The Lost Expert, page 5
“Right,” Chris said.
Alison smiled, encouragingly, ironically. Chris couldn’t tell. The smooth back seat of the car between them, a gleaming distance.
“There is one thing.”
“Oh yeah?” Chris said.
“He doesn’t want any more — absences.”
Alison’s hard stare, as if she could see right through him.
“Right,” Chris said nervously.
“I don’t want any more either.”
The car turned, and Chris pretended to slide a little, hoping they might touch. Absences, he thought to himself.
“You know, Thomson,” Alison said, a trace of a warning in her voice. “I almost didn’t take this job.”
“You didn’t?” He tried to keep his tone casual, but he felt suddenly desperate: desperate to know something, anything, about the life of Thomson Holmes.
“I was worried about what people say about you,” Alison said, turning to gaze out her tinted window.
“So why did you?” Chris asked quickly. He didn’t know. He didn’t have a clue. What people said about him?
“To be honest, Thomson, the money. I thought, okay, how bad can it be? And if he tries anything, I’ll just walk away. It’s not like I’m some young starlet who’ll do anything for a chance. And then, when you went missing, I thought, great, I never even had a chance. I was surprised. I felt so cheated. And you should have seen Reed.” Alison laughed gently now. “He was losing his mind. Just completely freaking out. He kept texting me. As if I knew where you were. As if it was my fault.”
“It wasn’t,” Chris protested. “It had nothing to do with you!”
“You just up and disappear without a word to anyone. And I was like, well, they warned me, right? I can’t say they didn’t warn me.”
“I — that was —”
“Park Hyatt,” the driver announced.
“We’re here,” Alison said.
A doorman opened the side door. Chris hesitated, then reluctantly stepped out. You’ve come this far. They were up on Bloor Street. Chris tilted his head to take in the twenty or so floors above him. The Park Hyatt. He pictured a drugged-out Thomson Holmes, lying naked on a plush oversized bed, watching old black-and-white reruns of The Twilight Zone, a full ashtray balanced on his taut stomach. Going into his hotel room. That would be too much. That would be really crossing the line. Where the hell was the guy? He’d disappeared. That much was obvious. They thought he was back. He wasn’t back. But he would be.
Alison gently tugged on his arm and gave him a beseeching look that seemed to sum it all up. Be normal now, okay? Chris reluctantly followed her into the posh lobby. He blinked against some anticipated change of space and light that didn’t quite materialize. The lobby, like the interiors of the town cars and the trailers, was dimly lit. Night in perpetuity. House lights falling. Art deco tiled floors and a giant Persian carpet. Dark wooden panels and vaguely modernist, uncomfortable-looking couches and armchairs. The lobby, too, was a liminal space possessing the incongruous, timeless feel of a movie set. They could be anywhere, in any time. A manager appeared out of nowhere and greeted them. A couple checking in looked behind them and whispered. Before Chris had a chance to assess his escape options, they were whisked through several ornate lobbies and into an elevator. Chris had only ever been in the Hyatt once before, when he was still in high school. Krunk had wanted to sneak into the once glamorous, now abandoned ballroom left over from the hotel’s glory days. He’d read in a zine called TOUE — Toronto Urban Explorers — that you could reach the floor hiding the decrepit hall with relative ease. Following the instructions of the zine, they’d slipped in and taken an elevator to the ninth floor. They’d wandered through several nondescript hallways until they’d found the door they thought they were looking for. The door led to a side staircase, which took them up a short flight of stairs before ending in another door that was supposedly always open but turned out to be locked. Krunk had wanted to break the lock. Chris had convinced him that trespassing was one thing, breaking and entering was another beast altogether. “Fuck it,” Krunk had said. Instead, they’d wandered the city guzzling from a jam jar of mixed boozes Chris had siphoned from the dusty bottles in his parents’ liquor cabinet.
The bellhop held the open-door button and gestured them into a long hallway. Chris followed Alison. Footfalls were muted on the heavy carpet. Nobody spoke. Chris found himself slowing down, forcing himself to put one loafered foot in front of the other. He’d been up since five. He was exhausted. “Here we are,” the bellhop said quietly. Alison unlocked the door with a key card. The bellhop grabbed the doorknob and held the door open for them. Chris winced in expectation, half closing his eyes. Alison moved into the room. She looked behind her. He stepped forward. The room was dark. It felt empty. The bellhop let go of the door and rushed ahead to turn on various lamps. Chris stood in the foyer as his digs were revealed. He saw an expansive suite complete with a living room dominated by a massive flat-screen TV and a fully stocked, glimmering bar. Patio doors offered a panoramic view all the way down to the lake. Behind soft grey clouds, the sun was just a sliver, the scene all but set.
