by Bruce Wagner
SHE was going to rent a house at the beach but didn’t have the energy. The hotel was so easy, everything was there, everything done for you, the food brought, rooms cleaned, clothes laundered, the pool and spa, Town Cars when you didn’t feel like driving. The sweet, starched nurses in revolving shifts were thrilled to be working in such a luxe environment—one of them, a Jamaican, thought Marjorie Herlihy was a famous old movie star. Another popular rumor was that Joan was a department store heiress. The bottom line was that everything at the hotel was intensely manageable.
She needed things to be manageable.
WHEN Chess said he and Laxmi were going to Joshua Tree “to chill,” Joan took the opportunity to see their father again.
She phoned beforehand. Ray said that his partner, Ghulpa, was home from the hospital and if Joan didn’t mind, he didn’t want to introduce her as his daughter just yet. No offense offered; none taken. Ray said “my gal is still a little shaky” and hoped she would understand if he called Joan his niece instead. There was something awkwardly poignant about it. “Oh, I understand very well!” she said, with levity, hinting at the slinky complications of her own life, and Ray was relieved. There was plenty she didn’t want to share with her dad yet either, like the details of what had recently befallen his former wife. Joan thought he would be OK with anything she had to say about Chess—wasn’t much going on there—but sensed the old man would be hurt if apprised of what happened to Marjorie in the last 6 months. Shit. It was hard enough for a complete stranger to hear.
She concocted a story on the way down (she was getting good at that). She would tell him Mom was traveling—that Marj had finally returned to India, and Joan was planning to join her. The machinatrix interrupted her machinations; she felt stupid using the Woman but had completely blanked on how she’d gotten to her father’s house that 1st time. Keep left, on the 6-0-5. She eyeballed the mesmeric navigation screen embedded in the dash and shook her head in amusement, recapitulating the “cover story”—her life a tangled techno-tango’d web—at last (at least), mother and daughter would fulfill the lifelong dream to visit the whipped cream shrine of the virtual Taj Mahal.
When the Woman announced, Your route guidance is now complete, Joan did as before, U-turning to the liquorstore to the lighthouse for Diet Coke, Marlboro Lights and fluffy Lay’s, then drove to the apartment complex and had herself a smoke. She was actually looking forward to seeing him because this time her nerves had settled. Relatively. He was so unaffected, so unmythic, and didn’t seem to want anything from her. (She wondered what she wanted from him.) Joan thought that today he might ask her simple questions. She was ready. It wasn’t about being interrogated, from either end. She was prepared.
She stood at the door, which this time was open
LXXVIII.
Ray
and smiled from the other side, old man/twinkle-eyed smile, remarking on her Diet Coke. I don’t know what they put in those things but it can’t be good. She brushed by and he smelled the cigarettes—why did she think she could pull one over? why had she even tried? she was still his little girl and didn’t want him to know that she smoked. She thought it so dear: he’d bought Diet Cokes at the store in anticipation of her visit, and had “a cold one” waiting for her.
The dog immediately bit her ankle.
He swatted it and the thing yelped and hid under a chair.
Joan kept saying No worries as her dad flushed Nip out and corralled him in the kitchen, swatting his behind, more yelping as they went. Please, no worries! She thought he might have another heart attack. Joan heard voices in the back—the “galfriend.” A woman in a colorful sari rushed out (was it her? No: too young), smiling diffidently on her way to the kitchen just as Ray and the dog ran past. Joan laughed: kind of a French farce. Water whistled and the sari made tea, wordlessly offering some to the guest. Joan shook her head then teacups were spirited to bedroom, the cousin grinning absurdly and bobbling her head at both as she fled.
“They’re helping out my gal,” said Ray.
An image was frozen on the living room television.
A cop, lying in the snow.
“My favorite show—The Twilight Zone. Ever see it? They play marathons on Thanksgiving Day. They’ll put on a whole season’s worth. Old ones, the classics. I think I’ve seen pretty much all of em. They’ve tried the show a couple times since, I mean a redo job, but they just can’t get it right. That fellow Serling was somethin special. They broke the mold. He was a smoker too! Busted. Back in the days when they didn’t hide it. Ed Murrow and Jack Paar and all those fellows. It was glamorous. Now they herd people out of buildings to puff up, like dope addicts. Busted. You see em on the sidewalks. Anyway, they did a movie—helluva long time ago. The actor got his head chopped off by a helicopter.”
“Vic Morrow.”
“That’s right!” He was pleased his daughter had the factoid at hand. “The director was gonna to go to jail but he got off.”
“John Landis.”
“Why, yes! I think that was his name. That was a big trial.”
He aimed the remote and said, “You know, Marjorie and I used to watch this together. My my, that was ’61, ’62.”
Joan’s gut clenched.
“How is she?” he ventured.
“She’s great! She’s traveling.”
“Married?”
“Her husband died last year.”
“Oh. Oh. That’s too bad. I’m—I’m sorry to hear that.”
Why did I say—that wasn’t part of the cover.
“Were you close?”
Joan thought he meant she and Mom, then realized what he was asking.
