Radiance: A Novel

by Louis B. Jones

  She added a baleful emphasis to that word congenital, a word she was applying with the wrong relevance, a word she’d plagiarized unfairly from Mark’s own recent personal life. In Mark Perdue’s house this spring, the word congenital meant something, something relevant.

  She clarified, “And degenerative.”

  He scoffed, “Have you seen him?” It sounded callous, but all he meant was, Bodie Lostig looked more robust than anybody on the tour, with his powerful upper body, in his truncation a satyr but chaste, with his golden hair, with the cleft in his chin like the base of an apple, with his manner of punishing a drum set, and in restaurants or parking lots or recording studios his way of swinging himself crablike on his arms, from car seat to wheelchair, from wheelchair to drum throne, with the grace of a gymnast on parallel bars or side horse. He was a vital young man with a genuine bloom in his complexion, and he was a sex object to his daughter, a consideration that made Mark’s heart, like an old man’s, resist saying farewell to the world as it spun out of control. His own lymebrain was always suspect. Maybe it was, admittedly, time to call the police. Not calling the police was like the trick of healing an illness by pretending to ignore it. Such magic can work, but only up to a point. In any case Billie Ahrsatz was hitting numbers on her phone, having more authority than a father’s decree, and she put the phone to her ear. She’d only hit three numbers, so it must be the 9-1-1 emergency line. “We’re going to have to phone the Lostigs, too. Mr. and Mrs. In Cleveland it must be who-knows-what. Ugh. What time zone is that?”

  The problem had, in one billion-trillionth of a second, expanded from toy-sized to galaxy-sized. The Lostigs of Shaker Heights were presently sleeping, no doubt heavily, in a large bedroom in their dark, peaceful time zone. Now they would have to get up, and maybe even go to the Cleveland airport—and something told Mark they wouldn’t get along, he and the Lostigs. Everything he knew about parenthood, and about the Midwest of his own youth, informed him that the Lostigs would think his child was some sort of bad influence. He pictured Mr. Lostig as a, say, car dealer in a Ban-Lon shirt, with a powerful, heavy wristwatch and a good thin leather jacket, getting off the plane with his wife.

  Also, the police would descend now. Billie had her cell phone at her ear and was averting her eyes from Mark. “No,” she told the phone, “this is not an emergency. We have a situation with a young lady who’s gone missing.”

  Mark cast an irritated-but-also-guilty look at Blythe. The expression deep in Blythe’s eyes, aimed at him, meant that he needed only be patient with this woman Billie—and they would share their impressions of her later.

  He sometimes really could have married Blythe Cress, here where things don’t matter so much. It was her wise, passive eternal laxity, it made her utterly absorbent, utterly languid, so anything was all right, nothing evaluated. All that languor of hers this weekend was draped before him for the taking. Nevertheless, he was still—he was always—“Mark Perdue,” and he had meanwhile taken out his own phone and hit speed dial, thinking he might give Lotta another try.

  Billie was talking into her own unit, telling the 9-1-1 people, “We were hoping you could give us a number we can call.”

  As for Lotta, her reception was still turned off. (Hi everybody, it’s Carlotta …) So he put it away. Billie was handing her own phone directly to him. “Here,” she said. “They’re transferring this to the police number. You’d better do the talking, because you’re the one who will have the information they’ll need. You’re ‘the father,’” she told him with an emphatic look.

  Well, the phone was ringing, and the universe was expanding. Every instant a fossil. Billie Ahrsatz was enacting the part of a professional who took seriously her legal responsibility for seven teenagers. And she now turned her attention, her entire box-of-cereal, around toward her employee Blythe, who as the assigned “escort” was possibly suspected of being at fault for some of this trouble.

  “Los Angeles Police Department.”

  The man’s voice, at Mark’s ear, was thoroughly weary of the world outside his office. Outside L.A. police headquarters tonight it was Saturday night, the night ruled by foolish mistakes.

  “Hi. My name is Mark Perdue. I’m a visitor to Los Angeles,” he began, as if being a tourist would somehow privilege him. “I’m here with my daughter, and she’s gone missing …” Saying it made his heart pound, for the first time now.

