THE NEW, MODERN Santa Monica police station wasn’t busy at all. Entirely the opposite. All the action—the handcuffed quarreling whores, the car thieves, drug addicts, bellicose drunks—must be somewhere in the back of the building, or in some other wing, because out front, Mark Perdue and his daughter seemed the only threats to society in all Santa Monica, at least so far tonight—he in his Berkeley attire of khakis and shirt and jacket, Lotta in her red dress, yellow cardigan, and black canvas sneakers. The only assumption anyone could make about them was that they were, plainly, father and daughter, rather than, say, procurer and streetwalker. But there was nobody around to make any assumptions. The place seemed unmanned, or running on autopilot. Overhead lights in the front receiving area came on only from the activation of a motion detector, after they’d all been buzzed in through two doors, under the watch of closed-circuit cameras, their upper arms in the formal, gentle grips of their escorts. The front counter wasn’t occupied. It looked, in fact, never-occupied, not even since the day it was constructed and installed according to the architect’s drawings and in conformity with all building codes—empty of all friendly clutter, not even a pen or a blotter, except for a large outmoded computer, turned-off, dusty, one more piece of equipment owned and neglected by the city of Santa Monica, or Los Angeles County, or the state of California. Society builds infrastructure for itself—it issues municipal bonds, it hires architects, and it puts up a big new state-of-the-art correctional facility, complete with an efficient workstation out front—then people move back anyway to the back room or loading dock where they can smoke, talk, hang out, put their feet up.
The one cop said to his female partner, “They’ll want us to put them in Large Meeting.”
Maybe this new part was an annex to the main jail. Meanwhile the handcuffs were coming off. Mark rubbed each bare wrist, though the cuffs had been no discomfort, light plastic. A guard appeared from a heavy doorway, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans rather than a uniform, holding a key that was leashed to his belt, and he spoke into the two-way radio on his waist. “Two in Large Meeting.”
The voice inside his belt-radio answered with something like Will we book them?
That’s what Mark heard. Was it possible that they not be “booked”? It seemed a good thing, if there was some unsureness about that. Being “booked” is probably what you don’t want.
In any case, the guard didn’t respond to the voice in the radio. He ignored it. He ducked behind the counter to come up with two wire baskets, and he held them out, telling his prisoners, “Shoes, belts, contents of your pockets, wallets, all jewelry, purse.”
So they complied, side by side, guiltily, including shoe removal, he and Lotta yoked together now by this ceremony. The justice system does make you feel undiagnosably vile as you surrender your shoes and your pocket change. And pull off your silly bangles. Lotta said, while she applied ChapStick before giving up her purse, “I am so sorry about this, Dad. Really.” She was trying to be blasé, but the situation had begun to scare her, he could recognize it in a rawness in her complexion, a fixed avoidance of the eye.
The guard said, referring to their belongings in the baskets as he set them aside, “I’ll have something for you to sign.”
His key opened the door to the next room, which had been visible through a large picture window. It was a bright, linoleum-floored place with plastic chairs and a table.
“That’s the camera,” he pointed to a recessed box, mounted at the intersection of walls and ceiling. “Try to stay out here where it can see you. If you go over in the corner, you’re off camera: somebody’ll come in and tell you to move back.”
Before leaving he added, “Y’ain’t g’be fingerprinted, photoed, or frisked. Y’ave to wait now a few minutes.”
And he left them there, in the room called Large Meeting.
