In the Night of the Heat (9 page)

Considering how hard the rest of the day had been, my last scene was easy.

Sanford is typing on his computer at his desk. Kelsey shouts something. Commotion. Sanford looks up. I never had a chance to say anything, or reach for my gun.

I never heard gunshots, so I was startled to feel the squibs burst on my skin. Like sharp, shallow punches. It wasn't hard to look surprised and reel backward. No blanks sounded, but they could fix that in editing. I lost my balance when I stumbled back into my desk, which only added to the effect. I tried to imagine how a father would feel knowing he was leaving his son behind, and I fixed that horror on my face. I gasped for air, my last chance to
be.

I dropped to the floor.

“Cut!” Avery said. “Where were my sparks?”

Gareth Priestly, the English propmaster who sported red hair and a beard to match, was already checking the gun's chamber. “Misfire,” he said. “Blanks are there.”

“Fuck it, we'll fix it in editing,” Avery said. “Give him the empty. Let's finish.”

I didn't move on the floor, waiting. I was just glad to avoid going back to makeup.

“Action!” Avery said.

On Avery's cue, the set became bedlam. More commotion. Shouting. This time, loud gunshots sounded behind me. I heard Perry's hurried footsteps behind me, his heels vibrating the set's floor. One step. Two.

Off camera, I nestled the last squib in my hand, ready to slap it to my neck.

I felt Perry's gun against my neck.
Good-bye, you assholes,
I thought.

Click.
And—

My head exploded. The
world
exploded. I still don't know which was worse—the noise or the pain. A fiery lance stabbed through my ear and into my brain.

My shout wasn't in the script, but I would only find out about the shout later, because I didn't hear it. I opened my eyes, expecting to
see only light, or utter darkness. With all sound gone, I was sure I was dead. My hand and shirt were covered with blood.

I saw Perry standing over me, his blood-specked face so pale he looked like a Japanese geisha lost in the prom scene from
Carrie.
Suddenly he was an old man—a stricken, confused old man. I was fascinated by the sight of his face shaking, the skin quivering from his jaw. Dad had looked that way in his hospital room.

BOOM-BOOM BOOM-BOOM BOOM-BOOM.

I thought the sensation shaking the floor was an earthquake, but it was my heart. My wondering eyes made the life snap back into Perry's haunted face, and his lips started moving. I couldn't hear him, but his lips mouthed in eerie slo mo, clear as day:

Somebody get a fucking doctor.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21

“Messed yourself up good this time, huh, Ten?”

I didn't need both ears to tell me what Reggie had said. Reggie, my doctor, has always been a smart-ass. He's my second cousin from a family intersection on my mother's side, and he used to treat me cheap. Now he was on staff at UCLA Medical School and working for the Lakers, so it's almost as hard to get a meeting with Reggie as it is with my agent. But this was an emergency, and Reggie is the only doctor I trust. Besides, he's family.

“Looks that way,” I said.

Reggie leaned closer, shining his otoscope into my ear, and I sat rock steady. I didn't want Reggie to miss anything. Reggie's proximity made the roar of silence deafening.

Dad and Marcela watched from a corner of Reggie's office, and the worry in Dad's eyes was for me, for a change. I tried not to let myself see it. I was worried enough for all of us.

“How'd this happen?” Reggie's voice sounded like it was at the end of a long tunnel.

“Some asshole put blanks in a prop gun that was supposed to be empty. Got fired right up against my neck. That's where that burn's from. And now my head rings like hell, and I can't hear shit out of that ear.”

I used to quiz myself when I was a kid—which would you rather lose, your hearing or your sight? That's a no-brainer. Hearing, hands down. Now that one of my ears had stopped working—and the other seemed anything but reliable—it felt like God had taken me up on my bargain.

I felt Reggie's sigh against my cheek. “Lucky you didn't get killed, man.”

“You think I don't know?”

“(Schibhiwkh).”

I shook my head, and Reggie pulled the little cone-shaped black light out. Usually, I could hear at least faintly out of my right ear, but sometimes words were lost. Instead, there was only the ringing, like three loud bells tolling at once.

“There's ringing. And I couldn't make out the last thing you said.”

“Hold still, Ten. Relax. You're gonna be fine.”

“You hope,” I corrected.

“Yeah. I hope.” Unfortunately, I heard that part fine.

I wish Reggie had been older than two and out of diapers when my mother needed honesty from her doctor. Or that he'd been in the country when Dad had his heart attack. After Dad's stroke, Reggie got me through the worst moments by being willing to pick up his phone any time of the day or night. I never ran out of questions. Reggie is the finest doctor there is.

“Hold still,” Reggie said again, gently. In my good ear, my right one.

Marcela said something encouraging, but I couldn't make it out.

