This Must Be the Place

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

Arthur Rook didn't know.

He woke up on Friday morning when Amy rolled out of bed, but the running of the shower sang him back to sleep. When his alarm buzzed at seven he woke again, shaved and dressed and fed himself and Ray Harryhausen, the cat, and stood on the curb in front of his apartment complex in Toluca Lake, just north of Hollywood, waiting for a ride to work. Like every morning in Los Angeles, it was colder than Arthur, who grew up in Boston, thought LA was supposed to be. He squinted at the sun, hugging himself. He saw his breath on the air. He wished Max Morris would show up already, hopefully with coffee, or maybe those little homemade donuts Max's boyfriend Manny made, that Max didn't like and didn't have the heart to admit. Manny put little notes in with the donuts—always a pun (You're my favorite in the hole world! or Donut what I'd do without you!)—and Arthur felt a little guilty devouring sweets specially packed for another person. When Arthur asked Max why he let Manny go on thinking he liked the donuts—wasn't he worried some day Manny would discover the truth and be hurt?—Max shrugged and said sometimes you let the people you love believe what they want to believe.

Why? Arthur had asked.

Because you love 'em, Max had said.

There. Right then.

That was the moment it happened, they would tell him: at 7:48, while Arthur was waiting for Max to show up in his stuttering silver Geo, thinking about Manny's donuts.

Arthur got into the car when Max arrived—late, sans both coffee and donuts—and the two of them headed down Cahuenga into Hollywood, creeping in a sludge of traffic. Max apologized for not bringing any breakfast, and Arthur lied and said he'd eaten at home, and when Max called him on it, they pulled into a gas station and Arthur ran inside for two cups of coffee and a box of Ho-Hos.

"You eat like a freaking teenager, Rook," Max said. "One of these days your metabolism is going to implode, creating a black hole that sucks this entire universe into it."

"I am the destroyer of worlds," Arthur said. He was tall and thin and had a recurring nightmare in which he grew thinner and thinner until he was a skeleton holding a sword and shield, like the vengeful dead in Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts. When he told Amy, she smiled and said she'd still love him if he were a special effect. She laughed—I might even love you more—and Arthur thought, Of course you would.

Max parked in the faculty lot of Hollywood High and they hauled their equipment into the front hall, just like they had last year on school picture day and the year before that. Then Max disappeared to speak with their office contact, and Arthur, chewing a Ho-Ho, unpacked the lights and the backdrops and the cables and cords. It was 8:45—8:43 was the time of the first missed call on his cell phone.

From 9:15 to 10:30, Arthur stood behind the tripod and told one hundred and fifty freshmen to smile like they meant it. This was his favorite part of the job. It was the reason he became a photographer: for love of the moment when his subjects showed themselves to the camera and to him. Arthur loved people. He didn't really understand them or feel like he belonged among them, even, but he adored being a witness to their existence. He loved how various they were, how fragile and tough and strange and each his own universe: self-contained and whole. He was a Watcher. Amy told him, one afternoon six months after they met, that he would be unbelievably creepy if he weren't so damned good.

"You think I'm good?" Arthur had asked. He didn't care if Amy thought he was creepy—he was a little creepy, he knew that; anyone who goes through life preferring to watch than participate will trend that way—but he had been enchanted that she thought he was good. "You mean pure of heart?" he asked. "Valiant?"

"Not quite," Amy said. They were in bed. "The truly pure don't know how to do that."

"Sometimes they do," he said. "When they've been driven to it."

Amy grinned at him. "What I mean," she said, "is that you believe other people are basically worth living for, and it shows."

"You mean I'm an optimist."

"I mean you see people, you see people all the time, and you don't get bored or tired of them. You don't start to hate them. How do you manage?"

He remembered the weight of her hand on his face, the pressure of her thumb against his cheek.

"How do you do it?" she said.

"You give me too much credit," he said. "I hate them plenty."

"You are such a liar. Name one person you hate, one person."

"Adolf Hitler. Douchebag."

Amy laughed.

"Cigarette-Smoking Man." Arthur counted on his fingers. "Iago."

"I mean one real person—"

"Short people who recline their seats all the way back on airplanes."

"—I mean who you know, personally, that you hate."

Arthur kissed her to buy himself time to think. "That guy," he said. "That guy at the restaurant the other day."

"Which guy?"

"With the bad suit and the tacky tie."

"Who yelled at the waitress and made her cry?"

"Yeah, him," he said. "I hate that guy."

Arthur couldn't hate people, any more than he could hate water or grass or stone. Ordinary people, like the chubby freshman girl slumping on the padded stool in front of default Backdrop A (Mottled Blue Slate), were too magnificent and too oblivious to hate. He asked for her name and homeroom.