So society’s slow-swinging door was closed upon them, with a sound of heavy magnets clamping in the electronic latch mechanism. Back out in the entry room, visible through shatterproof glass, the two patrol officers were tearing forms off their clipboards, painstakingly, to keep them ripping exactly along the perforations. That last piece of information—about fingerprints, etc.—seemed to imply that they wouldn’t be “booked.” Booking probably involved precisely the fingerprints and mug shots. It was possible that they were being treated with unusual leniency or even courtesy; their original arresting officer, whose heavy brass name tag pin identified him as MCCUDDY, had seemed an understanding sort; and Mark had explained to him that he was only out there trespassing in order to rescue the two children, that he hadn’t been trying, himself, to make a pilgrimage to touch the Hollywood Sign. He and McCuddy, while they waited for a van, had conversed a little, about the perils of tourism, and about their respective families and the foibles of youngsters, and about smog. Maybe McCuddy sympathized with a visiting middle-class guy, and maybe he had somehow influenced their fate in the channels of arrest procedures. He and Lotta hadn’t been put in “cells,” and to all appearances, they wouldn’t be thrown in with the brawl of the general prison population on a Saturday night. This room, which they called Large Meeting, was about as gemütlich as a jailhouse could possibly be allowed to be—if harshly lit—its block walls painted a cheerful yellow, its linoleum floor furnished with molded-plastic chairs too light and soft to be wielded as weapons and too durable to be broken up for makeshift knives. There was one table, large and indestructible, with legs as fat as logs. In this room, the most resourceful malefactor in the justice system wouldn’t be able to work much mischief, especially as there was no privacy: a big picture window displayed the entire outer entry area, its empty desk and counter. On the opposite side of the room was a low pane of mirrored glass that must serve as an observatory from the neighboring room.
So they might get off light. Their detainment might be finished in an hour, involving a few bureaucratic forms only, and paying a fine. And Blythe in her Subaru was, at this moment, churning through the empty L.A. streets toward them with an envelope of cash.
Meanwhile Lotta examined her reflection in the mirrored-glass observation window. It was set so low in the wall, she had to dip her knees to see herself. She plucked her sweater out in places. And she messed up her hair, scrubbing it around.
The chairs were the stackable sort, with armrests, and Mark took a seat. This predicament was going to offer a kind of opportunity: for an hour or so, he and his elusive, evasive daughter would be obliged to converse! His pleasure in, simply, being with his sixteen-year-old was in some way pathetic and craven, floored as it was by the open space of darkness unprobed, the rest of his life. “Anyway, Lotta, are you serious?” he began. “Do you really not want to show up for the videotaping tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow is today,” she pointed out, watching her reflection, while she lifted tresses and flicked them.
With both hands she got her fingers deep into her hair and crushed it in her fists, then began flicking at tresses again.
“What caused the change of heart about Celebrity Vacation?” he inquired. “You and Bodie are, like, ‘going AWOL.’” He spoke as if that were a lovely new development. Which was how he did tend to see it. Hearing that Bodie was only an environmentalist had perhaps created a more comfortable border around that expansionist personality.
Lotta, in response, turned and looked at him with an expression meaning there was so much to explain about the world, and so much that was woeful, she couldn’t even rightly begin. Then she turned back to the reflective glass and, unhappy with the outcome of her grooming efforts, flopped down in one of the white plastic chairs in a teenage girl’s total dejection, inclining her head. “I wish he would get here,” she said.
They’d been warned that Bodie’s van would take longer.
Then she started to address his serious question. “Bodie has a philosophy. Now don’t laugh.” Her eyes flashed.
He hadn’t the slightest impulse to mock, and it was a sharp pain to him, a fatherly pain, to thi
nk Lotta could ever imagine him laughing or mocking. He could have almost opened his mouth to tell her so. A better, readier man would have.
“He has a whole complete thing.” She leaned forward. She put her elbows on her knees and pressed her hands together: it was a posture like an athlete on the sideline bench. This was new, for her. Einstein used to say thinking is partly a muscular process—that the body is involved in thought—and now here was Lotta looking deliberative, as she never had.
She said at last, “It’s all about crimes against humanity and crimes against nature. And you know, really, it’s the truth.” Her one hand actually enclosed the other fist in a gentle washing socket. “Everything is a crime, if you just think about it.”
She didn’t look up, as that announcement would require plenty of explanation, and plenty of deep thought, for a while. She hadn’t meant it to come out so flatly. All the while, the one hand kept soothing its clenched opposite. Her feet in yellow footie socks—normally all a-twiddle—had fallen into stillness while she pondered this truth, that “everything is a crime.”
