American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  —Hollywood agent Williams Farquarsen is still missing. Police say he disappeared Thursday afternoon following a meeting with Warner Communications Vice Chairman Ted Ashley—

  The radio didn’t provide much, just reiterated that he was gone. Four days wasn’t long for anyone else, but Williams’s movements were so predictable. Even the cops knew this wasn’t normal.

  —is no suspicion of criminal activity, and Farquarsen is not believed to have fled the country—

  Marnie spotted a gas station. “Pull over.”

  We’d just gotten off the 10 and were a few miles north of their house on Lincoln Boulevard. Marnie raced to the pay phones, and the three of us kids sat in stilted silence under the filling island’s strips of yellow neon. There was the oily reek of gasoline. The radio repeated the facts. Will the elder was a no-show for work on Friday and had missed a number of important meetings over the weekend. It was now Monday night.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to my friend. What else should I have said? But when Little Will turned and met my gaze, I realized I shouldn’t have said anything at all.

  “C’mon,” he said to Sev. “Let’s go get some cigs.”

  “Grab me some gum,” I said, but he ignored me.

  The two of them walked off to the mini-mart and left me sitting in the car. Was something wrong with young Will’s response? It seems to me now a healthy effort toward denial. I watched Marnie pump quarters into the phone, calling and re-calling Will’s friends until she could find someone who might give her a straight answer. Where was I supposed to go? I lay in the backseat with both doors open and sucked air, sick exhaust, the diesel fumes from the freeway. The night was cool, and the traffic on the 10 made a frantic, serpentine hiss. But there wasn’t any place to run from it, nowhere I could imagine where bad news wouldn’t eventually find us.

  XIV

  WILLIAMS THE ELDER never came home. He just didn’t surface. Weeks passed, and there were no developments.

  “Anything, Mom?” My friend stood in his bathing suit, at my house, dripping after a swim. Every day he called home and each time received the same answer, Marnie’s sharp voice spiking from the receiver.

  “Nothing, kid. They’re still looking.”

  My own lungs seemed to pump with dread. Just as Beau had revealed himself to me a few years ago as my true father, to my ecstasy and despair, Williams’s vanishing filled me with a primary terror. The events felt related. Could dads just come and go? The cops interviewed Severin; they interviewed Beau. They interviewed everyone remotely close to the situation, including me. Everything was cloudy: the way Will’s Ferrari was still garaged in the Marina, for example, or the way his monogrammed shirts still hung undisturbed in his closet, every last one accounted for. The situation fascinated Hollywood. Where had Williams gone? Teddy became the agency’s acting president. People speculated like crazy—yes, even Beau came under some suspicion—but soon enough, they grew tired of it. Williams’s life left so few toeholds: there were no drug problems, no mistresses, no gambling debts or mob ties. By mid-July the case had been pushed back into the deeper reaches of the Metro section, the City pages of the Herald Examiner. Williams Farquarsen was missing. Well, yes, but there were still the Olympic Games and Miss America’s resignation and the first female space walker to think about. Hollywood wasn’t everything, after all. Young Williams and I hunkered down that summer at my house. It was just too chilly, too vacant at his. Marnie and my mom, who’d recently begun dating a smooth New York producer type named Peter Klane—he would appear suddenly in his battered maroon Mercedes, take unexplained flights to Copenhagen or Rio—formed a loose federation based on grief. My friends and I stuck together, and young Williams stayed at my place for an entire month while our mothers went out to dinner and commiserated over Soave Bolla and steamed clams. Then one afternoon the phone rang. My mom picked it up downstairs. I knew immediately. Her voice was somber, serious in a way that had become unusual.

  “Will?” she called up. “It’s Marnie.”

  He and I were in my room. It made little difference whether we were high, now. The paranoia was with us all the time. I lay on my bed reading The Dharma Bums and Williams sat by the window, smoking. Anyone looking would’ve seen not stoners but students, two short-haired boys in khakis with coffee mugs. In a few weeks, we’d enter eleventh grade. I stood up and turned down the stereo on Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Williams picked up the tan phone on my nightstand.

