I turned onto Brand, looking for the office address, shadowed by recent developments of white steel-and-glass towers. I passed a shining new shopping center with a massive open plaza and spools of neon lighting that cast color onto the street. The effect was like the change of The Wizard of Oz from black and white to Technicolor. I expected Munchkins and wondered if I’d really lived here.
Passing the Alex Theatre with its old movie palace marquee under the lighted, flowerlike spire that pointed to the sky, I felt the déjà vu like a blow. The farther north I went, the more familiar the scenery grew. I passed under the Ventura Freeway and into the smaller, older neighborhood that urban sprawl hadn’t overrun yet. My eyes watered, and not just from the yellow haze in the evening air. I knew I had walked along this street with my dad, hand in hand. Stopped in at that building for milkshakes (forbidden treats!) when it was a retro-fifties diner. Bought makeup and school supplies in the drugstore right there. The feelings that poured over me weren’t just nostalgic, though; an emotional darkness now tainted every memory and put a stone into my chest. I pulled the car into a parking space at the curb and got out to walk before I hit something from my inattention.
The sidewalks were so clean they sparkled in the late sun, even through layers of ghostly pedestrians and older shadows of orange groves and rolling, empty scrub. I noticed that many of the names on the businesses ended in — ian or — ianian; what had once been a solidly WASP neighborhood was now just as solidly Armenian, and cleaner than ever. The current residents clearly didn’t tolerate sloth or dirt. The shops were mostly closed—only a few restaurants were open at this time of evening—and no one, corporeal or ghostly, paid much attention to me as I went up the street, looking for the building that had once housed my father’s dental office.
It was a three-story brick-and-glass building that had been brand-new when we moved into the area. It looked a little less polished and swanky than its newer neighbors to the south, but it was still a very respectable address for small offices. Dad’s was on the second floor and the main door was locked for the day, but I walked around for a few minutes and found a smaller door at the side that was still open and sporting a sign that pointed up to BELLES SAUVAGES DANCE AND EXERCISE STUDIO.
More déjà vu. I’d never danced there, but as I went up the stairs, the familiar odors of sweat, old shoes, floor varnish, and rosin curdled the air. I could hear the thump of music and feet in rhythm on the wooden floor. As always, that combination of sound and smell roused mixed feelings in me: remembered anxiety and learned—or faked—happiness. I hadn’t hated to dance; I’d hated the emotional freight and unending demands that went with it.
I took the second-floor exit, which should have been locked but wasn’t, and went down the hallway looking for number 204. The suites had been cut up since my father’s time and I discovered that his office was now split between a chiropractor and an accountant. I wasn’t sure which of the new tenants occupied the room where he’d died, but I didn’t think I needed to be right in the room, just near enough. I looked up and down the corridor for cameras, though I didn’t think anyone observing would believe what they might see, and let go of normal.
The Grey in full flush rushed upon me, making the normal world into a dim watercolor beneath the realm of silver mist and lines of hot energy that throbbed as if alive. The layers of time were broken chunks, tumbled at all angles like striated rocks in a floodplain. The displacement of the disjointed temporaclines was much worse than I’d ever seen it in Seattle, and I wondered if it was related to Los Angeles’s famous earthquakes or the near-constant state of construction and reconstruction that went on in the area. I hoped I could do this without recourse to climbing and sliding through those ragged bits of time.
I glanced around and spotted the Grey outline of my father’s office door, still lingering where it had stood for so long. It would be a pain to get through it; it might have been a door once, but it was a wall now. It was much harder for me to move something that had no current existence in the normal world than to utilize the momentary memories of passages opened by ghosts. I could try to find the right stretch of time and get through the door there, but that didn’t look like the safest option. Relegating the temporaclines to last resort, I paced outside the phantom door and waited for a ghost.
After ten minutes that felt like an hour, the ghost of a young woman strode down the hall and unlocked the door. She was average-pretty behind purple eyeglasses and wore her long light brown hair pulled back with a clip. I wasn’t sure I recognized her, but I thought she might be Christelle LaJeunesse—Dad’s receptionist. I pushed through the doorway in her wake, and she stopped to stare at me.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked as we went into the ghost of the waiting room.
I was a little surprised at her attempt to interact with me. I couldn’t recall a ghost simply talking to me as if I were part of their context before. Usually I had to force myself upon them if they hadn’t come to me first.
“Uh, no,” I replied.
She went around behind the reception desk and looked back at me from her position of authority as the office gatekeeper. “Do you want to make an appointment?”
“I just want to talk to Dr. Blaine for a moment,” I said, on the off chance she could summon him.
“I’m sorry. Dr. Blaine’s not available right now. You’ll have to make an appointment.”
“When will he be available?”
“I don’t know. He isn’t in yet.” She looked around the shadow form of the empty waiting room. “Actually,” she added, “he hasn’t been in for a while. I think there’s something wrong.” As she said it, her demeanor changed and she became frightened and sad, aware, perhaps, of her own disjointure from life, of something precious lost or broken.
Ghosts have a strange relationship to time, and this one was odd but not unheard-of: She was aware my father’s absence, but she didn’t know he was dead. She wasn’t quite in sync with either her own time or mine. She seemed to think this was a day when Dr. Robert Blaine simply hadn’t come to work, but it disturbed her, and she wasn’t sure why.
“What do you think’s happened to him?” I asked.
She made a sour face. “Maybe his crazy wife shot him. She thinks he’s humping me. Silly woman. He’s been all paranoid lately. He thinks people follow him around. I think it’s her. Or maybe that creepy albino guy.”
That was interesting. “Albino guy?” I asked. “Who’s he?”
“He won’t give a name and I don’t know what he wants,” the ghost of Christelle replied. “He comes by once in a while, says, ‘Tell him I’m here,’ and Rob gets kind of freaked out. It’s like he knows when the guy’s here before I say anything. And he always tries to ditch him and slip out somehow or not go home until he’s sure the guy’s gone.”
“Tell me about this guy,” I said. “Do you still see him around?” I needed to look for Dad and I was possibly wasting time, but I’d be willing to bet this “creepy guy” was the same one my dad had called the “white worm-man.” So he wasn’t a figment of Dad’s imagination, but what had he been? He wasn’t a ghost if Christelle had seen him. A vampire? Just a disturbing man who happened to be albino? What had he wanted with my father?
Christelle shook her head as if she were trying to shake her thoughts into place. “Well. I haven’t seen him in a while. Like. about as long as I haven’t seen Rob. As to his appearance. he’s really pale and he gives me the willies but it’s not just the way he looks. He’s got those scary kind of washed-out eyes that kind of stare through you. And. he wears eyeliner. Somehow it just makes him creepier.” She shuddered and then her face went blank and she returned to the repetitive track of her remnant existence.