Complaints had been made because the girl had become frightened of "the situation." The manager of the girl and the boy wanted to speak to me at one point and I renegotiated the price and then handed the cell phone back to the boy and he spoke briefly into it before handing the phone back to me. Everything was confirmed. And then the boy took turns f**king me and then the girl and my fingers kept jamming into him, spurring the boy on, and the human skull in the plastic bag was a prop watching us from the nightstand in the bedroom and sometimes I made the girl kiss the skull and her eyes were in a trance and she gazed at me as if I didn't exist and then I'd tell the boy to beat the girl and I watched as he threw her to the floor and then I told him to do it again.

One night the girl tried to escape from the house and the boy and I chased her down the street with flashlights and then onto another street where he tackled her just before dawn. We dragged the girl quickly back inside the house and she was tied up and put in what I had told them to refer to as the kennel, which was her bedroom. "Say thank you," I told the girl when I brought out a plate of cupcakes laced with laxative and made the girl and boy eat them because it was their reward. Smeared with shit, I was pushing my fist into the girl and her lips were clinging tightly around my wrist and she seemed to be trying to make sense of me while I stared back at her flatly, my arm sticking out of her, my fist clenching and unclenching in her cunt, and then her mouth opened with shock and she started shrieking until the boy lowered his c**k into her mouth, gagging her, and the sound of crickets kept playing over the scene.

The sky looked scoured, remarkable, a cylinder of light formed at the base of the mountains, rising upward. At the end of the weekend the girl admitted to me that she had become a believer as we sat in the shade of the towering hills - "the crossing place" is what the girl called them, and when I asked her what she meant she said, "This is where the devil lives," and she was pointing at the mountains with a trembling hand but she was smiling now as the boy kept diving into the pool and the welts glistened on his tan back from where I had beaten him. The devil was calling out to her but it didn't scare the girl anymore because she wanted to talk to him now, and in the house was a copy of the book that had been written about us over twenty years ago and its neon cover glared from where it rested on the glass coffee table until it was found floating in the pool in the house in the movie colony beneath the towering mountains, water bloated, the sound of crickets everywhere, and then the camera tracks across the desert until we start fading out on the yellowing sky.

When I did a search for the name of the dead boy a link moved me to a Web site he had created before his death called the Doheny Project. A thousand pictures detailed the renovation of unit 1508 in the Doheny Plaza and then abruptly stopped. There were pictures of the boy as well, headshots of him blond and tan and flexing - he had wanted to be an actor - and there was the fake smile, the pleading eyes, the mirage of it all. The boy had posted pictures of himself in the club he was at the night he died, high and shirtless surrounded with boys who looked like him and this was before he went to sleep and never woke up, and in one of the shots I could see that he had the same tattoo that Rain had seen when she dreamed about him - a dragon, blurred, on his wrist. And the search led me to an audition reel and in one of the auditions the boy reads the part of Jim in Concealed, the movie I wrote. "What's the worst thing that ever happened to you, Jimmy?" someone playing a girl named Claire reads off camera. "Unconditional love," the boy says, the character of Jimmy turning away in mock shame, but the boy was reading the line wrong, giving it the wrong emphases, smirking when he should have been totally serious, turning it into a punch line when it was never supposed to be a joke.

When Laurie calls from New York I tell her she has a week to move out of the apartment below Union Square. "Why?" she asks. "I'm subletting it," I tell her. "But why?" she asks. "Because I'm staying in L.A.," I tell her. "But I don't understand why," she says again, and then I tell her, "Everything I do is for a reason."

At a fund-raising concert at Disney Hall that has something to do with the environment I talk to Mark during the intermission and where I ask him about Rain Turner's audition for The Listeners. Mark tells me that Rain was never going to get the role of Martina but she's actually being considered for a much smaller role as the older sister - basically, one scene where she's topless - and that they're going to see her again next week. We're standing at the bar when I tell him, "Don't, okay? Just don't." Mark looks at me, a little surprised, and then there's a little smile. "Okay, I get it." At the reception afterward at Patina I run into Daniel Carter, who says he's very serious about making Adrenaline his next film after he finishes shooting the movie Meghan Reynolds is costarring in. Daniel is also thinking of using Rain Turner in the movie Meghan Reynolds is costarring in - Trent Burroughs made a call, said it would be a favor, whatever, it's three lines. I tell Daniel to do a favor for me and not to put Rain in the movie and that Rain's more trouble than she's worth and Daniel seems shocked but I mistake this for amusement.