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August 2009

California, USA


Angelica Fotopoulos’ office was painted a comically ugly shade of yellow, probably intended to make the small room more cheerful. A window behind her desk let the sunshine in, but it did little to offset the terrible color of the walls.


Arthur often found himself looking out the window, his gaze going right over the therapist’s head. A small fern was growing in a planter on the sill, the leaves soaking up the rays. Other times, he would stare at a painting on the wall to his right. It reminded him of a budding flower, with petals of orange, yellow, and red unfurling into a vibrant blossom. Or perhaps it was just a depiction of fire.


He saw the painting and the window with the potted fern every Thursday at 10:30. Angelica, a pudgy middle-aged Greek woman with glasses, and her hideous office were familiar to him by now. So why couldn’t he talk to her?


“Have you always been so shy?” she asked, tapping the air with her pencil’s eraser-end.


He shrugged and looked down at his hands. “Yeah. Ever since I was a kid.”


“Why do you think you’re so reserved?”


“I’m afraid of talking to people. I’m afraid they’ll hurt me.” He smiled awkwardly. It looked more like a grimace. “Mom used to do all the talking for me, or Dad… or Toby…”


“How does that make you feel?”


Arthur resisted rolling his eyes. “I preferred it. It was safe that way. I didn’t have to worry about people manipulating me.”


Morgan’s face flashed through his mind like a searing migraine. Tomorrow night she would come to drop Johanna off. These days, he could hardly stand to look at her, nor she at him.


Angelica put her wrinkled hand on the shoebox sitting at one corner of her desk. Inside it were pictures cut out from magazines, each one representing the different aspects of Arthur’s life. He had thought the assignment was juvenile at first, like something an elementary school art class would do. Once the thing came together and he was able to give meaning to each little sliver of paper, he began to understand what it all meant.


“Would you want to change that aspect of yourself? Your fear of others?” she asked. This was part of the project—finding more traits he hated about himself, to be written down and put in the box for safekeeping.


“Sure,” he murmured, already reaching for the notepad. He scribbled the word afraid and removed the cardboard lid. Amidst the jumbled scraps, he spotted a Budweiser ad, a picture of a muscle-bound video game character, a generic beach photo, and a pin-up of a voluptuous swimsuit model emerging from a pool. His gaze lingered on her. She had eyes like the painting, dark irises imbued with a reddish hue like crimson roses or burning embers. Her name was Evelyn Sharma.


He shut the box a little too quickly. Angelica was studying him over the rims over her glasses. He had picked her because she wasn’t young and attractive, and therefore wasn’t a danger to him.


“You seem a little distracted today. Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”


Swallowing, he said, “I’m leaving for Australia on Tuesday, and I won’t be back for about four weeks, maybe longer. It’s for that movie I was telling you about…”


***


Hollywood had always been a machine first, a bed of creativity second. The machine chugged along, driven by hunger for profit, greed for money. Those who decided which project was funded were as far removed from the process as Pluto from the sun. It all boiled down to who could be convincing enough, who had the most intriguing idea—or rather, the idea most likely to succeed.


Somehow James Vogel, a skinny long-haired kid whose only experience was in low-budget independent films, had convinced the studio to give him the money and resources to make his insane dream come true.


“It’s set on a remote tropical island,” began his pitch, “A soldier washes ashore after a shipwreck. He is delirious and near-death. He’s found and taken to an elaborate compound in the forest…”


Basically, the plot was Frankenstein meets Apocalypse Now. The soldier found a mad scientist trying to bring back the dead. After trying to stop him, the soldier was imprisoned and experimented on, then he escaped and destroyed the laboratory. There were two twists: the soldier wasn’t shipwrecked after all, and the scientist’s lovely daughter was really a zombie. The studio couldn’t throw enough money at it.


Part of the “resources” Mr. Vogel had access to included Arthur. He was under contractual obligation to accept roles like that of the soldier. After a bit of squirming—he was seeing a therapist and his father had just died; did they really want a mess like him starring in a major motion picture?—the studio reassured him he would only be needed for a month, and that he wasn’t the focus of the film. That honor went to Lance Everhart and Tristan Gale.