“Not close, no. But he was a very, very nice man.”
She was glad not to have blurted out the fact that Ham adopted her, which definitely would have hurt him.
He pressed PLAY and they watched the DVD.
A police officer had been shot outside an old woman’s tenement door—she looked like Marj!—and when he asked for help, she was afraid to let him in. She kept saying he was Mr Death, and that he was just trying to trick her. The cop (a babyfaced Robert Redford, no less) said he was bleeding and asked her to at least call someone for help. Compassion got the best of her and he leaned on the frail, frightened woman as they crossed the threshold of her front door. She put a blanket on him and he slept. Now she seemed happy to have a visitor and when Redford awakened, she fed him hot soup. He realizes she hasn’t called the doctor because she has no phone and there aren’t any neighbors because they’ve all moved away; the tenement has been slated for demolition. She finally tells him why she never leaves the house.
“I know he’s out there! He’s trying to get in. He comes to the door and knocks, begs me to let him in. Last week he said he was from the gas company. Oh, he’s clever! Then he said he was a contractor, hired by the city…I sent him away! He knows I’m onto him. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.”
Redford tells her not to cry, that he’s not going to hurt her.
“At 1st,” says the old woman, “I couldn’t be sure. I was on a bus. There was an old woman sitting in front of me, knitting. Socks, I think. Then this young man got on. There were empty seats but he sat down right beside her. It upset her. He seemed like a nice young man. When she dropped her yarn, he picked it up and gave it to her—I saw their fingers touch. He got out at the next stop. When the bus reached the end of the line, she was dead.”
“But you said yourself that the woman was old.”
The tenement lady ignored the logic, lost in a dream. “I’ve seen him since, several times. I’ve seen him in crowds, watched for him. Once he was a young soldier…a salesman…a taxi driver. Every time someone I knew died, he was there. I knew—because I was getting old and my time was coming. I saw more clearly than younger people.”
She said she hadn’t always lived like a recluse. People used to tell her she was pretty. She loved the sun even though she’d been warned it would spoil her complexion.
“I didn’t care. I’ve always hated the dark and the cold. I’ve lived a long time and I don’t want to die! I’d rather live in the dark than not live at all.”
Redford said there was nothing to be afraid of. Just then, a burly man interrupted, pounding at the door. When she opened, he pushed in and she swooned. The old woman came to, and the man was relieved she was all right.
“I’m sorry, lady, but I’ve got my orders! Look, I don’t get no pleasure busting in doors. I got a crew and equipment coming in an hour or 2 to pull this tenement down.”
“Are you really not Mr Death?”
The intruder didn’t seem to hear what she said.
“All I know is I got a contract to demolish this row of buildings. You were notified months ago, right? These buildings were condemned by the city—this building’s had it! It’s worn out, used up; all these buildings have to come down! I ain’t no monster, lady. I’ve got a heart just like anybody else. I can see how you can get attached to a place, but the building’s got to come down and make way for the new. That’s life, lady—I just clear the ground so other people can live. A big tree falls and a new one grows from the same ground. Old animals die and young ones take their places. Even people step aside.”
“I won’t!” she cried, closing the door.
“Now what’s the sense of locking a door that won’t even be here in an hour? Look, I’ve been trying to go easy. If you insist on staying here, I’ll have to call a cop.”
She silently beseeched Robert Redford to help. After the intruder left, the old woman asked why he hadn’t come to her aid.
He told her to look in the mirror: his reflection was absent.
“You tricked me!” she shouted. “It was you all the time!”
“Yes,” said the handsome cop. “I tricked you.”
“But why? Now that I let you inside, you could have taken me anytime…but you were nice. You made me trust you.”
“I had to make you understand,” he said. “Am I really so bad? Am I really so frightening? You talked to me. You confided in me. Have I tried to hurt you? It isn’t me you’re afraid of—you understand me. What you’re afraid of is…the unknown. Don’t be afraid.”
“But I am afraid!”
“The running is over. It’s time to rest. Give me your hand.”
“But I don’t want to die!”
“Trust me.”
“No!” she said.
Arm outstretched, he softly called her Mother.
“Give me your hand.”
Their fingers, then palms, touched.
“You see? No shock. No engulfment. No ‘tearing asunder.’ What you feared would come like an explosion, is a whisper. What you thought was the end…is the beginning.”
“When will we begin?” she asked, faintly excited. “When will we go?”
He nodded toward the bed, where the old woman saw her own body lay—lifeless.
“We already have.”
Joan felt foolish sitting there bawling at a kinescope. Her father said something about how well-done the shows were but she couldn’t hear him for the roaring in her ears. So as not to make a scene for the ladies in the next room, Joan quashed her sobs into snuffles, a grotesque pulmonary collapsing-in upon herself—like demolished rooms. Her father handed her Kleenex and was glad she was moved, it was gratifying and sensible that his “blood” would appreciate the Golden Age craft, the emotions evoked, it never occurring to him she was responding on a multitude of levels, and Joan was grateful for that, for his simplicities. Then he made a dry little laugh and said the show reminded him of that night when the officers
LXXIX.
