Chapter 1 #3
“Not so much. I got divorced. Needed money. Then next thing I know, I’m a writer with a reputation for reliable mediocrity.”
Helen leaned her elbows on the balcony railing and studied him. Wich tugged uncomfortably at the hem of his T-shirt, hoping it wasn’t riding up.
“How much time do you have before you leave?” she asked.
“Couple of hours, why?”
“Because I want to show you something. See what would happen.”
A chill whispered down Wich’s back. It had been so long since he’d felt its like and couldn’t remember whether it signaled pleasure or fear.
Whatever it was, it had to be better than the lukewarm drear of mortgage payments, alimony, and contractual obligations to the Desert Lords in the Australian Outback.
Wich had filmed in LAX before 9/11; he’d flown in and out on his way to movie sets in countries he would never have time to see; he knew this airport better than most everyone who worked here, but as he followed Helen into halls hidden behind columns and through well-kicked double doors, he realized he didn’t know it at all.
He was no longer even sure what terminal they were in.
Finally, she stopped at another door clearly marked No Admittance.
It was locked, but with a practiced lift and jiggle, it opened onto a gently curving hall.
The inner wall was covered with colored tiles progressing gradually from bright yellow to green to teal to blue, contrasted with an outer wall of dingy paint and peeling black plastic privacy film.
“Where are we?”
“You’ll see,” she said, pulling the door closed until Wich blocked it with his toe.
“Look, I have written scripts where the protagonist goes into the basement slash attic slash weird deserted hallway because that’s the only way to move the narrative. But in real life, I know better than to follow strangers to second locations.”
“It’s not like we’re strangers, Wich.”
“You may know my name but you don’t know—“
“I know you’re the man who created Sarah, who gave her strength and vulnerability in equal measure. Who wrote a character so complex that I couldn’t help falling in love with her.”
He froze, staring at this woman, who was now officially freaking him out. “What are you talking…?”
She had reached into the bag pulling out something that was hard and oddly shaped.
A second later, a Lucite-heeled mule fell to the floor.
“I presume,” she said, “that you recognize this?” She pulled out a cloud of shimmering glamour.
“Or maybe you don’t, because you ran so fast to avoid a conversation you didn’t want to have. Like you’re about to do now.”
Wich focused on the sequined jumpsuit spangled with bright daisies.
“Who are you?”
“I am Helen Temple-Stewart, but everybody calls me Nell.”
He blinked at her then nodded at the mule abandoned on the floor between them. “I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing but you are not NTS. There’s no way that fits you.”
“Of course it doesn’t. I’ve seen you in Wishful, and I very much doubt you could fit in the jeans you wore then. This is not a remake of Cinderella. I am thirty years older than Nell.”
“What do you mean that you’re thirty years older than Nell? Are you telling me that you’re really a 21-year-old, playacting at being a grown up to get a part?”
“No, I’m telling you that I am really 54.
That when I leave this place, I am forever fucking 21.
Nell is the role I have to play, Helen is who I am, and Sarah…
Sarah is the part I want. So when Megan told me where you liked to hang out in LAX, I followed you.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Or maybe I do.
Maybe I hoped that because you make a living feeding audiences the most outlandish fantasies, you’d be able to suspend disbelief just once for my outlandish truth. ”
As Helen knelt on the floor furiously shoving the glittering jumpsuit into her bag, he thought he saw a hint of Nell’s profile, or Nell as she would be if she were angry and disobliging.
The world is filled with stories waiting to be heard. A writer’s job is to listen.
Oh, shut up, Karl.
“Okay,” Wich said, looking at his watch. “I have an hour and a half, so tell me. Tell me your outlandish truth.”
The secret to good fantasy is just enough reality to anchor it and keep it from floating away on a cloud of bunkum.
Helen’s story had that. Her father had been an early member of the Philosophical Research Society, a group of unorthodox thinkers who mucked around at the intersection of science, engineering and mysticism.
Wich had once been to their Neo-Mayan headquarters on Los Feliz, not far from the Griffiths Observatory.
When he’d asked about filming part of Jack B.
Rabbit in their library, the door had been slammed in his face.