Lance was arguably the most popular actor in Hollywood at the moment. He was certainly bigger than Arthur had ever been. And Tristan was legendary, bigger than either one of them would ever be. Putting the two of them together seemed the perfect combination, an infallible box office draw. And the men with the money were more than happy when Vogel cast his model friend, Evelyn Sharma, as the scientist’s daughter.


The product of an Indian mother and a German father, she was the most beautiful woman Arthur had ever seen. At his therapy session the following Thursday, he found her picture by chance among the magazines. Fiery eyes and a gorgeous figure rising from the pool. And he was going to be spending a month in close proximity to her, pretending to be her lover?


At Angelica’s behest, he tore her picture out and added it to the shoebox.


***


The night he arrived in Cairns, he received a phone call from the last person he would have expected.


“Hello?”


“Arthur?”


His brow furrowed. “D?”


“Yeah,” was the dismal reply.


“Are you okay? You sound—”


“I’m fine. I just have a cold, that’s all.”


His answer might have convinced anyone else, but Arthur didn’t buy it. Maybe time was finally catching up with D. He was afraid to ask.


“Well, uh… what’s up?”


D’s tone changed from depressed to tired. “I’m sending you a package in the mail. Don’t open it until you’re finished with Phoenix.”


“Why send me a package here when you could send it to my house?” Arthur asked, smirking faintly. He was surprised D even knew why he was there, much less the title of the movie he was working on.


“Anyone can look up your address in California. Not everyone knows you’re staying in Australia right now. I don’t want anyone else to see it...”


He was getting a funny feeling about all this. “Okay. But why do I have to wait?”


“Trust me. You don’t want to be thinking about it while you’re trying to work.” D paused, and Arthur thought he could hear a faint humming noise in the background. “I can’t tell you anything else about it over the phone. I’m sorry. Bye.”


The phone clicked before Arthur could return the farewell.


While his thoughts occasionally wandered back to the conversation with D, Arthur had other things to worry about than secret packages.


The film fell apart within the first two weeks. They hadn’t shot a single scene. Bad weather was the main problem, but the director was also to blame. James was shy, like Arthur, except he was in a world he was entirely unfamiliar with. It was difficult just to get him to come to meetings.


It didn’t help that Lance was always arguing with him during rehearsals. Why are you doing it this way? Why not that way? What’s the point of this scene? What’s the point of this character? What’s it all for?


Arthur could picture with perfect clarity the moment a red-faced James finally snapped, “Because it’s in the goddamn script, that’s why!”


It was the day before he was fired. Looking back, Arthur wondered if that outburst was the real reason they kicked him off the project. Sleazeballs like Lance usually had deep strings they could pull.


Speaking of Lance… well, there wasn’t much to say about him, really. He was almost a caricature, the stereotypical ultra-cool Hollywood brand of asshole. If Merle Sinclair had an evil twin who was everything he wasn’t, Lance Everhart was it. He was rude to everyone and obviously didn’t give a shit about anything more than his paycheck and his image.


The main cast gathered to meet the new director, Frank Balk, at a pub in the city. In the shadowy half-light, Mr. Balk (as he demanded to be called) lit up a cigar and growled, “Let’s be clear. I have no idea what’s going on. I’m just here to get the job done.”


Arthur swirled the contents of his glass. He hadn’t had a drink since Johanna was born, but the urge was still there, fed by his own frustration and uncertainty.


He looked around the table at the rest of the cast. There was Lance, wearing sunglasses inside just because they looked cool, and Evelyn, dreary and tired, staring down at the wood grain. Tristan Gale had never shown up, and probably never would—his son had just committed suicide.


His glass was empty, but he didn’t remember drinking it. It was so easy to forget.


***


He stumbled into the hotel lobby in a daze.


“Mr. Jackson?”


