I decided to stay on. The rent was paid for a month, and I wanted to try the room upstairs. That night I slept there, but the next morning I began to hate the place. With her there it was part of a dream; without her, it was a house. I packed my things into the rumble seat and drove back to Los Angeles. When I got back to the hotel, someone had taken my old room during the night. Everything was awry now. I took another room on the main floor, but I didn’t like it. Everything was going to pieces. The new room was so strange, so cold, without one memory. When I looked out the window the ground was twenty feet away. No more climbing out the window, no more pebbles against the glass. I set my typewriter in one place and then another. It didn’t seem to fit anywhere. Something was wrong, everything was wrong.

I went for a walk through the streets. My God, here I was again, roaming the town. I looked at the faces around me and I knew mine was like theirs. Faces with the blood drained away, tight faces, worried, lost. Faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed into a pretty vase, the colours draining fast. I had to get away from that town.

Chapter Nineteen

My book came out a week later. For a while it was fun. I could walk into department stores and see it among thousands of others, my book, my words, my name, the reason why I was alive. But it was not the kind of fun I got from seeing The Little Dog Laughed in Hackmuth’s magazine.

That was all gone too. And no word from Camilla, no telegram. I had left her fifteen dollars. I knew it couldn’t last more than ten days. I felt she would wire as soon as she was penniless. Camilla and Willie — what had happened to them?

A postcard from Sammy. It was in my box when I got home that afternoon. It read:

Dear Mr Bandini: That Mexican girl is here, and you know how I feel about having women around. If she’s your girl you better come and get her because I won’t have her hanging around here. Sammy

The postcard was two days old. I filled the tank with gasoline, threw a copy of my book in the front seat, and started for Sammy’s abode in the Mojave Desert.

I got there after midnight. A light shone in the single window of his hut. I knocked and he opened the door. Before speaking, I looked around. He went back to a chair beside a coal-oil lamp, where he picked up a pulp western magazine and went on reading. He did not speak. There was no sign of Camilla.

‘Where is she?’ I said.

‘Damned if I know. She left.’

‘You mean you kicked her out.’

‘I can’t have her around here. I’m a sick man.’