by Geoff Ryman
“What about us?” she asked him. She thought of white gloves, light pink fabrics, beaded purses, the smell of new hairdos. She thought of home.
“It shouldn’t make any difference,” Billy said.
It shouldn’t, it shouldn’t, she knew it shouldn’t. But it did. The car was warm now, and the hot air coming through the heater smelled of something harsh and itchy. It made the back of their throats go dry. Billy coughed. Carol said nothing. There was something dry and hot and dark between them. Finally it was Billy who said it.
“Maybe it’s a mistake getting married this young,” he said.
A pause. There was such a slender bridge leading out into the darkness, and Carol saw herself on it in high heels and a black cocktail dress. Black for mourning. Nothing she had been taught was adequate to deal with this. She felt dirty somehow. She felt defenseless.
“Maybe so,” Carol whispered, admitting defeat. She dreaded the shame that was to come, and the embarrassment of telephoning friends, of telling her aunts. She contemplated her coming freedom as well, with a lightening of the heart.
“Maybe, you know, it’s just a bit too soon, what with the Army and all,” said Bill, and coughed again.
That’s what they would say to everybody, that they felt they were rushing into things because Billy was about to go off into the Army. She could say that they just felt maybe it was better to wait awhile. Carol could live with that. People would say how sensible they were being. They would know what was going on, but that wouldn’t matter. The date for the marriage would be postponed, to some dim future, in some other life.
Goodbye, Billy, she thought. She saw autumn leaves in her mind. That’s what he said, when he kissed her goodnight on her chaste doorstep. Goodbye, with something in his voice that had no promise of tomorrow.
About four months later, in the spring, Bill’s church started a drive to collect funds for the Home. The Preacher knew what he was doing. The sight of some big ordinary kid like Bill in his Army uniform would be worth ten preachers.
There was a launch party with banners and free punch. Bill gave a speech. He kept it simple and short.
“It says somewhere in the Bible,” he began, “that to approach Jesus you’ve got to be like a little child. Well, that’s how some of the people in the Home are. I don’t mean that some of them aren’t unpleasant or even dangerous, because they are. But they see things differently than we do, and not always in a bad way.”
He told the story, as best he could, of Dorothy Gael of Kansas. He told them what he knew of her childhood long ago amid the steam trains and peach orchards and school stoves that smoked and how she had stayed a child. He told the story of how she had died making angels in the snow, and how she went out singing hallelujah to the God she had cursed.
“You see something like that, you know we’ve all got something inside us,” he told them, eyebrows slanting with pained honesty under his tiny Army hat. “We’ve all got something of worth, even those people in the Home, and they deserve just as good as we can give them.”
Money? There was an avalanche of it. Turned out that Bill Davison had a talent for money as well.
Part Three: Oz Circle
Santa Monica, California
September 1989
Now we can cross the Shifting Sands.
—L. Frank Baum’s last words, May 6, 1919.
The Shifting Sands border the East of Oz.
Baum was seeing himself traveling westward toward it.
Years later, Jonathan was sitting in Bill Davison’s office looking at photographs of athletes on the wall, and thinking of horror movies.
Jonathan starred in horror movies. The fear they generated seemed small and mean now, next to the real thing. You could only enjoy horror movies, Jonathan thought, when you were young and well and your fears had no name. Jonathan had a name for his terror now. He was dying.
The athletes in the photographs beamed at him, football players framed by a hunch of padding, hockey stars with missing teeth. They looked like gods of wholeness, gods of health.
Except that each of them had needed a psychiatrist. Bill Davison had made a fortune counseling athletes.
Football players who developed a terror of falling on Astroturf; baseball players who kept throwing out a knee, a knee that was medically perfect; rookies who developed such stage fright of crowds that they could not play. The photographs were signed with thanks.
Outside Bill Davison’s office, Los Angeles gleamed. It was blue and white, blue with sky and smog, white with sunshine, white as bone. Both Jonathan and Bill were a long way from home.
Bill Davison was leaning back in his chair and regarding Jonathan with narrowed eyes. It was toward the end of their session.
“Right,” he said. He rubbed the palm of his hand across his face. “Jonathan, I want to try something new.”
Bill Davison was nearly fifty, still handsome and broad-shouldered, though his face was creased and puffy and his chest sagged. His crewcut had been modified to suit later fashions. He wore a blue Lacoste shirt, casual and short-sleeved, that showed his football-player arms. Jonathan was rather in love with him. Counselor Bill, Jonathan called him, as if the whole sad business were a summer camp. It was appropriate. Jonathan had always hated summer camp. And loved his counselors.
Counselor Bill leaned forward on his desk and steepled his fingers. “I want you,” he said, “to think of the place where you were happiest.”
Jonathan did not try very hard. “I can’t think of a place,” he replied.
“Okay. Just think of something that you like, and try to remember where it happened.”
Jonathan’s thinking came slowly these days. Part depression and part drugs and part disease.
“I’m sorry, I just can’t,” he said.
“Where’s home?” Bill Davison asked. His face looked very serious.
“Canada, I guess.”
“Okay, Canada. Were you happy there?”