I shared a house with a man in a wheelchair, so I knew that life goes on after a disability. As long as I could work, I could handle hearing loss. I could manage a lifelong struggle to enjoy music again—even though so far, my jazz, blues, and funk collection was only a painful exercise in frustration. It didn't sound the same. Too much was missing. Still, I'd be all right with that.

But I couldn't handle the ringing.

They say Beethoven heard ringing while he was going deaf. And an artist, Goya, whose paintings I saw when I visited the Prado museum in Madrid with Alice during one of our vacations together. They say that the ringing in their ears drove both of them crazy. The madness in Goya's work is hidden in plain sight—people shrieking and screaming and eating their young. I'd had the ringing for only a day, and I was halfway to bugnuts myself. Night was hell. Nothing but ringing, hissing, and roaring in my head, keeping me awake. How would I put up with one more night?

Reggie was my last stop before Panic.

“When's it gonna stop?” I asked Reggie when he straightened up, his exam done.

Dad wheeled himself closer to hear better himself, and Marcela hovered, too.

Reggie folded his arms behind his head and gazed down at me, his lips refusing to smile. “Don't know for sure, man. It probably will—it usually does—but it might not. I gotta be real with you: It might be gone tomorrow, or it might not be gone for a while. Weeks? Months?”

Marcela muttered in Spanish, shaking her head, maternal worry creasing her brow.

Reggie went on: “In the short term, there are things you can do: Avoid aspirin, caffeine, alcohol. Studies show that they make the ringing worse. And if it's bad at night, get a humidifier, an air purifier, something that makes low-level noise. That'll help mask it.”

“
Mask it
my ass, Reggie. How do I get rid of it?”

That was when Reggie explained there was no known cure. And that the ringing might persist even after the hearing in my left ear returned—
if
my hearing returned, which was more and more doubtful after sixteen hours, and mine had been gone longer. And he explained that my mission now was to make sure the hearing loss didn't get worse. And recommended a good otolaryngologist, a specialist at UCLA Medical Center. Recommended some herbs and amino acids I could take.

In other words, there was nothing he could do. Just like the emergency-room doctor said.

Reggie's confirmation exhausted me. I would have lain down on the table, just let the weight of the knowledge sink down into my bones, except I didn't want to upset Dad. Or I didn't want to look weak to him, more likely.

“The gunshot and the ringing are related, but I'm gonna go ahead and look at them as two separate problems,” Reggie said. “It's rare, but I've seen temporary hearing loss up to three or four days. I'm hoping you have what we call a Temporary Threshold Shift—as opposed to PTS, the permanent kind. We don't know if there's cell death unless the hearing doesn't come back, and that only becomes clearer with time. But if you look at your ear's function as computer hardware, the ringing is more like a software problem.” He smiled as if pleased by the analogy. “It's a little more complicated. There's a bigger role that stress plays, for example.”

“So it's in my head?” I said.

Reggie grinned slightly. “In more ways than one, yeah. So…take it easy for a few days. Chill out. Low stress.”

That would be tough, with April, my job, and my left ear gone in a span of two days.

“(Twhig hie eeziiee), man,” Reggie said with a smile, slugging my shoulder.

I nodded, but I hadn't heard him. Instead, I'd heard a sound like waves crashing over my brain. The noise wasn't always a ringing. Maybe I would have to get used to that, too.

When the gun went off, I'd just been relieved that all the blood on my shirt and hand wasn't really mine—it was only from the squibs. I was so grateful to be alive, I'd made jokes for Chela by the time she got home from school.
(“Your turn's coming, all that loud music.”)

But that had worn off. All I could think about now was the damage.

When I tried to ask Reggie to repeat what he'd said, I couldn't open my mouth.

 

“One ear's better'n none…” Dad said, turning on the TV. Pep talk over.

To Dad, a few words of hard, simple truth and an afternoon of Court TV were the answers to all of life's problems. Dad had learned how to appreciate what was left instead of fixating on what was gone. Me, I wasn't there yet.

“I know that.” My teeth were gritted.

“Oughta sue 'em, though…” Dad said.

“Damn right I will.”

Maiming and killing are against the law, so suing is the next best
thing. I wanted to do great damage to the son of a bitch who had handed Perry a gun loaded with blanks. Gareth Priestly. He was the propmaster for
Homeland
, and that asshole's carelessness nearly got me killed.

Every hour on the hour, I had to talk myself out of driving to the set to talk to Priestly personally. Okay, I didn't want to talk to him—I wanted to hurt him. But I couldn't access the set anymore. I was fired. I was the reason every studio has a guarded gate. After Monday, I was the last person they would let in.

When someone knocked at my door, I let myself hope it was April. She'd changed her mind about South Africa. About me. I was desperate for a change of direction.

I opened the door to see Len Shemin, my agent, and I was almost as happy. My agent had never set foot in my house. If I had realized this was how to get Len Shemin's attention at one o'clock on a weekday, I would have blown out my eardrum a long time ago.