"Jennifer Graves. I'm in Mr. Woodbridge's." She was pale and had flat brown hair, pulled back in an unforgiving ponytail. There was an angry red spot on her chin.

"Jennifer, hi," Arthur said. "I'm Arthur."

"Hi," she said.

"You don't look like you want to get your picture taken."

She crossed her arms and scowled. "What gave you that idea—oh, do you have eyes?"

Arthur smiled at her. "You know what they say about high school?" He ducked to look through the viewfinder.

"That they're the best years of my life?" She had a truly scorching glare. He framed her in the camera sight. "These are my glory days?"

"Only the strong survive," he said.

She twitched a smile. He saw it through the lens and captured it, plucked it out of time and space and made a digital copy in ones and zeroes. And in two months when Jennifer Graves's parents opened the folio of their daughter's freshman-year portraits, Arthur thought they'd see someone familiar in her eyes, her lips, the lift of her cheeks. Not the sullen unhappy girl who slammed her door and said mean things just to say them. They'd see the little girl who'd known the joy of running naked through a sprinkler. Who'd spent the better part of 1994 lumbering around the house after her delighted little brother, pretending to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex. They'd see a hint of the person Jennifer would grow up to be, after she'd bested this phase of her life simply by outliving it.

They'd see what Arthur Rook had seen.

Max took over for the sophomores. Arthur stepped outside with what was left of his cold coffee and watched the traffic roll by. It had never felt right to him to have a high school this close to so many cars, so much exhaust. There was a gas station down on the corner, and the Walk of Fame was only one street up. He could see the top of the theater where they held the Oscars. Growing up in Los Angeles was unfathomable to Arthur—Los Angeles period, as a place where people lived normal lives, was unfathomable. When he first arrived, it had felt like the city was teasing him, rubbing up against him in a way that felt embarrassing and unreal, like a stranger crowding him on an otherwise empty bus. Alien vegetation, spiny and thick-leaved, sprouted beside walkways and highway medians or waved their triffid fronds high above his head. The world smelled of fresh-turned earth, of wet dirt. The murals that lined Hollywood Boulevard—Bette Davis, Bob Hope, Marilyn Monroe—rippled like mirages on storefront security gates, disavowing anything so pedestrian as death. There were a million pictures of corpses in Hollywood: eyes smoldering, cowboy hats tipped forward, skirts blowing up around their thighs forever. The city romanticized eternity by reminding you how many people were already dead, and in the presence of so many beautiful zombies, Arthur felt doomed.

Then he met Amy. He'd been in town for a month—a long dreadful month, with no job secured, no apartment rented, no friends met. No validation that his decision to come to LA—once so appealing for its diametrical opposition to Boston—had been anything other than a poor decision. He'd driven around the boulevards of North Hollywood aimlessly, refusing to get on the freeways (he had never owned a car, had never had to develop any quick instincts behind the wheel). When he accidentally turned onto Mulholland Drive, he was so frightened by the hairpin curves that he drove straight back to his motel and didn't go out for three days. He didn't speak to anyone in that time without the assistance of a telephone, and when his mother told him that no decision is absolutely permanent and he could come back to his old room any time, he didn't say no. He said, I'll think about it.

Fantasizing about flight yet refusing to leave Los Angeles before he'd properly seen it, Arthur mustered his courage and drove down to Hollywood. He passed the Chinese Theater and a man dressed as Dr. Frank-n-Furter stuck out a beautiful fishnetted leg and tried to wave him down. Arthur waved in return but didn't stop. He passed the Roosevelt Hotel and the Chateau Marmont and the Viper Room, knew he would never be cool enough to step inside them, and was grateful for it.

In-n-Out Burger—now, that was more his speed. He pulled into the In-n-Out on Sunset and parked. In the lot there was a boy in a white paper cap holding a board in front of him like a cigarette girl, taking orders from the cars in the drive-thru line. It was a long line—it was lunchtime, he realized. He also realized he was hungry. He didn't remember when he ate last, though he did know it had been something from the vending machine at the motel.

But his appetite, and his fledgling good mood, evaporated the moment Arthur Rook stepped inside the Xanadu of Southern California fast food. White-capped workers buzzed with efficiency, their red aprons held together with large wicked safety pins; customers casually ordered items that weren't even on the menu (a double-double? a Flying Dutchman?). The restaurant was tiled like a bathroom or a hospital, bright red and clean white, and rows of red palm trees marched across the walls, the rims of the drink cups, the paper place mats lining the trays. Everyone else knew what to do but him; everyone had a place here but Arthur, the out-of-joint socket, the improper cog in this beautifully humming machine. And now he was at the counter and the girl behind it was smiling broadly, and behind her another happy worker was murdering potatoes with a diabolical contraption that was half guillotine, half garlic press. The giant silver handle came down on a naked potato, and it splintered into pale fingers.

