“Leave a note on the kitchen screen. He’ll see it when he comes over.”
“Okay.” She closes the suitcase. “I wish I knew … what was wrong with him.”
“He doesn’t even know what’s wrong with him,” Dennis says. He’s still annoyed with Jim for leaving before dinner, the previous night. It hurt Lucy’s feelings. And it was a stupid argument; Dennis is surprised he ever let himself say as much as he did, especially to someone who doesn’t know enough to understand. Although he should understand! He should. Well—his son is a problem. A mystery. “Let’s not worry about him tonight.”
“All right.”
Dennis loads the car trunk. As they go to bed Lucy says, “Do you think you’ll take this other job?”
“We’ll see when we get back.”
And the next morning, at 5:00 A.M., their traditional hour of departure, they back out of the driveway and track down to the Santa Ana Freeway, and they turn north, and they leave Orange County.
80
By the time Tashi and Jim return to Tashi’s car, three days later, Jim is a wreck. He has several big blisters, three badly burned fingertips, a cut thumb, a bruised butt, a badly scratched leg, a knee locked stiff by some unfelt twist, a torn arch muscle in his left foot, deeply sun-cracked lips, and a radically sunburnt nose. He has also stabbed himself in the face with a tent pole, almost poking out his eye; and he tried to change the stove canister by candlelight, thereby briefly blowing himself up and melting off his eyelashes, his beard stubble, and the hair on his wrists.
So, Jim is no Boy Scout. But he is happy. Body a wreck, mind at ease. At least temporarily. He’s discovered a new country, and it will always be there for him. Both physically, just up the freeway, and mentally, in a country in his mind, a place that he has discovered along with the mountains themselves. It will always be back there somewhere.
* * *
He moans as they reach the car and throw their packs in the back, he moans as Tashi drives the car up the dirt road to the track, and heads down; he moans as he sits in the passenger seat. But in truth, he feels fine. Even the prospect of returning to OC can’t subdue him; he has new resources to deal with OC, and a new resolve.
“We should get Sandy to come up here with us,” he says to Tashi. “I’m sure he’d love it too.”
“He used to come up with me,” Tash says. “Too busy now. And…” He makes a funny moue with his mouth. “We’ll have to see how Sandy is doing when he gets back. He should be out on bail, I guess.”
“What?”
“Well, see…” And Tashi tells him about the aphrodisiac run, the stashing of the goods at the bottom of the bluff below LSR. “So with LSR’s security tightened, the drugs were stuck there, see. So, apparently the attack you guys were going to make on Laguna Space was supposed to serve as a distraction that would cover Sandy while he snuck in by sea and recovered the stash.”
“What? Oh my God—”
“Calm down, calm down. He’s all right. I called Angela the next morning when we stopped for food, to find out what had happened. Sandy was caught by LSR’s security forces, and turned over to the police. No problem.”
“No problem! Jesus!”
“No problem. Being nabbed by cops isn’t the worst thing that could happen. I was worried that he might have gotten hurt. He easily could have been shot, you know.”
That idea is enough to stun Jim into complete silence.
“It’s okay,” Tash says after a while.
“Jesus,” says Jim. “I didn’t know! I mean, why didn’t Sandy tell me!”
“I don’t know. But then what would you have done, anyway?”
Jim gulps, speechless.
“Since Sandy’s okay, it’s probably better you didn’t know.”
“Oh, man.… First Arthur, and now Sandy.…”
“Yeah.” Tash laughs. “You changed a lot of people’s plans, that night. But that’s okay.”
And they track on south. Jim’s mind is filled again with OC problems, he can’t escape them. That’s what it means to go back; it’ll be damned hard to keep even a shred of the calm he felt in the Sierras. He could lose that new country he discovered, and he knows it.
Tash, too, gets quieter as they approach home. On they drive, in silence.
* * *
In the evening they track over Cajon Pass and down through the condomundo hills to the great urban basin. L.A., City of Light. The great interchange where 5 meets 101, 210 and 10 looks utterly unreal to them, a vision from another planet, one entirely covered by a city millions of years old.
