Kara spends a moment staring at Oscar.

I open the case for her and let her hold it. I see flakes of dried blood in the crevices, but they’re microscopic. I’m sure she won’t notice.

“It’s so heavy,” she tells me.

“That’s what everyone says.”

“Was this like the best night of your life?”

“It was.”

I fix her a drink (Crown and Coke, very easy on the Crown) and take her out onto the patio. After the obligatory drooling over my extraordinary view of Los Angeles, we settle back into Adirondack chairs and talk superficially about the Haneline party and our interactions with various guests.

Then Kara mentions her conversation with Margot.

“Yeah, Margot was pretty interested in you,” Kara tells me.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, she was just asking how you’d been doing and all.”

“Been doing with what?”

“You know.”

“No, Kara, I don’t know.”

“With the uh…the substance abuse thing,” she whispers the last part.

“Oh. Thank you, Margot.”

“Jim, it’s fine. None of my business. I don’t care.”

“You don’t care if I’m a drug addict?”

She sighs, and I can tell by the way she plays with her ice that she’d love to have a second crack at not bumbling into this topic.

“Of course I care,” she says finally.

I reach over and take hold of her hand which is wet and cold from holding the Crown and Coke.

“I’m doing much, much better,” I tell her. “You should know that I went through some hard times a while back, but that I’ve come through it. I’m healthy now, Kara.”

It’s not much fun admitting to being a drunk and/or drug addict when you’re not, but I guess you’ve got to make sacrifices sometimes.

“You want to go inside?” I ask, and yes, I’m asking exactly what you think I’m asking.

“Love to,” she replies, and by the way her eyes have gone all soft and intense, I know that she means exactly what I think she means.

On the way to my bedroom, we pass the golden retrievers. They’re lying by the closed door to the yoga room, and when I reach down to pet them, they bare their teeth.

Kara asks what’s wrong with them, and I tell her they’re just playing, that it was a friendly growl.

We head on into my bedroom and get it on. It’s quite fun, because I care about Kara, and I feel strongly that she cares about me.

I even light two candles on my dresser and turn off the lights. It’s highly romantic.

Things are going very well. I’m making love to her more passionately than I’ve ever made love to anyone. Certainly more than the twins from New York. I have to say, we’re both enjoying ourselves immensely, and every now and then, I’ll look over through the window and see lovely LA at three in the morning, and then look down at lovely Kara. Everything’s just beautiful tonight, and I’m starting to think that maybe things will be all right, when I hear a noise.

I’m sure Kara can’t hear it, because she’s making some noise of her own, but it chills my blood. It’s the sound of a door opening very slowly. Creaking. I hear the tags on the dogs’ collars clinking, I hear them licking something, and then, through the open doorway of my bedroom, I see a hand, an arm, and then a head. Something drags itself out of the yoga room, slowly, impossibly across the floor.

I hate to do this to Kara, because she’s awfully close, but I whisper, breathlessly, “The dogs are getting into something. Can you hold on a second?”

“Jim, what are you—”

“Be right back.”

I hop down from the bed and run naked into the hall, closing the bedroom door behind me.

“Bad dogs!” I yell.

They growl, but I raise my hand to them, and they bolt off down the hallway into another part of the house.

I drag it back into the yoga room. I don’t even know what this thing is. As I make it stop moving, I keep thinking that I’m stuck in this awful nightmare. I don’t ever want to see it again.

When I finish, I wash up and walk back into my bedroom and climb into bed with Kara. She’s lying naked on top of the covers, head propped up on one elbow.

“Sorry about that,” I say, pressing my body up against hers. I can’t tell if she’s mad. I think she might be, but she kisses me anyway and pulls me back on top of her.

In the morning, Kara wakes up frantic, because she has an eleven o’clock recitation to teach. I tell her if she can drive a stick, that she’s welcome to take the Defender.

I walk her out, and we spend a minute saying all that stuff men and women are supposed to say to each other after a night like we had.

When she’s gone, I walk around the side of the house to a tool shed. Inside, I find a shovel and set about digging a hole a hundred feet or so down the hillside from my patio. It takes a long time, because the ground is very hard and dry. In the end, it’s not too deep, but it’ll have to do.

What’s even harder than the digging is the dragging of that thing out of the yoga room, all the way across my patio, down the hill, and into the bushes.

The hole is in a particularly nice spot, shaded from the sun, surrounded by sagebrush. You’d have to really be looking for it to find it, so I feel pretty good about the whole deal.

I roll it into the ground, but I don’t start filling in the hole right away. I just stand there, staring down at it. It helps if I imagine that this thing I’m burying is all of the shit that’s inside of me. I’m a firm believer that if you want to reach self-actualization or enlightenment, or whatever that really good place is called, you have to kill a part of yourself.

It’s kind of like that scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Luke Skywalker is visiting the little green guy, and he goes down in that hole in the ground and fights the guy in the black cape. Well, after Luke kills him with his light sword, he looks down into the black mask and sees his own face. It’s like he had to kill a part of himself to become a better human being.

That’s similar to what I’m doing here. It’s very metaphorical.

Chapter 25

phones Brad ~ swigs vodka ~ mulls over his amnesia and the impending automobile accident ~ into the ravine

I almost forget to call Brad. It’s not that he’s an essential component of what I’m getting ready to do, but it may expedite my rescue if someone misses me.

So I call him up, and he doesn’t even say hello or anything.

Just answers, “Where in the hell have you been?”

“I had a late night.”

“Another late night?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been calling you all morning, and it’s two o’clock now. You still want to get some work done today?”

“That’s why I’m calling you.”

“Are you fucked up?”

“No, of course—”

“’Cause don’t even come to my house if you are. I’m not in the mood to fuck around. We have real work to do. I talked to Tom yesterday, and he’s ready to see it. Like next week.”

“All right. I’m on my way. See you in five.”

Brad hangs up.

On my way out, I stop by the bar and open another bottle of vodka. I take four big swallows and head for the door, eyes watering.

The vodka kicks as I tear down Laurel Canyon. I’m feeling so happy about everything, and it’s not just the alcohol. I told you about how I’d been forgetting things lately. For instance, a few minutes earlier, when Brad mentioned that “Tom was ready to see it,” I had no idea what he was talking about. I don’t know Tom from Adam. And apparently, Brad and I are writing a screenplay, but I couldn’t tell you what it was about. And at Rich’s party last night, I didn’t know anyone who seemed to know me. Even my childhood has become a fog. For instance, I know for a fact that I grew up in the mountains near Missoula, Montana, but I have these inexplicable memories of a small town in North Carolina.