Remake

“She’s not in 1950,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “She’s down on Sunset Boulevard. I saw her.”

“On Sunset Boulevard?”

“No. On the skids.”

Not in a parallel timefeed. Or some never-never-land where people walked through the screen into the movies. Here. On the skids. “Did you talk to her?”

She shook her head. “It was morning rush hour. I was coming back from Mayer’s, and I just caught a glimpse of her. You know how rush hour is. I tried to get through the crowd to her, but by the time I made it, she’d gotten off.”

“Why would she get off at Sunset Boulevard? Did you see her get off?”

“I told you, I just got a glimpse of her through the crowd. She was lugging all this equipment. But she had to have gotten off at Sunset Boulevard. It was the only station we passed.”

“You said she was carrying equipment. What kind of equipment?”

“I don’t know. Equipment. I told you, I—”

“Just got a glimpse of her. And you’re sure it was her?”

She nodded. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but Betsy Booth’s a tough role to shake. And it’s hard to hate Alis, after everything she’s done.” She gestured at her reflections in the array. “Look at me. Chooch free, klieg free.” She turned and looked at me. “I always wanted to be in the movies and now I am.”

She started down the hall again.

“Heada, wait,” I said, and then was sorry, afraid her face would be full of hope when she turned around, that there would be tears in her eyes.

But this was Heada, who knows everything.

“What’s your name?” I said. “All I have is your access, and I’ve never called you anything but Heada.”

She smiled at me knowingly, ruefully. Emma Thompson in Remains of the Day. “I like Heada,” she said.

Camera whip-pans to medium-shot: LAIT station sign. Diamond screen, “Los Angeles Instransit” in hot pink caps, “Sunset Boulevard” in yellow.

I took the opdisk of Alis’s routines and went down to the skids. There was nobody on them except a huddle of tourates in mouse ears, a very splatted Marilyn, and Elizabeth Taylor, Sidney Poitier, Mary Pickford, Harrison Ford, emerging one by one from ILMGM’s golden fog. I watched the signs, waiting for Sunset Boulevard and wondering what Alis was doing there. There was nothing down there but the old freeway.

The Marilyn wove unsteadily over to me. Her white halter dress was stained and splotched, and there was a red smear of lipstick by her ear.

“Want a pop?” she said, looking not at me but at Harrison Ford behind me on the screen.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Okay,” she said docilely. “How about you?” She didn’t wait for me, or Harrison, to answer. She wandered off and then came back. “Are you a studio exec?” she asked.

“No, sorry,” I said.

“I want to be in the movies,” she said, and wandered off again.

I kept my eyes fixed on the screen. It went silver for a second between promos, and I caught sight of myself looking clean and responsible and sober. Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. No wonder she’d thought I was a studio exec.

The station sign for Sunset Boulevard came up and I got off. The area hadn’t changed. There was still nothing down here, not even lights. The abandoned freeway loomed darkly in the starlight, and I could see a fire a long way off under one of the cloverleafs.

There was no way Alis was here. She must have spotted Heada and gotten off here to keep her from finding out where she was really going. Which was where?

There was another light now, a thin white beam wobbling this way. Ravers, probably, looking for victims. I got back on the skids.

The Marilyn was still there, sitting in the middle of the floor, her legs splayed out, fishing through an open palm full of pills for chooch, illy, klieg. The only equipment a freelancer needs, I thought, which at least means whatever Alis is doing it’s not freelancing, and realized I’d been relieved ever since Heada told me about seeing Alis with all that equipment, even though I didn’t know where she was. At least she hadn’t turned into a freelancer.

It was half past two. Heada had seen Alis at rush hour, which was still four hours away. If Alis went the same place every day. If she hadn’t been moving someplace, carrying her luggage. But Heada hadn’t said luggage, she’d said equipment. And it couldn’t be a comp and monitor because Heada would have recognized those, and anyway, they were light. Heada had said “lugging.” What then? A time machine?

The Marilyn had stood up, spilling capsules everywhere, and was heading over the yellow warning strip for the far wall, which was still extolling ILMGM’s cavalcade of stars.

“Don’t!” I said, and grabbed for her, a foot from the wall.

She looked up at me, her eyes completely dilated. “This is my stop. I have to get off.”