Soon they’re back in OC, where the vision at least has familiarity to temper their new astonishment. They know this alien landscape, it’s their home. The home of their exile from the world they have so briefly visited.
Tashi drops Jim off at his ap.
“Thanks,” Jim says. “That was…”
“That’s okay.” Tash rouses from the reverie he has been in throughout southern California. “It was fun.” He sticks out a hand, unusual gesture for him, and Jim shakes it. “Come and see me.”
“Of course!”
“Good-bye, then.” Off he goes.
* * *
Jim’s alone, on his street. He goes into his ap. It’s a wreck too; he and his home are of a piece. Same as always. He observes the detritus of his hysteria, his madness, with a certain equanimity, tinged with … remorse, nostalgia; he can’t tell. It’s not a happy sight.
Over piles of junk, the trashed bookcase and the broken CDs and disks, to the bathroom. He strips. His dirty body is surely dinged up. He steps in the shower, turns it on hot. Pleasure and stinging pain mix in equal proportions, and he hops about singing:
Swimming in the amniotic fluid of love
Swimming like a finger to the end of the glove
When I reach the end I’m going to dive right in
I’m the sperm in the egg: did I lose? did I win?
Gingerly he dries off, gingerly he crawls into bed. Sheets are such a luxury. He’s home again. He doesn’t know what that means exactly, anymore. But here he is.
He spends the next day down at Trabuco Junior College, arranging next semester’s classes, and then back home, cleaning up. A lot of his stuff has been wrecked beyond saving. He’ll have to build up the music collection again from scratch. Same with the computer files. Well, he didn’t lose much of value in the files anyway.
The wall maps, now; that’s a real shame. He can’t really afford to replace them. Carefully he takes the tatters off the walls, lays each map in turn facedown on the floor, tapes up all the rips, flattens them as best he can. Puts them back up.
Well, they look a little strange: rumpled, with tear marks evident. As if some paper earthquake has devastated the paper landscape, three times over no less, a recurrent disaster patched up again and again. Well … that sounds about right, actually. A map is the representation of a landscape, after all, and many landscapes, like OC’s, are principally psychic. Besides, there isn’t anything else he can do about it.
He then wanders the living room gathering the torn paper scattered around the desk. This heap of scraps represents the sum total of his writing efforts. Seeing them ripped apart, he feels bad. The stuff on OC’s history didn’t really deserve this. Well … it’s all still here, in the pile somewhere. He begins to inspect each piece of paper, spreading them over the couch in a new order, until all the fragments have been reunited. He tapes the pages together as he did the maps. After that he reads them, throws away everything except the historical pieces. Other than those, he will start from scratch.
When he’s done with that job he gets out the vacuum cleaner and sucks the dust up from everywhere the thing can reach. Sponge and cleanser, dust rag, paper towels and window cleaner, laundry whitener for spots on the walls … he goes at it furiously, as if he were on a hallucinogen and had conceived a distaste for clutter and dirt, seeing it in smaller and smaller quantities. Music from his little kitchen radio, luckily overl
ooked in the purge, helps to power him; the latest by Three Spoons and a Stupid Fork:
You are a carbrain
You’re firmly on track
You’re given your directions
And you don’t talk back
You’re very simply programmed
And you don’t have much to say
And you’re gonna have a breakdown
It’ll happen some day.
“Well fuck you!” Jim sings at the radio, and continues the song on his own: “And after the breakdown, the carbrain can see, cleaning all his programs, so he can be free.…”
Yes, there must be an order established; nothing fetishistic, but just a certain pattern, symbolic of an internal coherence that is as yet undefined. He’s struggling to find a new pattern, working with the same old materials.…
All his poor abused books are on the couch. Stupid to attack them like that. Luckily most were just thrown around. He props up the bookcase of bricks and boards, starts to reshelve them. Is the alphabet really a significant principle for ordering books? Let’s try putting them back arbitrarily, and see what comes of it. Make a new order.
