Static!

by Michael R Collings

  The two men did not notice him as he passed; they were lying on their stomachs, apparently asleep. Their elbows touched.

  The girl waited for him. Payne thought he saw relief flicker across her face when he emerged from behind the waist-high boulders. He was wearing swim trunks. Had she expected something else?

  He caught up with her, smiled, and asked, “What’s on the other side?” as he gestured back to the ledge jutting into the ocean.

  The sand was gray now, not white. The rocks were reddish-brown, bearded with dying seaweed and locked barnacles. There were no voices at all.

  “Back there? Not much. Mostly rocks. No beaches, at least not for a mile or so. I like to walk there. There’s never anyone else there, or at least not very many. I can be alone there, to think.”

  “Oh. I see.” He started to turn away.

  “Hey,” she said with a laugh, “that’s okay. I’ve thought my quota of deep thoughts for today. I’m just leaving.”

  “Oh.”

  They walked a few more steps. Payne felt urged to speak but lacked words. He dug his toes into the hot sand.

  “Live around here?” he finally managed.

  “Down the highway. And you?”

  “In the hills. Tamarind Valley.”

  “I’ve been almost everywhere in the area, but never there,” she said, sounding mildly surprised. “I’ve heard it’s nice.”

  “Yeah. It is. I like it. I’ve only lived there a few weeks, though.” As if that explained something important.

  They reached the end of the beach and began climbing the rocks. Their silence remained unbroken except for an occasional watch out, there or you okay on the trickier parts, until they both dropped the last foot or so onto the damp sand at Zuma. By then, Payne already knew a lot about her.

  Her name was Cathy Litton. She was a student in LA. She had been born in the city and lived her life there, moving from suburb to suburb with her family but always circling like an eternal satellite of Los Angeles. Now she shared an apartment with two girls in the older part of the city south of Santa Monica. She loved walking along the beach...obviously!...and—what luck!—she loved watching old films.

  That much he learned as they walked from the point to the parking lot. By then he had forgotten his dream, his panic, even his uncharacteristic boldness in calling out to her, although he was certainly pleased that he had done so. She seemed to like him; he certainly liked her.

  “How about lunch?” she said as they neared the lot.

  “Here?” He glanced at the beach, this part now crowded with families and umbrellas and volleyball nets where an hour or so earlier there had been only sea gulls and silence. “I didn’t bring anything.” That last came out more apologetic than he liked.

  “Neither did I. And not here. Follow me.” She slipped into a small car waiting only two down from Payne’s and pulled out of the parking space and onto the roadway, gunning her engine impatiently as he fumbled for the key to his Toyota—shit, the thing looked a wreck next to hers and it wasn’t polished and he had left a pile of papers in the back window where she could see what a clod he was and it won’t turn over shit what’s wrong now the thing better start this time. It did.

  He followed her along PCH, never lagging more than a couple of car lengths behind, pulling closer when someone threatened to cut between them. Not fifteen minutes later, she turned into the shopping area in Malibu.

  John’s, a little sandwich place, was almost hidden behind a row of stores. The place was nothing more than a plain wooden counter where you ordered, a pick-up window where the cooks yelled out the numbers of the orders, and some benches and tables outside in the middle of a rose garden.

  It was not what Payne expected. The benches were bare wood but aged and weathered, scarred by hundreds, probably thousands, actually, of seam rivets from Levi’s back pockets until the wood seemed almost malleable, like some oddly grained upholstery.

  They ate lunch together at John’s. It was not a date really, he kept telling himself, as if trying not to let his hopes build too high. They were just eating in the same place, at the same table, at the same time.

  The sandwiches were great, he decided, but because the alternative would have been to talk with Cathy, he ate more quickly than usual. Then he sat and stared at the orange rind curling along the side of his paper plate. Even though he had enjoyed the lunch, sitting outside and eating next to a beautiful woman who seemed to like him, he felt suddenly self-conscious. There was a long moment of silence.

