L.A. Mental

by Neil Mcmahon

  Modern psychology has given a huge boost to refining all that, and it has mushroomed into an industry, largely covert, that reaches into political spin-doctoring and propaganda, indoctrination of all forms—particularly effective with young kids—many applications in industry and the military, advertising, and damned near every other area where someone is trying to influence someone else on a large scale.

  I’d gotten very interested in all that as a student, but set it aside to pursue what seemed like a more sensible career. But over the past couple of years that interest had reawakened, and now, what with Parallax an influence both in my family and with Lisa, it had taken a personal turn.

  I didn’t see any clear direction in which it might go. But I did have the sense that my life was turning a page, and that somehow that would figure into what came next.

  Thirty-One

  I parked in the Waterton College faculty lot and started walking, with the cat food in my day pack. I figured that feeding them was probably breaking some kind of rule, so I tried to do it on the sly and kept the stuff out of sight.

  The campus was pleasantly quiet during break. This was a two-year community college, but a big and very pretty one—built in the 1940s, with Spanish architecture, several hundred acres of wooded grounds, gardens, and even a redwood grove. Attendance was upward of 20,000 students per semester, with a high percentage transferring on to full four-year institutions; an excellent use of taxpayer money, by my lights, and I felt lucky to be working there. It had been a good home for the past few years, what with my washout from clinical work, my father’s death, the breakup with my ex-girlfriend, and trying to keep tabs on Nick. The job was enough but not too much, with a real reward in feeling that I could genuinely get an important concept across to a class, or counsel sullen, suspicious kids who’d come from unbelievably fucked-up backgrounds—dope, sex, and abuse, sometimes from infancy—and maybe start them seeing that they weren’t to blame and they had a chance to pull themselves out.

  I walked on to the gym, changed, and went to the weight room to get the more onerous part of the workout over with first—nothing serious, just a few sets of bench presses, pull-downs, sit-ups on an incline board, and such, to keep the muscle tone from turning to soup. I didn’t swim much anymore. I’d spent so many thousands of hours when I was younger following that black line on the bottom or chasing a water polo ball or bucking surf at the beach that I’d lost my taste for it; and while the weights seemed heavier as I aged, and so did my feet when I ran, I liked being out in the open air and working up a sweat I could feel.

  Later today, however, I was going to hit the water again. Lisa had a pool at her home, but she’d never learned much beyond dog-paddling, and she’d asked me to give her a few pointers.

  You bet.

  When I was done in the weight room, I got the cat food from my locker and headed out to the running path, expecting my furry little buddies to come out and start yelling at me about why the hell I’d been gone so long.

  But this time, there was no sign of them.

  I was worried. In the trees and thick bushes they could probably get away from dogs, but they’d be at risk from more dangerous predators—coyotes, raccoons, bobcats, or even a cougar.

  As I looked around, I noticed a fair amount of whitish dust sprinkled on the ground and foliage. Christ, had the maintenance department decided the cats were too much of a nuisance and deliberately poisoned them? But it was probably a pesticide or fertilizer, and they’d been living with all that stuff for years.

  I walked to the edge of the thicket, shaking the food sack. “Hey, you guys, it’s just me,” I called. “Come on out, let me see you so I know you’re okay.” I took another couple of steps forward on the narrow little path where I usually dumped the food.

  That was when the poison theory crashed hard. A throaty yowl came rising up from ahead—the kind of hair-raising, ululating sound that cats make when they’re warning off an enemy or about to attack. A couple of others joined in, like a chorus of banshees.

  I stopped. Now I was starting to see them, sinuous shapes darting through the rustling bushes.

  It honest to God felt like they were surrounding me.

  Abruptly, one of them lunged out on a tree limb above my head and swiped at my face, hissing and spitting. I jerked away just in time to avoid the slash and caught a glimpse of the creature’s yellow eyes, filled with fury that seemed almost demonic.

  I got out of there a lot faster than I’d gone in and kept backing away for several more steps, nervous that they might follow. Instead, they went quiet again, which was far eerier still—like knowing that you were looking straight at something lying in wait to rip you apart.

  What—the—fuck?