Finally he’s done. The late afternoon sun ducks under the freeway, slants in the open window. Door open, shoo out all the dust motes with a cross breeze. The place actually looks neat! Jim carries the accumulated trash out to the dumpster, comes back. He carries out the busted-up bedroom video system, throws it away too. “Enough of the image.” He comes back in and finds himself surprised. It’s not a bad ap, at least at this time of the day, of the year.
He makes himself a dinner of scrambled eggs. Then he calls Hana. No answer, no answering machine. Damn. He calls his parents. Their answering machine is on, which surprises him. It’s not a Friday evening; where are they? They usually only turn on the machine when they leave town.
There’s nothing to do at home, so after a while he drives over to check it out.
* * *
No one home, that’s right. A note from Lucy is on the kitchen screen.
“Jim—Dad’s been laid off at work—we’ve gone up to Eureka to visit our place—please water plants in family room etc.—we’ll be back in two weeks.”
Laid off! But there’s no lack of work at LSR!
Confused, Jim wanders his childhood home aimlessly. What could have happened?
It’s odd, seeing the place this empty. As if all of them have gone for good.
Why did they fire him? “Bastards! I should have let them melt you down! I should have helped them do it!”
But if he had, then his father just as certainly would have been fired, wouldn’t he? Jim can’t see how the destruction of the plant in Laguna Hills would have made it any likelier that LSR would have kept his father on; in fact, the reverse seems more likely. He doesn’t really know.
* * *
Jim stands in the hallway, where he can see every room of the little duplex, the rooms where so much of his life has been acted out. Now just empty little rooms, mocking him with their silence and stillness. “What happened?” He recalls Dennis’s face as he looked over the opened motor compartment of the car, Dennis holding to his beliefs with a dogged tenacity.…
Jim leaves, feeling aimless and empty. I’m back, he thinks, I’m ready to start up in a new way. Begin a new life. But how? It’s just the same old materials at hand.… How do you start a new life when everything else is the same?
81
He tracks down to Sandy’s, refusing even to look at South Coast Plaza.
Sandy’s door opens and it’s quiet inside. Angela’s there. “Oh hi, Jim.”
“Hi Angela. Is Sandy—is Sandy okay?”
“Oh yeah.” Angela leads him into the kitchen, which seems odd, so quiet and empty. “He’s fine. He’s gone down to Miami to visit his father.”
“I just heard from Tashi what happened the other night. We’ve been up in the mountains since then or I would’ve been by sooner. I’m really, really sorry—”
Angela puts a hand on his arm to stop him. “Don’t worry about it, Jim. It wasn’t your fault. Tash told me what you did, and to tell you the truth, I’m glad you did it. In fact I’m proud of you. Sandy’s all right, after all. And he’ll be back in a few days and everything will be back to normal.”
“But I heard he got arrested?”
“It doesn’t matter. They can’t make any of the charges stick. Arrests by security cops don’t mean much to the courts. Sandy and Bob said they were just boating out there, and there was nothing to indicate they weren’t. Really, don’t worry about it.”
“Well…”
Angela sits him down, comforts him in typical Angela style: “Sandy wasn’t even to shore when they caught him. It was pretty scary, he said, because they fired a warning shot to stop him, and then they had submachine guns aimed at him and all. And he spent a couple days in jail. But nothing’s going to come of it, we hope. Sandy may have to quit dealing for a while. Maybe for good. That’s my opinion.” She smiles a little.
Jim asks about Arthur.
“He’s disappeared. No one knows where he’s gone or what’s happened to him. I’m not sure I care, either.” Apparently she blames Arthur for getting all of them involved with the sabotage/ drug rescue attempt at LSR; although, Jim thinks, that’s not exactly right. For a moment she looks bleak, and all of a sudden Jim sees that her cheerfulness is forced. Optimism is not a biochemical accident, he thinks; it’s a policy, you have to work at it. “That was damned stupid, what he was doing,” she says, “and he was using you, too. You should have known better.”