Blinking, he turned to face the owner of the voice. It was the guy behind the front desk. What were they called again? Receptionists?


“Someone came about an hour ago with a package for you.”


He sank into one of the plush chairs in the lobby. “Who?”


The man shrugged. “A woman with red hair. She said it was very important. I’ve been keeping it in the back for you—”


Forcing himself on his feet again, he staggered over to the desk. Sure enough, the package was there, all wrapped up in brown paper and string. It was terribly old-fashioned and completely adorable. Smiling like an idiot, he held the package the same tender way he held Johanna. Johanna… oh God…


A manicured hand pressed against his back. He whirled around, still clutching the package.


Evelyn was smiling at the man behind the desk. She must have said something to him, but he wasn’t paying attention—too busy staring at her.


Then her hand was on his arm, leading him toward the elevator. With each step, the light changed the color of her eyes. Brown, then red, then orange, then black, like a kaleidoscope.


He didn’t know what she was saying, didn’t know what she was thinking. Didn’t want to know what he had been thinking. But he stopped in his tracks, shook his head in an attempt to clear it, and mumbled, “Sorry, I think I left something—” before stumbling out of the hotel.


Dropping the package on the ground, he threw up in a metal trash bin just outside the entrance. He was pretty sure he heard the click of a camera between retches. It was too dark to see much, anyway.


Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he stooped to pick up the parcel and slowly made his way to his rented car. He cranked up the AC and sat there in the driver’s seat staring down at it.


He’d already torn off the string and paper when he remembered D had told him to open it when his work was done. Ah well. How bad could it be?


The box was taped shut, but the package itself was light as a feather. For a moment he wondered if it would be empty, and D was playing some kind of bizarre prank as payback for all the things they had done to him.


It was never anything this serious, though. Stuff like putting a bucket of water over his door or “borrowing” his vinyls. D never seemed to care. No, there was no way this was a joke.


He peeled off the tape and lifted the lid, not sure what to expect.


***


The year was 1990. He was six years old. Clara was tucking him into bed. His room was filled with toys that other less lucky children coveted. They lined the shelves and furniture like sentries guarding a castle.


“Mommy, why did you and Daddy get married?” he asked.


She looked a little startled by the question. In the last year of her life, Clara had grown thin, pale, and tired. He would realize years later that it was because of stress and grief, but as a boy he had feared the strange transformation that made her hands seem skeletal.


“We loved each other,” she answered quickly.


“But how did you start loving him?”


A little more relaxed, she smoothed his blanket and said, “We met at a disco in 1980. I had actually gone there on a date with someone else. He just happened to be there that same night. I was a little embarrassed, because I didn’t really know who he was. Your grandmother never played the Jackson 5 for us, and I wasn’t interested in pop music anyway… But he was okay with it. It gave us more to talk about. And that’s pretty much what we did—we talked more that night than we danced.”


“What about the person you went with?”


“Oh, Alan?” one corner of her mouth turned up in a half smile, “He was a little upset, but he kept quiet and didn’t say anything to me about it. That was the way he was. He just took whatever happened to him, no matter how sad it made him. We’re still friends, you know.”


Alan showed up at her funeral. Arthur remembered being introduced to him by someone, probably Lorenzo. He was a tall man with brown hair, a little awkward, but unassuming and friendly. If it weren’t for his huge-rimmed 80’s glasses, he would have been quite handsome. They said he was a writer, like his mother.


After he, Toby, and Tiffany were dragged back into the house, he had looked out the window and saw Alan sitting next to D on the bench. At six years old, he hadn’t thought much of it. After all, they never saw Alan again.


Or so he thought.


Sitting in the rental car, Arthur turned the typewritten letter over and read it again. Was he dreaming? He pinched himself. Maybe it was the alcohol.


But he knew he was sober. What he had just read was sobering enough.


