The Weight of Nothing

The sun was white against the smog. Always white now. Like a cataract over the city's eye.

I sat in the aluminum chair outside the RV, watching the morning traffic crawl down the 405. Same cars. Same faces behind windshields. Going somewhere. Coming from somewhere. The distinction seemed arbitrary.

The coffee had gone cold an hour ago. I drank it anyway. Bitter. Everything was bitter now, or maybe my taste buds had given up trying to find sweetness in anything.

Sixty-nine years old. The number meant nothing. Time was just accumulation. Like dust on the dashboard. Like the unpaid bills stuffed in the glove compartment.

The phone hadn't rung in three days. Before that, a week. A woman in Culver City thought her husband was cheating. He wasn't. He was just working late because he couldn't stand going home to her. I didn't tell her that. Truth was a luxury I couldn't afford.

A jogger passed. Young woman. Earbuds in. Ponytail bouncing. She looked through me like I was part of the landscape. Maybe I was. Maybe we all were. Just fixtures in a sprawling museum of disappointment.

The RV park sat in the shadow of LAX. Jets overhead every three minutes. People leaving. People arriving. The same motion, endlessly repeated. I used to think about where they were going. Now I knew it didn't matter. Geography was just another illusion.

Mrs. Chen from the RV two spots over walked her dog. A small thing, white and yapping. She nodded. I nodded back. We'd been neighbors for two years and had never exchanged more than nods. Language seemed excessive for what we had to say to each other.

The dog lifted its leg against my tire. Mrs. Chen looked embarrassed. I shrugged. What was the point of embarrassment? The dog had needs. The tire was there. Cause and effect. Simple.

A text came through on my phone. Unknown number. "Need to find someone. Can you help?"

I stared at the screen. The cursor blinked. Waiting. Everything was always waiting. For answers. For purpose. For meaning that never came.

I typed back: "Depends who's looking."

The response was immediate: "Meet me at Mel's Diner on Sunset. One hour."

I almost laughed. Mel's Diner. Where old men went to pretend they still mattered. Where the coffee was even worse than mine and the waitresses called you "honey" out of habit, not affection.

But I got up anyway. Put on the jacket that smelled like cigarettes and regret. Started the engine that wheezed like an old man's lungs. Drove through the city that sprawled like a wound that wouldn't heal.

The streets were full of people who looked like they knew where they were going. Maybe they did. Maybe that was enough. Maybe the illusion of purpose was better than the clarity of meaninglessness.

At a red light, I watched a man in a suit check his phone. His face was anxious. Important. He probably had meetings. Deadlines. A mortgage. Things that mattered to him because he'd decided they mattered. I envied him his delusion.

The light turned green. I drove on.

Mel's Diner sat between a check-cashing place and a store that sold phone accessories. The neon sign flickered. Half the letters were dark. "M l's D ner." Even the signs were giving up.

Inside, the air was thick with grease and resignation. The booths were cracked vinyl. The floor was sticky. The waitress was fifty and looked seventy. She smiled anyway. Professional optimism. Another performance.

A woman sat in the corner booth. Forty-something. Expensive clothes that couldn't hide the worry lines around her eyes. She waved me over. I walked through the smell of burnt coffee and broken dreams.

"You're the investigator," she said. Not a question.

"I used to be."

"But you still… investigate?"

I sat across from her. The booth vinyl wheezed under my weight. "Depends what needs investigating."

She slid a photograph across the table. A young man. Twenty-five, maybe. Dark hair. Earnest eyes. The kind of eyes that still believed in things.

"My son," she said. "He's missing."

"How long?"

"Three weeks."

"Police?"

"They're not… they say he's an adult. That he left on his own."

"Did he?"

She was quiet for a long moment. Staring at the photograph like it might answer for her. "I don't know. Maybe. Does it matter?"

It was a good question. The best question. Did any of it matter? The searching. The finding. The answers that only led to more questions.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Sarah. Sarah Novak."

"I'm—" I started, then stopped. Names were just sounds. Labels we put on the void. "I'm whoever you need me to be."

She looked at me strangely. "Don't you have a name?"

"I used to. Now I just am."

The waitress appeared. Ancient. Tired. "Coffee?" she asked.

"Please."

She poured it into a cup that had seen better decades. The coffee was black and bitter. Like everything else in this city. Like everything else in this life.

"Will you help me?" Sarah asked.

