I suddenly find myself in an empty house, sheltered from the Santa Ana winds by the steep slopes of a weather-beaten canyon, watching lizards scurry out of shadows into fleeting warmth, and listening for the loosening sands of another gofer avalanche. With the sun rising from one ridge mid-morning and setting on the next mid-afternoon, it's like Alaskan winter time in this place.
Sound too travels in strange ways. I hear conversations that bounce off the irregular contours of the canyon walls, disguising their location - malicious machinations that their perpetrators think no one else hears. Boiling cauldrons of pulp simmer in the canyons late until the night, like festival candles...
At last I'm in bed with the entertainment industry, having sex with a seductive screen idol who can't remember my name. At least I can testify that at this point in the negotiations, one doesn't believe one's selling one's soul to Mephistopheles.
You soon see the warning signs: the producer who wears an impossibly trim goatee and laughs a lot, the director of development who moves uncomfortably around in his plush leather chair, the rotund company partner who flashes you an imperceptibly brief glare, during which you think you hear extraneous voices. You leave wondering whether or not, unbeknownst to you, your sleeping orifices were just surreptitiously probed by the Forces of Darkness.
How far will it take me, this affair with the Black Dahlia? If the sex is good, good things will come. How long before I have my own line of safari apparel..? Maybe I don't last the afternoon, as the entire side of Nicholas Canyon breaks loose and crumbles on top of me. I hear little land slides sidling gravity's way. There is nothing up there, I checked. It's just foreshadow and verisimilitude in allegiance with the Fate Clowns. This after all is the stuff of entertainment.
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