  “Just a minute, I’ll transfer you.” He was put on hold.

  And with a clotting sound in the earpiece, the intelligible universe everywhere was smothered and he was plunged into an insulted solitude. Worse than solitude, he was plunged, all unprepared, into the paucity of his life. Lotta was the main thing he had. He wasn’t at the annual physics conference in Germany right now. He was here in a fashionable young L.A. bar. This weekend in Karlsruhe, everybody would be there, everybody from New York to Cambridge and Edinburgh, from Berkeley to CERN. Now Lotta had gone missing. Again, every moment a fossil.

  He was letting his eyes rest on a wall of snapshots while he waited. On a bulletin board behind the bar, at least a hundred photographs were pinned up crowding and overlapping. For years the regular customers in this place had been captured by flashbulb, in their mirth, in their drunkenness, hugging and mugging and showing off, brandishing their beer bottles or their martini glasses, girls’ friskiness, guys’ throats exposed raw in the flash, eyes crazed. All his life he’d seen these bulletin boards in neighborhood bars, and they all blended into a single limbo, a sort of afterlife, some photos more faded than others, their chemical colors gone powdery, eclipsed by brighter, newer, overlapping photos. For the customers they perhaps stood as evidence that maybe they weren’t as beautiful, that night, as they’d felt in the moment. But beauty was never the point. Everybody always knew that. Everybody was pretending beauty was the whole point. It was visible now: the shine in those people’s eyes wasn’t exaltation. It was fear, or deeper, panic, there in the pinholes of the pupils. The Los Angeles of the early twenty-first century had passed like a dream all around them, a dream they’d invested in. Now they were immortalized, trapped behind that gloss. Even at the flashbulb’s pop, even then, they’d foreseen this afterlife. That’s what every flashbulb pop is all about. And Mark, him too, he was no better, he was no different. Avoiding appearing in a gallery of barroom snapshots isn’t going to specially enlighten anybody, or privilege anybody. All the excitement in Karlsruhe this week would be about the Large Hadron Collider. It was a time to start formally bidding to put a team on the Collider. A certain politicking would be happening all around Karlsruhe in the big modern hotel or in the old gasthof with the clever pastries under a glass dome, people like Seul Aspect standing genially around the dessert cart, and people like Parme Nides and Allen Aiken, all would be jockeying for time on the new machine in Geneva, where temperatures like a trillionth of a second after the big bang would soon be raging within the big magnets, generating a foam of microscopic black holes (which supposedly, according to the popular hysteria, would swell up and eat Switzerland, eat the planet, eat the solar system). Heidi Martingger was another one who wouldn’t be there. Heidi was the other pariah, along with Mark, who had gone to cosmology. He wasn’t there ostensibly because he was here in Los Angeles with the young Celebrities.

  When he and Audrey had looked at the calendar and realized there was this scheduling conflict—(all on the same weekend, Karlsruhe, the Celebrity Vacation, and the Oakland “Habitat” Build-a-Thon)—Mark had volunteered to make the sacrifice. He’d offered. He’d be willing to skip Karlsruhe. At the moment of making that offer, he happened to be at the stove stirring his Famous Mulligatawny with a wooden spoon, winding it up to elevate its broth to a shining golden velvet. Audrey, at the kitchen table, was frowning over the calendar, seeing the conflict of dates, and he himself volunteered, “I could skip Karlsruhe this year.” It felt like free-falling, while standing on his own kitchen floor, watching his mulligatawny revolve. Audrey apparently hadn’t heard.
She didn’t answer. He looked at her and waited, but her soul was absent from the room and had been absent for a long time.

  Then the cell phone at his ear was answered, “Missing Persons.”

  SO MARK LAUNCHED into this. His heart sped up. Talking to cops aroused a dread he should have been feeling all along. He was a fool. He was an idiot. “Just a minute,” spoke the Asian-sounding voice, interrupting him, a young man, Vietnamese or Cambodian would have been Mark’s guess. The clicking of a computer keyboard could be heard.

  He began by asking for a name: not Lotta’s name but his.

  Mark didn’t want to waste time on the many pages of this bureaucrat’s computer form. “Wouldn’t it be good to start with her? And a description? And then right away you can put out an ‘APB.’”

