"Sir-" the maid begins impatiently.
"It's okay, it's okay," I'm saying. "She's my girlfriend."
"Sir, you should come back later," the maid says.
"No, no, it's okay," I'm saying, realizing that the room seems totally unlived in. I move past the maid to the closet and open it.
"Sir, you should wait until-"
I hold up a hand. "I said it's okay," I murmur.
The closet is completely empty: no clothes, no luggage, not even any hangers. I close the closet door and move past the maid over to the dressing table and start opening drawers. All of those are empty too.
"Sir, I'm asking you to leave," the maid says, looking me over unfavorably. "If you don't leave I'm going to have to call Security."
Ignoring her, I notice that the wall safe is open and a Prada handbag-nylon with the trademark metal triangle-is halfway hidden inside. As I move toward the safe, behind me the maid walks out of the cabin.
Slowly I unclasp the purse, opening it. I reach in and it's basically empty, except for an envelope.
Queasy, suddenly breathing hard, the hangover washing back over me intensely, I pull a series of Polaroids out of the envelope.
There are eight photographs of me. Two were taken backstage at what looks like a Wallflowers concert: a poster for the band in the background; a sweaty Jakob Dylan holding a red plastic cup behind me, a towel draped over his shoulders. Two were taken during a magazine shoot: hands in the frame with a makeup brush touching up my face, my eyes closed serenely, Brigitte Lancome setting up a camera off to the side. The other four: me standing next to a pool wearing shorts and a vest with no shirt, mattresses on the ground everywhere, and in two of the Polaroids it's bright out and a giant orange sun beats down through smog, and behind a long glass partition near a teenage Japanese waitress wearing a sarong, Los Angeles is spread out behind me. The other two Polaroids were taken at dusk and Rande Gerber has his arm around my shoulder while someone lights tiki torches in the frame next to us. This is a place I recognize from various magazines as the Sky Bar at the recently opened Mondrian Hotel. But my nose is different-widcr, slightly flatter-and my eyes are set too close together; the chin is dimpled, more defined; my hair has never been cut so that it parts easily to one side.
I've never been to a Wallflowers concert
Or had my photo taken by Brigitte Lancome.
I've never been to the Sky Bar in Los Angeles.
I drop the photographs back in the Prada handbag, because I don't want to touch them anymore.
The bathroom reeks of blcach and disinfectant and the floor is wet and gleaming even though the maid hasn't started cleaning in here yet; a bath mat is still crumpled by the tub and towels lie damp, oddly stained, in the corner. There are no toiletries anywhere, no bottles of shampoo, no bars of soap lining the tub's edge. Then someone positions me by the tub so that I'm crouching next to it and I'm urged to move my hand to the drain and after feeling around in it my fingers come away stained slightly pink and when I move a finger farther into the drain I feel something soft and when I pull my hand away again involuntarily, alarmed at what I'm touching, something soft-the pinkness is darker, redder.
Behind the toilet there's more blood-not a lot, just enough to make an impression-and when I run my fingers through it they come away streaked with pink as if the blood has been watered down or someone had tried to clean it up in a hurry and failed.
Just off to the side of the toilet, embedded in the wall, are two small white objects. I pull one of them out of the wall, applying pressure at a certain angle in order to extract it, and after inspecting the thing in my hand I turn to the crew. There's an empty silence, people are fixating on the bathroom's cold light.
"I may be out of it," I start quietly, breathing hard, "but this is a f**king tooth..." And then I'm talking loudly, as if I'm accusing them of something, holding it out to them, my arm outstretched, offering it. "This is a f**king tooth," I'm repeating, shaking hard. "This is a f**king tooth," I say again, and then I'm told to race out of the room.
3
The crew directs me to Security but because there's not really such an office on board, this scene is shot near the library at a table meant to simulate an office. For "texture": an unplugged computer terminal, four blank spiral notebooks, an empty Diet Coke can, a month-old issue of People. A young British actor-who had small parts in Trainspotting and Jane Austen's Emma, and who seems lost even before I start talking-sits behind the makeshift desk, playing a clerk, pale and nervous and fairly cute as far as English actors playing clerks go.