Case One: A Haunting In Silver Lake. Prologue and Chapter One.

After a spirit channeling gone wrong, Santi and Iz are forced to confront their views on reality… and a ghost!

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Prologue

I had greatly disliked Santi when we first met. I had come upon him in the middle of my Burning Man camp, nude, getting painted head to toe with ‘tribal markers’ by my friends from college. I was terrified the French woman I was with might leave my orbit and glom onto the beautiful Brazilian standing confidently in the sun. She had given me my first-ever hit of molly eight hours ago, and she had become a sort of fetish for the ecstasy roll; all the joy, freedom, and love that pressed pill of MDMA had released into my brain I unwittingly attributed to her. The infatuation was painful, as was my ignorance of how to seal the deal.

I was right to be afraid. Santi was—and still is—somewhere between thin movie star and thick model attractive. I, on the other hand, was and am ‘unwitting sex symbol’ attractive. Hot like a short intellectual who’d somehow become the wet dream of women who read The New Yorker. A Wes Anderson character in the flesh.

I did not get a chance to sleep with the French woman, nor did Santi get the chance to steal her. She left my camp with a dreadlocked group of Israelis I’d never met who insisted on speaking to me in Hebrew—something I still find oddly anti-Semitic. I did gain a friend.

“Do you want to come to an ecstatic dance thing with me at the Shaman Dome?” Santi asked as he handed me a spoon of peanut butter and three long shriveled mushrooms.

“What’s ecstatic dance?”

“You dance… ecstatically, I guess.”

I agreed, though I still held a grudge against him for how he’d stolen the French woman from me in my imagination.

We arrived at the dome ten minutes after we’d eaten the mushrooms, undressed, and sat cross-legged in the large circle of bodies on the floor. The man in harem pants up front set expectations and intentions for what was about to happen, spoke at length about the blacklight paintings his friend had done which now hung on the wall behind him, and then started the music. By the second verse of the opening number to The Lion King, the mushrooms had kicked in.

We biked the length of the desert festival city that night; dancing, staring at art, screaming, and getting to know each other and just how different we were.

Santi Abreau, I learned, was an acupuncturist from San Francisco and was considering giving it all up to move to LA and follow his acting career. He believed in a lot: spirits, energy fields, chi, aliens, Bigfoot, crystals, setting intentions, friendship.

It wasn’t that I don’t believe in anything, but I believe in far less, and what I do believe in is rarely as fun. Me, Issac (Iz) Merman Berliner—a strong Jewish name, practically Hasidic—am a mathematics postdoc at Caltech. I believe that mathematics is as psychedelic and as spiritual as anything could possibly be. I believe in strong coffee, and little else.

It was clear to both of us that had we met under any other circumstance we would not be friends. Riding bikes through fields of sounds and lasers, brains melting from our ears, we became quite close.

Two years later Santi moved to Los Angeles and our friendship continued to blossom in a deep, sometimes thorny way. Santi, for his part, was determined to show me that his lifestyle was a worthwhile way to experience life, not something to be scoffed at. I, for mine, wanted to impart to my friend even a glimmer of the beauty I saw in logic, to show him that what he saw as ‘just dumb symbols on a page’ was, in fact, the most transcendent dance of concept and relation that the universe could cook up. Neither of us had been successful and that, perhaps, was to blame for our enduring standstill.

The haunted house changed all that.

CASE ONE: A HAUNTING IN SILVERLAKE

It was a dreary November Saturday in Los Angeles—sixty-five degrees and cloudy—practically arctic. Santi and I sat on the patio of Green Leaf Thai on Hillhurst, bundled against the cold. Santi ate his vegan pad thai with a side of tofu nuggets, a burrito, and a large smoothie. I picked out the fried bits from my vegan chow fun and sipped the dregs of the pour-over I’d gotten at Maru on the way.

“Are you actually hungry or are you just picking?” Santi accused.

