The Hollywood sign rests in its assigned place. Ted Kenwood sits on the first "L" looking out at the throng of people below, walking the sidewalks, driving their cars. The Sunday afternoon was unseasonably warm for this time of year. The smog would be a problem for people with bad lungs. When he lived, he suffered with emphysema. That was no longer a problem. He didn't miss taking a shit either. All the narcotics they gave him for pain created turds that were hard as concrete, lacerating his anus when he strained on the throne. Death had been welcomed.

Below, he sees Henry Tolbert on the sidewalk standing outside an art gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, and suddenly Ted is standing next to him. The words that come from the living man's mouth are silent, inaudible puffs of air.

…it begins here; here's as good as anywhere else…

He follows her, never having seen her before, thinking she might do…

…Like all the others, Ted thought. But nothing ever came of it. With any of them.

…I could walk up and ask her for a kiss…I could walk past her and feel her butt…I could grab her tit, smile, and stand there looking at her…

But you won't, Ted thought. You never do. You're just a big pussy.

Henry watched the woman in shorts walk up the street. He steps behind her, walking silently in his sneakers. She must be somebody's mother, he thought, seeing the ring on her finger as it catches the glittering flicker of the sun. Tall shapely body, firm. Must work out. She walks ahead and he follows as if she was a magnet and he a metal shaving.

Henry can't see Ted beside him, can't feel him. But Ted sees others like himself walking next to the living. They look like black fuzzy humanoid forms, transparent, not very well defined. And the others that are the opposite of him are there as well but he can't see them anymore than Henry can see him. They vibrated on a different level. And someone, somewhere, was keeping score.

The woman that Henry follows opens the door to a small BMW roadster and drives away, Henry quickly jotting down the license number. He would add it to the others he had collected, along with all the addresses he managed to trace. They rested safely in his computer. By this evening, he would know her name and address, and he might even be able to get her phone number. Sometimes he called them. He would let the phone ring and when he heard a voice, he would listen quietly, never answering before he hung up.

Silently, he walks the four blocks home, thinking of the woman. Inside the house, it smells like medicine mixed with the reek of dying meat, a sick smell, a scent carried by the terminally mortal.

In his room, Henry goes to the window and looks at the old woman sitting across the way in the next house that stands no more than ten feet away. She has a big bay window that displays most of her living room. There's a large velveteen portrait of the Golden Gate Bridge that nearly covers the wall behind her. She's an emaciated, tacky woman who wears a fashionable fawn colored wig, slightly yellowed. A long, filter-less cigarette dangles from red painted lips. She must have been a whore when she was young, Henry thought. An aged, hairless cat the color of intestines snoozed on her lap. The animal is blind and moves less swiftly than a crippled snail. Henry lifts his window, making enough noise to rouse the old woman's attention, and when she looks at him, he brings down the tan window shade level to his belly button. There's a rectangular piece he cut out of the shade so that he can clearly see the old woman through it. All she sees of him is his midriff down to his thighs covered in faded denim. He takes off his shirt and then pulls his T-shirt off before he drops his pants. The old woman sees his naked flesh, his insisting erection bobbing by itself, stretched out like a probing rod, a living monument to nature's clandestine call, oblivious to everything, hearing only the sound of excited sex demons. She can barely make out the gleam in his eyes as he peers at her from behind the curtain.

The old woman puts her ancient cat on the floor and stands to peel off her silken, tattered underwear, before sitting down again, her bony knees fanned out in abandonment, her summer dress hoisted to her wrinkled waist. As Henry grips his penis, the old woman places a skeletal fingertip to her shriveled clit and begins rubbing it while Henry watches her and she watches him slowly churning his agitated flesh.

He's glad she left her window closed as she usually did when they played this silent game. The glare distorted her enough so that he could clearly visualize any women he had seen on the street, superimposed over the ancient body. And now he sees the woman at the art gallery across from him on the couch masturbating to the vision he presents to her. His eyes don't see the knobby knees and scrawny legs, the almost meatless thighs. He sees the vigorous flesh of youth and the voluptuousness of her hairy gash gaping at him with glossy sex juice caused in part by the vulgar spectacle he gives her to witness.

Somewhere in the streets, the corroding, clashing sound of a car's screeching brakes comes over the smoggy air like a terrified scream that culminates in a loud muffled thud followed by agonized metal grudgingly crashing against assaulted metal, and against this the silent resonance of tormented blood is hidden in the volume of the noise, mingled with screams of immediate horror, gentle sounds of brutalized flesh being crushed and mangled. All of this in one single cacophony of tortured collapse.

Caught up in their personal trance, neither the old woman nor Henry Tolbert stop their mesmerized activity—not before his penis spits semen in three quick spasmodic throbs out of the open window, the hanging goo on the ledge dripping onto the dry grass below. When he finished, he let himself go; let his limp, swollen meat hang in her view, a congealed sticky drop of cum poking out of his cock like a pastel pearl.