I looked at the photograph again. The young man smiled up at me. Frozen in a moment before he learned what the world really was. Before he understood that existence was just something that happened to you, not something you chose.

"Yeah," I said. "I'll help."

Why? Because she asked. Because the sun was white against the smog. Because the jets kept flying overhead and people kept pretending they were going somewhere that mattered.

Because in a world without meaning, helping was as meaningless as not helping. And meaninglessness was just another kind of freedom.

I drank the bitter coffee and listened to her tell me about her son. About his dreams. His plans. His disappearance into the vast indifference of Los Angeles.

Outside, the city sprawled on. Endless. Waiting. Breathing smog and exhaling hope.

And I sat in the cracked vinyl booth, taking notes on another case that would end like all the others. With questions that had no answers. With people who discovered that finding what they were looking for was worse than never finding it at all.

But I would look anyway. Because that's what I did. Not because it mattered.

Because it didn't.

Chapter 2

The alarm was the garbage truck. Every morning at five-fifteen. Metal teeth grinding against dumpster lips. The sound of the city eating itself, one load at a time.

I lay in the narrow bed and listened. The hydraulics wheezed. The engine coughed black smoke that would drift through the RV park like a blessing no one wanted. Outside, Los Angeles was waking up to another day of pretending it wasn't dying.

The shower would cost three dollars at the truck stop. The coffee another dollar-fifty. Gas to drive to wherever Sarah Novak's son had disappeared would depend on how far hope had taken him before it ran out.

I dressed in yesterday's clothes. The mirror showed me a man I barely recognized. Stubble gray as ash. Eyes the color of disappointment. When had I become this person? When had the person I used to be packed up and left without saying goodbye?

Mrs. Chen was already walking her dog. Same route. Same pace. The animal moved with the careful deliberation of age, stopping to investigate smells that probably told him more about the world than the evening news told the rest of us.

She wore her work clothes. Pressed slacks that had seen better years but still held their crease. A blouse that was white because she bleached it every week in the communal laundry room. Her hair pulled back severe and neat. Armor made of respectability.

"Morning," I said.

She looked surprised. Words were rare currency between us.

"Good morning."

Her voice carried traces of an accent. First generation, maybe. Someone who had believed in the promise of America before America decided it didn't promise anything anymore.

"You work today?"

"Tax season's coming. People need help with their numbers."

Numbers. As if math could explain why she lived in a box on wheels while the people she helped prepare returns went home to houses with foundations. As if calculation could balance the equation of a life that had followed all the rules and still ended up here.

"What about you?" she asked.

"Looking for someone."

"Ah. A case."

She said it like it was something official. Something that mattered. I didn't correct her. Let her keep whatever illusions helped her maintain that spine-straight posture.

The dog finished his inspection of the chain-link fence and trotted back to her side. Tail wagging. Some creatures never lost their capacity for simple joy. I envied him.

Mrs. Chen walked toward the gate. She would catch two buses to get to the H&R Block office in Inglewood. Forty-five minutes each way. Standing room only. But she would arrive on time with her dignity intact and help people navigate the byzantine requirements of a system that had already decided their fates.

I made instant coffee with water heated on the camp stove. Folgers. The crystals dissolved into something that bore a distant relationship to actual coffee. Like most things in my life, it was a pale imitation of something I used to know.

The photograph of Sarah Novak's son sat on the dinette table. Michael Novak. Twenty-four years old. Recent college graduate. Philosophy major. That explained something. Philosophy was a luxury for people who hadn't yet learned that existence was just a series of problems that couldn't be solved, only endured.

According to his mother, he'd been working at a bookstore in Silver Lake. Independent place. The kind that sold poetry and foreign films to people who still believed in the transformative power of art. The kind of place that was disappearing faster than glaciers.

I started the engine. It turned over on the third try. The battery was dying. Like everything else. But it would last another day. Maybe another week. In my world, that qualified as optimism.

The drive to Silver Lake took forty minutes. Traffic moved with the sluggish determination of blood through clogged arteries. Everyone going somewhere. Everyone late. Everyone trapped in metal boxes, breathing recycled air and listening to talk radio hosts explain why nothing was their fault.

The bookstore was called "Pages." Original. It sat between a vintage clothing shop and a coffee place that charged seven dollars for what used to cost fifty cents. Gentrification in action. The neighborhood transforming into a theme park version of itself for people who wanted to feel bohemian without the inconvenience of actual poverty.