In school? As a little boy tearing up sheets? “How is this going to help the AIDS?” Jonathan asked.
“Maybe it won’t help the AIDS, but it could help you.”
Bill Davison had a direct approach. There was no time in the business of sports for psychoanalysis. In sports, with contracts worth thousands of dollars at stake, you had to intervene. Jonathan had read articles about Bill Davison. Bill would say to black tennis players who felt themselves adrift in a white man’s world, “This is your game. This court here is your neighborhood. Think of it as your own street.”
To football players who had suddenly grown angry at the ball, he would say, “Think of it as a woman. Imagine that it’s the sweetest, kindest woman you ever met. Think of someone you knew. If it ended badly, then make it up to her this time. Catch the ball gently.”
It worked. He had been criticized for merely treating symptoms. “I can read The Power of Positive Thinking myself without Dr. Davison’s help,” one psychiatrist had said. It turned out that Bill Davison was using visualization techniques fifteen years before anyone else. When the chemical pathway between conscious thought and the triggering of immune response was traced, it became, as they say, a whole different ball game.
Jonathan looked at Bill Davison and thought: You’ve been happy everywhere. What do you know?
“I don’t know, on stage maybe, when I’m performing.” Jonathan thought of the last play he had been in. “Oz,” he said. “I was happy in Oz.”
“Go there a lot?” Bill Davison asked, beginning to smile.
Jonathan remembered. “I used to. When I was a kid. Used to take my summer holidays there.”
“Okay. I want you to pretend to yourself that you’re in Oz.”
“You’re kidding,” said Jonathan.
“No, I’m not kidding. I want you to
think of yourself in Oz, all the time. You step out of here, and you’re in Oz.”
Jonathan closed his eyes and gave a weak little laugh. Jonathan and Bill had a contract: to do whatever Bill asked.
“We’re fighting, remember?” Bill said.
“Yeah,” said Jonathan. He had thrown up breakfast. He had thrown up lunch. “What’s the point of doing this, Bill?”
“I think it could help you feel more at home,” said Bill, shrugging as if it were obvious. “You’re not. At home.”
“I’m in Los Angeles,” said Jonathan.
It was time to go. Bill would have another client waiting. Jonathan stood up. His good behavior ran on automatic pilot.
Bill shook his hand. Bill always did that to show Jonathan he didn’t think of him as being different from anyone else. It was like the visualizations: Jonathan was aware of everything that Bill Davison was doing. He was still surprised when it worked. He was still surprised by the softness of Bill Davison’s hands.
He was surprised by the face; swollen by age, with hatchet marks around the eyes. The teeth grinned out at Jonathan, part of the skull peeking out. Hi, there, the skull seemed to say from underneath its temporary flesh. I won’t go away.
“Anyway, see you later tonight,” Bill was saying, still alive.
Jonathan’s mind went blank. He still saw the skull.
“You’re coming to our place for dinner, remember?” It was yet another way in which Bill Davison was unconventional. He was a psychiatrist who invited his clients home.
Jonathan stepped out into the hot white vastness of Wilshire Boulevard. He felt exposed and alone. The traffic roared past, impersonal, as if the cars carried no people in them. There was no one else on the sidewalk, all the way down from Barrington to Bundy. The lights changed; Jonathan began to cross and the traffic still advanced toward him, crawling to a stop, like bulls with their heads down. Jonathan found himself scurrying to get out of their way, even though the lights were still with him.
Jonathan sat down on a bench to wait for a big blue bus. The backrest was covered in a painted advertisement for a funeral home. Gleeful, thought Jonathan, but at least my back is toward it. He looked at the shadows cast by the giant buildings. They marched in rows like morons and gleamed like glaciers. Poor old silver-coated Barrington Plaza looked ancient now beside them. When Jonathan had first come to Los Angeles in the early seventies, the Plaza had been the biggest building all the way from the ocean to the Veterans’ Hospital. Jonathan could see the ocean, four miles away at the end of the wide straight road. The sea sparkled in sunlight. Everything was blue with fumes.
Jonathan remembered his contract.
Okay, he told himself, I am waiting for a big blue bus in Oz. The sidewalks are perfectly laid, because if someone is dumb enough to trip on the edge of a paving slab, they can sue the city. Because the paving is perfect, people roller-skate to work. They wear shorts and shades and a Walkman.
Can I imagine Munchkins here, little people flooding out of shopping malls and insurance offices the size of mountains? Do Munchkins wear mirror shades now? If this is the Emerald City, then the towers are tall because of the value of the land underneath them. And all the windows and doors are sealed because the air inside them is temperature-controlled. If Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man went tripping by, no one would notice. They’d think they were high.
It was a twenty-minute wait for the big blue bus. Jonathan read a free paper. It listed courses in adult education. On the cover an attractive woman pouted in a leotard and tried to look as though she were selling fitness courses and not sex. RELAX, said the headline, IT’S SO EASY.
There were courses about making money. How to Sell Real Estate in Your Spare Time. How to Make $ in Catering. How to Get Credit Cards.
And there were courses in Self Discovery Through Metaphysics. Coming Alive with Love. How to Flirt and Not Get Hurt. Courses in counseling or shiatsu or how to begin a conversation.
