Radiance: A Novel

by Louis B. Jones

  “What kind of a ‘thingie’ is he in?” said Mark, afire with satisfaction.

  “I guess gulch is the word. You know he’s incredibly strong and he would be able to get himself out. But in this one situation, it’s pretty straight down.”

  Mark was back in his own room now, watching the image of himself in the big mirror, Mark Perdue in pajamas holding a cell phone to his ear—looking always oddly flat-faced or flat-haired whenever he wore pajamas. But he was crowned with happiness. Happiness because this was a soluble problem, rather than some sticky or intractable (or “tragic,” newspapers would say) situation. And he could solve it. He liked prolonging the girl’s childhood, and he could admit it. In the mirror he watched himself actually frowning in judicious pleasure. Admittedly, too, this provided a reason for calling Blythe. She had looked bridal and hopeful standing before him under the hotel marquee with her hands folded and her heels together.

  Lotta in his ear said, “We’re out where you can only hike to. You’ll have to park down below and I’ll guide you here. So call me when you get near. So I better hang up and save the batteries.”

  “How did you get there? Why did you go there?”

  “Pilgrimage: Touch the Hollywood Sign. You know the Hollywood Sign? On the hill? Huge tall letters? It’s a pilgrimage, because we’re ‘Big Celebrities.’”

  That last sarcastic remark was directed at Bodie’s hearing, there with her.

  “All right, well, I’ll call Blythe. Blythe will know how to get there. And we’ll bring a rope, as you suggest.”

  IT WAS 11:17 at night, and of course Blythe wasn’t the sort of person to have a coil of rope, but in Los Angeles plenty of places are going to be open all night, and she knew where there was a big regional supermarket chain store. It was less than a mile drive, a huge place on a parking lot, windowless, tall-walled, a bunker fortified against the coming sieges of the Los Angeles class wars. At the foot of its northern face it invited customers via a limited set of glass doors. The tough, dirty, urban Subaru pulled into a spot.

  And they both got out. And went inside like a married couple over the grooved rubber mat together, or really more like young partygoers out for more six-packs of beer, into the confusing light, the heavenly clinical hospital light in the long, bright, empty aisles where pop tunes play all night long. He was experiencing the savor of duplicity. For here in eternity he was pretending to be single again, and young again, Blythe at his side. She had put on different clothes for this outing—faded jeans now—and under a light jacket, a sweater. He would always have his wife, his Audrey, all sewed up, back home in Terra Linda. He might almost take Blythe’s hand, or even throw an arm around her as they wandered. But that would have been electrifying to both.

  “It can’t be just clothesline,” she said. She kept a little ahead of him. “It has to be strong enough to hold a big guy like Bodie. Did Lotta describe the problem much?”

  “No.” All he imagined was that Bodie and the wheelchair lay at the foot of a slope.

  “There we are,” she said. “Right here.”

  Native of this town, she’d gone straight to it. In an aisle called Homeware, a cardboard display stood out, holding nylon ropes in transparent shrink-wrapping. The coils were advertised to be 3/8-inch, fifty-foot, six-hundred-pound-test ropes, and Blythe snatched the top one and then reversed direction, to go pay for it, without examining it, leaving him behind, standing at the rope display, foolish, happy, an errant husband, out past his bedtime: he actually found all the plastic and aluminum mops and pans and spatulas on the racks interesting, or just stupefying, just arresting, only because he wished to prolong the dream of shopping together—but he gathered his wits and got going, and he caught up with her. Her artistic hand—small-boned, freckled, rehearsed in the lifting and handling of medieval kimono fabric and samurai costumes, which, she’d said, must be stored flat and spread open in felt-lined, shallow caskets, never on hangers, to preserve them archivally through the ages—passed the plastic rope across to him, while her other hand dug in her jeans pocket at that cute, tender inguinal hollow of the hip. She was pulling out crumpled bills.

  Everything is overpackaged. This coil of rope was encased in heavy shrink-wrapping with melted seams, and it was girdled by a cardboard band that, alone, would have held it together. The standard recycling emblem, of three arrows chugging around a triangle, chasing each other, showed an SPI resin code of 5, so the strands of the rope would probably be polypropylene. Not the strongest of polymers. The sticker said “$4.99.” Surely Bodie Lostig couldn’t weigh more than six hundred pounds, even if he were hoisted up with his wheelchair.