Inside, the air smelled like paper and resignation. Tall shelves crammed with books that no one read anymore. A few customers browsed with the idle curiosity of tourists visiting a museum of dead technology.

The clerk was a woman about thirty. Short hair dyed an unnatural shade of blue. Tattoos covering her arms like illustrated stories she'd never tell. The kind of person who'd moved to LA to become something and had settled for becoming someone who sold books to people who didn't read them.

"Help you?"

"I'm looking for information about Michael Novak. He worked here."

Her face changed. Shutters closing behind her eyes.

"You're not police."

"No."

"Family?"

"Hired by family."

She considered this. Weighed whatever loyalty she felt to a missing coworker against whatever bills she needed to pay.

"He quit three weeks ago. Just didn't show up one day. Left his last paycheck."

"That normal for him?"

"Nothing about Michael was normal."

She said it without malice. Just observation. The way you'd describe the weather or the color of the sky.

"Meaning?"

"He asked too many questions. About everything. Why people bought books they'd never read. Why the city was full of homeless people and empty condos. Why everyone seemed angry all the time."

Philosophy major. Still trying to find meaning in a world that had given up pretending it had any.

"He say where he was going?"

"No. But the last week he worked here, he kept talking about some guy. Older man. Said he'd met someone who understood things. Someone who'd figured it out."

"Figured what out?"

She shrugged. "Everything. Nothing. With Michael, it was hard to tell the difference."

I left my card. Not that I expected her to call. In my experience, people who worked in bookstores had given up on happy endings.

I sat in the parking lot and tried to imagine Michael Novak. Young man with questions. Looking for answers in a city that specialized in beautiful lies. Meeting someone who claimed to have figured it all out.

In Los Angeles, there was always someone who'd figured it all out. Gurus and prophets and sidewalk philosophers selling enlightenment to people desperate enough to buy it. Most of them were harmless. Some weren't.

I started the engine and pulled into traffic. Another day in paradise. Another case that would probably end with more questions than answers.

But I drove anyway. Because that's what I did. Not because it mattered.

Because it didn't.

Chapter 3

The bench sat outside a Laundromat on Pico Boulevard. Green paint peeling like sunburned skin. Half the slats loose. The kind of place where people waited for buses that came when they felt like it, to take them to jobs that paid what they were worth, which was apparently nothing.

My advertisement lived on the back of that bench. Hand-painted in black letters that had faded to gray: "INVESTIGATIONS - MISSING PERSONS - DISCRETE INQUIRIES." Below that, a phone number. Below that, smaller: "CASH ONLY."

I'd misspelled "discreet." Had been meaning to fix it for two years. But the people who called didn't care about spelling. They cared about finding things that were lost. People who were gone. Answers that might help them sleep.

The Laundromat was where I conducted business when business needed conducting. Table in the back corner, between the detergent dispenser and a washing machine that ate quarters without returning the favor. The owner was a Korean man named Park who'd given up asking questions about why I held meetings next to his machines.

Sarah Novak had found me through word of mouth. Someone who knew someone who'd heard about the guy who worked cheap and didn't ask why you paid in cash. In Los Angeles, there was always someone who needed something found, and someone else who needed not to be found. I specialized in the space between those needs.

The phone had three missed calls. All unknown numbers. People who'd seen the bench. People who'd heard about the man who lived in an RV and asked questions for money. People desperate enough to trust someone who couldn't spell "discreet."

I called the first number back.

"Yeah?"

"You called about an investigation."

Silence. Then: "You the guy from the bench?"

"I'm the guy."

"My daughter's missing. Police say she's just another runaway. But she's not. She wouldn't just leave."

They never just left. Except when they did. But I didn't say that.

"How long?"

"Two weeks."

"Age?"

"Seventeen. Turns eighteen next month."

Almost legal. Almost free. Almost old enough to disappear on her own terms. The timing was interesting.

"Where do you want to meet?"

"You know the Carl's Jr. on Western? Near the 10?"

I knew it. Every private investigator in LA knew it. Neutral ground. Public enough to feel safe. Loud enough that conversations stayed private. Cheap enough that you could sit for an hour over a cup of coffee and nobody bothered you.

"One hour."

I hung up before she could ask my name. Names were complications. Labels that created expectations. Better to remain undefined. A function rather than a person.

The second call went to voicemail. Probably for the best. In my experience, people who didn't answer their phones were either more desperate or more dangerous than people who did. Sometimes both.