“I guess.” They were being used to cover a drug run, after all; what can he say? And in the earlier attacks … was that all there was to it? “But … no, I think Arthur believed in what we were doing. I don’t think he was doing it for money or whatever—he really wanted to make a change. I mean, we have to resist somehow! We can’t just give in to the way things are, can we?”
“I don’t know.” Angela shrugs. “I mean we should try to change things, sure. But there must be ways that are less dangerous, less harmful.”
Jim isn’t so sure. And after they sit in silence for a while, thinking about it, he leaves.
On the freeway, feeling low. How could he have guessed that sabotaging the sabotage would get Sandy in such trouble? Not to mention Arthur! And what, in the end, did he and Arthur accomplish? Were they resisting the system, or only part of it?
He wonders if anything can ever be done purely or simply. Apparently not. Every action takes place in such a network of circumstances.… How to decide what to do? How to know how to act?
* * *
He drives by Arthur’s ap in Fountain Valley. Into the complex, up black wood stairs with their beige stucco sidewalls, along the narrow corridor past ap after ap. Number 344 is Arthur’s. No one answers his knock: it’s empty. Jim stands before the window and looks at the sun-bleached drapes. That visionary tension in Arthur, the excitement of action … he had believed in what he was doing. No matter what the connection with Raymond was. Jim is certain of it. And he finds he is still in agreement with Arthur; something has to be done, there are forces in the country that have to be resisted. It’s only a question of method. “I’m sorry, Arthur,” he says aloud. “I hope you’re okay. I hope you keep working at it. And I’ll do the same.”
Walking back to his car he adds, “Somehow.” And realizes that keeping this promise will be one of the most difficult projects he will ever give himself. Since both Arthur and his father are “right”—and at one and the same time!—he is going to have to find his own way, somewhere between or outside them—find some way that cannot be co-opted into the great war machine, some way that will actually help to change the thinking of America.
* * *
It’s late, but he decides to drive down to Tashi’s place, to discuss things. He needs to talk.
He takes the elevator up the tower, steps out onto the roof.
It’s empty. The tent is gone.
�
�What the hell?”
What is happening? he thinks. Where is everyone going? He walks around the rooftop as if its empty concrete can give a clue to Tashi’s whereabouts. Even the vegetable tubs are gone.
Below him sparkle the lights of Newport Beach and Corona del Mar. Somewhere someone’s playing a sax, or maybe it’s just a recording. Sad hoarse sax notes, bending down through minor thirds. Jim stands on the edge of the roof, looking out over the freeways and condos to the black sea. Catalina looks like an overlit sea liner, cruising off on the black horizon. Tashi.…
* * *
After an insomniac night on the living room couch, Jim calls Abe. “Hey, Abe, what happened to Tashi?”
“He left for Alaska yesterday.” Long puase. “Didn’t he say good-bye to you?”
“No!” Jim remembers their parting after the drive back. “I suppose he thinks so. Damn.”
“Maybe you were out when he called.”
“Maybe.”
“So how did you like the mountains?”
“They were great. I want to tell you about it—you going to be home today?”
“No, I’m going to work soon.”
“Ah.”
Long silence. Jim says, “How’s Xavier?”
“Hanging in there.” Another silence.
But maybe Abe hears something in it. “Tell you what, Jim, I’ll call you tomorrow, see if you’re still up for getting together. We’ve got to plan a celebration for when Sandy comes back, anyway. As long as nothing happens to his dad.”
“Yeah, okay. Good. You do that. And good luck today.”
“Thanks.”
* * *
Jim tracks by First American Title Insurance and Real Estate Company, just because he can’t think of anything to do and old habits are leading him around.
Humphrey is out front, looking morosely at the construction crew that is cleaning up the inside of the building. It’s a mess in there—it resembles fire damage, although it isn’t black. They’ve got most of it cleaned.
“They blew it away,” Humphrey tells him. “Someone blasted it with a bomb filled with a solvent that dissolved everything in there. They got a whole bunch of real estate companies, the same night.”
The Gold Coast Page 42