Rules of Entanglement
Chapter One

Los Angeles, December 1999

The man stands over Greta’s body, the broken neck of the Scotch whisky bottle still in his hand.

He’s never broken a bottle over someone’s head before, although he’s put the action sequence in lots of movies. The sound is different than what he imagined it would be: quieter, more of a dull thud than a crash.

He pitches the bottle neck into the courtyard and it shatters.

Greta lies on the wood floor of her apartment’s entryway. He rolls her onto her back. Her face is pale under the florescent kitchen light. A knot forms on her forehead where she landed on her face.

He glances inside the apartment. He can see Daphne’s touches everywhere, from the cheery yellow paint color on the kitchen walls to the hand-made throw pillows of Chinese silk on the sofa. Daphne, a beautiful thing, loves beautiful things. Right now, he wants to fuck that beautiful thing. And since Daphne isn’t around, her girl will have to do.

Greta lies across the threshold of the door, so he grabs her arm and jerks her inside. Her shoulder pops, and she moans. Her eyelids flitter open.

“What happened?” Greta asks him, her voice weak.

He narrows his eyes and lets the anger enter his voice. “You got in my way.”

***

Greta stares above her hospital bed at the single flickering fluorescent bulb. She thinks of the complexity contained in the narrow glass tube. Electricity coursing through mercury atoms generates invisible ultraviolet light, which in turn causes the visible phosphorescence. Even though she can’t see the mercury, she knows it is there, and that knowing gives her comfort. At least the elements are still behaving as they should.

The ICU bustles. The wall clock indicates that the hour is three o’clock, and the darkness outside her window indicates that the time is antemeridian. Next to her, a morphine-derivative drip beeps every sixty seconds. She supposes that the doctors selected this particular class of painkiller because it does not have blood thinning properties.

Properties which would be bad given the bruising on her brain.

She blinks once to clear her vision, to refocus.

She knows that she probably won’t die of her injuries, although she’s had trouble maintaining consciousness over the past twenty-four hours since she first woke up. A concussion, the doctor said. It wouldn’t kill her.

Greta thinks about her daily vigils at her dying mother’s bedside when she was in high school. She glances at the empty chair next to the bed, grateful that no one sits there out of a feeling of obligation or duty. Marcellus, her landlord, who’d come with her to the hospital, left soon after the doctors had whisked her into surgery. Even Daphne and Timmy have left, sent away by Greta’s own request.

She couldn’t bear to see their guilty faces again.

She shuts her eyes and tries to place the events of the past thirty hours into chronological order. Without this deliberate effort, the faces and places merge and swirl, and causation gets lost in the muck of it. It is really important to her that the causes are clear. As clear as the effects.

The effects: lying in a hospital bed in the ICU with a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, and a large hematoma on her face.

The causes: well. That’s what she’s trying to work out. She has always believed that with enough application of concentration, she could solve even the most complicated quandary.

She admits to herself that this time she might be stumped. 


*** 


Los Angeles, January 1999

As soon as Greta agreed to move to L.A., Daphne started hunting around her neighborhood for a new apartment. Since it was just after the start of the new year, she figured there’s be some turnover in leases.

Daphne knew the place should be clean, because that’s what Greta would want. In fact, all Greta would really care about is cleanliness and whether the parts were in good working order—the sinks, the appliances, the door locks—because Greta liked things operational, orderly. Greta wouldn’t care about art deco architecture or eight-inch crown moldings, or the other impractical adornments that Daphne loved.

Daphne wanted to stay in West Hollywood even though it was pricey. She liked being close to Melrose. She liked being able to walk to breakfast at three different restaurants. She liked the grocery store down the street and the video store around the corner. Even though she’d only lived here for six months, the neighborhood felt like home. 


Daphne was gorgeous, as gorgeous as any girl had a right to be. She was Japanese, the daughter of immigrants who settled in the south. Her father used to tell her she was ugly because she was tall and had darker skin than her younger sisters. She figured out that he was wrong when she got to college and all of those rich North Carolina boys wanted to snatch her up. But her father’s voice was always there, calling her dani, a worthless good-for-nothing. You could say Daphne had something to prove.

She spent a lot of time getting ready for work in the mornings and believed this was her duty. Since she was an assistant for a producer at Universal, her face was the first one that everyone saw when they came into his office. She was driven like no one you’ve ever seen, a rabid wolf in a supermodel’s clothing. She’d stomp on anyone’s Prada-clad toes to get ahead.

The only person she truly cared about was Greta. 


For the last few months, she’d been renting a bedroom in a gorgeous yellow bungalow, but she didn’t expect to find a new place as nice. Her landlord and house-mate was an older divorcée named Tonya. Tonya rented out a room because she needed help with the mortgage in order to afford her Jag. 

Tonya had a hard time keeping roommates. Daphne could probably live with anyone; she was really easy going like that.  She overlooked Tonya’s flaws—her narcissism, her tightwad tendencies—in favor of her charms—her willingness to do the dishes, her tendency to bring home free makeup from Bloomingdale’s where she was a buyer, and her sharp sense of humor.

Daphne worried that Tonya would take it personally that she was moving out, because Tonya tended to take everything personally. So she hadn’t yet mentioned Greta’s imminent arrival.  She would tell her this evening, she decided, and pay her two months extra rent. Marco, her boss, would give her an advance on her pay to cover the check if she asked him to. 