“Shit—hallucinations, too?” I said, meeting him in the doorway.

“Shut up, you. I was in the neighborhood. You gonna invite me in, or stand there gawking?” Then he hugged me. Another first. “Shitty week, man.
Shitty.
First the Lynda Jewell thing, now this.”

Every once in a great while, an artist realizes his agent is also his friend. I probably should have guessed it sooner, but it was finally plain. Len Shemin is the biggest workaholic I know. I book lunch with him a month in advance. I could only guess what he'd rescheduled to make time to drive to my house.

“My dad's here,” I told Len quietly, inviting him in. “We can't talk in front of him.”

“Roger. But get us alone somewhere.”

I needn't have worried about how to excuse myself from Dad and Marcela with so much T.D. Jackson news to digest on TV. They were hypnotized by the parade of ignorant analysts making guesses
based on nothing. Dad mumbled a greeting at Len when I introduced him, but then Dad only fixed a disapproving scowl on the gel in Len's bleached-blond hair that made it stand up an inch. Between that and Len's red-framed Clark Kent glasses, Dad looked like he thought the circus had come to town. Sometimes I think Dad believed his age and infirmity made him invisible.

I whispered close to Dad's ear. “Weren't
you
the one who taught
me
not to stare?”

“You be sure to make this right, Mr. Shemin,” Marcela called after us, as Len and I walked toward my home office, like Len was our plumber.

“I'll do that, ma'am,” Len said. I almost believed him.

I'd moved my office into a corner of the screening room, which had once been the centerpiece of Alice's social life. She'd spent a fortune on it. My tiny corner desk, computer and printer faced opposite Alice's old nine-and-a-half-foot screen, two rows of seats, and a museum's worth of publicity photos in neat rows across the walls.

“Ten, this
house
! Jesus, all these years you're giving me this song and dance about no money, ‘Get me work, Len'…This fucking house is bigger than mine. This room! I don't have a goddamn screening room. Who do you think you are—George Lucas?”

I powered up my computer. “Inheritance,” I said. “Former client.”

“You're kidding! Who?”

I shook my head. “You know I'm not going there, man.”

Len admired Alice's photo collection on the wall, the record of her Hollywood friendships. Name someone, and their signatures and photos are up there. Name anyone.

“I'll look her up in the real estate records,” Len said.

“Do what you gotta do.”

With Len there, I almost forgot about my ear. Then my computer
beeped as the screen came on. I barely heard the sound, as if I were in a fish tank filled with water.

Len was talking to me, and I had to concentrate to listen. Len, ever perceptive, noticed I was favoring one ear and shifted to my good side. “…times I tried to get you to walk away from that life,
I
should've been lining up clients, getting my ten percent.”

I might have thought it was funny if it hadn't been so hard to hear.

“So you just came to say ‘I told you so'?” I was surprised by the anger in my voice.

Len's face went sallow. “Hell no, Ten. I was just kidding. A joke.”

Anger had hardened my face. I had to use my hands to knead my skin back to softness. The anger seemed to have boiled up out of nowhere, and that kind of anger is dangerous.

“Sorry, man,” I said.

Len patted my shoulder and checked the closed door behind us. “Listen, Ten, in all seriousness: I'm sure Jewell got you fired off the show.”

I'd had my suspicions, but if anyone would know, Len Shemin would.

“What makes you sure?”

“Your show-runner, Frank Lloyd, got his start at Dark Dream Productions, which was FilmQuest's television subsidiary, and he made them a fortune. I knew the Lloyds and Jewells play doubles at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club—that's why I sent her your packet.
Homeland
is his baby. All she had to do was pick up the phone, and you were gone.”

Pick up the phone and say what?
I wondered.

On my computer, I Googled my least favorite propmaster, Gareth Priestly. He got two hundred hits, including his MySpace page,
where I saw a long list of credits. He'd started his career working on
Alien,
and he'd worked steady, high-profile projects ever since, most of them involving gunplay. He should have done a better job. Leaving blanks in a gun about to be fired against an actor's body was damn near as bad as filling it with bullets. There would be an incident review at the SAG Stunt Performer's Board. If his mistake was taken seriously enough, there might be charges.

Beside Gareth's name, I typed L-Y-N-D-A J-E-W-E-L-L. Searched them together. Call it a hunch.

There were forty hits. Most of the sites were movie listings, from three or four projects Gareth Priestly worked on that Lynda Jewell shepherded as an executive producer. That didn't count: They might never have even met.

But the last hit was a photo from
Variety,
which I could only access because of my subscription: Lynda Jewell and Gareth Priestly side by side at a FilmQuest premiere party, raising champagne glasses toward the photographer, their faces slightly ruddy from alcohol.

The blood in my veins cooled.

Not only had they met, but they looked cozy. Priestly was in his midfifties, but he was fit. Strong face. Maybe handsome. Where was her husband when that photo was taken?