappy and Audubon, the way they make crinkly swans in nice places to shroud left-overs. I wrapped a bow around the neck, placed the tin-foil bird into a pretty box I'd saved from Christmas, ribboned it, found a greeting card with no message. The photo on the front was a natural cloud formation that looked a bit like George Lucas.

  I used my silver-ink pen that flows upside down, like something a doomed astronaut might use to write a final entry, and wrote "Some supplies to keep you happy and safe. Researchers say chocolate brings on the exact sensation of love; an effect of phenoalimine. (Just showing off). Welcome to this part of the world."

  My P.S. was a phone number, at the house, in case the Royal ever "needed anything." I also included a VHS of François Truffaut's Day For Night, a film I especially love for its tipsy discernment.

  I debated whether to include any exclamation marks, thought it excess, opted for periods. Clean, emotionally stable. Friendly but not cloying. Being in the film business, I knew first impressions counted.

  It's one reason I'm sought after to do scripts, albeit for lesser films with sinking talents. But I'm well paid and it allows me to live in this secured community near L.A., complete with gate-guard, acre parcels and compulsory privacy. I'm an anonymous somebody; primarily rumor. I wish I could've been Faulkner, but there you are. I'm a faceless credit on a screen; my scant reply to a world's indifference.

  I left the cookies and card in the Royal's mail-box, at the bottom of the driveway, and spoke tense baby-talk to the Dobermans, as I made the deposit, like one of those pocked thugs in The French Connection. The package fit nicely, looked cheerful in there. Too much so? I considered it. Every detail determines outcome; it's the essence of subtext, as Frank Capra once observed. And certainly, if the Royal were truly an international sort, I wanted there to be room for some kind of friendship. I could learn things. Get gossip that mattered; the chic lowdown.

  I waited two days. A week.

  Nothing.

  I'd sit by my pool, every morning, read the paper, scan box-office numbers, sip espresso. But I wasn't paying full attention. I was watching my Submariner tick.

  At ten-thirty, sharp, the heavy tires would crunch up the driveway and the door ritual would begin. I couldn't make out a word and tried to remember if I'd left my phone number in the P.S. Even if not, there was always my mailbox. Concern was devouring me by ounces and I disliked seeing it happen.

  In self protection, I began to lose interest in the Royal; the inky sleigh, the seeming apathy, the whole damn thing.

  At least that's what I tried to tell myself.

  Sergio Leone says the important thing about film making is to make a world that is "not now." A real world, a genuine world, but one that allows myth its vital seepage. Sergio contends that myth is everything. I suppose one could take that too far.

  Two weeks passed quickly and I'd heard nothing. I felt deflated, yet oddly exhilarated to be snubbed by someone so important; it bordered on eerie intoxicant, even hinted at voodoo. Despite efforts otherwise, the truth was I continued to wonder what the Royal thought about me, though it hardly constituted preoccupation.

  I'm a bit sensitive on the topic because my ex-wife often said I paid unnatural attention to those I considered remarkable, though I found nothing strange in such focus. The way I see it, we all need heroes; dreams of something better; perhaps even transcendent. A key piece of miscellany: she ran off with a famous hockey player from Ketchikan, Alaska; a slab of idiocy named Stu. TIME and NEWSWEEK covered their nuptials. Color photos, confetti, the whole bit. A featured quote from her gushed:

  "I've never been happier!"

  Real pain. Like I'd been shot.

  I feel it places things, as regards my outlook, in perspective. She certainly never could. Strangely enough, I've been thinking about her lately; how she drove me into psychotherapy after she left and took our African Grey, Norman, with her and never contacted me again, saying I'd made them both miserable. Over time, I heard from mutual friends that she was claiming, among other toxic side-effects of our marriage, that I'd caused Norman to stop talking, and that once they'd set-up house elsewhere, he became a chatterbox. I took it personally; couldn't sleep for weeks.

  More haunting facts of my teetering world.

  The fate of the cookies preyed on my mind for days, affecting work and sleep, a predicament rife with what my ex-shrink, Larry, used to term "emotional viscosity," a condition I suspect he made-up, hoping it would catch on and bring him, and his unnerving beard, acclaim. Still, I wrote half-heartedly and my stomach churned the kind of butter that really clogs you up.

  Another few days went by and I made no move. Any choice seemed wrong; quietude the only wisdom. I was feeling foolish; mocked. My heartfelt efforts had been more irrelevant than I'd feared. I continued to work on my screenplay, and joked emptily with my agent, who seemed an especially drab series of noises compared to the person I knew the Royal must be.

