NightSun

by Dan Vining

She walked toward the door. “I got another job for you,” Ava said. “For in the morning. Find Beck or Birmingham or whatever his name is. Follow him around. You have to do this right because he knows you. Do you know how to do that, tail somebody without them spotting you?”

  “With a partner, right?”

  “You don’t have a partner,” Ava said. “Just be cautious, tricky, stealthy.” She made a diving motion with her hand. “Undercover.” She made the opposite motion. “Not overcover.”

  Chrisssy nodded.

  “Five hundy a day plus expenses. Tail him. Keep your distance. Call me if he goes anywhere or does anything that makes you say, ‘You know what? I should probably call Ava.’”

  Chrisssy nodded bigger. She waited until Ava’d closed the door before she pumped her fist.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Edward Chang lived in a modest Costco tract home out in the IE, The Inland Empire, Riverside. By the time Ava got out there, it was almost 3:00 a.m. and all the fun had leaked out of the idea that she was going to kick his ass for sending her off after the wrong DL. She parked across the street and turned off her lights. The drapes were drawn but there were lights on in the house, including the front bedroom on one end. Shadows moved across the drapes now and then. From what she could make out, Chang was sitting in front of a computer and a bunch of monitors—big surprise—and someone else was coming in and out of the room. His mom? Worse, a wife? Ava seriously thought about just driving away and letting it go. But she didn’t. She never just let things go. She called him up on the comm.

  When he came on screen, he looked worried.

  “I’m out front,” Ava said.

  He looked more worried.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Come on out.”

  Nobody had grass anymore, not real grass, at least nobody in the middle-class Inland Empire. Gravel, baby. All the front yards in the ten-mile-square housing tract were white gravel. Edward Chang’s “lawn” also sported a peeling white birdbath—dry as a bone—with a chubby angel baby sitting cross-legged on the rim. Edward Chang came out the front door, saw the Hudson, and crunched across the gravel to it. He was wearing Converse All-Stars and cargo shorts and a black T-shirt that said in white letters, What’s Your Story?

  Ava was out of the car, getting another look at her creased back bumper.

  “I know what you are going to say,” Chang said. Now he had no accent. He sounded like a reporter on TV, a Nobody from Nowhere.

  “I knew you didn’t live in Chinatown,” Ava said.

  “I never said I did.” He came right out to the last foot of his yard. He had his hands in his pockets. He had a round face with the expected straight black hair. Ava was thinking he looked more Korean than Chinese, but she was a White; Whites made the same mistakes about non-Whites, over and over.

  “Yes, I believe you did,” Ava said. “But you were drunk.”

  “I don’t drink. I don’t drink and I don’t get high. Except gaming.”

  Ava leaned against the rear fender. “OK, so who is DL?” she said.

  “Who or… what?” The pause was most melodramatic.

  “Don’t get cute. It’s too late, in more ways than one.”

  Edward Chang looked up and down the row of houses, as if someone might be watching. None of the other houses even had lights on.

  “David Lynch.”

  “David Lynch?”

  “The director,” Ava said.

  “Yes. And so much more,” Chang said. “A remarkable man, even to those of us who might be seen by some as his declarated enemies.”

  “You mean declared.”

  “If you prefer.”

  That was the most words Chang had ever said to her. For now, Ava put a pin in the “enemies” thing and said, “He has a silver Bentley? Right?”

  “Silver, unconverted, gas-burning, twelve-cylinder. Nineteen sixty four-door S-two Saloon. He bought it when Twin Peaks was a hit.”

  “And then he bought—”

  Chang cut her off, nodding. “That’s right,” he said. “Ding ding ding, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. In twenty eighteen. He bought it from the State of California when Be.Here.Now. crossed the five-hundred-million-dollar mark in remunerated downloads.” This new Edward Chang was so proud of everything he knew that the average person didn’t know, or at least hadn’t looked up online. He was cocky, a whole other person. Ava wanted to smack him.

  “I heard of it,” Ava said. “A video game.”

