Another Kingdom Read online

  That was all I took in before Ken picked up the line. He said he’d “see if he could find” Candy, which meant he’d ask her if she thought I was worth speaking to. I guess I was. I was still looking down at the driver of the Mustang when she came on the line.

  “Austin,” she said curtly. I was just a reader, after all. I’d already had my weekly meeting. What did I want now? “Is there a problem with the assignments?”

  “No. Look, I’m sorry to bother you, Candy,” I said. I turned away from the window to focus. I already had my story prepared. “I was just checking my records and I found an unfinished report for a book called Another Kingdom. I was worried I hadn’t completed the assignment. Do you remember that one?”

  “Gee. No. I’m sure if it was important, I’d’ve asked for it.”

  “It was submitted by a guy named Sean Gunther,” I said.

  “Oh! Oh yeah. Sure. He’s a pal of Henry’s.” Henry Quint was the head of Mythos, Candy’s boss. “He was, like, some big writer back in the day, like, a million years ago or something.” As she went on talking, I searched Gunther’s name on my laptop. “Henry talks about him a lot. I guess he wrote this one famous novel at some point, and he was, like, the flavor of the month. Then he did that Hollywood thing they do, you know, where he came out here hoping to score the big bucks and he took a lot of meetings and people fawned over him and it was all sweet and dreamy except the years went by and nothing he wrote got made and then people stopped hiring him. So, by the time he decided to sit down and write something again, his glory days were over. Nobody cared anymore what he did.” Gunther’s Wikipedia entry came up on the screen. There was his picture: a noble countenance haloed by a leonine mane of silver-white hair. His first novel, A Thousand Pages of Self-Referential Drivel, had been short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Thirty years ago.

  Candy went on: “He sent this Another Kingdom thing to Henry because he wanted to adapt it for the movies. It was supposed to be his big comeback or whatever. It was a mercy read, basically. Henry was just being nice to a friend.”

  “Right. Only you pulled it before I finished the coverage, right?”

  “Right. Right. Now I remember: Gunther got cold feet about the whole thing and decided he didn’t want to go through with it. I think the guy’s basically an old drunk. You know. Henry humors him ’cause they were friends back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.”

  “You don’t still have a copy of the book around, do you?”

  “Nah. Why?”

  Again, I had my story prepared. “When I stumbled on the coverage, I remembered how much I liked what I read. I was thinking if Gunther doesn’t want to do anything with it, maybe I would. You don’t happen to have his contacts, do you? I’d like to ask him if he’d let me read it again.”

  “I’ll have Ken check with Gunther and get permission to send you his info,” Candy said.

  I thanked her and hung up. I turned back to the window. Glanced out, thinking.

  And there was the black Mustang. The kittenish man behind the wheel looked away quickly, as if I’d almost caught him staring up at me.

  I LAY DOWN on the sofa and slept again. When I woke up, my dizziness was gone. My head felt better. My mind was clearer. I touched the bump on my head, and it felt smaller, less sore. Maybe the worst effects of the concussion were passing.

  I sat up and looked toward the bedroom window. The light was fading from the small patch of sky that was visible there.

  “Oh, crap!” I said aloud.

  I had suddenly remembered: my parents! My brother was passing through LA and they were coming down from Berkeley to have dinner with the two of us. At six o’clock.

  I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes to six. No time to change clothes. I grabbed my denim jacket off the back of a chair and rushed out of the apartment.

  THERE ARE TIMES in LA when the traffic is so bad, you just sit in your car, motionless, and wait for the earth to turn and bring your destination to you. Fortunately, this wasn’t one of them. The traffic was only hellish, and I made it the ten miles to Beverly Hills in a mere forty minutes, twenty minutes late.