  “Look,” he said finally, staring at a single red-and-white rosebud unfurling a yard away. “You don’t really know me or anything, but if you’d be interested, I make a great spaghetti dinner and I have hundreds of old films on videocassette. If you’d like to...?

  “Come up and see my etchings, eh?” Cathy said, twirling an invisible mustache and dropping her voice into a creaky basso in imitation of a leering, lascivious melodrama villain.

  Payne flushed and faced her, his mouth working but no sounds coming.

  “No,” he finally squeaked, embarrassed by her response as much as by his reaction.

  “Hey,” she said, recognizing her mistake. “I’m sorry. It’s just that sometimes guys...well, sometimes they come on stronger than I want.”

  He started to stand but she laid her hand on his arm. “No, I’m really sorry,” she said. “That crack wasn’t called for.” She paused a second, looking directly at him. “And I love spaghetti.” She tugged at his shirt sleeve, using gentle force to pull him back to the bench. She spoke again.

  He looked away.

  After a moment, “Look, I’m used to guys and lines. I’m not bad-looking, it happens to me often enough. I guess so often that when the real thing happened just now, I didn’t recognize it. Seriously, I would love to come over. Do you have Casablanca?”

  “Sure.” He turned toward her.

  “It’s my favorite.”

  He brightened. “Okay. Can you come now? You could follow me into Tamarind Valley. I’d only have to stop to pick up a few things at the store.” He felt childishly eager and for a moment thought Cathy might agree. Instead she glanced at her watch and shook her head.

  “I can’t right now. I’ve got an appointment at three.” She saw him begin to retreat again. “Seriously. No line this time. But I can get to Tamarind Valley by five-thirty or six. Okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Great. It’s set.” She rested her hand on his arm again. “I’ve always wanted to see Tamarind Valley. Even the name sounds peaceful and quiet.”

  He walked her to her car. “Five-thirty or six,” he called into her open car window as she backed out of her parking place.

  “Right,” she called back.

  He watched until she pulled out of the parking lot and disappeared between the rows of stores. His car was not far away, glistening in the sunlight. It took him only seconds to cross the black pavement; the heat radiated though his shoes and the asphalt gave softly beneath his feet, as if the summer sun were melting it. The heat increased when he stood next to his car, taking the full reflection of sunlight from its windows.

  He reached for the handle. “Shit!” He jerked his hand away from the burning chrome. Swearing softly, he wrapped his shirttail around his fingers, gingerly opened the door, and slid into the car.

  It was oven-hot and stuffy inside. He rolled the windows down, grateful for once for the cheap plastic knobs painted to look like metal. Metal would have blistered his fingertips. The steering column was in full sunlight, though, and the wheel was too hot to touch. For a moment he envied the guy who owned the car in the next space; his car had some kind of aluminum fan-like apparatus connected by a suction cup to the base of the window. When the fans were open, the inside of the car was shaded.

  The sun reflecting off the hood of Payne’s car bleached the metal into a glare of unbroken, searing white. He stared at it, his thoughts trailing into nothingness, into the emptiness of white sand. He stared, and
black boulders appeared in the sand. Static rose in his ears, like whispering male voices at first, then more and more like a television tuned to the wrong channel. Sweat beaded from his forehead and dripped to his cheeks, his upper lip, his neck.

  He decided to open all of the windows, get out, and wait outside the car in the shade of an arbor of Double Delight roses, just until the wheel was cool enough to touch. He didn’t move. The static grew louder and the white vista through his windshield spread. It encompassed John’s Sandwich Shoppe, the gardens, the rows of stores, everything, until there was nothing left but white and black and roaring static. Payne stiffened, his muscles tight, his right hand curling into a claw on the hot leather beside him. Without knowing it, he slept.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Nick was busy the night Cathy Litton first came to Payne’s. He had been carefully busy for several nights in order to put off Payne’s persistent and recurrent invitations to watch films. Still, he considered Nick, a friend, perhaps his closest friend. Nothing had happened to change that.

  Certainly Nick would not have been jealous had he known at the time about Cathy. Later, when he knew about her and had time to think about things, he was sure of that.