  It's true, I had no real evidence. The Royal might be an overwhelming bore. Some rich cadaver in an iron lung, staring bitterly into a tiny mirror.

  But I didn't think so.

  In fact, I was beginning to think anyone who went to s
uch trouble to avoid a friendly overture had something precious to protect. On a purely personal level, if cookies, a card and a badly executed foil swan could scare a person, their levels of sensitivity had to be finely calibrated. Perhaps the Royal had been wounded; given up on humanity. I've been there. I wish somebody like me tried to crack the safe; get me the hell out.

  But when's the last time life had a heart. Let's face it, unsoothed by human kindness, souls recede. It's in all the great movies; pain, sacrifice, hopes in dissolution.

  It's how people like me and the Royal got the way we are. We flee emotionally, too riddled by personal travail to venture human connection. Sort of like Norman. We're just recovering believers, choking on the soot of an angry world.

  I understood the Royal. Yet I had to move on; get over it.

  But it was hard. Maybe I was simply in some futile trance, succumbed to loneliness and curiosity. I admit I'm easily infected by my enthusiasms. You read about people like me; the ones who do something crazy in the name of human decency only to find themselves stuffed, hung on a wall; poached by life.

  So, despite rejection, I found myself listening each morning, over breakfast, to the Royal's property, gripped by speculation. Awaiting the door ritual, sensing the Royal over there, alone, needing a friend. It was sad and nearly called out for a melancholic soundtrack; something with strings; that haunted Bernard Hermann ambivalence.

  It made me recall a line I once heard in a bleak Fassbinder movie; this Munich prostitute whispered to her lover that a person's fate "always escorts the bitter truth." She blew Gitane smoke, pouting with succulent blankness and, to my embarrassment, it just spoke to me. I don't know why. It got me thinking, I suppose, the ways movies can; even the sorry, transparent ones.

  It was the first time I began to consciously wish I could do a second draft of me, start things over; find my life a more worthy plot, tweak the main character. Maybe even find a theme. A man without one has nowhere to hide.

  Ingmar Bergman based a career on it.

  Two days later, the note came.

  In my mailbox, dozing in an expensive, ragcloth envelope. It was handwritten, the letters a sensual perfection.

  We must meet. How about drinks over here. Around Sunset?

  I must have read it a hundred times, weighing each word, the phrasing and inclusion of the word "must". It seemed not without meaning.

  I debated outfits. Formal? Casual? I was able to make a case for either, chose slacks, a sweater. I looked nice; thought it important.

  Before heading over, I considered a gift. Cheese? An unopened compact disc? Mahler? Coltraine? But it strained of effort and I wanted to seem offhand; worth knowing. The way Jimmy Stewart always was; presuming nothing, evincing worlds.

  I used the forgotten path between the two driveways, dodging the Dobermans, who seemed to expect me, tilting heads with professional interest, beady-eyes ashimmer.

  I walked to the front door. Knocked. Waited two minutes, listened for footsteps, and was about to knock, again, when the door opened. She was exquisite.

  Maybe twenty. Eyes and dress mystic blue, dark hair, medium length. Skin, countess-pale. She wore a platinum locket, and gauged me for a moment.

  "Hello," she said, in the best voice I've ever heard, up till then, or since.

  We spent an hour talking about everything, though I learned little about her. At some point, she said her name was Aubrey and I'm sure I responded, though I was lost in her smile, her attentions colorizing my world.

  It seemed she told me less about herself with each passing minute, which I liked; she was obviously the real thing. Genuine modesty looks best on the genuinely important.

  She asked me about my work and carefully listened as I spoke about why I loved the music of words and the fantasy of movies; of creating perfect impossibilities. Her rare features silhouetted on mimosa sunset, and she said she'd always loved films, especially romantic ones, and when her smile took my heart at gunpoint, I felt swept into a costly special effect, a trick of film and moment, as if part of a movie in which I'd been terribly miscast; my presence too common to properly elevate the material.

  She took my hand, and when we walked outside and watched stars daisy the big pool, I thought I must be falling in love. I still think I was, despite everything soon to befall me.

  After a slow walk around her fountained garden, she said she was tired and needed her rest, that she'd come a very long way. I wish I'd thought to ask for details of that journey; an oversight which torments me to this second.

  Aubrey slowly slipped her delicate hands around my waist and it almost seemed like loss had found us; a moment nearly cinematic in composition.

  She said she had a gift for me, and led me to a wrapped package that rest, on a chaise, near the pool.

