Zenith of Desire: The Hollywood Incubus

Yes, there is not going to be much domestic politics in this book. And when I say politics, I mean government politics within a country. However, world politics will absolutely be present, such as the current Asian financial crisis and other global events that directly affect the economy and power structures.

As for the victims of Pdfs like Jeffrey and those kinds of people, I will do my research first. If it involves Marvin’s girls or people close to him, then he will act. But for others, do not forget that he is still a demon—his soul is most rotten even after assemblimg with two humans souls. As long as such things are not directly in front of him or affecting his personal world, he would not go out of his way to stop them.

However, if we focus on another side of his character—the attention-whore side that eats admiration and public image—then the argument changes. In that case, he would absolutely do everything in his power to stop it if it meant elevating his reputation popularity and placing his name in the public spotlight, though not before becoming just as rich and powerful as the people he intends to oppose.

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******

At seven-fifty, Amy walked softly down the grand, sunlit corridors of the estate. The house was entirely silent, save for the ticking of a grandfather clock in the foyer.

She pushed open the doors to the master study.

The room was completely empty.

This, Amy had quickly learned, was not unusual. Marvin’s relationship with conventional human hours was best described as entirely flexible. He operated in sudden bursts of concentrated, almost frightening productivity that bore no apparent relationship to the sun or the clock. And then, just as suddenly, he would disappear into whatever private, interior space his brilliant mind occupied when he was not actively conducting global business. He would lock himself in the music room, or the library, and he would only emerge again when something required his attention.

She had learned in forty-seven days not to read any panic or significance into his whereabouts. He was an entity that was always, eventually, exactly where he needed to be.

Amy walked over to his desk. She placed the leather folio gently onto the surface, squaring it with the brass edge of the blotter in the exact way he preferred.

She lingered in the empty study for a moment. Even with Marvin nowhere in sight, the room felt thick with his presence. The faint, lingering scent of his body hung in the air, wrapping around her like a warm, invisible blanket. She smoothed her skirt, took a deep breath of the charged air, and retreated back to her own office to complete the rest of her list.

Items two through eleven occupied her morning in the orderly satisfying way that properly made lists do. Each task completed itself and made room for the next.

Sitting entirely alone in her office, the monumental work of actively managing Marvin’s professional existence moved through its paces with the rapid-fire rhythm that Amy had spent the last six weeks building entirely from the ground up. She managed CAA scheduling frameworks with Jeff’s office. She authorized secure wire transfers for the Zenith Trust. She fielded frantic calls from Columbia Records executives who were begging for updates on the single he released.

It was, by any objective, rational measure, an extraordinarily terrifying job.

She had understood this reality from the very beginning. From the initial, shocking phone call that pulled her away from Minnesota, right through to the end of her grueling trial period, she had understood that what she was being incorporated into was something that simply did not have an adequate, earthly precedent.

But what she had not fully understood, until she was locked completely inside it, was the *quality* of the thing.

The music was the first part of it.

She had known, of course, that Marvin was a prodigy. But what she had not known—what could absolutely never be known secondhand, from a glowing reputation or a Platinum-certified CD—was what it actually felt like to be standing in the room when Marvin played an instrument.

As she filed away a stack of Miramax contacts, Amy paused, her hands resting on the cool metal of the filing cabinet. Her mind drifted back to a memory.

She still vividly remembered a Tuesday afternoon, about three weeks into her trial period.

The volume of incoming calls from Wall Street brokers and Hollywood producers had reached a deafening pitch. Amy had been trying to manage the inferno with her characteristic Midwestern composure, but something deep underneath had been quietly fraying. She had been sitting at her desk, fighting back a sudden, overwhelming wave of anxious tears, feeling completely out of her depth.

Marvin had appeared in her doorway. He hadn’t asked her what was wrong. He had simply commanded her to leave the phones and follow him.

He had led her to the grand drawing room, seated himself at the ebony Steinway piano, and played for forty-five minutes without stopping.

Standing alone in her office now, weeks later, Amy closed her eyes, and she could still feel the phantom sensation of that music vibrating in her chest.