  “Think what you will, but Be.Here.Now wasn’t a video game.”

  “So what does DL stand for? Besides ‘David Lynch’? What’s the what?”

  A solitary car, a Fed, was coming toward them from the far end of the street. At twenty miles an hour, with one headlight burned out. Somebody on the night shift, or the Dawn Patrol. Chang waited until it was past them and then waited until it reached the next corner in the development before he gave her the answer.

  “Dark Lighthouse,” he said.

  www

  Ava was back to feeling lonely. That wore off fast.

  She stopped at the all-night Charge-’Em-Up on La Brea, then headed north. It only took an hour to break free of LA traffic. For most of the hour, she had the pirate radio guy for company. She’d decided she was his only listener. He was talking about the Dust Bowl and then the New Dust Bowl. He’d played a song she’d never heard, a nasally folk singer–type who sang, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows…”

  How did he know?

  The Hudson was running smooth, in spite of its dinged bumper and jammed door and hurt pride. It was as if it were glad to get out of town, open up, burn up some atmospheres. About Encino, the hot-stripped roadway began. The Hud slipped to the inside lane, dropped its skid-drag, got a good connection, and said, “Mmmm…thank you.” The electrified highway was one of the few new things in the new world that worked as promised. For now. It was another rushed government project. A couple of years after the twenty-two baby nukes up and down the coastline went online, the overwhelmed governor decided to try to revive the motor-tourist business. The open highways connecting cities and towns were too open, empty. No one was going to hit the road in a dinky Federal. Feds had a top speed of thirty-five before they started shaking like a palsied old person and their open road range was measured in minutes. A few holdout land cruisers were still out there rocking and rolling—the usual suspects, Cadillacs and Lincolns and Hyundai Big-9s—but who could pay for the gas now that it was coming from Mexico? The open-road gas stations all became Nuevo Mundo stations and—before long—most of them were closed Nuevo Mundo stations.

  The answer—in California at least—was to power up the highways. A machine that moved at two miles an hour dug a flat groove into the middle of each lane and laid down a six-inch-wide copper strip. Older autos were converted and sleek new electric models called OpenRoaders were engineered. Essentially, open-highway cars were slot-cars, just like the kids’ toy from the last century. A skid dropped down from the undercarriage and touched the hot-strip and away they went. They could go nonstop until you got to wherever you were going or you needed a pit-stop. When that time came, you disengaged, the onboard batteries took over, and you steered or were steered over to the outside lane, where the slow locals were. The juice was free. The State made its money from the reprieved motels and roadside restaurants and tourist attractions. Not that California wasn’t still bankrupt.

  Ava stopped in Summerland just south of Santa Barbara for an egg-and-chorizo burrito. She ate it in a beach park, sitting in the dark on a picnic table next to the kids’ playground, looking out at the water and the stars that curved down to touch it. A string of exhausted offshore oil rigs were in the foreground, close in, still fully lit to keep the sailors from running into them, looking like the lowest stars.

  She remembered a night with
her parents in the car, in Pasadena, coming back from something or other at the Flintridge Country Club, which her mother had made her father join. They were arguing, back and forth, taking all the easy shots at each other. Her mother had said something like, “You’re such a grump. You always act like you’d rather be anywhere than with me and my friends.”

  And her father had said, “You know where I’d like to be about half the time? I’d like to be working on a goddamn oil platform out there off Summerland! Where there are no women!”

  Ava had been in the backseat, looking out the window, wearing white gloves. She’d thought it was funny. Now, sitting at the picnic table, it was a story that seemed to be trying to make some other point; she wasn’t sure just what. Whatever it was, it wasn’t funny. “I wish they all could be California girls…” her father’s song, came into her head again as the high-tide black waves collapsed in front of her with a sound like hesitant applause. She hauled back and threw the last third of the burrito into the surf—hoping there was still something out there to eat it—and a minute later she and the Hudson were back in the groove, headed north.