"What can I get for you, sir?"

I do not belong in this place.

His eyes flew to the hand-painted menu above her head. Hamburger, cheeseburger. No other options. No one else had ordered just a hamburger or a cheeseburger. Would they know, could they tell, if he tried to fake it?

"Sir?" The girl at the register was stunning. Everyone in LA was beautiful, even the girls at the In-n-Out. It made him sad, and he didn't know why.

Arthur opened his mouth but nothing came out.

"Sorry, I didn't catch that."

The machine was slowing. He, Arthur the interloper, was screwing it up. He had a sudden violent premonition that it was too late for him to escape. He would be crushed by this city, eaten, and then forced to wander it forever: nameless and alone in an undead town.

"He'll have a double-double and an order of animal fries."

It was a girl's voice, behind him: strong and bright and sure. It continued. "And I'll have a two-by-three and a Neapolitan shake."

The voice stepped beside him and smiled, and the lonely Watcher, invisible for so long, was seen at last.

Seen by a beautiful girl—a woman. Maybe twenty-five. Tall, like him, with straight dirty-blond hair and wide open eyes and broad shoulders. She had a geometric body, all angles and planes and edges except for her breasts—large breasts that Arthur, at the same time as appreciating the hell out of them, imagined she might have hidden under sweatshirts and oversize flannel shirts for years. The way she held herself now felt new and unpracticed, as if she had only recently learned how to be at ease but had learned it and learned it well. Arthur smiled at her like a man granted his dying wish. The machine around them began to purr again, and he opened his mouth but still nothing came out.

"Don't mention it," she whispered.

That was how Arthur Rook met Amy Henderson. Amy, who would sit down with him at a table in the sun, who would explain the difference between a double-double and a Flying Dutchman and then wipe a dot of ketchup from the corner of his mouth with her left fingertip. Who would teach him how to navigate, how to survive, how to fall in love with LA's charmingly daft will—finding its resolve to exist for its own superficial sake perfectly romantic and not a terminal fool's dying delusion. Who would teach him to fall in love with her. Who would be his friend and his lover and then his wife, who would be his home, who could create life from metal and rubber and wires for the sake of a few frames of film, and who would, at 7:48 on a Friday morning in early October, send ten thousand volts from the tip of the same finger that had wiped the ketchup from his lips through all the chambers of her heart.

Amy, who would be killed instantly.

Amy, who would make Arthur Rook a widower at thirty-two.

"Hey, Arthur, your phone." Between students, Max jerked his head at Arthur's coat, draped over an open equipment trunk. "Been ringing like crazy."

Arthur set down his empty coffee cup and flipped his cell phone open. He had ten missed calls.

Of the ten calls missed, there was only one message, left by Amy's boss, Stantz. His real name was Bill Bittleman, but he loved Ghostbusters and wanted everyone to call him Stantz—everyone Amy worked with loved at least one movie like a religion; they loved movies, period, but there was always one movie above the rest. Bill Bittleman's was Ghostbusters.

"Arthur, I'm so sorry—oh, Christ, Arthur, I'm so sorry," said Stantz's message. "Call me. Call me on . . . this phone, this number, I couldn't find your number so I looked it up on Amy's . . . phone. Call me immediately. Where are you?"

Arthur was cold. Freezing.

His fingertips were numb when he redialed Amy's number. Her picture appeared on the tiny screen of his phone: Amy with Ray Harryhausen draped across her shoulders like a fur wrap—a very alive, very pissed-off wrap.

Why was Stantz using Amy's phone?

"Arthur!" shouted Stantz. "Arthur, I—I don't know how to tell you this."

Bill's voice cracked. Bill was crying.

"It was an accident," Stantz said. "It was just a stupid accident, a stupid—"

Arthur heard a high whine. The sound of crystal vibrating.

Arthur was lying in bed in the dark, under the covers, fully clothed. His sneakers were still on and his mouth tasted like tin. He couldn't remember Max dropping him off after work. He didn't remember if he'd fed Harryhausen. He kept more regular hours than Amy, so feeding the cat was his—responsibility—

Arthur was standing in the shower. A freezing cold shower. He was resting his head against the tile in the corner, and when he stood back, he felt a ridge pressed into the skin of his forehead. His throat was sore. His hand—hurt—Jesus, what did he do to his hand? His knuckles were raw and stung, bloody, under the cold spray from the showerhead. He turned off the water and stepped out of the shower and there were little red polka dots all over the bathroom sink, and Arthur saw that someone had punched the bathroom mirror. It hadn't shattered but it was cracked in one corner and dangling off the cabinet's glide track.