  They stood at the unmanned checkout counter, while their checker—an ultraskinny black girl with her hair in perfect, beautiful cornrows—postponed coming over and checking out their purchase, because she preferred to linger, joking and teasing, with her manager. Tonight in Los Angeles, all the world was flirting. Anybody would think he and Blythe, too, were out together teasing each other. At this point, coming out of the Homeware aisle with their package, they looked more married than dating.

  The checkout girl avoided looking at them and went on trifling, dallying, two check stands down, bouncing on her heels, describing something, patting epaulets on her own shoulders, hanging her hands before her, limp as paws. Mark couldn’t be patient, because all this while, his daughter and Bodie were stranded in their gulch. He had phoned her from the hotel lobby: when Blythe arrived to pick him up, he’d called to tell her they were on their way; and Lotta had told him they shouldn’t worry, things were fine, it was a warm night, and they had a package of Fig Newtons. Still, Mark wanted to get to them. Things could always go further wrong, in various unthinkable ways.

  Blythe took this becalmed moment to insert, turning to face him, “You know it wasn’t a ‘misunderstanding.’ I was thinking about what you said.”

  “What wasn’t?” he asked. But he knew.

  “The Rod thing. You couldn’t call it a misunderstanding.” She made a pinching gesture at her eye, as if, with a discerning squint, to adjust a kind of fine monocle: “You see the disaster coming. You see it all perfectly, but you go through it anyway, in slow motion.” She actually gripped Mark’s elbow. “That was exactly the awful thing, how we did have no misunderstanding, not at all, about what we were doing.”

  He couldn’t find a response. She had reproved him. Which he deserved. But she’d made reproof easy. She made it light, and kind of comical; she somehow turned it to his benefit, transforming a stupid insult into a cause for better closeness, going on, “Ah, but,” she tapped the coil of rope against her own temple, “for a scientist, everything is a misunderstanding, isn’t it?” (She plainly had been watching a lot of his old YouTube clips.)

  She added, “Or, no: Everything is just ‘a mere understanding’?” quoting his old stuff more accurately (“A Mere Understanding” was the title of one of the old televised PBS episodes)—and, so saying, she made her eyes glaze over blindly, and her magical palm rose and spread a blesséd unreality over the whole visible store, over all the aisles and checkout stands, everything, the shelved products in their seductive packaging, all the advertised answers to human afflictions and desires, all the wavelengths of color in the range between ultraviolet and infrared, whose buzz they stood within, a world made of merely human understandings. It was the phenomenal world the unborn boy orbited near, but then veered from, when he was waved off. Mark managed to make a sort of smile, a contrite smile, a grateful smile, she was so generously making herself a student of his old work, Googling things in her free hours.

  The checkout girl then, in her chain store uniform, came flouncing, limp hands still hanging like paws. She greeted them with maximum gaiety, “Hey, folks,” tapping the cash register’s keys to waken it, unlocking its money drawer with a key from her smock pocket, “How’re you folks doin’ tonight?” She was showing a superficial repentance for not having come over right away. Her plastic name tag said her name was Raya
. Mark found he immediately forgave her, and was willing to be in love with her, too, tonight, promiscuously, though she was probably barely twenty years old and of course had the limitation of living here. Her hair was beautifully and meticulously cornrowed with little candy-like beads, jujubes, woven into tassels, including a thread or two of actual tinsel.

  “We’re fine thanks,” said Blythe, flatly. She was not yet forgiving the girl.

  “You folks find everything you were looking for?”

  She says that to everyone. Their one and only item passed over the glassed-over abyss of the red eye, causing a bip sound, and went straight into a plastic bag. “Is this all, for you tonight? Just some rope?”

  “That’s all, thanks.”

  Speaking of the rope, she cracked a joke as she handed it across, “Headin’ off to a nice lynching? Looks like?” and then she rolled her eyes, because she’d shocked herself, “Wooh, I din’ say nothin’,” she smiled up at the lofty ceiling of the store and laid a beautiful hand on her cheek, which was like the metaphor of a slap.

  Blythe saved her, saying, “It’s a rescue operation,” pulling the rope out of its bag, waggling it, smiling a little—“Rescue operation.”