She had trained extensively in classical music, dance, and voice. But as she had sat in the velvet armchair that Tuesday, listening to him play, she had felt something impossible happen to the very architecture of her nervous system.

It was not merely that he was technically extraordinary. It was the terrifying, beautiful *quality of intention* in the playing.

It had been the uninterrupted presence of his soul pouring into the ivory keys.

There was no approximation in his art. Everything was exact, and the exactness was a warm, enveloping certainty.

But the most devastating realization of all had been the orientation of the music.

He had not simply played the piano to show off. The heavy magic of the music had been actively oriented directly toward *her*. He had selected the pieces, the chords, and the tempos with what she gradually understood was an intimate, flawless knowledge of her specific nervous system.

He had found the exact, resonant frequencies that her exhausted body responded to. He had woven the emotional textures that her frayed, panicked mind needed to heal.

*For her specifically.*

The music had arrived not as a boss’s demonstration of skill, but as an intimate gift that had been carefully measured and perfectly fitted before it was ever presented to her ears. And Amy had no earthly framework for receiving this level of profound, soul-deep intimacy from this little man. The only framework she had was the one her body had instinctively constructed: which was simply to receive it fully, let it wash over her like a warm, golden tide, and deal with the psychological implications later.

She opened her eyes, looking around her quiet, impeccably organized office.

She had spent the last weeks dealing with those implications.

The primary implication was that she was—to a degree that she found simultaneously deeply embarrassing and completely impossible to logically argue with—entirely devoted to him.

She was devoted to the professional wellbeing and the personal regard of the little man who was, in several significant, undeniable ways, the most extraordinary, terrifying person she had ever met in her life. He was not just the most successful. He was the most *substantial*. He was the most fully present, operating without the exhausting, pathetic performance and management of impression that she had come to understand as the baseline, tragic condition of every adult she had ever known.

He was eleven years old.

She was twenty-two.

These two biological facts existed simultaneously with everything else in her daily reality, and they did not resolve. Her logical brain knew his age, but her soul looked at him and saw an impossibly handsome little man.

These facts existed simultaneously with everything else and did not, precisely, resolve.

The sharp, sudden trill of the multi-line telephone completely shattered the quiet introspection of her office.

Amy instantly snapped out of her reverie.

---

By six PM, the monumental work on the Asian Vanguard was officially complete.

The 112-page consolidation report had been delivered, the follow-up items had been actioned, the international communications had been sent, and Amy’s handwritten list had been reduced from seventeen items to a mere two—both of which were minor administrative carry-forwards safely relegated to tomorrow.

She gathered her things from the borrowed office in the San Marino estate. She packed her leather tote bag, slipped her notebook inside, and grabbed her light trench coat, which she had brought that morning to ward off a crisp August chill that had completely failed to materialize in the California sun.

She left the sprawling, silent mansion and stepped out into the golden evening.

The drive home took exactly twenty-two minutes. Amy had learned the route in her very first week, memorizing the intricate sequence of turns and backstreets that navigated her from the hyper-exclusive enclave of San Marino to her West Hollywood apartment, minimizing the particular, soul-crushing kind of Los Angeles traffic that routinely turned ordinary distances into grueling negotiations with geography.

The apartment was a two-bedroom on the third floor of a beautiful art-deco building, tucked away on a quiet, tree-lined street just one block off the main commercial corridor. By any objective LA standard, it was a masterpiece. It was the exact kind of apartment that people who had been grinding in the city for a decade paying attention to the rental market coveted but could never actually afford.

The building was well maintained. The neighborhood was safe. The ceilings were towering, the original crown molding was pristine, and the floor-to-ceiling windows allowed in a natural light that made the big rooms feel larger than their square footage suggested.

And Amy paid nothing for it.

The entire building, she had discovered entirely by accident in her third week while cross-referencing a property holding for a different financial purpose, was owned outright by the Meyers Trust. It was a microscopic fraction of the Meyers family’s West Hollywood real estate portfolio.