He wrapped a towel around himself and opened the door.

Ray Harryhausen was lying in the middle of the hallway, his furry bulk puddling over his paws so that he looked like a striped brick with a cat's head.

"Are you hungry?" Arthur asked him. "Did I feed you? Huh, Harry?"

Harryhausen, who tended to be either inert or asleep, wasn't exactly behaving oddly by lying in the middle of the hallway, but something was wrong about it. Something was wrong about him. Arthur and Harry had never liked one another—Harry was really Amy's cat, had been her roommate for years before Arthur came along—

Amy's cat—

Harryhausen made a horrible, horrible noise and Arthur sank to the carpet on his knees. Everything that had happened that day, everything he lost, flooded back as a nightmare: Max driving him to the hospital, to the morgue. Standing there while Stantz, red-faced, explained that Amy had blown a fuse while working on an armature and went back to the breaker and there was a wire—that was old or stripped—Arthur couldn't understand, didn't want to—wires were crossed. Electrons flew. Into the tip of her finger (her left index, he had kissed it a thousand times) and up her forearm (pale underside, purple veins) and through her bicep, her shoulder. Straight down into her heart. Fibrillated, they said.

Fibrillated.

Stantz kept talking—about the sound and the blowback and the smell—and Max told him to shut the hell up, and the morgue was cold, and Amy was blue and dull and not-Amy. Her left hand was angry and swollen. Burned.

Did she have a will?

I don't know, Arthur said. She liked grapefruit and coffee together for breakfast.

Did she want to be buried or cremated?

I don't know, he said.

She wore his old concert T-shirts to bed and sang him lullabies as Axl Rose (Good night to the jungle, baby!) and Mick Jagger (Hey! You! Get into my bed!).

Any family?

All gone, he said. Just me. Just her and me.

What would you like to do with the body?

Max took him home—Max took him home and got him into bed and Arthur was pretty sure Max held his hand for a while and kissed him on the forehead—and then Max left.

Harryhausen made the horrible noise again. Arthur had never heard him cry before. Complain and hiss, sure, but this was completely different. This was deep and wild; it sounded like he was scraping it from the bottom of his tiny cat lungs. Like it was tearing his throat open.

Arthur sat on the carpet and stretched his legs out in front of him, in the hall, in the dark, and dripped cold water out of his hair and down his bare chest and tried to swallow but he didn't have any spit. He ached.

He lurched forward and his body tried to vomit but there was nothing in his stomach. Harryhausen jumped to his feet, hissing, and padded away, enormous fuzzy gut swaying from side to side.

Arthur didn't know anything. He didn't know if Amy wanted to rest in the ground or flame out into a million tiny particles. He didn't know if she'd made a will, or if there was an object, a memory, she wanted carried on by someone else in her name.

He didn't know and he was never going to.

He had to be dreaming. None of this was even remotely possible. He was thirty-two. Amy was thirty-one. They were young and full of blood. Their bodies and their minds were still their own to control. He couldn't imagine Amy—her body, Amy's body—lit with electricity. Had she flown? Had she fallen? Had she looked like she was dancing?

She liked to dance.

Of course Amy hadn't made out a will, it was too soon—but he didn't know that, not for certain. And just because she might not have officially left a will didn't mean Amy didn't want certain things done or said or given after her death. Just because Arthur didn't know what Amy wanted him to do with her body didn't mean Amy didn't know.

Why hadn't she told him?

Why hadn't he asked?

What else didn't he know?

What else hadn't he—the Noticer, the Watcher, the Good Seer of so many strangers—not known about his wife? What had he missed? What could he still see, if he looked hard enough?

He pressed his back against the wall for leverage and slowly, gently, pressed himself up from the floor. He blinked back stars. He could do this—if he, Arthur Rook, could see anything, he could see his wife. It didn't matter that she wasn't here. He could see.