The third number had been disconnected. Story of the city. Everyone moving. Everyone running. Everyone disappearing into the vast anonymity of eight million people who'd come here to become someone else.

I drove to Western Avenue through neighborhoods that changed character every few blocks. Gentrification advancing and retreating like a tide that couldn't make up its mind. Coffee shops next to check-cashing places. Yoga studios next to bail bondsmen. The city consuming itself and calling it progress.

The Carl's Jr. was exactly what it was supposed to be. Fluorescent lighting that made everyone look sick. Plastic furniture bolted to the floor. The smell of processed meat and industrial disinfectant. A place where hope came with a side of fries.

She was already there. Forties. Hispanic. Uniform that said she worked somewhere that required hairnets and name tags. The kind of job that paid just enough to keep you showing up but not enough to ever get ahead.

I bought a coffee and sat across from her. She clutched a photograph like a rosary.

"Maria Gutierrez," she said.

I waited. Names were her choice. I was whoever she needed me to be.

"My daughter Elena. She's a good girl. Honor student. Never gave me trouble."

She slid the photograph across the table. Pretty girl. Dark eyes that still held light. The kind of innocence that Los Angeles specialized in destroying.

"Tell me about the day she disappeared."

"Normal day. School. Work. I do night shift at the hospital. Cleaning. When I got home the next morning, her bed hadn't been slept in."

"Friends?"

"She doesn't have many. Keeps to herself. Studies."

"Boyfriend?"

"She says no. But you know how teenage girls are."

I didn't. But I nodded anyway. Let her tell me what she needed to tell me.

"The police, they took a report. But they don't really look. They see another Mexican girl from the neighborhood, they think she ran off with some boy. Had a baby. Joined a gang. They don't see honor student. They don't see college applications."

The same story every parent told. My child is different. My child is special. My child wouldn't just vanish into the statistical void that swallowed thousands of kids every year in Los Angeles.

Sometimes they were right. Usually they weren't.

"My rate is two hundred a day plus expenses."

She reached into her purse. Pulled out an envelope. Counted out four hundred in twenties and tens. Two days' worth of hope.

"Find her," she said.

I took the money. Not because I believed I could find Elena Gutierrez. Not because I believed she wanted to be found. But because Maria Gutierrez needed to believe that someone was looking. That someone cared enough to ask the right questions.

In a world without meaning, caring was as meaningless as not caring. But meaninglessness went both ways. If nothing mattered, then everything mattered equally.

I put the photograph in my jacket pocket next to the one of Michael Novak. Two missing people. Two families buying hope they couldn't afford. Two more names to add to the list of people who'd discovered that Los Angeles was very good at making things disappear.

Outside, the sun was white against the smog. Traffic moved with the sluggish determination of blood through diseased arteries. Everyone going somewhere. Everyone late for an appointment with disappointment.

I sat in the parking lot and counted Maria Gutierrez's money. Enough for gas. Enough for another few days of pretending I was solving puzzles instead of just postponing the inevitable discovery that some questions didn't have answers.

But I would look anyway. Because that's what I did. Not because it mattered.

Because it didn't.

Chapter 4

The fire came down from the hills like God's judgment on a city that had forgotten how to pray. Orange light painted the morning sky the color of apocalypse. Ash fell like snow that would never melt, coating the windshields of cars stuck in evacuation traffic that moved nowhere.

I drove through neighborhoods where people loaded photographs and pets into whatever vehicles still ran. The essentials. The irreplaceable. Everything else could burn. In Los Angeles, everything usually did, eventually.

The radio crackled with updates. Malibu. Thousand Oaks. Pacific Palisades. Rich people's houses turning to smoke while poor people's houses waited their turn. Fire was democratic that way. It took what it wanted without checking credit scores.

A helicopter passed overhead, bucket swinging empty. They were running out of water. Always running out of something in this city. Water. Hope. Reasons to stay.

But people stayed anyway. Because leaving required somewhere to go. Because this broken place was still home. Because the alternative to accepting meaninglessness was accepting that there might be meaning somewhere else, and that was a bigger gamble than most could afford.

The ICE van sat outside the apartment complex on Alvarado. White and unmarked but everyone knew what it was. Families had already scattered. Curtains drawn. Doors locked. Children kept home from school. The city holding its breath while uniformed men decided who belonged and who didn't.

