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eighty-five-hundred-square-foot Santa Monica Canyon house, staring at a pimple. All day long he’d felt its achy inchoation. In adolescence, he suffered from acne vulgaris and bore the scars to this day, minimized by dermabrasion. His years of papular plague had been something out of the Middle Ages—weeping pistachios on forehead and cheek, walnuts on shoulder, pecans on back and buttocks, groin and nasal fold. Sometimes, at the whim of jaded acne gods (having feasted on his worried flesh, they sat at table, sated and snoring, turkey drumsticks still in hand), a lone pimple was sent like a scout to unlikely, mind-bending territories: back of the hand, kneecap crown, achilles heel. The men didn’t seem to care—the men in movie theaters and coffee-shop bathrooms, some sandy-haired, muscular and trouble-free, others with afflictions of their own. The men who picked him up in cars on the boulevard desired him, with or without his mother’s concealing makeup (he could still summon Max Factor’s somewhat acrid, hopeful smell). The piratical flesh of Leslie Trott became his enemy. He resolved to have dominion over the landscape that had ostracized him with such methodical, unforgiving cruelty. In medical school, he envied the Jews their baby faces and wispy beards, their unblemished certitude. They were funny and kind. He was their mascot, the over-achiever with bad-news oil glands, a living laboratory of follicular mayhem. He would show them all.
    He took a syringe from the drawer and injected the thing with cortisone. Les still ruled over the dermis—he would save his own skin, at all costs. He padded to the kitchen and sat under the bright lights. The hum of silver appliances and halogen allowed him to ponder what he had dreamed. He had been walking, or gliding, down the middle of Sunset Boulevard. No cars. Something lay in the road ahead. A body. His mother hovered over it—not his mother, but rather a succubus: the DEA inquisitor. When the demon said the body needed to be buried, Les laughed and fled. Next thing he knew the demon was upon him, hurling him face-down. Les’s teeth shattered on the asphalt. That was when the dermatologist felt theweight of the cadaver, its hands clinging to his neck. The demon forced him to stand with his burden, having strapped the body to Les’s back like a nidorous papoose. He was warned that this latest development was born of his attempting to run; if he didn’t obey, the consequences would be unimaginably worse. Les asked the demon its bidding. The demon said the body must be buried before dawn in the yard of a distant house. When he began to walk, the weight was almost insupportable, like trudging up a muddy hill carrying a two-hundred-pound man. He tried desperately to awaken. Then he found himself at the gates of a house. The succubus waited there with pick and shovel in hand. The gates opened slowly, as in a cheap horror film but with chilling effect: the house was his own.

    Donny Ribkin sat at a table with Oberon Mall and the producer Phylliss Wolfe. They were lunching at Sweets, an ICM haunt on Beverly and Sweetzer. Phylliss really owed him for this. She’d been trying to put together an indie remake of Pasolini’s
Teorema
for years now, with an interesting spin: the Terence Stamp role of the libertine stranger would be played by a woman.
    Phylliss Wolfe was lanky and elegant, with buttery hazel skin. She apotheosized all the New Yorkers Donny’d ever known—brusque and intimate all at once, quick to laugh and trigger-haired when it came to perceived affronts. Although she’d been a fixture on the independent scene for more than a decade, the last few years had been colorless; Phylliss hoped
Teorema
would change all that. She knew how difficult it must have been for the agent to have gotten Obie’s attention, let alone nailed down a lunch. The fact that Katherine Grosseck, his beloved ex, happened to be the writer on