Ted Kenwood tolerated this spectacle because humanity fascinates him, even when it bored him. A gray spirit like Henry Tolbert was ready to cave in. It was just a matter of time. He was a godless soul with no backbone to speak of; he had to be well cured before the living man's exact nature would be revealed, even to himself, perhaps for the first time since beginning his present journey. Short of a miracle, Henry was going to join Ted Kenwood in his exclusive realm, which was neither heaven nor hell but a guarded place all dark souls inhabit before returning. All that was required was a little patience. At this point in Henry's life, Ted did not see a conversion to any other path except the one Ted was endeavoring to lay out for him. Between lives, Ted had never met or seen anything that looked like a supreme being of evil. There were just those like him. Some were stronger, darker. But there was always the opportunity of advancing in strength, depending on your actions. For corrupted souls like Ted there was no turning back. Henry Tolbert, however, still had the prospect of staying clear. Ted's destiny was fixed. And he had absolutely no problem with this.

Sirens wail loudly in the distance, growing louder as they approach.

"Henry, you home? Is that you?"

It was his father, slowly dying in the room next door. The weak voice sounds strong today. The old man might want to go out and sit in the sun, maybe have some Jell-O with a squirt of whipped cream, maybe Henry will read to him—his favorite passages from the Old Testament. His father was sure he was going to heaven. Jesus was waiting. He gave away enough money to church people to make sure he had the right of passage. Is it possible to buy your way in? Henry would wonder, believing that there was no such place as heaven in the first place, just a black void of absolute nothingness.

Many years ago when he was a young man, Luke Tolbert with a group of others hung a man in Georgia, killing him because he was a dark skinned heathen bastard that had no legitimate reason to be walking on God's good earth. It was God Himself who sanctioned this act of murder, according to Henry's father. Even in this day and age, nothing could make him believe any different. There was a picture of the man hanging by the neck from a tree with a young Luke Tolbert pointing at the body like an avenging angel. His father kept the picture on his bedroom bureau. The black and white photo appeared in the local paper the day after the lynching.

Henry walks into the room and sees his father under the sheet. The wizened old man hasn't shaved in days; his cheeks are puckered into his whiskered face because he doesn't have his teeth in. Henry looks at the bureau and sees the black and white photograph of the hanging man with his father pointing at the still body immortalized inside a gilded frame. Ted Kenwood sees the photo as well, and sees what others can't see—dark blobs like him scattered among the onlookers. There are so many things the mortal eye is kept from seeing, leaving them to play mind games and toy with suppositions that give them comfort.

"Where you been, boy?" the old man says.

"Went for a walk." Henry goes to the bed and looks down at his father.

"Got a real bad Charlie horse earlier. Tried to call you to come put some weight on it."

"I'm back now."

"Charlie horse is gone."

"That's good."

Ted Kenwood passed through Henry's body and released a charge of energy. It emitted an indistinguishable sound that could have been construed as anything. In Henry's case, it sounded like…Kill him now…over and over again…

"Would you like to go outside," he said. "It's a warm day."

"That might be a good idea," the old man said. "A little air won't hurt."

"I'll bring in your chair."

The three words buzzed in his head like a trapped fly…Kill him now…

He heard the words as he helped the old man out of bed and secured him in his wheelchair. Henry rolled him outside; the old man's bare, stick-like legs covered with a folded blanket.

"Would you like to sit out in the sun?" Henry said.

"That would be good, son. Roll me out there by the birdbath."

In the next yard, the old woman Henry had masturbated with was out watering her lawn in a sleeveless summer dress, showing thin wrinkled arms the color of roasted chicken. She looks at them over the low wooden fence and offers them a wide smile, revealing yellowed dentures. Henry didn't know her name, didn't care to know it. He smiles back at her as he rolls his father near the stone birdbath in the middle of the yard where the old man closed his eyes and lifted his stubbled face to the noonday sun.

Henry was thinking of visiting one of the girls on Sunset Boulevard. His father didn't allow him to bring any women in the house so whatever he did with them had to be done outside in the alley either in his car or between trash bins. It was quick and sordid. Henry wanted to bring one home, keep her overnight. It wouldn't cost much. Most of the money the State paid him to take care of his father had been accumulating in the bank for two years because all he did with it was rent movies and street girls. Henry didn't have any serious bad habits, thanks to his father. He didn't smoke or drink, and the old man didn't know about his excursions to Sunset to find relief.

"Hot day," the woman in the next yard said, spraying water over her plants.

"Too hot to talk," Luke said, keeping his eyes closed, face lifted to the sun.

"You have a good day now," the woman said, twisting the nozzle shut and tossing the hose on the lawn. She walked on skinny legs into her house and Henry wondered what she might have looked like when she was young. Seems like we become different people with the passing of time, he thought. And he felt the person he was now had to change. The feeling was inside him, building pressure, wanting out.