I'd seen this dance before. The raids that came in waves. The communities that went underground. The way fear moved through neighborhoods like smoke, seeping under doors and through walls. Making everyone invisible except to the people looking for them.

A woman hurried past carrying a grocery bag, eyes down. Walking fast but not running. Running attracted attention. Attention meant questions. Questions meant papers. Papers meant proof you had the right to exist in a place you'd lived for twenty years.

The homeless camp under the 101 overpass had grown again. Canvas and cardboard cities that appeared overnight and disappeared when the sweeps came. People living in the shadows of people driving to jobs that barely paid enough to keep them from joining the camps themselves.

Shopping carts loaded with everything someone owned. Tarps stretched between concrete pillars. Fires burning in metal drums, the smoke mixing with exhaust from the freeway above. A civilization built from refuse, surviving on the margins of a city that pretended not to see it.

I knew some of them. Former clients who'd run out of money before I'd run out of questions. People who'd hired me to find someone and ended up losing themselves instead. The city was good at that kind of mathematics. Subtraction disguised as addition.

The rain came Tuesday. Not the gentle rain that waters gardens and fills reservoirs. The kind of rain that turned streets into rivers and hills into landslides. The kind that reminded everyone that Los Angeles was a desert pretending to be a garden, built on mountains that had never stopped moving.

By Wednesday, half of Pacific Coast Highway was underwater. By Thursday, houses in the hills were sliding into the houses below them. Mud mixed with dreams and mortgage payments. The earth reclaiming what had never really belonged to anyone.

The news called it a natural disaster. As if any of it was natural. As if building cities in fire zones and flood plains was nature's fault. As if the climate wasn't responding to what we'd done to it for a hundred years of thinking tomorrow would be someone else's problem.

But people stayed. Rebuilt. Moved their RVs to higher ground and waited for the next disaster. Because this was home. Because leaving required believing somewhere else was better. Because the alternative to enduring meaninglessness was admitting that meaning might exist and you'd spent your life in the wrong place looking for it.

I sat in traffic on the 405, watching brake lights stretch to the horizon like a necklace of red stars. Everyone going somewhere. Everyone stuck. Everyone part of a system that moved without purpose toward destinations that wouldn't matter when they got there.

The woman in the Honda next to me was crying. Phone pressed to her ear. Bad news traveling at the speed of cellular towers. Behind her, a man in a pickup truck drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and stared at nothing. In front of me, a bus full of people heading to jobs that would barely pay rent on apartments they shared with strangers.

We were all here. Still here. Despite the fires and floods and raids and landslides. Despite the smog that turned sunsets beautiful and lungs black. Despite the earthquakes that reminded us the ground beneath our feet was no more permanent than anything else we'd built our lives on.

Why?

Not because it made sense. Sense was another luxury Los Angeles had priced most of us out of. Not because it was getting better. Better was a direction no one remembered how to find.

We stayed because leaving required hope. Hope that somewhere else was different. Hope that geography could solve what character couldn't. Hope that running away was something other than running away.

And hope was the one thing this city had taught us to live without.

So we stayed. In our RVs and rent-controlled apartments and cardboard shelters. In our jobs that didn't pay enough and relationships that didn't work and dreams that had been downsized to just getting through another day.

We stayed because the alternative to accepting meaninglessness here was accepting meaninglessness somewhere else. At least here, the meaninglessness came with perfect weather most of the time.

At least here, we were meaningless together.

Traffic moved forward three feet. Stopped. The woman in the Honda stopped crying. The man in the pickup found something to look at. The bus driver checked his mirrors and waited for the light to change.

We were all still here. Would be here tomorrow. Would be here when the next fire came down from the hills and the next rain turned streets into rivers and the next earthquake reminded us that permanence was a story we told ourselves to sleep at night.

Because this was home. Not because it made sense.

Because it didn't.

Chapter 5

Elena Gutierrez was waiting for me in the Carl's Jr. parking lot.

She stood beside a rusted Honda Civic, arms crossed, looking exactly like her photograph except older. Not in years. In the way that comes from learning things you wished you hadn't.

I sat in my van and watched her for a moment. Seventeen years old. Supposed to be missing. Wearing the same clothes from her school ID photo but they hung differently now. Looser. Like she'd lost weight or gained worry.

She saw me and walked over. Direct. No hesitation. The kind of confidence that came from making decisions you couldn't take back.

"You're looking for me," she said through the open window.