  Nor would he have consciously tried to spy on Payne and Cathy if he had known beforehand that she was coming or if he had seen Payne escorting a girl from her Lexus up the long sidewalk to his place. Nick might have noted it, sighed, and turned back to a pile of papers, or to slogging through Spenser, or to whatever else was in the works at the time. He certainly wouldn’t have slipped through the hedge and tried to pull a Peeping-Tom at the living room window—or at the bedroom window.

  Besides, as he would have discovered by glancing up from his work at the darkened house next door that night, all of the draperies were pulled as tightly closed as they had been when The Greer was alive.

  As a matter of fact, though, Nick didn’t even hear about her until a couple of days later when Payne was over at Nick’s house to play chess. Usually Payne was pretty good and handily beat Nick game after game, but that night his moves were desultory at best, criminal at worst. When he slaughtered his own queen almost without noticing it, Nick came close to calling the game right then. Obviously this wasn’t the right time for chess.

  “What’s up?” Nick asked instead, his hand hovering over an endangered pawn. “Something wrong?”

  “What?” Payne looked as startled as if Nick’s voice had called him from a deep reverie.

  “Your game’s sure off tonight,” Nick answered. He made his move and quietly set Payne’s knight next to the other pieces lined along his side of the game board. “Something wrong?”

  “Uh, no,” Payne said, “nothing much, I guess.” He glanced at the board and slid a piece from one square to the next. Nick could see no sense in the move, especially since it put at least three of Payne’s pieces into jeopardy.

  Nick reached across the chess board and moved his bishop. Payne seemed hardly to notice the resulting danger to his king. His next move was nothing short of stupid.

  “Check,” Nick said patiently. “Look, Payne, this game is wasted time tonight.” He hesitated—’tis a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before—before coughing to clear his throat and continuing. “Maybe if we, you know, went over to your place and watched...a film or something, at least that way part of the evening might be salvaged.”

  Payne looked up, his eyes showing interest and life for the first time that night, and nodded slowly. “I got a couple of new cassettes yesterday. They might be fun to watch.”

  He reached to move his remaining knight.

  “Thought you were too busy for films, though,” he said as he moved the piece.

  The comment came out flatly, neutrally, but it seemed to Nick that there was a hidden edge to Payne’s voice. Irritation? Anger? He wasn’t sure.

  “I...,” Nick began.

  Payne’s hand hovered about six inches above the chess piece.

  Then he stopped. Just that—he stopped. For a second Nick wasn’t sure if Payne was even breathing. He was eerily still, stone still, as if he were in a trance. Nick started to speak, to call his name and ask him if he felt all right, when he saw Payne’s other hand curl over the crease of his trousers just above the knee.

  “Payne?” he said finally, as the seconds stretched uncomfortably and Payne still did not move, except for the faint scrabbling of fingernails on the coarse, thick material. In the silence, Nick imagined that he could feel the nails scraping along the woven fibers—screee, screee, screee. He shivered. “Payne, are you all right?”

  Payne looked up at the sound of Nick’s voice. His eyes widened and his breathing increased as if he had been startled. Nick had the feeling that they were no longer sitting in his living room, at least as far as Payne was concerned—that the other man was seeing and hearing something Nick couldn’t. Payne’s eyes and ears seemed tuned to an entirely different landscape.

  Payne’s hand moved like an automaton, like one of those waldo hands designed to manipulate things too small or too dangerous for direct human touch. The fingers closed over the chess piece—a black knight, more traditional in design than the pieces in Payne’s unused set. The fingers tightened until the knuckles glowed bloodlessly white. It looked like either the plastic knight or his hand would shatter.

  “Hey, Payne,” Nick said, lightly touching the other man’s wrist.

  Payne shuddered like someone startled out of sleep, saw Nick’s hand on his, and started to smile. His eyes cleared. His other hand straightened, the fingers taut and stiff. He jerked backward. For a moment, before his eyes blinked and Payne—the real Payne, Nick thought, as much confused as frightened by the sudden impression—looked out through them, Payne seemed almost ready to lash out at Nick.