  APB was an expression he had been hearing on television police dramas since he was a child, but something in the acoustics of the phone, on the other end, made it ridiculous.

  The officer said, “What’s APB?”

  “‘All points bulletin.’ All the patrol cars can begin searching for her. With her description.”

  “We don’t do that, sir.”

  “You don’t do that?”

  “We don’t look for anybody.” This was something the man had said to many people before, many distraught and unreasonable people.

  “What do you do, then?”

  “We take your report.”

  “Then what do you … do?”

  After a pause he said, “We don’t do nothing, sir.”

  It was possible to start getting the picture. A big city police department lacks the manpower or resources to put out great dragnets whenever a child, somewhere in L.A., doesn’t come home. Instead they have her on file. When, or if, something terrible happens, her name pops up as “reported missing.”

  “So after. Oh. Hm. I see. After a crime has been committed,” Mark said with an immediate access to a rancor that he wasn’t entitled to, and which he had had no inkling of. “Then you look at your information. Then you’ve got something so you can blame her. Make her seem like it’s her fault, or her problem, whatever it is.”

  Before saying one more regrettable thing, he closed up the phone and set it down on the bar. He stood up off his stool, just to walk around and stretch, and go outside, get a breath of fresh air.

  Billie had turned on her stool to look down at the closed-up phone on the bar, then she looked at Mark. She said, “Well, I’ll have to call them.”

  He was headed toward the door. Involving the police felt like bad luck, that’s all. For the first time, now, he pictured himself calling Audrey back home and beginning the conversation, Sweetheart? Something has happened.

  “Fantasy Vacations has to report it,” Billie reemphasized for him, as he left.

  He thought he might get a breath of fresh air. See if Lotta just might happen to be right outside, right this minute coming up the street. Or at least he could have a look, out there, at the profound city she had vanished into.

  IT WAS AT that point—just as he’d come outside, into the city’s ancient cool kiss of anonymity—that his phone was destined to ring, announcing Lotta, her distinctive ringtone, the ringtone her mom liked to refer to as “the wrongtone,” a musical phrase from a pop song that, in turn, was derived from the obnoxious old melody of the schoolyard taunt. At the sound of that nagging in his coat pocket, relief and anger and thankfulness surged in him. It was amazing how empty is all the rest of life when there’s love. It amounted to an unmanly dependency, on the vagaries of a girl, a subjugation of his kingship, but when this particular girlhood was over (which it already was), it would be all mulligatawny for him, from then on, in a semidetached on a cul-de-sac, and the tedious personal chess match with imaginary heart-attack sensations, TV clicker in hand.

  “Hi, Dad, how’s everything?” said Lotta’s voice.

  She was with somebody all right. Because she never said any such thing. Never, not in all her sixteen years, did she ever say How’s everything.

  “Where are you?”

  “We’re by the Hollywood sign. We’re okay.”

  “‘We’?”

  “We’re just out on an excursion.”

  “Excursion. Do you know what time it’s getting to be?”

  Of course she had met up with the boy again somehow, for some reason. But Mark wasn’t going to make her go into the details. Being interrogated by your telephoning parent is always an indignity, and surely tonight her whole fragile personality would be shivering in oscillations back and forth between “starlet” and “back seat girl”; his only proper role was to get her on the plane tomorrow after the closing party, and get her back home, home where she could go back to being simply Lotta, “Lotta” at home, a broad wave function that hadn’t collapsed to a specific time and place: damp bath towels and footies and scrunchies, her pajamas-plus-parka costumes, eating cheese-flavored crackers and casting her usual gloom, unwashed dishes beside the computer, televisions and radios playing in empty rooms.

  She said, “I thought I’d call because I saw all these times you called tonight when I checked my messages.”

  “Excursions are great, Lotta, but it’s going to be midnight, and this is an unfamiliar city, and you’ve got a recording session tomorrow.”

  “It’s not a recording session, it’s a video shoot, supposedly.”

  “Where are you?” he said, adding, “Which, in any case, you want to be rested for. And get a good night’s sleep.”

  She didn’t answer, and Mark just waited, because that—right there—was the form an ultimatum took. At least with him. She would know now. It was inevitable. Wherever she was, he would come get her. In Blythe’s Subaru.