“Like, for example,” she said. “The amount of jet fuel it took for Bodie’s United Airlines plane from Ohio,” and she went on about how much fertilizer that fuel might have made, for a Pakistani village to grow rice. Or a microloan might have been offered to some woman who could buy apricot trees. Mark was confirmed in relief. All that was worrying her was the fate of the Earth, that trifle. “And for my plane,” she went on, “to come down from San Francisco. So we could pretend we’re famous. And ride around in stretch limos with fake paparazzi. Did you know, for example,” she was quoting Bodie verbatim now, “that just one tankful of ethanol in your car uses up enough corn that one human being could have lived on for a year? One tankful?”
“Well, does he want to hitchhike back home?” He didn’t mean to sound flippant. He was just glad this anguish was only her personal drama, of her own good-heartedness. “I only mean to say, darling, that it’s hard for one idealistic individual to change the system and save villages.”
“Even just to walk upon this floor …” There again was the new preposition, upon, and he loved his daughter with such a sharp pang he worried how the world would treat her, even over there in Connecticut, once she’d made her getaway. “When you put your foot upon it, you’re walking on a tile which some poor little guy—probably of some racial group—in some factory!—was underpaid to make, and doomed to die at a young age, from inhaling the toxic substances in the factory. Or that policeman! Dad, he’s black!” she pointed back toward the scene of their arrest. “His grandparents were slaves. And now he has to stand there listening to you talk about ‘Celebrity Fantasy Weekends.’” She shuddered, it had been so mortifying, hearing him make idle conversation. “And like the ground our own house is built on, stolen from indigenous people. And the shoes I’m wearing, my Converse All Stars,” she inclined her head in the direction where her wire basket had gone, “were manufactured in some place, like China, in some factory by some woman probably, where the pollution makes babies deformed and causes the biological death of the oceans and blah-blah-blah-BLAH! All so I can cause jealousy! All so I can create jealousy in other people! That’s the point of it. Creating jealousy wherever possible.” She held her arms up, out from her sides, because her body was sticky from the great swamp of crime she’d been born to wade through, all her life, crime against humanity, crime against nature, perpetrated on her behalf, so she could wear her red party dress. “I am the problem. I am. Do you know we could’ve had solar panels on our roof ten years ago? And never wreck the lives of Nigerian tribes? Where the oil fields are? Not to mention the poor Iraqis or the sea-squirt population.”
“Dear heart, we’ve had this discussion,” he said. Her concerns were so sweet, and, in a paradox, selfish. She’d pulled her feet far back under her chair, withdrawing them.
He said, “Remember, Lott? Solar panels would mean cutting out the big sycamore with the swing.”
She used to love the swing: it was the one instance of his being a good fatherly handyman and building something for her, long ago when she was little. She still did love it. Only recently this spring she’d sat in it by herself making up songs, with a notebook for lyrics, her toes dragging back and forth in the worn dust. She told him, with wide eyes, in a soothing, healing, even motherly tone, “Fuck the old sycamore, Dad. And the old swing. Instead we kill brown people in faraway places.” Then she flopped back in her chair, spreading her legs in a way that would have been very unladylike if that dress hadn’t been a long one. She went on, “Everybody already knows all this. People go, ‘Yeah, wouldn’t it be great if everybody did the right thing. Too bad they don’t.’ Well, why not just do the right thing, instead of just saying everything’s ‘too bad.’”
A child’s using the f-word, before her parent, is a calculated form of histrionics ordinarily, but at this moment he found, in his own sixteen-year-old daughter, he admired such language as magisterial. At least she would make her way in the world, spoiled girl.
She added, “We still don’t have those energy-saving lightbulbs. Putting in a single one of those bulbs saves enough energy to—” She shrugged. Feed some village.
“Well, your mother—as you know—she likes it when you flip a switch and you get nice light. It’s an aesthetic thing with her. The spectrum you get in those fluorescents …”
“It’s so easy for you. For some of humanity, it’s now life-and-death situations. For some of humanity it’s no joke. Do you know that? They actually fucking die? Literally die? Fucking die? For a large part of humanity?”
