Tiring of this, I stopped — and he stopped. The tinnitus faded to a distant plink-honk. We stood twenty yards apart for a minute or so. I turned back to face Marina del Rey, then whipped back round — I’d caught him out: it was Mac Guffin. ‘So it’s you,’ I called. ‘Should I be afraid? I mean, when you turn up people generally get dead — even your clients.’
‘Especially my clients,’ he called back. ‘My clients have a near 100 per cent fatality rate.’
‘But you don’t let it get to you, do you, Mac?’
‘I try to maintain a regular disposition.’ He held his hands palm up, the laughter lines creased around his trustworthy brown eyes.
‘What’re you trying to tell me, Mac — that the worst has already happened?’
‘I figure someone had to, Wilclass="underline" you’re a dead man walking. You’ve been dead since Laurel Canyon.’
‘Was it the implants?’ I asked, kneading my breasts through the damp fabric of my T-shirt. ‘I mean, I know suicide rates are way higher for the women — the people who’ve had them.’
‘No.’ He shook his head pityingly. ‘It wasn’t the implants; it was that dumb-ass report you wrote. You didn’t think you could get away with saying those things about the sigmoidal flexure of TC’s penis without getting clipped, didya?’
‘Well, I dunno…’ I hung my head in the sweet breeze coming in off the wetlands.
‘Y’know what it was, Will, it was attention-seeking.’ Mac shook his head; he didn’t seem so happy today.
‘I… I just wanted to belong.’
‘Well, now you do belong: to the departed. And, while we’re at it, it’s 10.2 and 67 degrees.’
‘I had no idea it was that… big.’
‘No’ — again the weary shake — ‘you had no idea.’ And he turned his back on me and trudged on along the scrappy verge. Having no alternative, I followed my Charon, the swish-swash of the traffic fading imperceptibly into the moody horns and sucrose strings of a pickup orchestra fucking over The Isle of the Dead in Westwood.
Which faded out on the rise, where Mac halted and I turned back, hoping for a sweeping panorama of the coastline, but saw only a sign for La Vista Motel and the highway in its mid-ground of embankment and plantation, up above the blue screen and a few dabbles of cirrus. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve gotta leave you here, man; there’s a hiking trail along the bluff to the playa — kinda neat walk.’
‘Neat walk!’ I spat. ‘What is this crap?’
‘Y’know,’ Mac said, observing me with impatience and pity, ‘some people walk for fun, Will, for leisure — to have a good time.’
‘I… I don’t know what to say…’
‘You mean there’s no illusion of a core self that’s giving you direction?’
‘Ye-es, I s’pose so.
‘Well, what can I tell you,’ he said, sucking his moustache; ‘this is an amazingly complex piece of software — there’re bound to be some glitches. I mean to say, this has to be the first time anyone’s tried it.’
‘Tried what exactly?’
‘Kidnapping someone, forcing them to undergo systematic motion-capture filming and standard-deviation face tracking, then replacing them with a 3-D image of themselves.’
‘So that’s what was going on — I wondered. Boy’ — I shook my empty head — ‘they must have been laughing when I asked what my motivation was.’
‘Yeah, kinda ironic: they knew all about your motivation and I have’ta give it to you, Will, you were on to something, you got close, but there was no way they were going let you find out who killed the movies—’
‘So they killed me and replaced the actors playing me with an animation.’
‘You got it.’
That’s why I’d been feeling so exiguous, so thinly drawn — and that’s why my thoughts came to me unbidden, and I had no sense of smell, taste or… touch. I wondered how far back it all went — to the CGI riot in Hollywood or even before that? But there was no point in speculating, not when I’d paid someone to discover the truth for me. ‘Tell me, Mac.’ As I spoke, I expertly rolled a cigarette with one hand, struck a non-safety match on my thumbnail and lit it — now that I was a simulacrum of myself cliché came unbidden, and smoking was a stylish breeze. ‘If I’m a 3-D image of myself, then what exactly am I being projected on to? I mean, what’s all this stuff, is it LA or just a blue screen?’
Pity gave way to impatience as Mac rolled down his sleeves and fastened his cuffs. The dirty work had been done. ‘I’m a detective,’ he snapped; ‘not a fucking metaphysician. You want answers to that kinda appearance/reality stuff, go ask the Wachowskis.’
That was it: no farewell, no bear hug; he just turned and strolled away from me, the happy detective out for a Sunday afternoon promenade. While somewhere out in the Valley, in a darkened home studio, an overweight claustrophobic, headphones clamped on his head, crunching Cheerios and messing about with a synthesizer, turned the volume back up on the Rachmaninschmaltz.
Having nothing else to do, I went on. Isn’t this what we do: go on, no matter how depersonalized and useless we feel, no matter how lost in our own lives and confused about our role in the universal — if any? I went on past the Westchester golf course and saw the first sharks’ fins cutting through the wavy air on the far side of the savage fences. I went on to the junction with Sepulveda and made a right, and then a right again for the terminal. I went on through the curtains of light falling from between the decks of the overpasses, and I went on past the birches in their triangular concrete pots and the benches shaped like aerofoils — fly away, you writing bums! I went on until my rubber soles married with the treads of the escalator and carried me up to departures, and I went on through security and groped my way towards the Air France lounge.
Sitting in there, I looked about me at the other whey-faced travellers contemplating the imminent hurl skywards. They did their best, rattling the sections of that Sunday’s LA Times, making last-minute phone calls, fiddling in their laptops — but it was hard. The light in the lounge was yellowing, like a fishtank that hasn’t been cleaned, and the sounds were all muted except for Lionel Ritchie singing ‘All Night Long’ — which was far too loud. And I thought, well, I may be dead, but who’s to say everyone else isn’t as well?
So I did my best to conform and called Stevie Rosenbloom to say goodbye — and got Ellen DeGeneres: ‘That’s you gone, is it?’ she said, and I could only mewclass="underline"
‘You knew, didn’t you?’
‘I kinda did,’ she admitted, ‘although I wasn’t in on the whole thing, I mean it was like the tag line for the movie, “The Strangest Vengeance Ever Planned’.’
‘What movie?’
‘Touch of Evil.’
I broke the connection without saying goodbye. Of course! And that’s why when I reached the colonnade in Venice I had felt so peculiar. I had never circumambulated Los Angeles at all, only remained standing exactly where Welles had executed his famously circuitous tracking shot while the entire city walked around me.