Page 39 of Hollywood, Ending

10

I was woken up the next morning by a phone ringing. Not my phone. The hotel phone. “Hello?”

“Good morning, Mr. Laramie. I’ve got Brian Arawas here to see you.”

I rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 8:12, more than an hour before our scheduled breakfast. “I’ll be down in five minutes.”

I brushed my teeth, put on a Mekons T-shirt and yesterday’s jeans, and began the long journey down to the lobby. The sun was brighter than seemed necessary. Brian Arawas was standing outside waiting for me in the narrow shade of a palm tree. He wore Ray-Bans, a neatly trimmed beard, and a close-cropped haircut that appeared to be less than a day old. Arawas had been an actor before he’d become a director, and although his hair was graying, he still looked fit and handsome, and also aware of being fit and handsome. “Kai,” he said as he approached, arms out. We hugged. There is a lot of hugging in Hollywood. “Kai, I apologize for being one hour and eighteen minutes early for our breakfast, but I am a punctual person, and an enthusiastic one, and I literally couldn’t wait to meet you. Where should we eat?”

“I don’t really know Los Angeles,” I said.

“Amazing. Never get to know it. Stay gold, Ponyboy. You’re a New Yorker, right?”

“I’m mostly from Indiana.”

“Well, no one’s perfect,” he said, smiling out of the corner of his mouth. “We’ll go to the Algernon.”

_____

In the car, a silver Audi A8 with a white leather interior, I told Brian that I’d loved his last movie, a one-off film in the X-Men universe about a mission to free mutants from a prison camp. “Yeah,” he said, “we basically got to remake The Great Escape but with superheroes. We had an awesome time. The studio watered down the political message of the film, but that’s Hollywood. They all love freedom and democracy until they want to sell a movie internationally, and then we have to respect that many forms of government can be legitimate. Have you read the book yet?”

“Most of it,” I said. I tried to say something about how much I liked the character I’d auditioned for, but I just rambled. I said that Garon reminded me of me, which wasn’t really true. He mostly reminded me of other scribes from other fantasy stories. Brian nodded, but didn’t say anything in response, and I wondered if I’d ruined my shot at the part before we even got to the restaurant. We turned onto Sunset Boulevard, where traffic was crawling.

“You see that new Tarantino film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“All of Quentin’s films are about wish fulfillment, and that one imagines the most wish fulfillmenty alternate history of them all—a world in which there is no traffic in Los Angeles. Is Garon really the character you most identify with in the story?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so. Who is?”

“Gavinth,” I said. Queen Agrippah’s husband.

Brian nodded. “You know, I’ve talked to probably forty actors about that role, and not one of them has pronounced Gavinth’s name correctly, until you.” I started to tell him that was only because I was listening to the book rather than reading it, but stopped myself.

“I just love how he supports his Queen, and really believes in all the rules of Andromeda, but still wants power, you know? And I like his turn. Like, I think he really loves her, but he also knows that loving her is a way to be close to her, and being close to her is a way to have a say in whether the war happens.”

“Yes,” Brian said. “Yes. Each character explores a human journey in the story, and Gavinth shows us how people travel from the power of love to the love of power.” Brian paused as he pulled into a parking lot, and then said, “I don’t want to create false expectations. I love what you’re saying about Gavinth, but I see you as a Garon.” I nodded, and said something to the effect that I saw myself as a Garon as well.

_____

The Algernon was a breakfast joint, and we were immediately seated outside, on a small patio next to the restaurant’s parking lot. Brian recommended I order something called Today’s Harvest, so I did. It was basically sliced avocado and tomato drizzled with red wine vinegar, only it cost thirty-seven dollars. One thing that bothers me about Los Angeles is its complete lack of self-awareness. Like a baby that doesn’t know there’s anything weird about shitting in a diaper, Los Angeles doesn’t know there’s anything weird about charging thirty-seven dollars for an avocado.

Brian was waxing extremely poetic about the book. “In the film I want to make, Garon’s journey charts perhaps the most important question in the movie: How does a tool become a weapon? Think about the stone axe, for instance. It was likely first used as a tool, but at some point it came to be used as a weapon. In both cases, the stone axe was powerful, but as a weapon, it became an instrument with which to enforce power, right?”

“And that’s Garon’s pen,” I said.

“THAT IS GARON’S PEN,” Brian answered, smacking the stone top of our little table. “It starts out as the tool through which laws and decrees travel from the court to the people, and then it becomes a metaphorical weapon, when Garon writes the declaration of war against the orcs, and then it becomes a literal weapon of war when it is melted into the handle of his sword. Yes. Yes. You totally get this, Kai. You get the journey. I feel like we are already on the journey together. Do you feel that?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Totally.”

“But the real question,” Brian said, “is how can the weapon journey back to being a tool. Having opened the Pandora’s box of violence, how do we return to a state of peace? And that’s why in the sequels, I think we will see Garon struggling with his sword, both literally and metaphorically.”

“There are sequels?”

“Oh, yes, Valentina has a trilogy planned. The second one is mostly finished, and I’ve seen the outline for the third. I don’t want to spoil Garon’s journey for you, but in the end, he is once more holding a pen.”