Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

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******

The book was finding its people.

And its people, it turned out, were scattered across the globe like seeds before a storm.

---

Sherman Oaks, California — December 27, 1996

The Olsen family home in Sherman Oaks sat behind iron gates on a street where the houses were set far back from the road and the lawns were tended by people whose names the residents didn’t always know. It was a large house — large enough to require a proper staff, large enough that two children could occupy entirely separate wings and not encounter each other for hours, large enough that the sound of the Pacific Coast Highway could not reach the master bedroom even on nights when the Santa Ana winds pushed everything eastward.

It was also, on this particular Friday evening, a house in quiet transition.

Their parents had divorced just months ago— a fact that lived in the house now the way certain facts lived in houses, present in the silences between conversations, in the changed geometry of dinner tables and weekend schedules, in the particular careful cheerfulness that adults deployed around children when they were trying very hard not to let something show. The family was reorganizing itself. The machinery of that reorganization was still warm.

But tonight, in the sprawling living room with its deep sofas and the Christmas tree still standing in the corner, its lights blinking their slow, patient rhythm against the wall, none of that mattered to the youngest of the Olsen children.

Elizabeth — called Lizzie by everyone who loved her — was seven years old and in possession of a mission.

She stood in the center of the living room in her striped pajamas, her blonde hair still slightly damp from the bath she had been forced to take thirty minutes earlier under protest, wielding a wooden mixing spoon that she had retrieved from the kitchen during what was supposed to be a quiet pre-bedtime period. The mixing spoon was, she had informed anyone who would listen, the Legendary Staff of the Dragon Warrior. This was not negotiable.

On the large sofa opposite her, buried under a considerable quantity of decorative throw pillows, lay her two sisters.

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen had been performing professionally since they were nine months old.

They were ten years old now — ten years old and, as of that morning, freshly back from a six-hour commercial shoot in Culver City that had involved seventeen costume changes, a malfunctioning wind machine, and a catering truck that had run out of everything worth eating by eleven o’clock. They were, by any reasonable measure, exhausted. They had earned their sofa. They had earned their throw pillows. They had, Ashley felt strongly, earned the right to approximately twelve consecutive hours of doing absolutely nothing.

Lizzie had other ideas.

”Ashley,” Lizzie said, in the tone of someone making a reasonable proposition for the fourth time, ”you have to be Tigress. You’re wearing the striped sweater.” She pointed with the Dragon Warrior’s staff. ”Stripes. It’s perfect.”

Ashley lifted the corner of a pillow from her face and regarded her younger sister with the weary, specific love of someone who had accepted long ago that certain battles were simply unwinnable. ”Liz. It has been a very long day.”

”You’ve been home for two hours.”

”Two hours of recovery.”

”That’s enough.”

Mary made a sound from beneath her own pillow that could have been an agreement with either party and was strategically designed to commit to neither.

”Mary,” Lizzie said, pivoting with the fearless decisiveness of someone who had learned to treat a refusal as merely a redirection, ”you’ll be Viper. Viper doesn’t have to do much kicking. You can mostly hiss and be elegant.”

”I don’t want to hiss,” Mary said into the pillow.

”It’s very easy. It’s just—”

”Lizzie.”

”—a soft sound, like—”

”Elizabeth.”

The full name. The deployment of the full name was, in theory, a deterrent.

In practice, Lizzie absorbed it without visible effect.

Near the entry hall, the family’s bodyguard Mike stood with his arms crossed and the particular expression of a very large man who had decided, some time ago, that his professional dignity was perfectly compatible with the domestic chaos of this household. He was a broad-shouldered presence of thirty-eight years, with the easy, watchful stillness of someone who had done real security work and understood the difference between actual threats and seven-year-olds with kitchen utensils.

”Mike,” Lizzie said, ”you’re the snow leopard. Tai Lung.”

Mike considered this seriously, with the respect the offer deserved. ”I’m gonna be honest with you, kid — I think I’m about sixty pounds too big for the wire-fu.”

”You don’t have to do the wire-fu. You just have to look scary and then lose.”

”I can do the looking scary part,” he said.

”See?” Lizzie turned back to the sofa with the triumphant finality of someone who had just closed a negotiation. ”Mike’s in. It’s just you two.”

A long moment passed.

On the sofa, an entire silent conversation took place between the twins — the wordless, rapid-fire communication of two people who had shared not just a birthday but the first breath, the first light, the first sound of the world, and who had been reading each other across rooms ever since. Ashley’s eyes said: ’if we don’t do this she will be unbearable until midnight.’ Mary-Kate’s eyes said: ’I know.’ Ashley’s eyes said: ’we have an early call tomorrow.’ Mary-Kate’s eyes said: ’I know that too.’ Ashley’s eyes said: ’fine.’

They disentangled themselves from the throw pillows with the synchronized, resigned grace of professionals accepting an unavoidable obligation.

Lizzie’s face broke into a smile of such unguarded, luminous joy that even Ashley, tired to her bones, felt something soften in her chest.