  Had to be Beverly Hills, of course, the most expensive restaurant in the most expensive neighborhood. Because my brother was just so important and successful, nothing less would do. I left my car with the valet and rushed inside. The maître d’ was a tall brunette so beautiful she seemed unreal. Her glance up and down me made me aware of what a mess I was: still in old jeans and an untucked shirt with the denim jacket over it, my face pale, the bruise on my head still darkly visible. Nonetheless she consented to let me join my party, and I followed the heartbreaking sway of her unobtainable backside across the white floor between the white tables past the diners all done up in sleek suits and spangly dresses specifically designed, it seemed, to make me feel ashamed.

  There were my parents and my brother already seated at their corner table in the coveted brick patio out back. I was preparing to tell the made-up story of how I got the bruise on my head, but you know what? No one asked me. No one said, “How’d you hurt yourself, darling?” Not even my own mother. When I leaned down to kiss her offered cheek, she just said, “Well. You did come after all.”

  My father gave me a thin, absent-minded smile. My successful and famous brother stood up to give me a successful and famous handshake and slapped my shoulder as if with brotherly affection. And by the time I took my seat, the three of them were doing what they usually did: talking among themselves, as if my arrival had been nothing more than a rather irritating interruption.

  Instantly, I was twelve years old again, feeling ignored, excluded, insufficient, angry, and depressed. My bizarre mental journey to Galiana was forgotten. The impossible mystery of my real-life bruises was forgotten. My quest to explain it all: forgotten. What was remembered, what came back to me—like an anvil dropping on a cartoon villain’s head—was my failure: my script rejected, my agent dumping me. Not only was I so much less successful than my brother was, I was even less successful than I’d been just a day before.

  Wine came. Food came. I still felt unsteady from my concussion, and I barely ate. I just gazed morosely at my parents and my older brother as their conversation went on without me. They had always had a way of doing that, of discussing their big ideas in a sort of shorthand, so that I could never quite catch up with their meaning and so could not contribute ideas of my own. I always felt I wasn’t meant to.

  “Well, of course, the populace will bristle, that’s to be expected,” my mother was saying at some point. “The nation-state, after all, is their warm and fuzzy blanket, isn’t it?”

  “World War I,” my father murmured wisely. “World War I.”

  “This is the whole theme of my new book,” said Richard, circling a glass of white wine beneath his golden Viking beard. “Revolutions travel downward, not upward.”

  “Ah,” said my mother, fingers to her chest, as if her darling little boy had just brought her a picture he’d made all by himself. “Wonderful. Of course.”

  She was thin as a needle, my mother, flat as a blacked-out window in her dress of sequined lace. Her body all lines, her face all angles, her lips sharp, her cheeks high, her eyes narrow. Her hair sprung out about her crown in brittle curls like steel wool. She was my mother! Shouldn’t she have some soft place to burrow into? Just looking at my mother made me feel motherless.

  And my father—where was the manly meat and muscle on him? His body was like a willow wand. A breeze might have rippled it. His salt-and-pepper hair, cut close to his head, seemed solid as a helmet. Owlish, musing, preoccupied features. Sharp, narrow glasses. Mom and Dad both wore sharp, narrow glasses. They both had those vague, distant, distracted stares.

  “Reviews,” my father was saying now. “Essential. Connections. Reviews.”

  I think this was by way of paternal advice to my brother.

  “Has Serge read it yet?” my mother asked him.

  Serge, of course.

  “Serge says
it’s my best,” said Richard proudly.

  “Well, Serge …” murmured my father with a chuckle, as if this were all that needed saying: Serge.

  Well, maybe it was all that needed saying: Serge Orosgo—another factor that linked the three of them and excluded me. My father held the prestigious Orosgo chair in Psychology at Berkeley, which the billionaire endowed. My mother, also a professor at Berkeley, did sociology research, which was often funded by the Orosgo Foundation. Mom and Dad had introduced Richard to the great man, and now Richard was a senior muck-a-muck at the Orosgo Institute think tank and the billionaire was his mentor and friend.

  Of course, I suppose I was linked to Orosgo now too, since it was his charity, his favor to my brother, that had gotten me the reader’s job at the production company at Global Pictures, which Orosgo owned. But somehow, it wasn’t quite the same thing, was it?