Furthermore, she was currently receiving four times her initial, already generous starting salary since her trial period had officially ended.

Marvin was paying her fifty thousand dollars a month. It was a huge sum—more liquid cash than she had made in her previous two years of grinding at regional theaters and dinner shows combined. She had accepted the direct deposits with the professional composure of someone who fundamentally understood that the high-stakes global work she was executing bore approximately that exact relationship to her previous employment.

It was, by any measure, transformational employment.

She parked her car in the secure underground garage, stepped into the private elevator, and sighed anyway.

The heavy, ragged sigh had nothing to do with the money, the luxury apartment, or the professional opportunity, all of which were extraordinary and which she was profoundly grateful for.

The sigh was about the fact that it was six o’clock in the evening on the twentieth of August, and Marvin Meyers had not called her.

She hasn’t seen him all day.

She had not told him.

This was the first, most logical relevant fact, and it was the one she stubbornly kept returning to as she walked down the carpeted hallway toward her door. Her bag hung heavy over one shoulder, and she was radiating the quality of self-directed exasperation that comes from being deeply disappointed by something you had no reasonable, logical grounds to expect in the first place.

She had not told him her birthday was today. In forty-seven days of working together side-by-side, she had never once mentioned it.

He was eleven years old. Most eleven-year-old boys did not track the birthdays of their own parents, let alone the birthdays of their professional administrative staff. The expectation was entirely, pathetically irrational.

She rationally knew all of this.

She still felt the sting of it deeply in her chest.

”Amy,” she whispered to herself quietly, stopping in front of her door to dig through her purse for her keys. ”There is no reasonable, logical basis for the pathetic feeling you are currently having. You are going to go inside, you are going to make a cup of chamomile tea, you are going to watch a sitcom on television, and this will be a perfectly peaceful Tuesday evening.”

She found the brass key, her fingers cold against the metal.

”He is eleven,” she muttered, sliding the key into the deadbolt. ”He has been actively navigating three Pacific Rim financial markets today. He’s recording a Platinum EP. He’s doing whatever brilliant things he does when he disappears into the east wing of the estate. He does not know it is your birthday. This is not evidence of anything except the ordinary limits of other people’s awareness of information they were never given.”

She turned the key. ”Next year, you’ll mention it a week in advance. It will be completely fine.”

The heavy door swung open. She stepped inside, dropping her keys into the ceramic bowl by the door, and reached out blindly in the dark foyer to find the light switch.

She found it. The warm lighting of the apartment flickered to life.

And the voice that came from the open kitchen—warm, precise, and containing that devastating quality of composed, unhurried pleasure that she had learned in days was his natural register—began to sing.

”Happy birthday to you...”

Amy made a sound. She was not entirely sure what human sound it was. It was a choked mixture of shock recognition, and something else entirely that arrived in her chest before she had the time to sort it into its logical component parts. Both of her hands flew up to cover her mouth as she took in the scene in her own apartment.

Marvin was standing behind her marble kitchen island.

He was wearing a crisp, tailored white button-down shirt. The cuffs were casually rolled up to his elbows in the exact way she had seen him wear them when he was working on a model that required sustained focus.

And he was holding a massive cake on a glass pedestal stand in both of his hands, presenting it with the ceremonial, gravity of a little man offering a priceless tribute that had been prepared with the utmost seriousness.

The cake was enormous. It was a towering red velvet—she could immediately tell from the deep, rich crimson color of the visible crumb at the base, and the thick, creamy warmth of the cream cheese frosting that covered it in sweeping peaks.

And it was studded with lit candles. They flickered beautifully, casting a warm, dancing glow over the little man’s handsome features. She counted them automatically, without even meaning to.

Twenty-three.

He sang the rest of the song with the clean directness that characterized everything he did. His voice wasn’t a thin, boyish treble; it was a rich, velvety baritone, carrying the simple, traditional melody with a profound warmth that made the familiar lyrics feel vastly less like a polite social obligation, and infinitely more like an actual, intimate communication from his soul to hers.

*****

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