  “Mom?”

  What had I done with that phone, besides talk with people to whom I had nothing to say, call 976 lines and jerk off to the recorded voices of women? Had it ever relayed anything of importance to me? Williams listened in silence, and I went into the hall. Whatever Marnie was telling him was for his ears alone.

  “Nate?” My mother stood at the bottom of the stairs. “Williams’s dad is dead.”

  She stared up at me. She could still do a convincing impersonation of a rational human being when she needed to. Her big square sunglasses were propped on her head and her hair was pulled back, her gaunt, alcoholic face a rictus of concern.

  “I’m sorry, Nate.”

  “I am, too.”

  That summer, my mother was writing a movie about Princess Grace. Her office, that little shed out by our swimming pool, was a hothouse ruin of gin bottles, index cards, and ashtrays, typed sheets cysted with Liquid Paper. Her skin was crisscrossed with capillaries.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “He was mugged.”

  “Seriously?”

  Would I have believed her even if she were telling the truth?

  “On the street, downtown. It happened while you were away, but the body wasn’t identified at the morgue.”

  I watched my mother. I’d be able to identify her no matter what, so something would’ve had to mangle Williams Farquarsen’s body quite a bit before no one could name it.

  “How could they not have identified him?”

  She shrugged. “He wasn’t carrying an ID. They had the body as a John Doe. Apparently it was an accident. They think he got hurt during a struggle and bled to death.”

  The pieces all fit, but I wasn’t sure I believed them. Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic. So said the Raymond Chandler essay my English teacher had assigned me, and this was certainly realistic enough. But at sixteen you’re suspicious of everyone and everything, so who knew? Maybe it was true, maybe the elder Williams had gone to an event—of what kind I didn’t know, since downtown was mostly the province of painters and punks, not Hollywood machers—then been jumped and beaten up and left to bleed out on the street. Maybe he’d been scooped off the muck-brown pavement and locked in a metal drawer alongside the drunks and the transients no one ever wondered about anyway. Some lazy beat cop could’ve written him off as such. But nothing to identify him at all? And Williams was a martial artist, so any mugger would’ve had to be swift.

  “I see,” I said. Staring down at my mother’s narrow, semiderelict face.

  Most of her life was intolerable. If I could reel her back into its earlier years, if I could find its little seams of hope or happiness, I would. Just because a life is awful doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.

  “Poor Williams,” she said, meaning my friend. “Poor kid.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Be good to him, Nate. Look after him.”

  She knew something I didn’t. For all the brute and horrible and careless acts she herself would commit, she knew I wasn’t a good enough friend: I was already too selfish. Williams came out of my room a moment later. He looked so adult, in that way actual adults don’t often, calm and responsible behind his tortoiseshell glasses. He flicked a strand of hair off his forehead.

  “My dad died.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, dude.”

  “He was jumped on the street.”

  My mother turned away. I can imagine what this looked like to her—two boys discussing this as if it were anything
speakable, sensical.

  “Dude,” I said. De profundis. What matter if I sounded like a future beer commercial? “I’m so sorry.”

  Williams nodded. Whatever his mother had told him, it wasn’t exactly identical but it was close. A mugging. What an end for a Hollywood ruler, a man who’d governed everything but the tides.

  “Thanks.” His face was stark in its privacy. “I appreciate that.”

  Williams, my friend, was the first of us to grow up all the way. Unless, in fact, he was the last. Downstairs, my mother wept in the kitchen, her sobs competing with the clatter of dishes as she put them away. Our dog, a psychotic terrier, was chasing something out in the yard, the sound of his voice reduced to a rude gargle. I could hear his nails scrabbling on concrete, my mother’s yips and wails. I opened my mouth but found nothing more articulate to offer, myself.

  PART FOUR: RECURRING

  I

  “WILLIAMS! WAKE UP, MAN! Wake the fuck up!”