"Your mother thinks I am."

"My mother thinks a lot of things."

She got in without being invited. Sat in the passenger seat and stared through the windshield at the traffic on Western Avenue. Cars full of people going places. Everyone else with somewhere to be.

"How did you find me?"

"I didn't. You found me."

She almost smiled. "I saw you talking to Mrs. Rodriguez yesterday. She's not good at keeping secrets."

"Neither are most people."

"David is."

The name hung between us like smoke. The older man who understood things. The one who'd been helping with college applications.

"Tell me about David."

"Why should I?"

"Because your mother's worried. Because she's paying me money she doesn't have to find you. Because disappearing doesn't solve problems, it just moves them somewhere else."

Elena was quiet for a long moment. Watching the traffic. Thinking about things seventeen-year-olds shouldn't have to think about.

"You know what it's like?" she said finally. "Having everyone tell you you're smart. Having everyone say you're going to get out. Make something of yourself. Escape."

I waited.

"But escape to what? College costs more than my mother makes in three years. Scholarships go to kids with better stories than mine. And even if I get out, then what? Become another person in another city, working jobs I hate to pay for things I don't need?"

"So you decided not to try."

"I decided to try something else."

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a business card. Plain white. Black text. "DAVID REEVES - LIFE TRANSITIONS."

The name meant nothing to me. But the concept did. Life transitions. The kind of euphemism that could mean anything from legitimate counseling to something much darker.

"What does he do? David Reeves."

"He helps people disappear. Legally. New identities. New lives. For people who can pay."

"And you can pay?"

"I can work. He has... opportunities. For young women who are smart. Who can follow instructions. Who need to start over."

The words came out clinical. Rehearsed. Like she'd practiced saying them until they sounded normal.

I felt something cold settle in my stomach. The kind of cold that came from recognizing patterns you'd seen before. Young women. Opportunities. Men who helped people disappear.

"Elena."

"That's not my name anymore."

"What's your name now?"

"Haven't decided yet. David says identity is a choice. You can be whoever you want to be if you're willing to let go of who you used to be."

"Where is he? David."

"Why?"

"Because I want to meet someone who's figured it all out."

She studied my face. Looking for something. Truth, maybe. Or lies she could live with.

"You're not going to try to take me back."

It wasn't a question.

"No," I said. "But I need to tell your mother you're alive. She deserves that much."

Elena nodded. Reached for the door handle.

"The bookstore in Silver Lake," she said. "Pages. Tuesday nights after closing. Tell them David sent you."

She got out of the van and walked back to the Honda. Started the engine on the first try. Better than mine managed most days.

I watched her drive away. Seventeen years old. Disappearing into traffic. Another person becoming someone else in a city that specialized in transformation.

My phone buzzed. Text message from unknown number: "Stop looking for what doesn't want to be found."

I stared at the screen until the words blurred. Then I started the engine and drove toward Silver Lake.

Because sometimes the only way to find yourself was to keep looking for other people until you found the one who'd taken them.

Chapter 6

Michael Novak’s Instagram told the story of someone trying to become someone else. Two hundred and thirty-seven followers. Forty-three posts. The digital archaeology of a young man’s search for meaning.

I sat in the RV with my phone, scrolling through photographs of coffee cups and sunsets and books arranged artfully on wooden tables. The kind of life performed for an audience that mostly didn’t exist. Strangers liking pictures of moments that had been staged for their approval.

Why did we do this? Curate ourselves into fiction? Present edited versions of lives that were already too complicated to understand without filters and hashtags and carefully chosen angles?

His early posts were different. College photos. Friends laughing. Normal twenty-something documentation of being young and stupid and alive. But something changed about six months ago. The photos became more deliberate. More philosophical.

A picture of Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” with the caption: “What if authenticity is just another performance?” Thirty-seven likes. Comments from people who probably hadn’t read the book but recognized the pose of intellectual searching.

Another photo: the view from his bookstore window, looking out at Silver Lake Boulevard. “Everyone’s looking for something. Most don’t know what.” Twenty-two likes. Someone had commented: “Deep bro.” Someone else: “You ok?”

The last post was three weeks ago. The same day he’d stopped showing up for work. A selfie taken in what looked like a coffee shop. Different lighting. Better quality than his usual photos. Someone else had taken it.

The caption read: “Found someone who gets it. Finally.”

No location tag. No friends tagged. Just a young man smiling at the camera with the kind of relief that came from thinking you’d found answers instead of just better questions.