He started in the bedroom. He looked through her dresser and saw her yellow-and-black striped socks, her grandfather's enormous green sweater, the blue lace bra she wore on their third anniversary that made her pale skin glow. He smelled Amy all around, but he didn't see anything he didn't know. He looked under the bed and saw her purple bowling shoes, also the white open-toed pumps she named Marilyn (left) and Norma Jean (right). He looked in the bathroom, in the broken medicine cabinet and the hamper. He tossed razor blades she would never use and unopened tubes of toothpaste and dirty clothes on the floor, and still he didn't see anything. Arthur was slowly drying from his shower but he was cold, only wearing a towel, and shaking so viciously his teeth chattered in his skull. He ran to the kitchen and looked in every cabinet and in the refrigerator, and all he saw were the plates they had bought together, the cups and the bowls they'd eaten ice cream and cereal and hot soup from. An unfinished gallon of milk, leftover Thai take-out, half a grapefruit swaddled in plastic wrap that she'd been saving for breakfast tomorrow. Arthur saw all these things but he did not see Amy—only trace evidence of what she'd worn, what she'd eaten, what her body had done.

"Where ARE you?" Arthur shouted, scaring himself. "I know you're here!"

He heard Harryhausen crying again, followed the sound to the living room, saw Amy's monster movie posters—The Clash of the Titans (her One Movie, her religion), The Thing, The Beast from 10,000 Fathoms—and saw his own reflection in the framed glass. He tossed the cushions off the couch and found thirty-six cents and a single blue sock. There was nothing else—nothing that he didn't know—no clues to solve, no hints, no indication.

Nothing to see that hadn't already been seen.

Shuddering now, muscles twitching with cold and fear, Arthur returned to the bedroom. At some point he had begun to cry. He sat on the edge of the mattress and told himself to calm down, that he'd just proved he knew everything there was to know about Amy Henderson. He'd seen her. He'd seen all of her. She hadn't told him what he didn't know because there wasn't anything to tell.

She hadn't known either.

Arthur choked on nothing.

Harryhausen hissed at him and Arthur looked up, and there was Harry, in front of the closet—how stupid Arthur was, not to have looked in the closet. He didn't have the strength to stand, so he crawled over to the door and pushed it open, and there were all his pants and shirts and Amy's skirts and dresses, hanging silently, companionably. Suspended. Sleeves waiting for arms that would never fill them. Collars waiting for a throat that had grown cold and still. Shoes entombed and stacked in bright paper boxes. And Arthur, exhausted, fell over on the carpet, hating himself for not being able to see.

He blinked. He breathed. The pile was rough on his cheek. He felt Harryhausen walk by his head and closed his eyes and wished he could just fall away and forget everything, could make it untrue, could make it unhappen. He tried to will himself to sleep for a long time and couldn't. He opened his eyes again.

And Arthur's eyes, which had only needed time to adjust to the dark, saw a shoebox. A huge shoebox on the floor of their closet that he'd seen a million times, that he remembered moving into the apartment, even; but a shoebox that—despite its bright pink cardboard, the word GUMBALLS! like a cattle brand on its side, big enough to hold a pair of black stiletto boots (pictured) that Arthur had never seen his wife wear—had always been effectively invisible, tucked neatly beneath the hems of their everyday lives. He had never opened it. He had never asked Amy what it contained. He had never even been curious until the day his wife disappeared.

It was so very pink, even in the dark.

He lifted the lid.

He saw Amy.

At eleven o'clock the next morning, Arthur Rook's apartment would be broken into by Max Morris, who, after Arthur didn't answer any of his phone calls, would worry the door open with a credit card only to find the tiny one-bedroom he'd never actually stepped inside ransacked. Gutted. The refrigerator door open, motor wheezing. Papers strewn across the hallway and the bedroom floor. A trail of empty duffel bags and packs like shed skins leading from the hall closet to the bedroom, where, on a bed littered with clothes, an empty space the size of a large case told Max that Arthur had packed and fled. Arthur Rook would never know, but Max, who was a little in love with him (he couldn't help it; he'd never met anyone so guileless), would put everything away as best he could. He would fold the clothes and place them in drawers and on hangers. He would find Arthur's cell phone on the living room floor and feel a little less hurt that Arthur hadn't answered any of his calls. He would stack the papers neatly on the kitchen table and close the refrigerator but throw out the milk (probably spoiled). He would leave the blood in the bathroom. He would see the cat food dishes on the counter and guess that Arthur had taken Amy's cat with him. Then Max would steal a lukewarm beer for his efforts, and call the police, and sit in the living room and wait for them to arrive, examining a picture of Arthur and the late Amy Rook: huddled together on a beach somewhere, the wind whipping her hair across both of their faces. And Max would hope that his strange, quiet, runaway friend, wherever he'd gone, would be able to find his way back home.

But Arthur's home had ceased to exist. Its ghost had called to him and told him where to run.

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE Copyright 2010 by Kate Racculia