  "I made it," she said.

  "A painting?" I guessed, reaching to open it, until she gently stopped me.

  "Tomorrow," she suggested. "When you're alone."

  It seemed she was being dramatic. I wish it had been anywhere near that simple.

  "Goodnight." Her full lips uncaged the word, as she looked up into my eyes, vulnerably.

  I protested, wanting to know more about her, but she placed her mouth to my ear.

  "I've always looked for you out there," she said, softly, voice a despairing melody. "In the dark. I've wondered what you were like."

  "What do you mean?" I finally replied, lost.

  She never answered and I watched her disappear into the mansion, with a final wave, and what I would describe, in a script, if I had to tell the actress what to convey, as veiled desperation.

  The next morning, I slept so deeply I didn't even hear the car that sped up my driveway. It wasn't until the knocking that I finally awakened.

  When the detective spoke, I felt the earth die.

  "A break-in?" I repeated in a voice that had to sound in need of medical attention.

  He explained the missing piece was valuable, purchased in London, at auction. The chauffeur had told the police the owner of the house was a collector, but gave no further details.

  "It was a gift. She gave it to me." I explained.

  "She?"

  "Aubrey." I could still see her plaintive eyes, desperate for connection. "The woman who lives there."

  He said nothing.

  Asked if he could see it.

  I nodded and took him to my living room, where it leaned against the big sofa. He slowly, silently, unwrapped it and my world began to vanish.

  The poster was full color, gold-framed.

  It was from the thirties and the star was a stunning brute, named Dan Drake; unshaven and clefted. His beautiful co-star was Isabella Ryan, and she was held in his embrace as the two stood atop Mulholland Drive, windblown; somehow doomed. Behind them, a stoic L.A. glittered, morose precincts starved of meaning. Though striking, no splendor could be found in its image, merely loss. The movie was titled City of Dreams, but I'd never heard of it.

  Isabella's eyes and dress were mystic blue, her flowing dark hair and pale skin more regal than the platinum locket adorning her slender neck.

  From any angle, no matter how inaccurately observed, she not only resembled Aubrey, she was her.

  It was shocking to me in a way I'd never experienced and I nearly felt some cruel director zooming onto my numbed expression for the telling close-up.

  Both stars had signed at the bottom.

  "To everyone who ever loved. Yours, Dan Drake"

  Beside his, in delicate script was:

  "I've always seen you out there. You're in my dreams. Love, Isabella Ryan"

  She seemed to be looking right at me, disguising a profound fear.

  Charges were never brought against me, and the sunken-faced detective said I'd gotten off easy, that my neighbor, still unnamed, didn't want trouble and was giving me a second chance. The Royal only wanted the poster back, nothing more. For me, this generosity stirred further mystique; intolerable distress.

  It's futi
le to determine who I'd actually spent the evening with; I don't believe in ghosts unless they are of the emotional variety; aroused by séances of personal misfortune, you might say.

  But this thought brings no peace, no clarity.

  I looked up City of Dreams in one of my movie books and found it; 1942, MGM. Black and white. Suspense. 123 minutes. There was a related article about Isabella, an air-brushed studio photo beside her husband, the obscure composer Malcolm Zinner. Zinner was bespeckled, intense. It appeared their marriage had been loveless.

  The book said she'd had a nervous breakdown, but then don't they all? She'd never done another movie after City of Dreams, despite promising reviews, and died in a plane crash, in 1953. The book said her real name was Aubrey Baker.

  Truffaut said that film is truth, twenty-four frames per second. Mine seems to be moving rather slower these days, my heart circling itself. I feel drenched by confusion; a lost narrative. I am drawn to unhealthy theory and wonder if perhaps I am dying.

  Maybe I've just seen too many movies.

  My ex-wife used to say the thing about irony is you never see it coming; that's how you know it's there. Also, the bigger it is, the more its invisibility and caprice. She used to talk like that, in puzzles. I'm not sure what she was getting at, but there you are.

  All I know, is a movie poster with a long dead beauty, had been the most genuine thing I could remember in a lifetime of misappropriated and badly written fictions; it seemed a bad trend. Not even a particularly worthwhile plot, but I was never much good at that part.

  Meanwhile, the Royal, it appears, is out there somewhere, hidden by lawyers; filtered and untouched. Bereft, bled by abuse and event; disfigurations of neglect.

  It's been two months now, since that evening by the pool, and still no sign of the Royal, who remains at large in elite silence. I suppose I've given up thinking we'll ever actually meet, barring the extreme twist.