  He lolled in the front seat. A cold, predawn wind fluttered in my ears, whistled along the car’s rubberized window seams. And because I couldn’t do anything, because Severin was still zooming toward a hospital that didn’t exist, I took it upon myself to pull Will’s damp hair and shake him.

  “Wake up, buddy! Come on!”

  He was our friend. He may have been an idiot, too, but were we supposed to feel any less for him?

  “Sev, what the fuck?” I yelled. We were crossing La Cienega, effectively killing our chances of reaching a proper hospital in time. You went east into deep Hollywood and you were left with Kaiser Permanente, the sorts of places that would reject our shitty insurance plans instead of remembering who our fathers were. “This isn’t the moment to get nostalgic!”

  My brother banked sharply down La Cienega, pulling his Gremlin at a ninety-degree angle across what would’ve been a wall of traffic were it not 4:00 AM. Down a steep hill, past the strange ruin of the Circus Maximus. Its cracked clown faces yawned, cattails breaking through its whorehouse decay.

  “What are you doing, Sev? Playing Steve fucking McQueen?”

  He cackled. Just messing with you.

  “Are you high? Did you shoot up earlier, too?”

  “Nope.”

  The little Gremlin shot down the hill. First gear . . . second gear . . . I couldn’t help it either; the Beach Boys rang inside my head. Day was just beginning to turn across the flats, and we sped through the flashing yellow light at Fountain, then caught the green at Santa Monica. This was the fastest way to the hospital, the reconstructed Cedars-Sinai over by the Beverly Center. My brother knew what he was doing all along.

  “Why did you say Cedars of Lebanon, buddy? How come?”

  He shrugged. To him the distinctions were practically moot: the past was the present, the present was the future. Severin knew just how to live. We raced along La Cienega, the moon expensive overhead, the sky’s rich purple now beginning to lighten. A strip club called the Seventh Veil, a wig shop flashed past. Was there anything on this earth that did not involve the donning or removal of our disguises? We turned right on Beverly and then left on George Burns Road, pulling up in front of the ER.

  “Are you using, Sev?” I jumped out of the backseat and Sev from the front, and we ran around to pull Williams out of the passenger side. “Have you been?”

  “A little.” The doors gasped open, their respiratory sound reassuring as we lugged Will into the lobby. “Occasionally.”

  “Occasionally, what”—Will sagged, and we buckled along with him—“what does that mean, Severin, occasionally? You don’t do this drug occasionally. It fucks you up, as you can see.”

  I dropped my half, let Severin ballast Williams—screw them both, really, again—as I ran to the nurses’ station and started jabbering at the woman behind the counter.

  “Our friend . . . messed up, OD’d, heroin . . . help.”

  “What? What’s the problem, heah?”

  The woman was in her forties, possibly Jamaican. She was café con leche–colored, with freckles and a big, round face. She seemed to know her part.

  “My friend overdosed.” I spoke to the Plexiglas. “An hour, maybe two hours ago. I think he might die.”

  Other people concentrate our energies. They make our selves possible, force us to be more than just a shrieking puddle of id. This woman’s calm directed me. She leaned back from her desk, turning her wide face—it was almost as big as Beau’s, but it was more tender in its froggy unhappiness—to an orderly. Helpdisboy, I think she said. The orderly, who was big and strapping and dreadlocked himself, came round.

  “What happened?”

  I told him. My brother was still standing near the door with Williams hanging off him, like King Kong slewing from the side of his skyscraper. There was something funny about stolid Sev waiting there with Will, who lolled and drooled like the world’s worst (or best, I suppose, depending) prom date. But then there is something funny about everything.

  “Thanks,” Sev grunted, as the orderly took the burden off his hands.

  The orderly carried Will over to a gurney with ease. “When did this happen?”

  “An hour or two ago,” Severin said. “We found him like this.”

  Over in the ER’s waiting area was a corkscrew-curled Hispanic woman with her fever-red baby, an older couple, and a pair of kids—younger than us—who sat on either side of a guy who was obviously having a hard time of his own, a bad drug experience that had him blinking, dazed, palpitating. The orderly lay Williams down on the gurney and was joined by another.

