Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter Read Free Book Online Page A

later, Night Ravagers remains Daryl’s best acting credit, and Zombie #14 remains a gorgeous lump in her bed.
    No, she won’t break up with Daryl. Not today. Not after the Scientologists and the proud grandpas, the lunatics, zombie cops, and skin-pickers. She’ll give Daryl one more chance, go home, bring him a beer, nestle into his broad, tatted shoulder; together they’ll watch the TeeVee (he likes those trucks that drive across the ice on the Discovery Channel) and she’ll have that tenuous connection to life, at least. No, it’s not the stuff of dreams, but it’s a perfectly American thing to do, a whole nation of Night Ravager zombies racing across the horizon, burning through peak oil to get home and sit dull-eyed, watching Ice Road Truckers and Hookbook on the fifty-five-inch flat (the Double Nickel , as Daryl calls it, the Sammy Hagar ).
    Claire grabs her coat and starts for the door. She pauses, glances back over her shoulder at the office where she thought she might get to make something great— silly Holly Golightly dream —and once more checks her watch: 4:17 and counting. Outside, she locks the door behind her, takes a breath, and goes.
    T he clock in Shane’s rented Kia also reads 4:17—he’s more than a quarter-hour late, and he’s dying. “Shit shit shit!” He pounds the steering wheel. Even after finally getting turned around, he got caught in several traffic snarls and took the wrong exit. By the time he rolls up to the studio gate and the security guard shrugs and informs him that his destiny is at the other gate, he is twenty-four minutes late, sweating through his carefully chosen whatever-clothing . When he arrives at the proper gate, he’s twenty-eight minutes late—thirty when he finally gets his ID back from the second security guard, shakily slaps a parking pass on his dash, and pulls into the lot.
    Shane is only two hundred feet away now from Michael Deane’s bungalow, but he stumbles out of his car the wrong way, wanders among the big soundstages—it is the cleanest warehouse district in the world—and finally walks in a circle, toward a nest of bungalows and a tram filled with fanny-packed tourists on a studio tour, holding up cameras and cell phones, listening to a microphone-aided guide tell apocryphal stories of bygone magic. The camera-people listen breathlessly, waiting for some connection to their own pasts ( I loved that show! ), and when Shane staggers up to their tram, the star-alert tourists run his disheveled hair, broad sideburns, and thin, frantic features through the thousands of celebrity faces they keep on file— Is that a Sheen? A Baldwin? A celebrity rehabber? —and while they can’t quite match Shane’s oddly appealing features with anyone famous, they take pictures anyway, just in case.
    The tour guide chutters into his headset, telling the tram-people in something like English how a certain famous breakup scene from a certain famous television show was famously filmed “right over there,” and as Shane approaches, the driver holds up a finger so he can finish his story. Sweating, near tears, in full overheated self-loathing, fighting every urge to call his parents—his ACT resolve now a distant memory—Shane finds himself staring at the tour guide’s name tag: ANGEL .
    “Excuse me?” Shane says.
    Angel covers the headset microphone and says, heavily accented, “Fuck jou want?” Angel is roughly his age, so Shane tries for late-twenties camaraderie. “Dude, I’m totally late. Can you help me find Michael Deane’s office?”
    Something about this question causes another tourist to take Shane’s picture. But Angel merely jerks his thumb and drives the tram away, revealing a sign that he was blocking, pointing to a bungalow: MICHAEL DEANE PRODUCTIONS .
    Shane looks at his watch. Thirty-six minutes late now. Shit shit shit. He runs around the corner and there it is—but blocking the door to the bungalow is an old man with a cane. For a second,