“Thank you,” Alison said to the bellhop. She handed him a twenty. “I’ll talk to you later, Thomson,” she said, and, before Chris even realized what was happening, the door closed with a soft click and they were both gone.
Chris closed his eyes, rubbed them against the palms of his hands. The room muted the busy city below. Everything seemed far away. He felt his eyeballs rolling against his palms. He heard a faint sound, distant laughter, breathing, footsteps. He blinked furiously, spun around. There was no one. He was alone.
He opened the French doors to the balcony. The city in front and below, twinkling twilight. Chris traced the outlines of massive skyscrapers leading down to the black lake, then honed in on individual office windows randomly flickering into darkness as harried salary workers reluctantly packed it in and headed home. Chris followed them, scurrying, ant-like in gait and size, toward the subway. He stared intently, willing himself to be mesmerized by their rhythmic synchronicity, as if they were part of some gigantic stage direction, extras in their own lives. But not him. Not the Lost Expert. He goes his own way. Ha ha, Chris thought nervously, self-consciously. Where did that come from? The Lost Expert. Everything has its pattern, its way of being in the world, an inevitable slope that determines how it will roll, in what direction it is most likely to disappear.
He was tired. Exhausted. He’d sit for a minute. Maybe he’d watch a little cable. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Then he’d go. It was time to go. Laurie didn’t have cable. She said it was a waste of money. It was the rare thing she and Krunk agreed on. But when Chris went home to visit his mom in Mississauga, the small industrial city half an hour west down the highway she’d moved to after the divorce, he relished in it, whiling away the hours switching between the Weather Channel, obscure European League soccer games, and cheaply made reality shows chronicling the exploits of hoarders, pest controllers, hillbillies, and bounty hunters. Chris stepped toward the couch. Just for a minute. Who would suspect him? He didn’t know the actors or the director or anyone even remotely related to anything Hollywood. North or otherwise. He could leave now, vanish into thin air, and no one in the world, even once the deception was uncovered, would have any reason to suspect that he, Christopher Hutchins, was the culprit. Krunk was more likely to be questioned. This was the kind of thing he’d love to have staged. Chris smiled at the image, his friend in pedantic mode, lecturing bemused detectives on Hollywood’s persistent motif of inner decay, a tired façade covering up the truth of their own complicity in celebrity capitalism’s destructive consumerism. He should call him. And Laurie too. Chris leaned forward and picked up the television remote lying on the coffee table in front of him.
A knock on the door. Chris froze. Another knock. “Mr. Holmes?” The voice was tentative, worried about interruption. “Excuse me, Mr. Holmes?” Chris stepped quickly to the door and peeked through the peephole. A man in hotel livery. Chris opened the door. “Good evening, sir,” the waiter said. He wheeled in a tray, lifted the silver lid to reveal a single glass of champagne, the bubbles coalescing and popping around a sole red raspberry. “Your cocktail, sir,” the waiter said importantly.
“Oh. Ah … thanks.”
“Will there be something else, sir?”
“Ah …”
Chris looked up at him, actually noticed him for the first time. He wasn’t young like the bellhop. He was an older gentleman, in his late fifties, older than Chris’s father. Dark complexion, a hint of an accent, maybe South American. The waiter stood in his perfect uniform, a white napkin draped over one arm, and regarded him curiously, one eyebrow raised.
“Sir?”