And there were courses that were an odd mix of the two. One offered instruction in Interviewing Techniques for Selecting a Husband:
Dating is time-wasting and inefficient. Before accepting that time-consuming invitation to dinner, you need to apply the techniques of market research to discover if the man is really interested in marriage. Manipulative? Yes—and we make no apologies for that. If you change your makeup and put on a nice new dress for a date, then you’re manipulating. This course will simply help you to LEARN TO MANIPULATE FOR SUCCESS.
And I was thinking of learning Spanish, thought Jonathan.
He thought of bars where the men all wore nothing but leather harnesses or Dodgers T-shirts, baseball caps and jockstraps.
Oz, he reminded himself, I’m supposed to be in Oz.
HOW TO FIND A LOVER OR A LOVING PARTNER
A solid, proven system for finding that special someone who’s fun to be with, able to carry on a sparkling conversation, financially stable—maybe even rich.
Which, thought Jonathan, is why they haven’t found love. And never will.
The bus finally came, and Jonathan got on it, wrestling with coins. He had never, in all his thirty-eight years, learned how to count out change quickly. The door whooshed shut; the bus lurched; the driver said nothing, his face blanked out by sunglasses.
Jonathan sat in the back, where he always did. He tried to pretend the bus was full of Munchkins, all of them talking in speeded-up voices. The bus was full of Angelinos instead. Angelinos have never met each other and cannot trust each other. They suspect each other of carrying murder weapons, possibly with some reason. Angelinos sit alone, in silence, no one next to them. As Jonathan was doing.
On the seat in front of him, a very fat man in dirty shorts sat reading the Style section of the Los Angeles Times. The person across the aisle from Jonathan stood up and moved two seats farther back, to be more alone. He was reading People magazine. He was thin and smelly, in what looked like standard-issue Veterans’ Hospital couture—a tartan shirt with rolled up sleeves and khaki trousers. UNITY BY THE SEA, said a passing billboard, JOIN US FOR A LOVING EXPERIENCE.
The bus stopped with a slight squeal of brakes. The squeal came and went with the rhythm of a kiss. An old man got on. He was very thin, very brown. His skin was somehow translucent and splotchy. He stumbled unsteadily toward his seat, and when the bus lurched forward, he fell into it, swinging around one of the support poles. The old man was almost too frail to walk, but he wore a jaunty tracksuit. A yellow plastic Sony Walkman whispered disco music into his ear.
Lighting-fixture shops and banks passed by, with acres of parking in the back. Beside a large drugstore, a sign said PARKING FOR PATRONS ONLY, in lettering that imitated nineteenth-century script. Jonathan loved that word “patrons” and that word “only.” An old-time, old-fashioned drugstore with an admissions policy?
At the next stop, a middle-aged woman got on with a boy. Her hair was yellow and she wore black tights that showed how far and loose her hips had spread. The boy was about seventeen and wore long, boxy swim trunks and a vest and a bomber jacket. His upper lip was trying, and failing, to grow a mustache. They sat down just in front of Jonathan. The jacket was shrugged back and the woman began to peel sunburned skin off the boy’s back. The windows of the bus were open. Patches of skin were caught up in the wind and were whirled about like snow.
A few moments later, the boy got up and started to ask people for money. “Don’t have any, man,” said Jonathan, wondering if that was how seventeen-year-olds still spoke. He went back to reading about adult education. If this is what they teach adults, he thought, what are they teaching the kids? He finally found his course in Spanish. It was opposite Hot Air Ballooning.
He got off the bus at Fourteenth Street, and across Wilshire Boulevard there was a billboard, an ad for chocolates. IT’S NEVER TOO LATE, it said, TO
HAVE A HAPPY CHILDHOOD.
Jonathan lived on Euclid—Thirteenth Street, except that people were too superstitious to call it that. Euclid Avenue was tree-lined and residential and quite pleasant, but it was as if the shrubs and the flowers and the sprinklers and the sunlight and the glimpses of the Santa Monica mountains were all lying. They could bring no real comfort.
Jonathan’s property was quite extensive. There were two bungalows in front that he used to rent out in his days of relative penury as an actor. Behind them was his garden, and backing the property, a two-story house for him and Ira. Downstairs were the garage and Ira’s office. Upstairs was the house itself. Jonathan trudged wearily up the steps and pulled out his keys.
The key for the house wasn’t on it.
What? Jonathan tried to remember what he had done with it. Who could he have given it to? He had his car keys. What could he have done with the key to his house?
It had been happening a lot lately. Forgetting things. Jonathan climbed back down the steps. Well. It was three o’clock. He would just have to wait until Ira got home. He slumped down into his chair, in the garden by the pond.
Jonathan did not want to sit in the garden. It made him feel vulnerable, as if his back were unguarded. He wanted to sit in the house, on the couch just behind the stained-glass window, sheltered in his own little nook, hidden away from people. He wanted to listen to National Public Radio.
Funny the things that kept him going now. NPR saw him through the desolate afternoons like a friend. The music, the features, reassured him that there were other people who thought like him.