On a Saturday morning, Daphne walked down the sidewalk toward Melrose Avenue with a notebook in her hand to take notes about an apartment that she’d just found. As she walked, she devised justifications for moving out that might appease Tonya. Moving out because her best friend was moving to town would not be good enough. Tonya would say, Why can’t she just find a place for herself? Tonya’s voice would reveal what was really bothering her—a fear of abandonment that she hadn’t been able to shake since her husband ran out.

Her voice would also reveal her infatuation with Daphne, but Daphne tried to ignore that.

Daphne stopped in front of a small duplex with a sign in the front yard indicating it was for rent.  The house was a low lying dun-colored bungalow with a glossy black front door, a red tile roof, and a tidy yard. She had a good feeling about the house. Succulent shrubs—jade plants, mostly—grew by the side of the house, hemmed in by pink pea gravel.

She thought of the pale, stunted jade plants her mother grew back home in North Carolina, kept inside because the humidity and the moist soil outdoors would smother them. Her mother kept the plants because they reminded her of her parents’ home in the outskirts of Tokyo.

In L.A., jade plants thrived in the soil like any other shrub, their waxy oval leaves guarding precious moisture.

Daphne opened the iron gate of the low fence that separated the yard from the sidewalk and walked up the path of smooth blue slate. She rang the door bell of the only door she could see, glancing around for a second entrance.  She waited for a few moments, then rang the bell again.  She was about to leave when the door opened, revealing a short, dark-haired man with a shadow of a beard. 

“Yes?  Can I help you?” said the man with an accent Daphne couldn’t place.

“I’d like to ask about the apartment for rent.”

“Yes!  Of course.”  The man extended his hand. “My name is Marcellus Skiadas.”

“Daphne,” she said, and shook his hand.

“Are you American?”

Daphne was startled by the direct question. “My parents are Japanese, but I was born here.”

Marcellus nodded and grabbed a key ring from a coat tree by the door. “Follow me.”

They walked along the side of the house to another entrance in back.  This door was less hospitable than the front, with no porch to speak of, just a door-frame cut into the wall and a small cement step.

“I converted the house into a duplex five years ago,” Marcellus explained, sounding proud of his ingenuity. “This used to be a window.”

He unlocked the white metal exterior door, and then the wooden door, turning the deadbolt with a strong snap that satisfied Daphne’s need for security.  The apartment was dark because it had few windows, but it was spacious for the price: two bedrooms, a living room, and an eat-in kitchen for less than a grand.  Truly, a steal for West Hollywood.

She stepped in, the kitchen to the left, separated from the living area by an L-shaped countertop that extended from the wall in front of her. Straight ahead was the bath, with a bedroom to either side.

She stood in each bedroom, taking in the large closets and the golden-hued hardwood floors. A few of the planks were rubbed bare from years of use. She came back to the living area and looked out through the doorway. Out back there was a gated carport leading to an alley. No cars were parked in the carport now. Between the carport and the house was a paved courtyard hemmed in by a tall iron fence.

“Are the carport and courtyard part of the rental?”

“They are on the property,” Marcellus said, avoiding a direct answer to Daphne’s question.

Her eyes narrowed, her love of bargaining taking control. “I’ll rent this place if we get the carport and courtyard.  Otherwise, I’ll have to keep looking.”

Marcellus eyed her.  “What do you do for work?”

She smiled, “I’m a production assistant at Universal.”

Marcellus grunted.  “Got a paycheck stub?”  

“Naturally.” 

She looked closely at the small man. She estimated he was in his mid-fifties.  She noticed his left hand bore no ring, and that his shirt was more rumpled than a man’s would be if he had a woman—or, this being West Hollywood, another man—to care for him. 

He considered her offer for a long moment.  “The carport and courtyard you can have,” he said.

“I’ll have a roommate.  She’ll be driving here from the east coast.”

Marcellus raised his eyebrows.  “Is she American?”

“Of course,” she said. She was certain now that this apartment remained unrented because the landlord was a pest.  But she could handle pests. Money usually did the trick. “Can I give you a deposit today,” she asked, “and the first month’s rent?”

“A cashier’s check?”

“No problem.” She kept her tone deliberately calm, her smile soothing. 

Daphne could get anyone to trust her.

“Excellent!” Marcellus’s tone changed abruptly to one of enthusiasm, as though he had placed a wager and won. “You sign your lease now,” he said. “Your friend will sign when she moves in.” 

He handed her two sets of keys and two transmitters for the carport gate. When she got home, Daphne placed one key, one transmitter, and a postcard of the Musee D’Orsay with safe travels written across the back into a small package and mailed it east. 


*** 


Los Angeles, Two Weeks Later 

Greta turned down the alley behind her new apartment, an interminable concrete strip lined with seven-foot iron gates and faceless garage doors. Her transmitter—mailed to her by Daphne the week before—sent the alley gate clanking open, and she pulled into the carport behind the duplex.  She emerged from the pickup truck slowly. She stood still in the middle of the small courtyard, shut her eyes, and dropped her head back, exhausted from the cross-country drive.

But she was doing more than stretching sore muscles.  She was letting something she no longer wanted to carry slip into the heavenly ether, or trying to.

Everyone comes to Los Angeles for a reason, and that reason usually involves trying to leave something behind.  In this, most fail.

Greta didn’t have anything resembling a romantic notion in her head. She would have said that ether refers to specific chemical compounds that are unable to form hydrogen bonds, and that heaven, in the Judeo-Christian meaning, is a load of crap.


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