Vassar was the biggest name Eric had ever worked with-and a man who’d made certain that he was also the last big name that Eric ever worked with. They’d hit it off well enough at the start, the project something Eric truly liked, an on-the-road thriller involving a hitchhiker who witnessed the execution-style killing of a journalist. It was a great story, gripping as hell, and the day Eric was hired, he bought four bottles of champagne and drove with Claire up to a beautiful inn near Napa and they had sex five times in the first twelve hours. Wild, playful, laughing, gasping sex. Victory sex.
There’d never been anything quite like that for them again.
You had heavy-handed directors and then you had Davis Vassar, who evidently hired a cinematographer just so he had someone else to bark orders at. Talent meant almost nothing to him, professional judgments even less. Eric fought through a month of it before the first blowup, and two days after that, his fist was connecting with Vassar’s face and a waitress was screaming and Eric Shaw’s Hollywood career was ending.
Temper, temper, temper. You have to watch your temper.
The moment it had started to go south with them was crystallized in his memory. Eric had come to the production company office for a meeting with Vassar and two of the producers. They’d been sitting in a room that looked out onto Wilshire, and Vassar made the three of them wait on him for twenty minutes. There was a glass-topped coffee table in the middle of the room, and when he finally swaggered in, he plunked himself down in one of the black leather chairs and put his feet up on the table. Banged the heels of his shoes down on the glass with an unnecessarily loud flourish. The message: I’m a Big Fucking Deal.
They’d talked for nearly an hour, and Eric still couldn’t remember what had been said. He was an image guy, and that image-Vassar’s shining black shoes on that glass tabletop-wouldn’t leave his mind. He stared at those shoes and listened and watched the producers cowering and sniveling with Vassar and thought, This is bullshit. They’re listening to you because of your damn name, not talent. Because you caught some breaks and rode somebody else’s phenomenal acting performance into an Oscar nomination. You don’t even see this story; you don’t have the first damn clue how it should be told. I do. I should be directing this, not you, but I don’t have the name. And so I have to sit here and watch you put your shoes up on somebody else’s table and mouth off while looking at your BlackBerry every two minutes to remind us all how important you are.
He’d made it out of that meeting peacefully. He didn’t make it out of the film the same way.
“And this,” Eric said aloud, “is how you ended up in Indiana. Well done.”
He could shake the memory off for the morning, but not the headache. Food might help, or some black coffee at least, so he left the room and walked down the steps and out into the atrium again. Made it only twenty paces across before the light shining in through the dome brought him to a halt, and he turned on his heel, gritting his teeth, and retreated to the darker corridor that circled the atrium. Found his way to one of the dining rooms, took a table, and ordered an omelet and coffee. Hurry on the coffee, please.
He drank two cups and felt no effect, picked at the omelet and got maybe three bites down before giving up, tossing cash on the table, and returning to his room. This was bad. Headaches like this one, so sudden, so blinding in their pain… they were harbingers. Eric knew enough to understand that, and the possibilities chilled him. Brain tumor, blood clot, cancer. Aneurisms and strokes and heart attacks.
Time to call Dr. Sharp in Chicago. That was all there was to it.
He called from his cell phone. Only when he reached the robotic-voiced menu did he remember that it was a Saturday, and therefore getting the good Dr. Sharp on the line was going to be impossible. His office was closed weekends, and the monotone message suggested Eric visit the emergency room if his condition was serious.
It felt awfully serious to him, but it was also only a headache. You didn’t walk into an emergency room with one of those. And where was a hospital around here anyhow?
He wasn’t sure if he looked at the Pluto Water because he thought of it, or if he thought of it because he looked at it. The chain of logic wasn’t clear, but somehow he found himself staring at the bottle on the desk and thinking, Why the hell not? It was supposed to cure headaches, wasn’t it? He was sure he’d seen that on the lists of ailments the mineral water boasted it could handle. Granted, damn near every other affliction of the early twentieth century had been on those lists, but the stuff couldn’t have gotten its reputation by being a pure placebo. It had to help some problems.
He walked over to the desk and reached for the bottle but stopped with his hand about six inches away, tilted his head, and stared at it. There was a glaze over the bottle now. It looked almost like…
Frost. Son of a bitch, it was frost. He wiped some of it off with his thumb, found it just like wiping clear a streak on the window on an early winter morning in Chicago.
“I’ve got to figure you out,” he said.
He wasn’t going to figure anything out if he had to hole up in this room, sitting on the floor and chewing Excedrin like they were Skittles. So why not give the water a try?
He unfastened the cap and took a small, hesitant swallow.
Not bad. If anything, the sulfuric taste was down and more of the sugary flavor was present in its stead. He took a full swallow, and the taste drove him on for another and then a third, the stuff going down like nectar now. It took a conscious effort to stop, and when he lowered the bottle he saw that more than half of the contents were gone-the same liquid that had made him gag back in Chicago at the smallest of tastes.
The flavor might have improved, but it had no effect. The headache pounded on, that motorcycle gang still circling through town, racing one another.
Okay, the Pluto Water wasn’t going to do the job. Dumb idea, fine, but he was willing to try a dumb idea if it meant he could go about his day.
He went back to the bed and stretched out on his stomach, slid his face under the pillows and held them to his head. Maybe he should go to the hospital. Probably was crazy not to. If Claire were here, it wouldn’t even be an issue; they’d be driving these rural highways right now, looking for the telltale blue-and-white sign. She was a worrier. Protective of him, too. Would defend him to the end.
Well, almost to the end. She’d stuck with him through it all in California, but once they were back in Chicago, back around her family and their judgmental whispers, her resolve had wavered. The questions started then, asking him what came next, saying that it was fine if he needed out of the movie business but what business was he going to find for the future, what would he do? He’d needed time, that was all, and she didn’t have enough of it for him, evidently. Didn’t have enough…
His thoughts left Claire, and, very slowly, he removed the pillows and lifted his head. Cocked it to the side, as if he were listening for something in the distance.
“It’s going away,” he said.
The damned headache was fading. Still present, but the biker gang was driving away now, heading uphill on the roads that led out of town.
14
HE DIDN’T TRUST IT at first, maybe didn’t want to trust it. He went onto the balcony and sat overlooking the atrium for fifteen minutes as the headache continued to fade and then was gone. No, he thought, it can’t really be gone. You’ve just adapted to the light.