Annoyance had begun to peck. Here he was now in the position of quarreling. Here he was defending society’s unforgivable sins, guilty of those sins, supposedly—and meanwhile they were sitting in an actual jail, waiting to pay a big fine, a fine incurred by her. He wondered whether he ought to make a little inquiry: how many hungry villagers somewhere might be fed on the, probably, several hundred dollars of forfeited bail money? A father’s ability to take pleasure in having a “spoiled daughter,” viewed objectively, is perhaps not necessarily a great life achievement; objectively it could be merely a big mistake, a mistake of a father’s own laziness and pusillanimity so the result was, she would grow up to be a selfish, unfeeling woman, bitchy would be the current word, and nobody will want her as a wife, everyone will discern it a mile off. Only guys in wheelchairs, with their reduced expectations, will put up with her.
He snapped, “So this is all Bodie’s point of view, I suppose.”
“Everybody is trying to be cool, in American society. And everywhere, too. Everybody is so cool. Everybody is so ‘impressive.’ Which just belittles everybody else. That’s all it is. That’s all it is, when you’re impressive. You just climb up on top of other people. On other people’s right to happiness. You belittle other people. That’s how your raise yourself up. Be cooler. Have better stuff. I would really rather live in a tin shack. Really. And eat other people’s leftovers. No kidding. That’s no ‘hyperbole’ just to illustrate. I would rather. It would truly be better. Wear crap and eat people’s garbage.”
He might have thought announcing such an ambition must be the climax in her tirade. Because where could you go higher? But then she went higher. Her fingers took a pinch of the fabric of her own red dress, and she whined, “I’m supposed to make myself look …” she shuddered. “Yeah, I won’t even say.” So she aspired to be like a nun now and cover any beauty. Or dress like Muslim woman, in the total black package. And take vows of poverty, too. “I don’t want to be superior. Why would I want to be better than anybody? Why would anybody want that? What’s so wonderful about having other people be lower down and envy you?”
Mark hardly knew where to begin. The dress came from one of those places where they sell old, used clothing and call it “vintage,” so, about that dress, she needn’t feel materialistic. In fact, she couldn’t honestly feel the least bit materialistic, or guilty about it, not in her heart.
In her heart, a healthy acquisitiveness throve. She, in her suburb, at the malls, was plundering the manufacturing base of third world nations with imperial-colonialist lawlessness. She was, tonight, only ashamed. Ashamed of causing all this legal trouble, ashamed of having been caught kissing the paraplegic drummer, all the calamity that unravels around you because your beauty naturally leads to things.
He wanted to get her home. Get her out of this whole Southern California environment, and get her back home where she would again just be Lotta-in-her-pajama-bottoms-and-T-shirt with her cute, blubbery midriff showing. Back home where she wasn’t onstage all the time, and where she liked to make herself cucumber sandwiches and commune with her computer behind her closed door. Back home where she might forget that she’d glimpsed a little bond of love between her dad and the media escort Blythe Cress. Maybe that glimpse of a father’s unfaithful yearning, back in the context of “home,” would be dissolved, forgotten, and even seem like a dream, pertaining only to this bizarre fugue time of Three Days and Two Nights in L.A.
“Did you know Mom had an abortion before she was married? I shouldn’t even be alive?” Her hands rose, and they cast a disappearance spell up and down her own body. “Rightfully, I shouldn’t be here.”
“I see. You probably shouldn’t be taking up space a third world villager could have used?”
At last he’d begun to tingle with the accumulation of insults.
The fact was, Audrey had never mentioned it. Never mentioned an undergraduate-days abortion. Not in all these years. Of course he’d never thought to ask. Who would think to ask? “Did your mother tell you that?”
“So there should’ve been another person instead of me. In the normal, rightful course of events, there’s no such thing as Carlotta Perdue. ‘Carlotta Perdue, Big Star.’”
“Genetically, that’s not how things work, sweetheart. You’re you. There’s always going to be a ‘you,’ Lotta.”
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