”Okay,” Ashley said, standing and smoothing her striped sweater. ”But I’m telling you right now, Tigress would not do that spin thing you showed me last time. It’s not in the book.”

”It is in the spirit of the book,” Lizzie said seriously, taking up her fighting stance.

”That doesn’t mean it’s in the—”

”Begin!” Lizzie announced to no one in particular, and launched herself at the sofa cushions she had arranged as the walls of the Valley of Peace.

Mike watched from the doorway, arms still crossed, the faint suggestion of a smile at the corner of his mouth. He looked at the three girls — the two exhausted professionals doing their best, and the small, incandescent force of nature orchestrating all of it — and thought, not for the first time, that whatever the world had planned for this family, it was going to be thoroughly interesting.

On the coffee table, where it had been read and re-read until its spine had softened into a quiet, papery flexibility, sat a slightly battered copy of *Kung Fu Panda*. The Olsen girls’ personal copy, purchased by their mother at a bookstore in Brentwood three weeks earlier.

The receipt was still folded in the back cover. Tina had bought it because the cover caught her eye and the first page had caught something else — something she couldn’t quite articulate but trusted, the way she trusted fabric and color and the things that lasted.

She hadn’t been wrong.

---

Wyomissing, Pennsylvania —

Three thousand miles and a world away, the night was completely different.

Here the dark was a real dark — the full, dense, uncompromising darkness of a rural December in the mid-Atlantic, where the sky was close and black and thick with stars that city children never saw, and where the cold was not the mild, politely chilly cool of a Southern California winter evening but something with actual intent. Something that pressed against windows and found its way under doors and made the heat of a lit room feel like a specific, earned, cherished thing.

The Swift family’s Christmas tree farm in Wyomissing was exactly what it sounded like— eleven acres of carefully managed blue spruce and Douglas fir, their rows visible from the farmhouse windows in daylight as orderly dark lines against the white-sugared ground, though tonight everything was simply darkness and snow-silence and the particular hush that descended on working land after a December day.

Scott Swift was a stockbroker by profession — a patient, warm-voiced man who had developed, through years of explaining financial instruments to people who didn’t speak finance, an excellent instinct for when to press and when to wait. He applied this instinct now to his daughter.

Seven-year-old Tay was arranged in her bed the way she arranged herself every night at story time — not lying down, which was sleeping, which was the end, but sitting up with her back against the headboard and the duvet pulled up to her chin and her expression deploying, without calculation, every ounce of its natural, devastating sweetness. She had a face that made adults feel that what she was asking for was actually what they had wanted to give her all along.

Her father had seen that she’d been singing almost constantly from age three — music was not something Tay had chosen so much as something she had simply arrived already containing, the way some children arrived already knowing how to organize a room or already having opinions about color. It was constitutive. It was structural.

But tonight she wasn’t singing. Tonight she was pressing both small hands flat on the cover of *Kung Fu Panda* as though she could extract the next Chapter through the palms.

”Daddy,” she said, ”Master Oogway didn’t just say that. He said it because he knew. He knew Po was the Dragon Warrior the whole time, right? He set the whole thing in motion himself. He’s the secret architect.”

Scott looked at his daughter over his reading glasses. This was not, as far as he could tell, a question a seven-year-old was supposed to be asking about a children’s book.

”What makes you think that?” he asked, with genuine curiosity.

”Because of the peach tree,” she said immediately. ”The whole speech about the peach tree isn’t about fruit. It’s about what you plant and how long you’re willing to wait for it to grow.” She pulled the book closer. ”And Oogway planted *Po*. He’d been waiting for him his whole life. The scroll being empty isn’t an accident, it’s the answer. Because the answer was never going to be written down. Some things you have to figure out yourself.”

Scott sat very still on the edge of her bed for a moment.

He had three degrees, a successful career, and twenty years of professional experience reading people. He did not, at this moment, entirely know what to do with his seven-year-old daughter.

”Okay,” he said, taking his reading glasses off entirely, which was a signal they both understood — it meant he was here fully now, not half-reading, fully present. ”Tell me more about what you think is happening.”

Tay pulled her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them, her bright eyes moving to the middle distance the way they did when she was working something out.

”The story is about believing,” she said. ”But it’s not about believing in yourself the way people always say it. It’s more specific than that. It’s about believing in *what you already are* instead of trying to become something different.” She paused. ”Po doesn’t get better by training to be like Tigress. He gets better by becoming more like himself. That’s the real lesson.”

Outside, the winter held the farm in its cold, still hands. The snow on the fir trees held its breath.

Scott put down the book and looked at his daughter — this small, serious person with her yellow hair and her reading-glasses-off attention and her enormous, unhurried inner life — and felt, the way he sometimes felt, that he was in the presence of something he was not entirely equipped to measure. Something that was going to require, from both of them, a great deal of patience and a great deal of faith.

”You know what I think?” he said.

”What?”

”I think you should write that down. What you just said about believing in what you already are.”

*****

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