  The girl in gratitude laid her two hands upon her throat, and she closed then opened her eyes, then she spun away, to go back to flirting with her manager, bidding them, “You folks have an excellent excellent night now,” petting and smoothing her own bottom as she restored herself to her true station.

  Mark did want to be single again. He’d missed out on all this, he’d missed out on the affinities of night people, the kindling of warmth in the cool Southern California night. He’d gone straight from MIT to Columbia and then the Berkeley job, while here in Los Angeles all the while was a world you didn’t need postgraduate degrees to get entrance to, or any schooling, you just jump in. It was a world where conceivably a person might ask a pretty girl like Raya When do you get off work. And she might even take such an offer seriously. She would even know some clubs, at her age, and at this time of night. These people were immortal. They of course might see him as awesome (they would imagine him in a lab coat, manipulating formulas, a wizard, his chalk sketching in air), but they, here, they were like faeries. Mark, during his time, had missed out on Southern California. Now, married and tenured, and somewhat lymebrained, he would always have missed it. Blythe, meanwhile, was already headed for the exit. He owed all this ease to her, his guide in the city of night, and as they passed out into the dark, he added a little more, to try to explain, walking nearer to her, catching up, because he was going to indulge himself in some additional apologizing:

  “I mean, supposing with Rod it were in some sense true—”

  True, that is, that Blythe’s ten-year relationship with the musician was only a big misunderstanding and a waste.

  “—Well then,” he said, “that wouldn’t be funny.”

  It was already horror enough: Blythe had reached a point of no longer admiring her man, which happens sometimes, but this was while he was dying. As the one person in all creation who knew him best, she’d come to despise the human being she was handing out of this world.

  Anyway, outside, his own voice was oddly damped and quieted in the open air. This was a huge city. Everywhere a thrum. Everywhere a freeway overpass’s tensile clang. His little, provincial San Francisco couldn’t possibly compare. This was a city of the world, a profound city, an endless city. The windowless superstore really did look fortified against the day when the masses would storm it in food riots. Here in an L.A. parking lot, as she kept a half step ahead of him, he watched the woman who, in another life, he might have lived alongside of—the crisp cedar hair shoulder-length, the one shoulder poised a little higher than the other as she walked, the seat of the denim blue jeans tailored to possess the famous advertised valentine. The whole person of “Blythe Cress,” of course, made sense here in Los Angeles. There were elements back home that held him together, too. Terra Linda held him together, its surrounding hills, its freeway exit ramp, where, right away in the sudden serenity, you hit a stoplight beside the mall. The University of California held him together—his lucky assigned parking place on campus, the retirement package—the tollbooth at the Richmond Bridge every afternoon, and of course Lotta and Audrey, and the monthly checks to Countrywide Home Loans, and the necessity soon of repainting the house, according to the prescribed palette of colors allowed by the neighborhood covenants and restrictions. In a way, one is already dead. Already dead-andin-heaven, while living it all. That was the secret he knew. And that secret, it too was another thing that had always held him together. That perspective.

  Blythe popped the locks on her Subaru—which, too, he wouldn’t leave his wife for, its sticky drink holder dedicated to this woman’s travel mug, its bucket seat dedicated to her famous valentine, its rear hatchback floor burdened with her NORTON SIMON MUSEUM gift shop bag—and as she sorted through her key ring, she said with a gesture out toward the stranded kids on their hillside, “Coyotes and perverts. That’s all we might have to worry about.” She was sitting there stabbing her key myopically in the general area of the ignition slot. “And contrary to the general belief about L.A., the populations of coyotes and perverts here are not that, uh …” (stab stab) “not that densely concentrated.”

  The way she dimly, trustingly poked at the ignition, it was fetching, it was seductive, her passivity; this woman’s endless mystic torpor could take over his male soul. In his heart, everything was revokable. He was as already dead, watching all this from an afterlife. And so he was mute, and couldn’t speak out, at least not anything of the truth, brimming with it. He, Mark, he was the only “pervert” right now, seeing her through his peephole for these three days as a visitor. He was definitely here in Los Angeles in the company of a young woman he could sleep with at will—rather than (for example!) home diapering and sedating a baby who is paralyzed, blind, retarded, hopeless. That trade-off—the bona fide legitimacy of it—grants a fantastic buoyancy in the L.A. night in a parking lot, a buoyancy that is an entitlement completely legal and lawful and aboveboard, for a man who has the smarts and the integrity not to literally sleep with her in the end.