  The waiter brought us after-dinner coffees. I don’t think I’d said five words since I’d sat down. Somewhere along the line, I stopped listening. My mind drifted, drifted back into time. A wistful memory returned to me. I was a little boy, maybe five or six or so. I was sitting on the floor in the back room of our house in Berkeley. My parents and my brother were in the next room over, the living room. My brother was seven years older than I was, so maybe twelve or thirteen then. The three of them were discussing big ideas, just as they were now.

  My little sister, Riley, only two or three, had vanished into a long storage space hidden behind a sliding wall panel. She liked to crawl around in there and then return to tell long-winded stories about the secret hiding holes she’d found.

  But I—I was aware of none of them. I was completely immersed in an imaginative universe of my own. I was arranging plastic figures against a backdrop I’d made out of colored paper taped to a cardboard box. Space knights and alien monsters and villainous galactic tyrants were doing battle in front of my crayon drawing of starry darkness. I whispered their dialogue to myself as I moved them into their various positions. Creating tableaux. Acting out scenes. Making movies of the mind.

  And there was within me a stillness of complete delight—I remembered it—as if, in the act of creation, my brain waves had arranged themselves into their native patterns and my flesh was speaking the silent language of my original spirit. Delight, delight. Creation and delight.

  Where had the purity of that impulse gone? I asked myself. Where had that original spirit gone? What had Hollywood done to me? What had I done to myself?

  “Well, she can’t. She simply can’t,” my mother said.

  I snapped back into the moment, suddenly aware that the subject of the conversation had changed.

  “A time. A place. Then … no,” my father muttered. “Just … no.”

  “I mean, really. It’s for her own good. Aliens!” my mother said.

  Ah. Finally. The ostensible purpose of this gathering. Just as my brother had warned me: we were discussing Riley now, our little sister.

  “Listen, we’re lucky there are aliens,” said my brother with a laugh.

  “Well, this new one though. Juan or Pedro or …”

  “Marco,” my brother said. “And not an alien, in that sense.”

  “It’s not funny. It really isn’t, Richard.”

  “Venezuela,” said my father darkly.

  For the first time that evening, my mother turned to address me directly. “Really, Austin, you have to talk to her. You’re the only one she listens to.”

  In every family drama, each person has a role to play. In my family, my older brother, Richard, was obviously the big success, my parents’ pride and joy. Me?—well, I guess I was the misguided wastrel, frittering away my life in Hollywood until I came to my senses and got a real job or went back to school.

  Riley, though—she was the black sheep, the lost cause. She lived up north near my parents. She lived off my parents too, dependent on their money although she did have a job, or a sort-of job, a parttime job on weekends as an “actress” at the Happy Town Amusement Park near Walnut Creek. She would play a farm girl at the petting zoo there or a ghoul at the funhouse, jumping out at passersby.

  But her “real work,” if you could call it that, was as a “video artist.” She spent most of her time making this insane video series called Ouroboros: Dark Dreams of Reality. In the videos, she lay on her bed, kicking her legs in the air like an adolescent girl. She looked into the camera and spun conspiracy theories out of stories she’d read online. These theories involved aliens from outer space trying to take over the world with the help of an international cabal of human plotters. I could never tell whether these videos were serious or ironic. But the funny thing was: people liked them. They had tens of thousands of viewers, sometimes over a hundred thousand.

  My parents had worked their way out of a Midwestern nowhere to become what they were. They were proud of their status and their elegant, intellectual friends. Riley’s videos—her videos and her endless series of disastrous romances—embarrassed my folks no end.

  But me, I loved Riley, loved her like crazy. I’d practically raised her, playing dolls with her, telling her stories when my parents were too busy professoring to do the job.

  And so I didn’t want to be in this conversation—yet another in the endless series of what-are-we-going-to-do-about-Riley family discussions.

  “Excuse me,” I said abruptly.