But that was his story, not hers. Her story started with her father, a surveyor, who, though he was “very much a numbers guy,” believed in ley lines, paths of innate power within the earth.
Over the years, he’d spent his spare time mapping them and only in one place did they intersect.
That’s what had brought him to Los Angeles.
“He called them LA lines and called the spot where they crossed—”
“LAX?” Wich suggested, warming to the story.
“Exactly,” she said. “Anyway, back then the Society was like the Illuminati or something and had members in all sorts of institutions. They lobbied to put the new airport here and made sure that one of their members designed the monument on top with arches that traced the lines and the exact spot of their crossing.”
“What happened to your father?”
“He’d been sick forever and died when I was young. But my mother had left him when I was two weeks old so I didn’t think about him until I turned 21 and a friend of his from the Society sent me an envelope he’d put together of blueprints for the Theme, old photographs and a letter.”
They stopped where the mosaic wall turned green and she handed him her phone, looking out the window while he zoomed in on the image of a typewritten letter.
“You’re serious?” he asked, when he finally returned her phone. “You believe your father gave you eternal youth?” He felt queasily like he’d moved from red flag territory into pet-bunny-in-the-Crockpot land.
“I know it sounds crazy and at first, I dismissed it as the ravings of a loon I had never known.” She slipped the phone back into the bag.
“When you’re 21, it takes a while to realize you’re not getting any older.
That the girls I’d been auditioning with in Chicago weren’t trying out for high school roles anymore.
They’d graduated to playing wives and mothers in soap commercials. ”
A bright triangle of late afternoon sun razored through a folded sheet of the dark film, playing across the lines at the corner of her mouth, the shadows under her eyes and the softening fullness of her cheeks.
“I'd been 21 for 15 years when I first came to LAX. I got off the plane and immediately noticed that my body was a little thicker. That I had veins in my legs and freckles on my hands. It was only when I looked out the window at the Theme that I remembered the letter and called my mother.”
Her mother had never told Helen anything about the odd circumstances of her birth but now knew she had to.
Helen’s father wasn’t old but everything that could fall apart, had. He’d hoped the power of the ley lines’ crossing would rejuvenate his failing body. It hadn’t. But when his wife became pregnant, he tried again, this time in the form of a gift to his unborn daughter.
She’d loved him, Helen’s mother had said, and understood where his mania came from but she had a dying husband and a difficult pregnancy and didn’t have the bandwidth for delusion, so when her water broke and she was trundled into the car, she hadn’t paid attention to where they were headed.
It was only when she was loaded onto a gurney and saw airplanes landing and taking off that she started screaming.
“No one heard her, except for two Society cronies tasked with delivering me at the intersection of the ley lines. They managed not to kill either of us, but two weeks later, my mother and I landed in Chicago. And it was 36 years before I returned to the place I was born.”
Her eyes flickered to Wich to see what he thought.
And what he thought was, Why make up such an insane story?
They both knew how this business worked.
Knew that in the end, he was just a second-tier writer and she was NTS.
If she wanted to play Sarah that badly, Kyle, Megan and his sour-faced accountant would ultimately force Wich to comply, no backstory required.
“Have you told anyone else?"
“Who would I tell? All the principles are long gone, and everyone I know—even people I think might actually like me—is invested in the NTS brand. None of them have questioned how I’ve managed to be her for so long.
I come here just to get away from it all and I’m pretty sure everyone assumes I’ve had some kind of magic plastic surgery.
No one asks, though, because no one wants it to stop. ”
“Except you.”
“Except me.”
He looked past her, past the peeling film and the dusty glass to the spaceship restaurant and intersecting parabolas that had once signaled a future both to this city and to a young writer from Maryland.
Outside, a cab drove by, the glowing triangular topper advertising a swirl of soft pink peony petals and NTS’s young, open face, a blank screen welcoming the projection of every fantasy, every desire.
NTS: The scent of spring, the promise of summer.
“My father thought it was a gift but I’m so trapped.” She stopped. “Just once I would love to play the woman I am and not the girl I pretend to be.”
The curve of the hall had grown gradually tighter, and the tile had grown darker until it ended in a large column of deep indigo. “It’s here,” she said, her hand on the tiles. “Do you want to see?”