"You think you ever going to get married, boy?" his father said.

"Might."

"Make sure she ain't no whore now. You hear me? And you ain't getting' no younger. How old are you anyway. Thirty?"

"Thirty one."

"Find yourself a nice church woman like your momma. Maybe a widow woman."

"Got to go to church to do that, Pa."

"Then do it. You ain't no heathen. I brought you up right."

Ted Kenwood listened tolerantly. Then he passed through Henry again and lingered over his aura, releasing his energy…Kill the sonofabitch now!…

Henry knew his old man was just talking. He could bring a virgin home fresh from the convent and the old man would find fault with her while at the same time pointing out to the woman all the faults his son had, imagined or real. In all his years on earth he had only been away from his parents for short periods of time, always coming back because he couldn't make ends meet on his own. He had promised his mother he would take care of his father at home, wouldn't let him go to a convalescent home to die with other discarded folks, strangers really. They were family and they had to treat each other accordingly. Henry told his mother he would not leave his father in the hands of strangers, promising her this while she lay on her deathbed.

He looked at his father's shiny head in the sun, his thinning gray hair mixed in with pink skull meat. How long would the old man live, he wondered, how many more years would he have to bathe him, cook for him, listen to his cutting remarks?

"You got anymore of that gumbo from last night?" Luke said.

"There's a little left."

"Think I'd like some for supper."

Later that day, after he put his father back in bed so he could watch the Astro's game, Henry went to the refrigerator and looked at the large stainless steel syringe in the butter compartment resting on a folded paper towel. The clear chamber showed a foggy-white liquid: water and barbiturates, Seconals the doctor had prescribed for him. Henry never took the pills, saving them instead until he had enough to dissolve and suck into the syringe. It was for his father. One of these days, he would have the nerve to plunge the entire cylinder into the old man's arm.

…Today…he heard in his head…kill him today…

He had planned it for some time now. The old man didn't see all that good. He would just tell him it was his vitamin B-12 shot. He wouldn't know the difference; and after it was done, he would have the old man's money he kept in the closet, along with the money the old man had in the bank. Then there was some insurance money. He could bring women home with his father gone. Maybe he'd rent a room for company, find a woman to share the place with. He didn't love his father; didn't hate him either. The old man was just a burden keeping Henry from living his life, and he wasn't getting any younger.

…Today's as good a time as any…

Ted Kenwood watched Henry Tolbert reach for the cold syringe. He picks it up and looks at it. If the old man died today, he could bring one of those Sunset women over tonight; keep her as long as he wanted.

…Do it now…

He heard the TV in his father's room. The announcer was excited by a home run and the stadium crowd was cheering.

"What you got for me, boy?"

"Your vitamin shot."

"Can't it wait? This game is gettin' good."

"It won't take long."

"That's a big needle you got there."

"Doctor wants me to put a little more into you."

"Those fools don't know nothin', boy. They're just a bunch of greedy heathen bastards."

"Let me have your arm."

The old man stretched his arm out, not taking his eyes off the TV set. Henry wanted to stick the needle into a vein if he could, feeling the drug would work faster. He jabbed it into the skin, missing the vein, and decides to inject anyway. When he finished there is a pad left on his father's arm that looks like a large, pus filled blister.

"You sure you know what your doin' there?" the old man said.

"It'll work itself in," Henry said, trying to flatten out the patch of water under the wrinkled skin.

After this, he stands back and looks at his father in bed with just the sheet covering him. The old man yawns, showing his toothless gums.

"We'll have to give you a shave later on before supper," he tells his father.

"Sounds good, boy. After I take a nap."

The old man's eyes close against his will to keep them open. Finally, he lay there snoring. Henry watched his chest as it rose and fell. It'll take a while, he thought, going to the living room to sit on the couch, watching the grandfather clock against the wall as it swung its pendulum in measured sweeps. His father had brought it back with him from La Boca del Diablo shortly after he married his mother. They had gone there on their honeymoon. Coiled around the face of the clock was a young rattlesnake. As Henry watched the pendulum move, he recalled the red-haired girl he'd seen on Sunset the last time he was there. He'd like to invite her over so they could eat gumbo together.

When he went in to check on his father, Henry could see that the old man was still breathing shallowly. Maybe there wasn't enough sleeping powder in the liquid.

Ted Kenwood stood beside him, both looking at the sleeping body in the bed.

…The pillow…

Henry looks at the pillow next to his father's head.

…Put it over his face…

Henry reached for it and looked at the old, whiskered face before laying it across his father's nose and pressing hard, holding it down until he slowly counted to a hundred. When he lifts the pillow away, his arms are aching from the strain. The old man is motionless, his toothless mouth gaping, saliva spilling onto his chin.