  When the day broke, Ava was a hundred miles above Santa Barbara, rolling north along the coast on the mostly empty California 1, the primer-gray Pacific off to her left, the brown hills on her right. The car windows were down. The air was funky in that seashore way. The new light angled in through the open passenger-side window. There were no trees on the hills to break the beam of the sun so it didn’t flash. The steadiness of it appealed to her. She literally warmed up to it. The whole side of her face felt as if it were glowing. Or as if she was blushing, something she hadn’t done in who knew how long. She looked over. The brown hills all wore tiaras now.

  “Up and at ’em,” she said and went faster.

  She came through the little tourist town of Cambria at ten in the morning, only slowing down enough to keep from getting a ticket from the cop who was always lying in wait down the side street by the bank. (It had once been a bank, now it was another gallery selling Plein Air landscapes and polished redwood burls.) A new wine shop sat next to an old wine shop next to the gallery. She could have stayed on the highway and bypassed the town altogether, but she wanted to see if all of her favorite places were still there. She had spent more than a few weekends and weeks in Cambria, with friends and alone, when she just had to get out of LA—something everyone who lived in Los Angeles understood.

  Business was good, the town full of electro-travelers. The cop had pulled over a white El Dorado convertible, the driver and the officer laughing as he wrote the ticket. They both waved at Ava as she came around them. She almost stopped for a fancy coffee but instead kept on all the way through the town; she then crossed over the main highway to the two-laner that went along Moonstone Beach, with its motels lined up shoulder to shoulder facing the sparkling water. Her favorite spot to hole up, The Little Sur Inn, was still there and apparently prospering: the lot was full and a no-tech No Vacancy placard hung on hooks off the bottom of the wooden signboard.

  Moonstone Drive gently returned her to Highway One, the way north.

  “Auto-drive?” the Hudson Man said.

  “No, I got it,” Ava said, her mood darkening a bit now.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Below Hearst Castle out on a point on the ocean was a dramatic stand of three-hundred-foot-tall eucalyptuses, as big as they get. The trees leaned toward the mansion above—toward America, if you thought about it—pushed that way by a hundred years of prevailing wind that came all the way from…somewhere. Below the trees was a curving sandy beach and a surf line that broke right, toward a long wooden pier. An offshore breeze stood the waves up, easy six- and seven-footers, green and clear.

  Cali had one all to herself. She had the beach all to herself. She was on a longboard, a red-striped Dewey Weber, wearing a white bikini that tied on the sides. She was tan in a way she hadn’t been just a few days ago, the kind of tan a person has to relax into. She wasn’t smiling, but she looked gentled, in the moment, in the here and now. Happy? Possibly. Why not? Was happiness really just a choice? She certainly looked far away from her troubles with Beck. Or whomever. She eased down the face of the wave and gracefully turned—these classic old boards didn’t pivot—into a section that threatened to collapse but never did. She kicked out, then paddled out to catch another. When she reached the landscape of gentle swells beyond the shore-break, she glided to a stop and sat up, still facing out to sea. A leopard shark circled her, close enough for her to see the spots. She looked over the side of the board. She could see her toes, her pink-painted toenails. She wiggled them and giggled. It seemed to her that she could see all the way to the bottom, what looked like a mile down. A pelican floated over. She looked up at it, tracked it, slowing it down and changing its color from gray to turquoise. To better match the water and sky. There was so much gray in the world. She made it pink and let it fly on.

  “This is perfect,” Cali said. She turned her head. She could hear the wind breathing in the trees on the point. “This is perfect. I’m perfect.” She said it again, “I’m perfect.”

  A swell lifted her and she saw the woman on the beach in a purple dress.

  “Margo!” Cali said, delighted. “Margo Channing…” The woman in the purple dress was looking out to sea, with a hand over her eyes for a visor, but Cali didn’t know if she could see her.