“I’m a nosher. It’s in my blood. I come from a long line of noshers, grazers, etc. My mouth gets lonely.”

We both stared out into space for a moment until Santi finally said, “I just feel like my soul is atrophying.” We’d been having this conversation, drawn out for the past two years, both of us circling around the fact that we were no longer the men we’d been when we met. We were now in our early to mid-thirties, which are lost years for everyone as far as I can tell, which is why most interesting people die at twenty-seven. One’s mid to late twenties are a time bursting with potential and upward energy. Being twenty-nine is a second reprise of one’s senior year of high school—boundlessly confident in your abilities and convinced you’ve learned how to be an adult. As we’d aged out of that, we came to realize that we’d both learned next to nothing, and our lives had become as dreary as the day around us.

“While I don’t believe in the existence of the soul, as such,” I said, “I’m right there with you. I never expected my life to be so… dull? After all, that’s why I got into mathematics instead of econ or engineering,” I shuddered, “the excitement.”

“We could always take up another hobby,” Santi said.

I pulled the collar up on my coat to protect against that idea and the chill in the air.

“Where’d you get that?” Santi asked. “I like a cord jacket.”

“My girlfriend thrifted it for me. She runs a vintage clothing blog. It’s a side hustle.”

Santi scraped the last of his pad thai into his mouth and set in on his vegan burrito. “You should bring her around.”

“Ehh,” I exhaled—a noncommittal noise, one of my favorites.

Santi swallowed rice and cashew cream, furrowed his brow, and wiped his face. “We’ve been talking, Iz. You seem to really like this one and none of us have met her.”

“Who’s we?”

“We: Tori from Burning Man 2018, Seema, Matt—”

“From Hebrew School? You two hang out without me?”

“His girlfriend is my yoga teacher. We got açaí bowls last week. Why does that bother you?”

I hadn’t realized I was making a bothered face. “I guess it’s just strange to think about some of the main cast in my life having scenes without me,” I said, only half-ironically.

“We’re all the main cast of our own lives.” Santi moved from the burrito to the nuggets, holding meaningful eye contact as I pulled again from my mostly spent coffee.

“It’s always hard for me to tell with you, Santi; are you telling me this vague aphorism in earnest or as a bit?”

“Yes,” he said, stabbing a fork in his last nugget. “So, why aren’t you bringing her around?”

“I really like this woman, Santi, it’s just… well, she’s like me.”

“Short? Butt problems?”

“It’s called colitis and it’s no joke. No, she’s an… atheist, a nonbeliever, as opposed to spiritual metaphysics as she is to fast fashion.”

“So you’re embarrassed of me?” Santi downed his smoothie, offended.

“No.” I played with the lid of my cup. Keeping my hands busy makes it easier to be honest. “If anything, I’m embarrassed of her. Her family is extremely Christian and she’s only recently escaped. She hasn’t had the time I’ve had to realize that atheism works well as a philosophical stance but miserably as a personality trait. I’d be worried she might say something unkind.”

“Well I do more than spiritual stuff. I’m a multi-dimensional person.” Santi wiped his face in a napkin and dropped it on the table. We stood almost in unison and walked north towards Rodney.

“Really?” I asked. “What are you doing tonight?”

“Going to a spirit channeling in Silver Lake… I guess I see your point.” Santi cocked his head as he thought, a strange tic—I’m still not sure if it’s real or manufactured. “Ok, how about this. Bring her tonight.”

“Are you serious, Santi? She hates that sort of thing.”

“But does she like beautiful houses in the Silver Lake hills, catered meals, and a chance to sneak off and wander through the closets of a very rich woman?”

I stopped and considered, thrusting my hands into my pockets to warm them against the breeze rustling the palm trees. “You know, sometimes I almost believe you are some kind of intuitive. She might like that a lot,” I agreed, turning down Russell towards my apartment. “I’ll ask her.”

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