  AT A CERTAIN point she swung a left off Los Feliz, and he supposed they must be getting in the area. “I don’t see it,” he said. In postcards the Hollywood Sign seemed to loom so large it ought to be visible from all over.

  “I actually know a pair of guys. They live right here in Griffith Park, and I could call them if we need a hand. They’d come out. They’re devoted to me. But maybe you ought to phone your daughter. Start getting directions from her. Tell her we’re just about in the area.”

  He took out his phone and opened it. Meanwhile he was ducking to see through the windshield toward a dark territory uphill that must be an unbuilt slope. She glanced at him and informed him, “It’s not illuminated at night.”

  So Lotta was somewhere in that void. He hit speed dial on his phone. And she came right on: “Are you here?”

  “How’s everything going?”

  “Oh, it’s a party. Except poor Bodie is twenty feet down. I’ve been tossing him Fig Newtons like he’s a performing seal, poor guy.”

  “I think we’re nearby,” Mark said. The car had come to a stop before something. “There’s a sign on a gate: NO TRESPASSING. CITY OF LOS ANGELES. THIS AREA IS NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.”

  “Those signs are everywhere. Are there any houses around where you are?”

  Blythe swept the rope coil off the dashboard and told Mark, “This will have to be close enough.” She was getting out of the car. “We’ll hike in a little. I think soon you’ll be able to shout and maybe hear each other.”

  Meanwhile Lotta on the phone was continuing, “We got here by this little road, behind some houses. It was flat and easy. Do you see anything like that?”

  “Oh we should have bought a flashlight!” Blythe cried as she walked away. She ducked through the gate to set out on a dirt road
beyond the NO TRESPASSING sign.

  “Let me hang up now,” he told Lotta. “Blythe seems to know where she’s going, and once we’ve made progress I’ll call you again.”

  Lotta said, “Uh-oh. Dad?”

  He had been slightly aware of the sound of a helicopter’s rotors.

  Lotta said, “They’re looking right at us.”

  “Who, Lotta?”

  “They’ve got a spotlight.”

  From this back road, no helicopter was visible. Nor any spotlight. But he could hear it. Moreover he could hear it reproduced, sharply, on the phone to Lotta.

  “Is it police?” he said.

  Blythe, ahead of him on the dirt road, stopped and turned, and she put her hands on her hips, watching Mark’s face.

  Lotta was speaking to Bodie, telling him, “They wouldn’t do that if we were a manzanita bush.” Then she spoke into the phone, “Whoa, Dad, they’re shining the light directly on us. Whoa.”

  Blythe, standing there, had begun letting her head loll in discouragement. She told Mark, “The whole place has surveillance cameras.”

  “I think they’re going,” said Lotta. “They’re going.”

  Then with a loud whap-whap, the helicopter came into view. It must have been hovering above a spot a half mile away, or less.

  So Blythe and Mark got going.

  His own breath whuffing in the phone as he strode, he could hear Lotta in the earpiece: “They were just having a look at us. But Dad? That was probably a police helicopter, so it’s a good thing you’re coming. Did you bring the rope?”

  “Let me put away the phone now. I think we’re near. In a minute, I’ll be able to shout for you and you’ll probably hear me.”

  Blythe then stopped him. “Wait,” she said.

  He told Lotta, “Wait. Don’t hang up.”

  Blythe set her hands on Mark’s shoulders, but since touching wasn’t supposed to be allowed, especially face-to-face, she kept him at arm’s length. “We need to have a little strategy here.” She took her hands off Mark’s shoulders. “I think I should go back to the car. You have my number on your phone. You—by yourself—should go up and get them. I’m an employee of Fantasy Vacations, I don’t want to be up there. If you need me, you can call me. Meanwhile, I’ll go off and find a couple of friends. I know these two people in Griffith Park. Just in case you need somebody strong to get Bodie out of his gully, these two guys are very athletic, and they’re buff, and they’re my pals: they’ll come out.”