So saying, I walked away.
Chapter 38
I hate LA.
Endless straight lines from nowhere particular to nothing much especially.
Even the places that should be green–parks and “recreation areas”–are no more than a slab of fenced-off concrete where the kids sit and drink while waiting for something more interesting to pass them by.
But say what you will for Los Angeles, you can always find someone willing to do something if it’ll cut them a break.
At 12.03 p.m. I left my host for the body of a passing stranger, walked far enough along Lexington for my former host not to suspect, then crossed over the street to where Will was waiting, squinting against the noonday sun.
“Hi,” I said, and to his credit he didn’t jump. “Make your mind up?”
Two weeks later we sat on the concrete stands of the stadium, he eating popcorn, me in the over-tanned, dry-skinned body of a handy stranger, when Will put his hand on my arm and said, “I can see you now.”
“See what?”
“You,” he replied. “Doesn’t matter who you’re wearing, where you’ve come from; I wait by the car and when you come to find me, I know it’s you.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. Something in the way you walk. Something in the way you look. Something old. I can recognise you, whoever you are. I know who you are now.”
I tried to answer and found I had nothing. My eyes were hot, and I turned my face away and hoped he didn’t see me cry.
Chapter 39
The Kepler file made no mention of estate agents.
Its list of my bodies was far from comprehensive. Details were pieced together based on the testimony of witnesses, medical reports, but by definition the bodies I had worn had only gaps in their memories to offer, not hard information.
Nowhere did it tell of my previous employment.
If it had, perhaps Nathan Coyle would have tried that much harder when he came to pull the trigger.
A good estate agent will spend months researching a target.
For long-term habitation, a clean skin is advisable: those with no social connections or economic expectations, whose sudden alteration will not be noticed. The ideal candidate is, naturally enough, the comatose patient whose family have given up hope. With no one else at home, it’s as clean as it comes to pick the body up for whatever purposes you so desire. The downside of acquiring a body whose original inhabitant is in a vegetative state is you cannot always guarantee the extent of the biological trauma the body itself has suffered. Some muscle atrophy is inevitable; I find that bladder control and various secretions such as tears, saliva and snot can also take a hit, though these can be nursed back to stability with patience, a quality many of my kind lack.
In rare cases ghosts have been known to jump into a vegetative patient only to discover that as well as higher brain activity, muscle control and coordination are entirely out of the window, and so they remain, trapped, awake, paralysed, screaming without a voice, shrieking with no sound, until someone, God almighty be praised, some nurse or passing janitor, accidentally brushes their naked skin, and they can move out again. I once spent two days in such a state, until my body was given a sponge bath, and when I escaped into the nurse I fell on to the floor, weeping with relief to have a body back.
Whatever the risks, a long-term habitation of a clean skin is almost invariably preferable to one with an established history. An estate agent can help: they can teach you the names of brothers, fathers, mothers, daughters, colleagues, friends; they can show you where your skin keeps the car keys, help you learn the signature, fake the accent, tell the tales, to ensure that the leap from skin to skin happens with minimum fuss to the moving ghost. Hopping into any well-established skin is hard; ghosting into Marilyn Monroe was utterly insane.
“She’s taking drugs,” I said as Aurangzeb sat in my flat and drank my wine. The great glass window of the living room looked out and down from the LA hills on to a city like a circuit board, red and yellow twinkling in the smog beneath us.
“So?” she asked. “Who isn’t in this town?”
“She’s mixing drugs and drink.”
“Come on.” Aurangzeb rolled her eyes. “Having me in residence will be a lucky break for the girl! Couple of clean days, you know?”
“Have you had much experience of the physiological effect of dependency?”
“A day–two at most–I think the body will make it a coupla days without going to shit, you know? Gimme the stuff I can use. Who’s she sleeping with, what’s her agent’s name, who’s the guy she owes money to, that sorta stuff. Is she…” She shuffled forward eagerly. “Is she sleeping with Kennedy?”
“Even if she is,” I replied, “Monroe’s response is coyness, and I suggest you try that yourself. The golden phrase is ‘I don’t really want to talk about that now.’ ”
“Whatever–I can do that.”
“She’s no dope,” I added quickly. “Whatever you do, don’t play her as a dope. She becomes vapid as a defence mechanism, is blunt when she’s sure of her power. You can’t be sure of anything with this level of research, so for God’s sake play it empty. But not dumb.”
“I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” said Aurangzeb, stretching her stockinged legs across my tabletop. “I thought you’d be up for this.”
“Honestly,” I replied, shuffling my papers out of the way of her heeled shoes, “I don’t see the point.”
“You don’t see the point of being Marilyn fucking Monroe?” she squeaked.
“No. Is it wealth you want? There’s richer people out there. The body? There are prettier bodies. You want fame? You want to feel adored, adulated for a night? They’re not adoring you, it’s not you they’ll praise. You want to experience that high, find the body of a dresser or a stage manager, and as the actor goes on for their final bow, grab them by the wrist and walk out to the roaring of the crowd. Or learn to do it for yourself. Find a pretty body–an anonymous pretty body–and I’ll jump into producers and casting directors in any studio in LA and tick that box by your name right up to the moment when you turn to the camera and smile your cosmetic moonlit smile.”
Aurangzeb had rolled her eyes when my words began, and now she rolled them again as I finished. “You want me to work? I could be Clark Gable like that.” She snapped her long manicured fingers. “I could walk Laurence Olivier naked round London; I could be fucking Marlon Brando–I could be Marlon Brando fucking–and you wanna tell me to sit back and take, what, five years out of my life, maybe ten, to get what I could get in a day? What the hell is wrong with you?” She leaned forward, legs swinging down, eyes bright. “I heard things about you. I thought you were the kinda guy who lived.”
“What kind of things did you hear?” I asked softly.
“That you were a guy who tried things out. That you’d been the fat soprano, the airline pilot; you’d shaken hands right into the Oval Office. I heard you did stuff too, like, back in the war. I heard that there were more forgetful soldiers staggering around central Europe in 1943 than there were fucking V1s dropped on London.”
“I had no idea Janus gossiped so much. And what did you do in the war?”
“Moved about. America. Canada. I thought it’d be cool to hitch a ride with a GI on a ship to Europe, once the U-boats were going down, but in the end I tagged along with a co-pilot and faked food poisoning over the Atlantic. Way easier. I saw the liberation of Paris.”
“And what was that like?”
“It was shit,” she replied. “Guys marching up and down and people waving and bands playing, and I thought, where were you last week, where were you yesterday, when you didn’t know if you were gonna wave the fucking tricolour or the swastika? Then I found out that the guy I was wearing was a collaborator and that dampened my mood.” She slammed her hands down into her thighs and exclaimed, “The war was so fucking lame!” and it occurred to me that, for all her curving clothes and pampered hair, in every way, in every flail of her arms and the way she sat with knees apart, Aurangzeb was through-and-through an American male.