So was the photograph at the bottom of the box only there to add insult to injury? He held it up. It was of a smiling young brunette posing for the camera. She was wearing a stylish black dress, a necklace, and makeup that didn’t quite match the tone of the exposed skin on her shoulders. Nonetheless, she was a very pretty girl. Pretty like Clara.


He turned it over. Anastasia on her 21st birthday, was scribbled in blue ink on the back.


Third time’s the charm. He read the letter over from the beginning.


Arthur Jackson,


My name is Alan Sheridan. I know that you’ll remember me. It may seem very strange that I’m writing to tell you this, but rest assured, there is simply no other way to explain it.


Your mother, Clara Silvestri, is alive and well. But you will most likely never see her again, and so it makes no difference. You may wonder why I would tell you this information, when it will only hurt you. Your brother “D” believes you are the only person who deserves to know.


Of course, you want proof that I am telling the truth. So, I have enclosed a photograph of my daughter Anastasia. You will no doubt notice the resemblance. As I imagine you have guessed already, Clara and I assumed false identities and married not long after she was supposed to have died. Anastasia has no idea who her parents really are, though she is always flattered when people say she looks like Clara Silvestri.


I cannot tell you our location, obviously, but I have arranged a meeting with you and your brothers at Neverland Valley Ranch. If you come, I know you will understand better.


Alan Sheridan


PS: I strongly recommend you destroy this letter after reading. The picture is disposable as well; I have a copy of it.


He had even signed his name at the bottom.


It was real. It was really happening. All of his worst fears come to life. Oh, D—D, don’t you know that joke isn’t funny anymore?


***


He was packing when he heard a knock on his door.


It was Evelyn. He wanted to close the door in her face and forget she had ever been there, but she was just so beautiful he couldn’t move.


“I wanted to apologize for any misunderstanding,” she said, her tone dead serious. Her arms were crossed. “Whatever you might have thought I was trying to do this evening… Well, I saw that you were drunk and I wanted to make sure you got home safely. That’s all there is to it.”


“Okay.”


She looked at him funny. Sighing, he rubbed his eyes and said, “You won’t have to put up with me anymore, anyway. I’m leaving tomorrow morning, first thing. In fact, I was just packing.”


“What? But you can’t just leave! You’re under contract too—the studio would sue you, your career would be ruined, and—and—”


“I’m the son of Michael Jackson,” he interrupted, shrugging his shoulders, “Nobody can hurt me. And between you and me,” he leaned forward and whispered, “if I leave, the whole thing will fall through, and that means everyone else involved in this mess gets to walk away. They’re already beating a dead horse, so why not let me take the blame for burying the poor thing?”


At first, she just stared at him. Then, slowly but surely, a smile spread across her face. She laughed. He laughed. And they both stood there in the doorway laughing like idiots.


“Oh God!” she said suddenly, “What about James?”


“What about James?” he echoed.


“He’s been living out in the wilderness ever since they sacked him. Everyone thinks he’s going to try and sabotage the production!”


“Now that’s crazy!”


“I know!”


They laughed again.


“And poor Mr. Balk—he hasn’t even been here a day, and you already want to quit!”


He was laughing so hard there were tears in his eyes. “You make me want to stay after all!”


“Well, why not? You can still quit then.”


Reality kicked him in the gut. His sore cheeks were abruptly liberated, his sides given rest. Seeing his mood swing, Evelyn stopped laughing. She looked worried.


He tried to smile reassuringly, but it was a ghost of his earlier giddiness.


“Something just… came up. It’ll be okay. But I have to go and be with the people I love first.”


The seconds ticked by slowly between them. She took a step forward and made like she was going to comfort him.


He wrapped an arm around her, pulled her closer, and kissed her. It was a slow kiss. They barely moved. She didn’t stiffen up, not even at first, but he still pulled away long enough to let her decide.


He watched her choose. The flicker of her fiery gaze from his face to the floor. Her hands sliding down his chest. She could have turned on her heel and walked away. But she circled around him, slipping through the open doorway.


That was her decision. His eyes never left her, even as he shut the door behind him.

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