Chester
prayed to the 4 directions, something she’d been shown by some kind of shaman in Northern California. Chess never took mushrooms before though once did acid as a teenager, by mistake, his friends said it was psilocybin, whatever that was, he still didn’t know, supposedly something milder but it turned out to be “Tim Leary’s Blue Blasters” and scared the holy shit out of him: 12 hours alone in the basement rec room Cinema-scoping krazy kavalcade of buxom breasts while every fiber in his being fought not to go mad or run upstairs to tell his mom.
Now here they were in the desert, insurance check on its way, “set and setting” a groove, Laxmi an old hand, said she would only take half a dose herself so if he “freaked” she could take care of him, they were going to do some MDMA 1st to chill him out, so beautiful she said, but then goddammit, he started stressing over what happened to Maurie, his culpability, same ol same old, shit, everything had been going so well, he’d been determined to tamp that down and mellow out, he thought he was succeeding yet here it was, OK, that was his demon, that was all part of it, but what if he got stuck on a guilt-trip in the middle of his visionquest and spilled his guts/ran screaming into Joshua trees of red-armied boulder dusk, coyote-mauled and soulcrushed by the Great Cactus-Needled Karmic Wheel? Suddenly worried the vertigo might come back too. Jesus, I’m a bigger Jew than Maurie Levin. Why was he even doing this? Because it’s righteous and she’s righteous and this is my path so fuck you. Chess shouted at himself and wished he were dead, hated being in his own skin, being Chester Herlihy was such a fucked-up chore. This was supposed to be his Journey of a Lifetime. They had watched that show on the Travel Channel, the guy who plays the agent on Entourage went over to India, it was corny but cool, the actor visited orphanages and 5-star spas, did Laughing Yoga, stumbled into elephant processions, met a guru, and generally had a high old time. Still, that was pussytime compared to mushroomville. Finally he became resolute: Fuck it, this is how it is, this is my fucking path, my Journey of a Lifetime, and guilt is all right, vertigo’s all right, guilt and vertigo are part of it anyhow, this shit probably cures guilt and vertigo.
He told Laxmi his plan (the plan that dropped down on him one day and had motivated him to settle his suit, stoked by bad vibes, the fear that Maurie would wake up and accuse him, or that Chess might weaken and turn himself in to the cops—further aided and abetted by the paranoia that what happened to his mother was karmic retribution, and preamble to his own fate should he remain in the City of Angels): that he wanted them to go to India, he would buy their tickets with the monies, that way she could see her dad and Chess could get away from everything I mean fucking everything his mom was in good hands with Joan, get away from all the bad energy and the failure and the years of bullshit that clouded his life, find a new road in that epic magisterial dirty consecrated country. Of course he didn’t Viagrashare; there was no need. She was so moved by his invitation and stratagem, everything he said sounded so right, not just for Chess, but for her as well; this way, he said, she could confront her demons, plus see her old man yet not be dependent, the settlement would last them years, God knew how many rupees it translated into, and even if it did run out (which it wouldn’t), by then they’d be off into something else, earning their keep, Western ingenuity, teaching English, founding schools or hospitals or whatever, until that illusive unlikely impossible time when funds dried up lifetimes stretched before them, a life in which they would never have to worry about survival, a life in which to heal, to write (her eyes welled up, because Laxmi knew he was referring to her book), a life to do yoga and cleanse, to be of service, to help others—Laxmi called that “Karma Yoga,” a supposed actual ancient term—Chess said he wanted to stop taking painkillers, India would be the perfect place to detox, he was confident he’d get better there, repair himself physically, spiritually, emotionally, like a sidewalk preacher the more he spoke the more he believed, talking about it was medicine, the doing of it would be the cure, and his makeshift girlfriend, fellow traveler, Journeyer (Journaler) of a Lifetime, said she knew he was right, he was so right about everything, she was so glad God brought them together! that everything was right and had happened for a reason, they had met through Maurie and been “broughten” together through Chess’s injuries, that awful thing happened at Morongo for a reason, and Chess winced then quickly r
ecovered because he knew: no malice behind it, no malice of Universe behind anything, an ethereal rather than satanic plan—what a concept!—for the 1st time Chess became aware, She made him aware, She, goddess and woman, in the cool stunned fading lucid heat of high desert he let all of it in, erstwhile canned notion of Higher Power—it sounded so pathetic through the years, the AA slogan, but it was true, Chester Herlihy was an instant convert, there was a Higher Power, how could he have not known or thought that, how could he be so arrogant to believe it was a cliché, to believe or not in clichés had nothing to do with what Maurie had visited on him or what Chess then visited upon his friend or what Laxmi/Chess/Maurie made of their triangle (pyramid)—it was only what had happened, without judgment or reason, the Universe did not plot, was not engineered from guilt or shame or pride or desiring, it was gloriously unbuilt of jigsaw happenings and events. Chess realized he would have to learn a new language: old gates need be abrogated, he’d molt like a snake, be-come someone, was becoming, some thing, different, that was the Path because what he still/once is/was had broken down and no longer worked.