The Face

school, his favorite food, his favorite color, his favorite world-famous movie star.
        They were always trying to cadge some Ritalin or antidepressants from Fric. They refused to believe that his only prescription was for asthma medication.
        If not by the pool, he might dine dangerously with fine china and antique silverware at a table in the rose garden, keeping his inhaler ready on a dessert plate in the event that a breeze stirred up enough pollen to trigger an asthma attack.
        Sometimes he ate from a lap tray while ensconced in one of the sixty comfortable armchairs in the screening room, which had recently been remodeled using the ornate Art Deco-style Pantages Theater, in Los Angeles, as inspiration.
        The screening-room equipment could handle film, all formats of videotape, DVDs, and broadcast-television signals, projecting them onto a screen larger than many in the average suburban multiplex.
        [187] To watch videos and DVDs, Fric didn’t need the assistance of a projectionist. Sitting in the center seat in the center row, adjacent to the control console, he could run his own show.
        Sometimes, when he knew that no cleaning had been scheduled in the theater, when he was certain that no one would come looking for him, he locked the door to ensure privacy, and he loaded the DVD player with one of his father’s movies.
        Being seen watching a Ghost Dad movie was unthinkable.
        Not that they sucked. Some of them sucked, of course, because no star rang the big bell every time. But some were all right. Some were cool. A few were even amazing.
        If anyone were to see him watching his father’s movies under these circumstances, however, he would be the National Academy of Nerds’ choice for Greatest Nerd of the Decade. Maybe of the century. The Pathetic Losers Club would vote him a free lifetime membership.
        Mr. Hachette, the psychopathic chef related to the Frankenstein family, would mock him with sneers and by drawing sly comparisons between Fric’s sticklike physique and his father’s maximum buffness.
        Anyway, in the only occupied seat of sixty, with the ornate Art Deco ceiling soaring thirty-four feet overhead, Fric sometimes sat in the dark and ran Ghost Dad’s movies on the huge screen. Drenched in Dolby surround sound.
        He watched certain films for the stories, though he’d seen them many times. He watched others for blow-out-the-walls special effects.
        And always in his father’s performances, Fric looked for the qualities, the charms, the expressions, and the bits of business that made millions of people all over the world love Channing Manheim.
        In the better films, such moments abounded. Even in the suckiest of the sucky, however, there were scenes in which you couldn’t help but like the guy, admire him, want so much to hang out with him.
        [188] When citing the brightest moments in his finest films, critics had said that Fric’s father was magical. “Magical” sounded stupid, like gooey girl gush, embarrassing, but it was the right word.
        Sometimes you watched him on the big screen, and he seemed more colorful, more real than anyone you’d ever known. Or ever would know.
        This super-real quality couldn’t be explained by the giant size of his projected image or by the visual genius of the cameraman. Nor by the brilliance of the director-most being no more brilliant than a boiled potato-nor by the layered details achieved through digital technology. Most actors, including stars, didn’t have the Manheim magic even when they worked with the best directors and technicians.
        You watched him up there, and he seemed to have been everywhere, to have seen everything, to know all that could be known. He seemed to be wiser, more caring, funnier, and braver than anyone, anywhere, ever-as though he lived in six dimensions while everyone else had to live in only three.
        Fric had studied certain scenes over and over again, scores of times, maybe a hundred times in some cases, until they seemed as real to him as any moments he had actually spent with his father.
        Once in a while, when he went to bed drag-ass tired, but was able to settle only on the twilight edge of sleep, or when he woke incompletely in the middle of the night yet continued to skate upon the surface of a temporarily frozen dream, those special movie scenes with his father did seem real to Fric. They