Free Los Angeles by Peter Moore Smith Page B

boy’s eyes were still open, but his lips were trembling and he seemed to have descended
     into some sort of fugue.
    I couldn’t help but look around, thinking I might need to find some help. I even considered running back to the car and speeding
     away. “Are you… are you all right?” I asked again.
    Thankfully, the boy coughed convulsively, and when he looked up, his eyes were clear. “What do you mean?” he asked. He seemed
     to have come to.
    “You were… your eyelids were flickering, and you seemed to be… I don’t know —”
    He smiled hugely. “Oh, that’s just what it’s like when I’m
remembering.
” He broke into an unselfconscious, high-pitched giggle, saying proudly, “That wasn’t really my report. That was from the
     Discovery Channel.”
    “From TV?”
    “I have an audiographic memory,” he announced.
    I didn’t know what to say. “A… what?”
    “
Audiographic.
That means I can remember everything I hear.”
    “Everything?”
    “Absolutely everything,” he answered. “And once it starts, it’s kind of hard to turn it off.”
    “Do you remember anything about Angela… I mean, about Jessica?”
    “Were you her boyfriend?”
    I had to close my eyes. The light was killing me. “Yeah, I was… I mean… I am.”
    “I don’t usually remember stuff like that. I have to care about it at least a little bit.”
    My head was starting to throb, the migraine assembling its powers, storm clouds gathering on the horizon. “Well,” I said,
     “I really need to talk to her.”
    “You could ask my mom.” He indicated the living room, an oasis of cool shadow. “She’ll be home pretty soon, and you could
     wait inside.”
    I hesitated, thinking of the photo I had shown him, and wondered if the kid would launch into another science report. “You
     probably shouldn’t invite strangers into your house.”
    He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t look very dangerous.” Then he pointed to my chest. “And you could use our bathroom to rinse
     the throw-up off your shirt.”
    I looked down. The front of my shirt was striped with greenish bile and orangey red smears of regurgitated spaghetti sauce.
    Fantastic.
    The boy opened the door for me all the way.
    The interior had that afternoon feeling of no one being home. There was that stillness, a summer quiet. Motes of dust floated
     in the heavy air, revealing shafts of thick yellow that burned through the wooden blinds and cast hard zebra stripes of shadow
     across the floor. That film crew had been here before me to set up the scene, it seemed, the same one that had lit the parking
     lot yesterday. I pictured the gaffers inside this little duplex, standing around with their alligator clips and rolls of colored
     tape. I imagined that one of these walls was fake, concealing Universal’s entire lighting department.
    “I’m Angel,” I said.
    I was barely holding it together. In a few short moments, the course of the migraine had progressed from a slight stabbing
     pain to the feeling of a needle piercing my eye to the sensation of a shard of broken glass cutting through the back of my
     head.
    “I’m Victor,” the boy said pointing. “Bathroom’s that way.”
    “Thank you, Victor.” I stepped through a small hallway between the living room and kitchen and found a single toilet and sink
     in a closet-size space. There was a flaming intensity slashing through my cerebral cortex now, my medulla oblongata throbbing,
     the migraine coming on with full, merciless effect. I could feel it penetrating my frontal lobe like a surgeon’s scalpel.
    Inside the little yellow room, I pushed my mother’s octagonal glasses up onto my head and examined my face in the mirror.
     My skin was practically transparent, the veins beneath my skin pulsating like an alien’s. My eyes were even pinker, even more
     infant-fleshlike than usual, and deeply bloodshot from my being awake for so long. I ran some cold water over my fingers and
     placed them gently on