  He just didn’t want to have to face Bodie, his weird personal beauty, his self-certainty. The Winnetka boy David, in dissecting Bodie’s personality, had talked of compensatory strategies, one of which was heroism, and the word summed up everything that was invincible about “Bodie.” On the phone he listened for background sounds, but the circuit was silenced by the low-pass filters they use, erasing everything below a few kHz. Quiet as velvet. She must be outside in the night air somewhere, and he imagined her standing under one of those palms that clatters in the L.A. breeze, her boyfriend beside her in his wheelchair.

  “We’ve got Blythe’s car,” he said, which was his way of asserting that they would come get her right away. “Be a bit of a comedown from the fancy limos. You’d be slumming, with us. By the way, darling, you were great tonight. Onstage I mean. People were standing up out of their seats.” He’d already told her all this, backstage. “Literally, people stood up. You were electrifying.”

  Such praise was a way of tightening the screws on Lotta. This according to the logic of a secret esoteric code of fatherhood. Or at least his fatherhood. And her daughterhood.

  She sighed under the pressure and whined, “Oh Dad …”

  So he actually felt remorse, administering one more small humiliation tonight.

  “Dad? We really don’t need to do the so-called video shoot tomorrow. I’m not going to. Neither of us are.”

  He’d underestimated this.

  Ordinarily she might have bounced right back. She had an even ruthless ability, ordinarily, to forget about any chagrin within five minutes.

  “Well, Lotta, why not?”

  Stupid question. Wrong angle.

  “Do you want to go home?”

  She said, “No, no, not at all. It’s expensive changing the tickets. Let’s just stick with the reservations we have now.”

  “But you might regret not having something to look at later, Lott. Posterity! And who knows … ? When you’re famous … ?”

  “No, Dad, I’ve been doing some thinking. Doing a lot of thinking. This isn’t the moment, right now, but sometime I’d be happy to discuss my thinking with you.”

  That was clearly a remark she had delivered while looking into the eyes of Bodie there with her. She’d never in her life spoken in such a way,
with a social worker’s calm condescension.

  “Let’s discuss your thinking right now. If it might involve changing our plane tickets.”

  She said right away, “I’m reordering my priorities, and I’m going to be a humbler person, starting now. Or I’m going to try.”

  This was Bodie. Bodie was helping her reorder her priorities. Helping her become a humbler person.

  It wasn’t necessary for him to pry, because she went right on, airing her new thinking, “I actually think most people are incredibly selfish. Selfishness is the whole thing. The sooner anybody can be a larger human being, the better.”

  He had to wait a minute, and allow the beguiling new rhetoric to die away ringing.

  Then he started out, “Lotta, music isn’t selfish, music is a gift.”

  Oh, but now there was fatigue in his voice, because he was, face it, tired.

  And she and Bodie did have plenty of taxi money, and he remembered she’d gone out wearing her sneakers instead of high heels. And he was starting to get a handle on this situation, and it was all feeling like a dreamily predictable fiasco, all too tiring to stand here and take apart. It was still long before midnight. His daughter was only going through a new phase—maybe it was a kind of moralistic trend. Which was a relief. Considering the alternatives.

  “Dad?” she read his mind, “You can go to bed. We’re totally fine. I’m with Bo, and we’ll take a cab home eventually. We’ve got plenty of money. We’re not in a dangerous neighborhood. This is Hollywood! Nothing’s going to happen! It’s Hollywood!”

  “Why don’t you just tell us where you are, and we’ll come get you.”

  She put the phone to her chest for a sec to muffle it.

  With his ear against the nap of silence, he remembered she had a sweater, a yellow cardigan, to cover up the red dress she’d performed in. She’d put it on backstage. So she was wearing the sweater and the canvas high-top sneakers.

  When her voice returned, she said, “Really, Dad, I’m hanging up. Now don’t worry your head about anything. Go back and get a good night’s sleep. I’m having a wonderful time this whole weekend. Really. I’m grateful for all this. Good night, now. I’ll see you tomorrow. If not before. ’Cause we won’t be long. We won’t stay out late. Love you.”