Amnesiascope: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

being gone, and in the midst of my devastation there was also a sickening opportunism, that everything was behind me now. Then, in a daze, I was in another casino, stumbling through the halls, when I realized that at the very least I had to call out, to Viv or my mother, on the off-chance they might still be alive and hear me. I opened my mouth and started to call—
    And woke myself up.
    I couldn’t have been more surprised. It never occurred to me I was in a dream, and now it stayed with me with defiant clarity. Viv was still curled up next to me, her back to me. “Oh God,” I sighed, reaching for her.
    She turned. “What is it?” she said, immediately conscious.
    “Oh God. I had a horrible dream.”
    “What was it?”
    I shook my head. “No, I can’t. …”
    “Was I in it?”
    “No.” I didn’t really think it was specifically about her anyway, or even us. But what I woke to, what remained with me, was not how my dream had wiped my life of its past, but how I had spared myself in the dream by feigning indignation at Viv’s jealousy and heartbreak, and bursting out of the room and the casino. In other words it was not my dishonesty that had doomed Viv and my mother, it was more complicated than that: honesty would not have saved them, it would only have destroyed me, leaving me entombed with them. Now in bed I took Viv, clutched her by her hair and lowered her to me. I slipped between her lips into that territory where my conscience can’t reach me. I was convinced that if she had been there this morning when I woke, between my legs, her mouth wrapped around me, I never would have had this dream; she would have sucked the bad faith right out of me, it would have rushed out of me with everything else. Now she had to suck all the harder, stroking me as though to set me on fire, and I could still feel the small drop of conscience left inside me afterward, like the errant cell of a cancer left behind after surgery.
    “But you aren’t responsible,” Ventura says this evening when I tell him the dream, “for what you might have done.”
    “I wanted to go swimming with the strange woman,” I argue. “I wanted to take off my clothes and go into the pool with her.”
    “You aren’t responsible for what you wanted . You’re responsible for what you do .” We’re driving down Fountain Avenue through the blue corridor of cypresses that sag with clumps of wet ash, the turrets and towers north of us unlit in the night. The air is filled with this odd smell the city has taken on recently, not the common smell of sandalwood and hashish but a different smell I can’t place, and as we sometimes tend to do we point things out to each other—the sites of famous suicides and old Hollywood love affairs—as though we’re tourists, which, like everyone in L.A., we are. Sometimes we even make things up, though for all we know we’re not making it up; in L.A. you think you’re making something up, but it’s making you up. After a while, looking at the dark towers and thinking about dreams and earthquakes, Ventura adds, “It’s going to be very weird, when we’re all driving around with a dead city in our psyches.”
    “But we’re already driving around with a dead city in our psyches,” I answer. Those of us who are still in Los Angeles know the rest of you out there are laughing at us. Those of us who are still here—a million, half a million, a hundred thousand, no one really knows anymore—are already driving around with dead streets and dead alleys inside us, dead buildings and dead windows and dead gutters, dead intersections and dead shops, not the urban corpse of the present but the dead city of the future. We’ve already seen the end of Los Angeles the way the people of Pompeii watched their end rise in the smoke of Mount Vesuvius years before it actually blew. And walking around with a dead city in you either makes you just as dead or it thrills you, it makes you the most alive you’ve ever been,