  “Wake up,” this new one said, an orange-haired white guy with a vinegar mustache, a little line of fur just like the stoner kids used to grow. “C’mon, Sleeping Beauty. Wake up, wake up!”

  “That’s what you’re supposed to do?” I said. The two orderlies shook him and slapped him, cuffing his face as they lifted under his neck to keep him from gagging on his tongue. “We could’ve done that.”

  “Shh.” Severin dragged me aside. “Let them do their jobs.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to give him an adrenaline shot?” I shouted. “Something?”

  They wheeled him through some double doors, taking him away from us. It was the theft of our responsibility, but what could we do? The waiting room was a warm, chalky blue, filled with ficus plants and an encouraging Freon glow. There were televisions in every corner. This place was a friendly and beautiful machine, where it seemed even the scrawny kid who sat blinking in his chair—I could practically feel his seizured pulse from here—was part of the plan.

  “How high are you?” I asked Sev. Imagine, that I was still young enough to believe what the hospital signaled, to be lulled by its intimations of safety. “What are you on?”

  “Nothing, now.”

  “Then why? Severin, why are you doing that shit, ever?”

  “I like it.”

  We were such children, and so you might forgive the lunkheadedness of this response. Still, such raging, idiotic self-centeredness made me seethe.

  “You fucking like it? Who’s the asshole romantic now, Sev? You’re always on me about my Chandler thing, but who’s your model? Thomas De Quincey?”

  “I’m not shooting it.”

  The older couple nearby watched us. Perhaps they were just looking for an out, a distraction from their own trauma. They clung to each other as if for dear life, their bodies blending in a mass of tan clothes, walnut skin, dirty sneakers, and gray hair. I hope to die just so some day, in some smashed-up, transhuman calamity.

  “I’m only smoking it. And not very often, Nate. Once a month, if that.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “Williams and I have done it a few times, that’s all. I didn’t know he was shooting it.”

  “Oh, excuse you.”

  “No, really. I mean it.” We sat down in a pair of black-pleather seats beside a plastic table with magazines, sports pages, newspapers abandoned by last night’s sufferers. “There’s a difference between exper
imenting and being strung out.”

  “Really? Why don’t you explain that difference, huh? When exactly does an interest become a need?”

  I wondered, not for the first time, what was really going on in my brother’s head. What Will had done wasn’t truly a surprise. It was in character. He’d been a mad dog since early childhood, and for him to slip off in the afternoon to cop on Bonnie Brae—now I could guess where he’d been—was just another dunderheaded act of self-destruction in a lifelong series of the same. But what about Severin? Wherever he went he presented the face of mastery, a mellow intellectual calm. He’d done this since we were teenagers. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t troubled. Far from it. Right now he just shook his head.

  “He always needed to be first,” he murmured. “Will has always wanted to be first with everything.”

  “He might be the first one to die.”

  He stood up and went out to move his car. I watched him go, still wondering a bit what made him tick. He certainly had the trauma to back up all sorts of emotional disturbance, a history no less ruinous than Will’s. But I’d never seen him act on it. He loped down the emergency room drive and vanished, for a moment, into the day. The air had lightened, shifted from rich dark to anxious gray. We’d gone from nighttime emergency to near daylight, to a place where our disasters were suddenly unromantic. There was no grand design here, no idea that our Will was either a hero or a victim. He was just a statistic, if that.

  “What d’you think happens when we die?” I said when Severin came back, after he’d nestled down in one of the plastic chairs with the paper.

  “You wanna get metaphysical?” Severin lowered the sports section, which was two days old but which—unsurprisingly, given his bent—seemed to interest him as much as tomorrow’s. More. “Is this really the time?”

  “When is it not the time?”

  Severin watched me. He looked wry, amused, the way you were supposed to look when you’d been up all night after going to a rock concert and were now enjoying the paper with a friend.