  Cali waved. The woman took a step closer.

  www

  Ava had steered off the highway to an oceanfront observation point shy of the mansion. She was guessing there’d be a gatehouse ahead, so she’d stopped well before the road that led down to the point. She had the observation pull-off all to herself. The highway coming up from Cambria had been empty, too. Maybe the tourists were all still asleep in their borrowed beds back down the way on Moonstone Beach. No hurry. It was only a two-hour drive to Big Sur, the next wonderful place on the way north. Ava parked the car, started down to the beach, then realized she could lose the shoes, went back, steadied herself against the doorframe, unbuckled the buckles, and threw her red pumps into the front seat.

  “Back so soon?” the Hudson said.

  “Go to sleep,” Ava said.

  She walked along the beach toward the pier and the point beyond. She was coming in on the down low. Ahead, the point with the landmark stand of eucalyptuses. It was a good half mile beyond the long wooden pier. Everything up here was outsized, a landscape for giants. There wasn’t a soul in sight yet but no signage, nothing that marked the beach as out-of-bounds to outsiders. And so far, no electrified fences or robo-dogs. Or even cameras, unless they were implanted in the eyeball of the screeching gull overhead, holding in the same spot, riding the wind.

  Ava stopped cold. Ahead were dark bulbous shapes on the sand. Blobs, furry blobs. It looked as if someone had cleaned out the closet of an old society maven and thrown around the mink coats in a fit. Then one of the fur coats flippered some sand onto its back to warm up. Its neighbor lifted its head and barked a rebuke. At least it sounded like a rebuke to Ava. She wasn’t much of a Nature Girl, though she sometimes liked to pretend otherwise with a Nature Boy. She gave the sea lions a wide berth and walked on. The warm sand felt good to her, too, the sun and the sand. The sky was cloudless. It was a beautiful day. Unassailable. She could see why someone would want to escape to this, or at least give it a try.

  William Randolph Hearst had officially named the estate “Le Cuesta Encantada”—The Enchanted Hill—but he himself just called it The Ranch. Everyone else called it San Simeon. David Lynch, when he bought it from the State in 2020, named it—or renamed it—Xanadu. The grand house with its fifty-six bedrooms and nineteen sitting rooms had proved too grand—not even Lynch’s ego could fill it—so after six months he let the tours and tourists back in and moved himself and his friends down to more modest quarters in a renovated building below on the point, what once had been Hearst’s private
train station, at the end of a spur line that came up from LA.

  A few hundred yards more and Lynch’s train station house was visible through a broad grove of orange trees. The trees had uniform dark green leaves and were thick with fruit. The grove looked so perfect Ava wondered if it was all fake, a good bet. The drought that had tried to kill off the Central Valley was still lingering hereabouts. It had all but wiped out the vineyards below Cambria. The train station house was a hundred yards up from the beach. No one was around it, though it didn’t looked deserted. It was big. It would have been called a mansion, too, if it wasn’t just down the hill from Xanadu. It had a pleasing, old-timey shape to it. No wonder, it was a copy of Union Station: arched entryway, high round windows, red Saltillo tile everywhere, and a central clock tower—though the hands were missing, which no doubt was intentional.

  “Margo! It’s been forever! How are you?” Cali said to Ava, coming in, dragging the surfboard by its nose through the shallows.

  “I’m good,” Ava said, with only a little bit of questioning in her voice, standing a few feet up from the reach of the sliding suds. “Are you OK?”

  Cali gave her a curious look. “Of course,” she said. “This is where I belong. Remember when we used to talk all night about finding the place where you belong? Your proper place in the world? You’re so pretty. I had forgotten how pretty you were.”

  All right, Ava thought, she’s high. Though she was still in the shallows, Cali turned loose of the board, let it drop, and walked away from it. It started to drift out.

  “You’d better get that,” Ava said.

  Cali turned and looked at the drifting surfboard. “No, it’s all right,” she said. “It’s part of the program.” She threw out her arms and came at Ava and hugged her tightly, just as she had hugged her in Ava’s living room, out of the blue. “Margo, Margo, Margo…” she said.

  “We have to talk,” Ava said, still in the embrace.