“Just, uh, just a second …” Chis said. He dug into the pockets of his new pants and pulled out his battered wallet. His hands were shaking again. He dropped the wallet, and it burst open, spilling old receipts, change, the tips from work he had cashed out into a five and a fifty from the register. Lately, Chris had started converting his tips into bigger bills, the idea, Laurie’s idea, being that he would be less likely to break a fifty to buy a coffee, a pint, a popsicle, or a tattered copy of last year’s Murakami novel. Laurie said he was terrible with money. Laurie said that he should be saving a minimum of one-third of everything he earned. Laurie could never figure out why he was always one shift away from being broke. The answer, of course, was Krunk, who borrowed twenty or forty bucks off him once a week and seemed to be under the impression that the least Chris could do — if he was going to sell out with his bourgeois job and banker girlfriend — was buy the tickets, post-movie drinks, and greasy Chinese snacks a night out with the great artiste required. Sheepishly, Chris scrabbled in the carpet, snagging change and streetcar transfers. The waiter watched, dignified, expressionless, as Chris straightened up, wallet’s contents in hand. Chris avoided looking at the motionless older man. Quickly he grabbed a bill, waved it in the air. The waiter took the crumpled bill gingerly in his fingertips. Shit, Chris thought as his fifty disappeared.
“And good evening to you, sir,” the waiter finally breathed, retreating into the cloistered hallway.
Fifty bucks. An entire morning shift, practically. Chris shrugged. What could he do? It was probably worth it, right? For the day he’d had? He sniffed at the champagne. The bubbles tickled his nose. He’d never had real champagne before. On his and Laurie’s one-year anniversary he’d wanted to buy a bottle, but he couldn’t afford it, so he’d settled for the next shelf over, cava from Spain. “Also very nice,” the guy at the LCBO had assured him with studied dispassion. They’d drunk it out of juice glasses. This was a different beast altogether. The glass was thin and delicate in his big hand. When Chris brought it to his lips, he had the absurd urge to bite down. He drank instead. The taste: sour and dry, then wet and sweet. Had Alison sent this? He imagined her sitting across from him on the settee, looking impassive and perfect, an actress from the age of silent film, big eyes full of mystery watching him drink.
Chris drained the champagne. He’d acted. He’d done it. And the character — the Lost Expert. He had seemed so real.
In the Italian loafers he was quickly becoming accustomed to, Chris padded over to the closed door that led, he assumed, to the bedroom and bathroom. Tentatively, he opened the door. The room was occupied by exactly the kind of bed he’d imagined, an oversized king bulging with gold pillows. It was the kind of bed James Bond would wake up in, a blond and a brunette on either side, both spies, both not what they seemed.
There was a closet and a nightstand and a dresser and another closed door leading to the bathroom. Chris put the champagne flute on the nightstand and inspected its single drawer. Maybe he’d find a bit of cash. Fifty bucks, he thought, and we’ll call it even. After all, Holmes, I did your job today. The drawer was empty. Which was just as well. He wasn’t a thief. He didn’t even like to jaywalk. He opened the wardrobe. It was filled with clothes, linen suits and tight European jeans dangling off wooden hangers. Weird. No money, no personal effects, just clothes. Where the hell was this guy? All day long, Chris had dreaded the inevitable appearance of Thomson Holmes. Now he kind of wanted him to show up. Just get it over with. They’d get drunk, they’d laugh their asses off. Thomson Holmes would give him the diamond watch off his wrist as a combination memento and bribe — nobody needs to know. Nobody would ever know.
So where was Thomson Holmes?
THE PHONE RANG. CHRIS jerked to awareness. He was sitting, half awake, on the toilet. The soft seat exuded a gentle warmth. It was heated. The phone kept ringing, a trilling over his left ear. Then he noticed it, a cordless mounted above what looked very much like a platinum toilet paper dispenser.
“Hello?”
“Thomson! What are you doing?”
It was Alison.
“Uh.”
“Reed is downstairs. He’s waiting for you.”
“Reed?”
“Why aren’t you answering your cell?”
“My cell?”
“I called you three times. What’s going on?”
“It didn’t —” Chris realized, just in time, that she wasn’t talking about the ancient Nokia flip phone with the cracked screen. She was talking about Thomson’s cell. “I lost it,” he blurted.
“You lost it?”
“Yeah. Someone call The Lost Expert.” He winced at the lameness of his own joke.
“I’ll have another delivered tomorrow,” Alison said tonelessly. “I’ll arrange for them to transfer your contacts and data.”
“Thanks.”
“Did you see your new clothes?”
“Yeah, I —”
“Wear the black suit with the turquoise shirt. I’ll text him that you’ll be right down.” She was about to hang up.
“Why?” Chris blurted.
“Why what?”
“Why does Reed want to have dinner with me?”
Alison sighed. “I don’t know, Thomson.” She hung up.