I studied the background. Generic coffee shop. Could have been anywhere in Los Angeles. But the lighting suggested morning. East-facing windows. The kind of place that served artisanal coffee to people who thought spending twelve dollars on breakfast made them interesting.

The comments were sparse. His mother had written “Love you honey” with three heart emojis. A few friends had left thumbs-up reactions. One person had asked “Who took this?” but Michael hadn’t responded.

I switched to his Facebook. Older platform. More personal. Friend list full of college classmates and high school acquaintances. People he’d probably stopped talking to but couldn’t quite bring himself to unfriend.

His posts here were longer. More thoughtful. Less performed. The writing of someone who still believed that social media could be a place for actual ideas instead of just advertising for your life.

A post from two months ago: “Reading Kierkegaard. Either/Or. Keep thinking about the aesthetic versus the ethical life. Like maybe the problem isn’t choosing between them but realizing the choice itself is an illusion. Maybe we’re always performing authenticity for an audience of people who are performing authenticity right back.”

Forty-seven likes. Twelve comments. Most of them variations on “I need to read more philosophy” and “You always make me think.” The kind of responses that meant people appreciated the idea of thinking without actually doing it.

But one comment was different. From someone named David Reeves. Just three words: “You’re almost there.”

I clicked on David Reeves’ profile. Private. No profile picture except the default silhouette. Joined Facebook in 2019. No visible friends or posts. A ghost account. The kind that existed only to watch other people live their lives online.

Michael had responded to David’s comment: “There?”

David: “To understanding that the performance and the authentic self are the same thing. That choosing is the only freedom we have.”

Michael: “I’d like to talk more about this.”

David: “I’d like that too.”

The conversation moved to private messages after that. Whatever David Reeves had said to Michael Novak, he’d said it where no one else could see.

I put the phone down and stared at the ceiling of the RV. Water stains formed patterns like continents on a map of nowhere. Michael Novak had been looking for someone who understood. Someone who could explain why existence felt like a performance he’d never auditioned for.

Every generation thought they were the first to discover meaninglessness. The first to notice that life was mostly pretending to be something you weren’t while hoping someone would like the version of yourself you’d constructed for their approval.

But social media had made it worse. Turned the performance into a full-time job. Made everyone a curator of their own mythology. Likes and shares and comments became the currency of existence. You were real only to the extent that other people confirmed your reality by double-tapping it.

Michael had been smart enough to see through it. Philosophy major. Someone who read Kierkegaard and Sartre and understood that authenticity was just another pose. But smart enough to see the problem wasn’t smart enough to solve it.

So he’d gone looking for someone who had answers. Someone who could explain how to live in a world where everything was performance but you still had to choose what to perform.

And he’d found David Reeves. A man who helped people disappear. Who offered new identities to people tired of being themselves. Who understood that if life was just a series of choices about who to pretend to be, you might as well choose someone interesting.

The sun was setting behind the smog. Another perfect Los Angeles sunset, painted beautiful by pollution. The kind of beauty that came from destroying something else. Like everything in this city. Like everything in this life.

I picked up the phone and scrolled through Michael’s photos one more time. Looking for something I’d missed. Some clue about where a philosophy major would go when he decided to stop being himself.

But the photos just showed a young man performing the search for meaning. Staging authenticity for strangers. Hoping someone would like the version of wisdom he’d constructed from books and coffee shops and carefully composed thoughts about existence.

Maybe that was the real tragedy. Not that he’d disappeared. But that he’d spent so much time documenting his search for truth that he’d forgotten to actually look for it.

Or maybe David Reeves had convinced him that the search was the truth. That looking for yourself was the same as finding yourself. That the only authentic thing to do in an inauthentic world was to choose your inauthenticity consciously.

Either way, Michael Novak was gone. Lost in the space between who he’d been and who he’d decided to become. Another casualty of the city’s promise that you could be anyone you wanted to be, if you were willing to stop being who you were.

I closed the phone and watched the last light fade from the sky. Tomorrow was Tuesday. Tomorrow I would go to the bookstore after hours and meet David Reeves. Learn what happened to young people who got tired of performing themselves for an audience that was too busy performing to watch.

But tonight I would sit in the aluminum silence and think about the strange cruelty of a world that demanded you choose who to be while never teaching you how to make the choice.

Or why it mattered.

Or what happened when you chose wrong.