I don’t want to look at nips but he pushes the iPad at me and these nips I do want to see because they are Amy’s nips. “How did you get this?”

“I pretended I was taking a selfie and I got a picture of her,” he says. And Calvin missed his calling. I could hug him.

“Did you get anything else?”

“Don’t be pissed,” he says, holding up his hands.

“Okay . . .” I say slowly.

“Well, I tried to tell her that the owner was coming back.” He laughs. “The hatha yoga shit, but then I said something about kundalini and she caught onto my bullshit and she was like ‘What are you really trying to do here?’ and I was like, ‘I’m trying to get to know you’ and she was hot for me, Joe. I’m sorry but you know, it was like some classic sitcom shit where the friend tries to get the girl to stay for the friend but then the girl likes the friend.”

My heart beats again. I toss the thinkThin bar in the trash. “Did you get her number?”

“No,” he says. “But I did get her address. I told her I would send her a flyer for this show I’m doing.”

“You got her address?”

“Yeah,” he says.

I reach for his iPad and he pulls back. “And this show, it’s called Back in the Day and we’re totally analogging it, you know? We’re gonna, like, not promote on Facebook or Twitter or—”

“Calvin,” I barge in. “What’s her address?”

He squirms. “Can I say something?”

Fucking A. “Sure.”

“I kind of can’t.”

“Why the fuck not?” I snap.

“It’s property of my improv group and technically she gave it to the group.”

I take a deep breath. I will not lose my mind. “That’s cool,” I say. “But you know, I won’t tell her how I got it.”

“Yeah,” he says. He smoked an ounce of weed today. Fucker. “But like, I’ll know that I gave it to you and I’ll feel shitty about that.”

Calvin, who Tinder bangs one girl after another, Calvin, who won’t look Delilah in the eye when he runs into her at Birds, Calvin, who won’t watch Enlightened because he just can’t get into a series with so much chick voiceover, this guy is now gonna talk to me about boundaries? Keep me away from Amy Fucking Adam? God, she’s a manipulative beast. But I’m better. I hop off my chair.

“Smoothie?” I offer.

“Always,” he says. “Kale.”

I go next door and order the kale smoothie and I go into the bathroom and crush three more of Dez’s Percocets. Twenty minutes later, Calvin passes out. At last. I reach into his pocket for the password cheat sheet he keeps in his wallet and I get into his iPad and into the database for his improv group and boom.

The building is around the corner on Bronson and Amy did settle into this neighborhood. Maybe she got a wealth hangover and maybe she’s still the girl who tells the guy she’s using that she misses her own bed and maybe she’s back in it right now, freaking out about seeing me, eating frozen chicken and waiting for the truffle oil to evacuate her pores and ooze out of her body.

I go to the Pantry and buy violets—the painted ones. Then, I go to Bronson and buzz apartment 326. Nothing. I buzz apartment 323. Nothing. I buzz 101 and 101 is female and 101 is awake.

“Hello?” she says, husky.

“Flowers!” I say.

The girl in 101 doesn’t ask who they’re for because everyone likes to get flowers. Woody Allen knows this; Anjelica Huston gets murdered in Crimes and Misdemeanors because she wants flowers and lets a stranger into the building. My breath quickens when I enter the lobby and I have to dart into the stairwell because apartment 101 is just a few feet from the front door. In the stairwell, I freeze. I am shaking. The flowers rattle, swish swish. I don’t have to do this. So Amy is harassing me. So what? I could just slip out of this building and run back to Love. I prefer Love. She’s sweeter. She knows music and she’s ready for me. So what am I doing in this stairwell, jeopardizing my future with Love?

“Fucking closure,” I mutter. If only Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were a real thing and it’s such an asshole Angeleno thought to have, unoriginal and bratty. I can’t erase my memories of Amy. But I can stop her from fucking around with my future.

I begin my ascent toward her apartment. This stairwell is concrete and white and every time I step it echoes. Everyone in this building is sleeping; Angelenos need beauty sleep. They need energy to make storyboards for web series and hike and talk about movies they’ll never make and walk their dogs that hate them. My heart pounds and I reach the third floor and I turn the doorknob and it squeaks and I flinch and I bet nobody was ever murdered here before.

I jimmy the “lock” of 326—nothing is built well anymore—and the front door opens directly into the living room, which is awash in bras, bowls of cereal, empty bottles of Corona Light, and US Weeklys. There is one sofa, covered in frayed blankets, and a small TV. To the left is a galley kitchen with a sad little countertop meant to facilitate socializing.

The TV is off and the apartment is quiet, but there’s an open box of Cocoa Krispies on the counter, like someone just made a bowl of cereal and wandered away. I pass the counter and walk past the Pier One barstools into a narrow hallway. The walls are white and there is a bathroom at the end of the hall and the door is open. A closet door to my left is ajar, which means that the door to my right leads to the bedroom. Amy’s bedroom.

This is it. I put my hand on the doorknob and push. The room is small and dark. Marilyn Monroe hovers above the bed, a breathy beacon in white, immortalized on the wall (why, hello, Joe). Beneath her is a rumpled comforter, covering the faint outline of a body. Hair peeks out from those covers, blond, greasy. My breath is short. I count down. I flex. I clench my jaw. And in one fell swoop I peel away the blanket.

There’s a shriek and a kick and a little ninja, a foot shorter than Amy in a black tank and black panties, springs up as I fall onto my back. The floor is hard. Wood. Her foot is a weapon and she knows it. She kicks me in the crotch. I scream and roll to my side and that foot gets my kidney. I fold into myself and now she gets my tailbone and I retreat and now that fucking foot jabs me in my belly.

“Stop!” I beg.

She kicks me again. Harder. And I deserve this because I didn’t find Amy, because I don’t know Love’s number, because my balls have been kicked into my intestines.

She jumps on the bed and stands in karate chop mode. She yelps, “Don’t move.” As if I could turn over. As if my body isn’t a collection of throbbing, busted places. I breathe. This was supposed to be Amy. That was supposed to be me on the bed, in control. I open my eyes. She perceives my eyes as a threat and she jumps off the bed and kicks me in the head. Everything goes away now, the pain and the fear and the anger and the lukewarm blood.

Blackout.

21

“DON’T move,” the girl says again.

I can’t move. She’s being redundant. While I was out cold she went to work on me. She tied my limbs together with resistance bands. I’m a mermaid flat on her white shag area rug. I can’t talk. A resistance band is wrapped around my head, cutting through my mouth and jamming my tongue. The girl paces. She grips her cell phone and I wonder when she called the cops, what’s taking so long, how bad this is going to get. Fuck these fucking resistance bands and I have only one move.

I cry.

In the big way. For everything bad, the starving kids and the way Harvey refreshes his YouTube videos, for Calvin’s body, how confusing it must be, the pot and the coke, the acting and the writing. I cry for Mr. Mooney and his eggs and for Marilyn Monroe, framed here too; she is everywhere and yet she is dead. My captor picks up a pair of scissors and kneels beside me. Ferberizing a baby is no easy thing. She pulls the band from my cheek and cuts it.