Chris slumped. Laurie would be heading home; maybe she was already there, getting dinner together, a simple, wholesome meal — arugula and avocado salad topped with yesterday’s leftover roast chicken. Champagne swirled around Chris’s stomach. Get up, he told himself. Wake up.
THE ROOM WAS STARK white with a projection of softly tinted lights in varying shapes — stripes, prisms, globes — on the west wall. Chris and Reed sat in a corner table set somewhat apart from the other diners watching the lights rotate through barely perceptible renditions of pinks, purples, and yellows.
“What’s this place called again?” Reed demanded.
Chris shrugged. How was he supposed to know? He had no idea where they were. If he got up and walked out the door, he’d probably be as lost as his alter ego Thomson Holmes. He should have been uncomfortable, intimidated. But it was all just too ridiculous. Ignoring Alison, he’d picked out the most movie star outfit he could find in Thomson Holmes’s closet — a shark-grey Italian suit showing flashes of a Florida orange T-shirt. He’d posed for himself in the mirror. He looked silly. He looked kind of amazing. It was dress-up, he realized. Krunk on some movie star or other: “It’s just clothes! The clothes make the man!” It was fun being Thomson Holmes. The realization gave him a sudden confidence. Brazenly, Chris gazed around the room. Moneyed older couples stared docilely at their plates. They don’t want to be caught looking, Chris realized.
“And to start, gentlemen? A cocktail, perhaps?”
“Champagne,” Reed said to the waiter. He looked over at Chris. “What are we celebrating?”
Chris felt the emergence of a self-satisfied grin. His old self was a million years away. Light-years, he told himself, watching the wall glow and fade, lavender slowly dissolving into a radiant bath of canary yellow.
The waiter returned with a bottle. He said something in French. He was talking to Reed, but looking at Chris.
“Good, good,” Reed agreed. With a flourish, the waiter opened the bottle.
“To the new you!” Reed proposed when the glasses were filled and the waiter had retreated a safe distance.
“Yeah,” Chris muttered, suddenly ill at ease. Their glasses clinked. Chris could feel the eyes of the other diners. But if he looked around, he knew he’d see nothing but their shadowed profiles.
“So, what’s the deal?” Reed blurted.
Chris stared back questioningly, trying to maintain the fixed grin on his face.
“Today. On set. Since you’ve been back. The way you move, the way you look into the camera, the way you speak. It’s like you’re a different person.”
“I am a different person,” Chris said. He felt his heart beating. But he smiled coolly. “I’m The Lost Expert.”
“That’s just it,” Reed grumbled with what Chris was coming to understand as his trademark delighted gloom. “That’s just fucking it.”
Both men hit the champagne.
“You know, I was going to make changes.”
“What?”
“I was going to get rid of you.”
Chris willed himself to look up, to look Reed in the eyes.
“Really?”
“Cut the crap, Holmes. Man to man, you knew from the beginning I didn’t want you in this thing.”
Chris nodded.
“Nothing against you, okay? Did they really think I was going to ruin my movie? Just piss it all away because someone upstairs had a hard-on for Thomson Holmes and the second phase of his so-called career?” Reed peered at him, his eyes angry and piggish beneath his ball cap. Chris stared back. “What, Holmes?” Reed barked. “You gonna cry now?”
Chris smiled genuinely. Something about Reed reminded him of his grandfather. Grandpop had been confident and blunt, a siding salesman prone to saying exactly what he thought — which was usually something preposterous, hilarious, and at least half true. But when Chris’s parents had split up, Grandpop held his tongue. At the house for dinner and a game of chess with his grandson, he stared at a crack in the ceiling as Chris and his mom talked interminable, depressing logistics: what days he’d be at his mom’s, he could call whenever he felt like it, it’s not forever (whatever that was supposed to mean), don’t forget your gloves at your dad’s place again. For his part, Chris knew that Grandpop would get quite the kick out of “Dad’s place,” the cheap, undecorated bachelor pad Chris was now consigned to for half-weeks at a time. But it wasn’t funny, really. At his dad’s, he spent his time watching tv and eating freezer-burnt pizza heated in the microwave. His dad, meanwhile, hid out in the bedroom, working on an old laptop. Chris pictured himself and Reed, sitting hunched over the cardboard chessboard, their faces — young and old — nearly touching.
