"What is up with that guy, anyway?" I asked Hal. We were walking down by the beach, posh restaurants behind us and a nice breeze on our faces, and I was looking at an outlined figure sitting in a tentlike structure on the sand, near the concrete wall. The tent was made of fabric so thin it wavered in the wind like a woman's sari, layered across itself in overlapping scarves of shelter, and it didn't look like much in the way of protection.

"I see him every time I come down here," said Hal. "As far as I know, he's been here forever."

"He lives here? In that tent?"

"Yeah," he said. He hesitated. "Steve told me that he thinks he's marooned here."

"What?"

"Steve said he thinks he's on a desert island. He only looks out to sea. Eats what he can find. He's waiting to be rescued."

I shook my head. "That's bizarre."

Hal put his arm around me. "It's not so strange," he said. "Most people feel kind of like that when they first move here."

I thought about this and didn't say anything. It was only an hour after he'd told me, and already he was putting his arm around me again, as if everything was the same.

"Can I come with you tomorrow?" I asked.

He dropped his arm. "Oh, Dawn, why would you want to do that? It's nothing you'll want to see."

"If you have to do it, I want to watch," I said. I said it kind of like I wanted to be there for him, through this ordeal, even though it wasn't like that in my mind.

Hal sighed. "I guess," he said. "It'll be boring, though. Especially at first."

We walked on, and I kept glancing back at the man in his threadbare tent. Washed up on the shore of the glittering city, unable to turn and see his salvation. I imagined that in his old life, whatever life he had before he sat in his tent, he must have been a single-minded man. The sun was going down and it shone red through the ballooning, deflating fabric.

I sat in a studio that was so full of fakery that I thought a rose would freeze to plastic if brought within ten feet of the place. My arms were crossed and my legs were crossed twice over, one foot hooked under the other ankle. The lights were hot and I sat in the shadows.

Hal was naked. There was a naked woman composed largely of silicone and peroxide lying on the bed holding her ankles, her silver platforms tucked up to her rear. Standing nearby was a naked man tanned and gorgeous like Hal, who was twitching-coked up, I think—and a sweaty, clothed man with sunglasses who kept telling the silicone woman to "really feel it." The bed was sheeted in white. A hideous flowered bedspread, rejectable by a Motel 6, lay crumpled in the corner. The walls were gray, black-marked in places, and the bedside table had dust on it. The carpet stopped six feet from where I sat with my legs crossed twice over.

"Now when you come on her, Hal, I want a serious load," said the sweaty man. Hal had his hands on his hips and he was squinting. He was half-hard and his penis dangled oddly. "None of that watery stuff like the last time. Fucking thwack on her. Like Elmer's glue. All right?"

Hal nodded, and tried to meet my eyes. He couldn't see past the lights.

"Buck, you just hang tight, okay? I just need one more money shot before we're on to the BJs. You all right?"

Buck nodded, rapidly, and cracked his knuckles. I thought if he crouched he could probably jump up and through the ceiling.

"Tanya, you ready?"

Tanya nodded and flashed peroxide teeth. "He's good," she said.

"Okay, let's go," said the sweaty man, and stepped beyond the edge of the carpet. "Are we go, Hal?"

"One minute," said Hal, who was fingering his penis. For a tiny second I was worried he would call on me to help, and I shuddered. It grew hard without me, though, and Buck handed him a condom that he unrolled over it. "Ready," he said.

"Camera on."

Tanya started rolling her head around and moaning in a way that I found dull and annoying. Hal knelt over her and began fucking her, hard, methodically, and as I watched I wondered if sex between us was this sterile to an observer. Tanya moaned on, and I watched Hal's face strain as he enjoyed it. He grunted here and there, but his rhythm never changed. I saw Tanya's eyes roam the ceiling. Buck was masturbating absently.

Hal pulled out and slipped off the condom with amazing speed, and then the director bounced on the balls of his feet and I heard the tiny mechanical sound of the camera zooming in, and Hal's hand blurred as he jerked off, and finally he fucking thwacked her, on her silicone tits and her tucked tummy, inches above her sterile shaved pussy, as she said "Mmmm...ohhh…"

I got up and ran.

I ran as if I could leave behind my brown curly hair, my wobbling stomach, my not-always-shaved legs, my never-shaved pubic hair, all the imperfections that made me flesh and blood. The look on his face as he fucked her. The company of those people, of Buck and the sweaty man.

He doesn't want this, I told myself. We need the money. It's actually a sacrifice for him, a sleazy foray into a world he never wanted to know. But his words tasted sour and ludicrous to me now, next to the ugly bedspread and the stained carpet. And his face, the concentration, the smooth brown landscape of her thigh pressed against this man that had made love to me, that had murmured his commitment to me, that had promised me that every moment of today would be torture. Every moment of today and all the days after, all the days that I could see unrolling before us. This was not a one-time gig. I even knew that yesterday, when he looked in my eyes and pleaded for me to understand.

I've seen porn, I even like porn sometimes. This ached like murder.

I found myself walking on the same stretch of sidewalk that we were on the night before, passing the same turning waves and the same posh restaurants. I could drop out of grad school and work full-time, to save money. Hal could get a different job, give up on acting (for Chrissake), for the time being. There must have been a hundred slightly less-desperate solutions that I hadn't even thought to offer yesterday. I'd just sat there with my mouth open, nodding, as if it were rational.

The man sat in his tent. The sun was high. I walked over to him, getting sand in my shoes, and I stood in front of the tent, looking in.

He looked like a very old man, possibly older than seventy, but leathery and tough like beef jerky. He was dressed in layers of clothing unique to street people in their strange melting quality, the thing that makes them bear no resemblance to separable articles of clothing, but appear to be more like a brownish stained blob that has been stepped into and pulled up around the neck.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him.

"I'm waiting for the boat," he said.

"What boat?"

"The one that will rescue me," he said. "I've been here for months, waiting for the boat."

"Do you know where you are?" I asked.

"The Pacific," he said. "Washed up here after a dogfight."

"The war's over," I said.

He scoffed and shifted his weight.

"If you're on a desert island, what am I doing here?"

"You're a figment of my imagination," he said. "Like all the others. I just have to wait it out, and they'll pick me up, and they'll be able to fix it for me. In a couple of weeks I'll be in a Navy hospital with nice clean sheets and pretty nurses, you just wait and see."

"You're in Los Angeles!" I shouted at him. "There's a city right behind you. You can get help there."

"No help for me there," he said, almost murmuring. "I'm alone."

When I got back to the apartment, Hal wasn't home, but there was a light on the answering machine. I checked my cell phone, on vibrate in the depths of my purse, and I'd missed three calls from him.

I flipped open my phone, and then closed it again. I paced around the apartment, looking at the framed pictures, the parking lot outside the windows, the convex black eye of the television.

"Alone," I said aloud.

The door opened and Hal came in, fully clothed and with a washed-out, empty look on his face. We stared at each other for a moment, and then he closed the door.