  And abruptly, I got up. I weaved my way through the white tables quickly, as if making my escape. With a sense of freedom and release, I entered the main room of the restaurant and found the door to the restrooms. I opened it and went through into a narrow corridor paneled in old wood. I just wanted to stay there, hide there.

  But I went down the corridor toward the men’s room.

  AS I STOOD at the urinal, I checked my phone. There was an email from Ken, the assistant at Mythos. He had sent me a phone number and street address for Sean Gunther, the author who had submitted Another Kingdom to the company.

  I flushed and stepped away from the porcelain. I was alone in the room. I glanced at my watch. It was still early, not yet eight. Without really thinking about it, I punched in the number.

  Mostly, it was just a way of stalling, staving off the moment when I would have to return to my family at their table. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say to Gunther if he actually picked up the phone.

  Hi, my name is Austin Lively. Earlier today, I was transported into an alternate reality, and I was wondering …

  He picked up on the third ring. A gruff voice: “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Gunther?” I said, startled.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hi, my name is Austin Lively. I …”

  “Oh yeah, come on over.”

  He hung up.

  I took the phone from my ear and stared at it. I thought: Okay, that was weird.

  But weird or no, it had changed the entire tone of my evening. Suddenly I was charged up, on the hunt again. I was going to get out of this place, get out of this dinner, get out of this conversation, and find out what the hell had happened to me.

  I slipped the phone into my pocket. I hurried to the men’s room door and pushed through.

  And I let out a wild shout of horror: “Oh no!”

  Suddenly, two guards had me gripped by the arms, and I was being hustled up the dungeon steps to face my trial for murder.

  IT WAS A BRUTAL SHOCK. A HAMMER BLOW TO THE GUT, knocking the air and life right out of me. Why hadn’t it occurred to me I might walk through another door and find myself swept back into Galiana? Because shit like that doesn’t happen, that’s why. I still didn’t really believe it had happened to me the first time, and to find myself back here, in manacles again, facing murder charges again—the jolt of despair was so sudden it was nearly crippling. Was I going nuts? Or was this real? Why hadn’t I gotten that brain scan while I had the chance?

  One of the guards gave me a rough shove.

  “Come on, let’s go! Hurry up! Stop stalling!”
/>   The man in the red vest walked ahead of us, leading the way. Sir Aravist Tem, the captain of the guard. Even in the whirl of hopelessness and confusion, I knew his name now. I remembered it from the character list in my computer.

  We reached the top of the stairs. Went down a short stone hallway. Pushed through a heavy set of doors. I prayed that crossing the threshold would transport me back to Los Angeles and save me. No such luck. We came into a small chamber. A cohort of guards was waiting for us there, all with their swords drawn. Why?

  Then a sound reached me, and I understood. It was the sound of a mob, just outside. An angry mob. People shouting, chanting.

  “Bring him out!”

  “Bring us the murderer!”

  “Murder! Conspiracy!”

  “We’ll strangle him with his own innards!”

  I looked around wide-eyed at the guards surrounding me. I swallowed hard. “Wait, are they screaming for me?”

  No one answered. No one even looked my way. The guards focused only on Sir Aravist Tem.

  Sir Aravist said, “Keep him surrounded. Don’t let them get at him. Let’s go.”

  “No, wait! Wait!” I said.

  The Captain pushed through the doors and the guards marched me out after him.

  “There he is!”

  “Let us at him!”

  “Murderer!”

  “Get out of our way!”

  Everything was chaos, noise, and motion. I was in a courtyard, a square of sky above me, stone walls rising on every side. I was jostled hard. Rough faces, contorted and purple with murderous rage, lunged at me over the guards’ shoulders. Hands reached for me, grabbed at me, clawed the space in front of my eyes. The mob’s cries filled the air like the roar of a surging sea. They pushed and shoved at the guards who veered and stumbled left and then right, dragging me with them. With my hands manacled behind me, I had to fight to keep my balance. I could barely see beyond backs and shoulders, angry faces, and wheeling glimpses of the sky.