Desaparecer Aqui

Mark Brucer wheels me through the Monticello front doors of my Bel Air home. The wheelchair squeaks and clatters over the Calacatta gold honed marble flooring of my foyer. 

In the main room, between the double spiral staircases, people are busy making my house a home again. No less than 15 illegals are simultaneously dusting, sweeping, mopping, polishing and smiling, saying things like, “Bienvenido a casa, pedazo de mierda!” and “Tu padre deberia haberse retirado!” and “La gente tiene miedo de fusionarse!” 

Someone whips a drop cloth off the Lalique Cactus Table at the far side of the room, and dust swirls up into the air against the burnt butterscotch shaft of late afternoon sun flooding through the low skylights, and it all seems to happen at 120fps. It's a kind of magic that makes me want to put my hands up and look at it in through "widescreen fingers." But I can't. Because my wrists are handcuffed to the arm rests of the wheelchair.

There are 4,783 messages on my answering machine.

1,509 are from Tyler. In the most recent one, he whispered (so softly that I almost couldn't make it out):

"I read an article in Los Angeles Magazine about a street called Sierra Bonita in Hollywood. A street I'd driven along many times. The article said there were people who drove on the street and saw ghosts; apparitions of the Wild West. I read that Indians dressed in nothing but loincloths and on horseback were spotted. One man had crashed into a palm tree because he had seen a covered wagon in his path and it forced him to swerve. To merge.

Unir. Unir. Unir."