"I don't give a shit where he is."
"Why don't you ask around and then get back to me?"
"Who do you think would know this?" I ask. "Why don't you just talk to Rain?"
He sighs.
"Did you have him beaten up?" I ask. "Was that just a taste of what happens next if he doesn't leave her?"
"You have no imagination," Rip says. "You're actually very by-the-numbers."
Rip leans over and pushes a disc into the CD player. He sits back. Panting sounds, the wind and the sounds of sex, someone whispering as he has an orgasm, and then it's my voice and I suddenly connect images to the sounds: the bedroom in 1508 in the building looming above us, the view from the balcony, the ghost of a dead boy wandering lost through the space. And then Rain's voice joins mine over the speakers in the back of the limo.
"Turn it off," I whisper. "Just turn it off."
"There's nothing of any use," Rip says, leaning over, ejecting the disc. "That's it."
"Where did you get that?"
"Oh, the common questions you ask."
"I'm not involved with any of this."
"Who knows why people do the things they do?" Rip leans back against the seat, not listening to me. "I can't explain Julian. I don't know why he does the things he does."
I reach for the door handle.
"You discover new things as you go along," Rip says. "You discover things about yourself that you never thought were possible."
I turn back to him. "Why don't you just move on? Let him have her and just move on?"
"I can't do that," he says. "No. I just can't do that."
"Why can't you do that?"
"Because he's compromising the structure of things," Rip says, enunciating each word. "And it's affecting my life."
I'm about to get out of the limousine.
"Don't worry. I won't come around anymore," Rip says. "I'm through with you. It'll play out like it's supposed to play out."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I just wanted to warn you," he says. "You've been officially implicated."
"Don't make contact with me ever - "
"I think you want him gone as much as I do," Rip says before I slam the door shut.
Later that night I dream of the boy again - the worried smile, the eyes wet with tears, the pretty face that looks almost plastic, the photo of Blair and me from 1984 he clutches in one hand, the kitchen knife he's holding in the other as he's floating in the hallway outside the bedroom door, "China Girl" echoing throughout the condo - and then I can't help myself: I rise up from the bed, and I open the door, and I move toward the boy, and when I hit him, the knife falls to the floor. And when I wake up the next morning there's a bruise on my hand from when I hit the boy in my dream.
Rain arrives wearing sweats and no makeup and she's trying to keep it together with the audition set for tomorrow and she didn't want to come over but I told her I would cancel it if she didn't and she's been fasting so we don't go out to dinner and when I first touch her she says let's wait and then I make another threat and the panic is cooled only by breaking the seal off a bottle of Patron and then I just keep f**king her on the floor in the office, in the bedroom, the lights burning brightly throughout the condo, the Fray blaring from the stereo, and even though I thought she was numb from the tequila she keeps crying and that makes me harder. "You feel this?" I'm asking her. "You feel this inside you?" I keep asking, the fear vibrating all around her, and it's freezing in 1508 and when I ask her if she's cold she says it doesn't matter. And tonight, for maybe the first time, I'm smiling at the black Mercedes that keeps cruising along Elevado, every now and then slowing down so that whoever is behind the tinted windows can look up through the palm trees to the apartment on the fifteenth floor. "I'm just helping you," I tell her soothingly, trying to calm her down, and then she's slurring her words. "Can't you think of anyone but yourself?" she asks. "Why can't you just be chill about this?" she asks when I start touching her again, murmuring how much I love it like this. "Why can't you accept this for what it is?" she asks. She pulls a towel over her body that I just as quickly pull off.
"What is it?" I whisper. I feed her another shot of tequila.
"It's just a movie that you're writing." She's crying openly now as she says this.