  Nick pulled away, restoring the neutrality of the chessboard between them. Payne stared at Nick for a moment before he gently returned the knight to the board—to precisely the same place it had been.

  “Sorry, Nick. I was thinking of...something.”

  “That’s okay,” Nick said automatically. But it wasn’t, not really. There was something ominous in Payne’s eyes, or there had been something for a second, that frightened him. Now it was gone.

  Payne stood and smiled and gestured to the front porch.

  “Let’s sit out there for a while. Just relax and talk.”

  “Do you want to watch a...?” Nick began.

  “No.” Payne stiffened momentarily, then relaxed his tensed shoulders. “No, not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Let’s just sit and talk and drink.”

  They moved out to the two rickety chairs on the porch. Payne pulled one over by the edge-rail and slouched deep into the fraying cushion, feet hooked over the white railing. Nick sat for a moment in the other—Payne had taken the one Nick usually preferred—before getting up and going into the kitchen to rummage through cupboards and shelves, finally returning with a couple of boxes of crackers, a wedge of cheese about to make the transformation from cheddar to something pungently stronger, and a couple of drinks.

  Payne hadn’t moved. It was as if he were a statue staring out over the same landscape for centuries, not seeing the changes wrought by time and the recurring seasons, not caring, just a static part of things without knowing how or why.

  Nick sliced the cheese, poured a few crackers into a bowl, popped the tab on a beer. Still nothing from Payne.

  So Nick settled back.

  Maybe five minutes later Payne spoke, his eyes still focused at some point a few feet above the house across the street. The only thing that moved was his mouth, as if some kind of alien were speaking through him, appropriating his physical apparatus but remaining essentially foreign to it.

  Nick flashed on that kid’s performance in one of the last films the two of them had watched, The Hidden. His brow furrowed as he tried to remember. What was his name, the one who was Paul Atreides in the monstrosity they released as Dune, the guy with the high, white cheekbones an
d jet black hair and whose lips barely moved when he spoke and who was really an alien Altairean in disguise? The voice that crossed the silence of the porch was Payne’s though. It sounded distant and quiet at first, but it was recognizably Payne’s.

  “I met a girl the other day.”

  “Oh.” Nick was nonplussed. The comment was miles from anything he had expected. He looked at the man across the porch.

  Payne was apparently waiting patiently for him to say something. His body was tensed, his shoulders high and almost hunched. Payne’s eyes still strained outward, to the other side of the street.

  “Oh,” Nick finally repeated, “Where?”

  “Some beach.” Payne waved vaguely westward with his left hand. The movement looked more as if he were swatting a pesky fly than suggesting a direction. “I don’t remember which one.”

  The voice seemed strained but gradually relaxed as he continued. “We had lunch together. She came over for dinner. Nice.”

  “Good.” Nick wasn’t sure what to say next. He didn’t know where Payne wanted to go with this conversation, why the other man was unloading this information on him right at this moment.

  Suddenly Payne swung his feet down and turned to look at Nick. “Her name is Cathy Litton.”

  “Linton?” The name rang familiarly In his memory.

  “No, Litton,” Payne said, almost irritated. “Like that company, you know, the one that makes...computers, I think, or ovens. Something like that. There’s no connection, though. She didn’t mention one. We talked a long time.”

  He fell silent, as if exhausted by the outburst.

  Nick waited. Payne seemed to want to say something but at the same time not to. Nick had been in that situation; sometimes the only thing a listener could do was just wait. Nick ate another bit of cheese and took a long drink.

  “We watched Casablanca,” Payne finally said, “and talked and had a few drinks and...and had a nice time. She’s a nice girl, Nick. You’ll like her. I’ll bring her by the next time she’s over.”

  Nick still didn’t know why Payne was going into all of this. But he nodded and said something appropriately innocuous, just to avoid the sense that he was Payne’s father and that Payne had to clear his girlfriends with Nick.