  Could somebody have scared or harmed them so badly that they were all suddenly terrified of humans? I doubted it; there were quite a few of them, probably a couple of dozen, and it was hard to imagine what could cause such a sweeping and radical behavior change. A disease outbreak—maybe rabies? That seemed more within the realm of possibility, although I still had a hard time buying that so many animals could get infected so quickly and turn from feral but friendly to uniformly vicious, in just one week. But it was a possibility I had to take seriously—if they were dangerous, much as I hated the thought, they’d have to be put down. I decided to give it a couple of days; over the weekend, especially during break, there’d hardly be anyone around. If I got the same kind of reception on Monday, I’d have to inform the administration. I dumped out my sack of food in a new spot—they’d find it if they wanted it—and took off on my run.

  After the workout and a shower, I stopped by my cubbyhole office to check mail and messages, and to gather a few materials I wanted to work on at home. I wasn’t in any rush, and after going through e-mails I decided to further my own education a little.

  The issue of the nanoparticles in Nick’s cocaine hadn’t come up again since my talk with Dr. Ivy Shin at UCLA, and I’d hardly thought about it while I dealt with the other pressing matters. But I was curious, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a nodding acquaintance with this hot new technology.

  The word nano itself was hot, I discovered; when I typed it into Google, it brought up about 130 million matches. Most of them seemed to be for gadgets like Apple iPods and even a brand of cars, so I tried “nanotechnology.” The result was still a respectable ten million, and more along the lines of what I was looking for. I winnowed out a few of the less technical ones and tried to get an overview.

  It was a relatively new branch of science; the famously eccentric physicist Richard Feynman was credited with first proposing the existence of the ultratiny particles in the late 1950s. Just how tiny they were was mind-boggling. Medieval theologians may have debated about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but modern science gave a concrete estimate of the number of nanos that could fit—several million. A human hair was 100,000 nanos thick.

  Over the next decades, research accelerated explosively. By now, as Ivy had said, the particles were everywhere—in socks to make them drier, tennis balls to make them smoother, razor blades to make them sharper, as fillers in food and additives in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. New applications were hitting the market literally every week, with possibilities touted that ranged from new cancer treatments to fuel sources. There were also some red flags about safety issues, including fears that they could be used for virulent WMD, and of course there were potential consequences that nobody could yet imagine.

  Public awareness of all this was not high, and as near as I could tell, no form of regulation was poised to step in. On the contrary, the industry seemed to be a wide-open gold rush with a lot of interests wanting to keep it that way. We were all going to spend our lives surrounded by increasing trillions of the little motes.

  I locked up the office and headed to my car, on my way to my swim date with Ms. DiFurio.

  Thirty-Two

  The drive to Lisa’s place in the Hollywood Hills
was only about ten miles from the college as the crow flies, but it still took me a good half hour. I knew it was just the same old everyday traffic, but it somehow seemed even more frantic than usual, with drivers appearing out of nowhere in my rearview mirror just inches from my bumper, then lunging around to cut me off. It was like everybody’s life depended on beating somebody else to the next red light.

  I decided that I was just more jangled than I’d realized from my encounter with those cats. I’d put it out of my mind while I was in my office, but I’d started reliving it again during the drive, and I could tell that it was going to keep nagging at me. It was simply so wrong—not in the sense that it was their fault, but having the rug jerked out from under me, a pleasant little ritual suddenly turned into an ugly, baffling slap in the face. Maybe the really bothersome thing was that it had come right as I thought I was getting back on track.

  I made it to the gated community where Lisa lived a little after five. The place wasn’t wildly upscale, and her own house was fairly modest, but a female celeb like her, living alone, needed the security. I’d been here once before, and the same guard was at the kiosk today; he clearly wasn’t impressed by my vehicle, but he probably remembered it. Still, he took his time checking my license plates against the guest list before waving me through.

  I parked in Lisa’s driveway and rang the bell. She came to the door wearing a terry-cloth wrapper over a turquoise bikini—ready for her swimming lesson. But as soon as she saw me, her smile changed to a worried look and she raised her hand to touch my face like a mother with a fevered child.

  “What’s going on with you?” she said.

  “I’m fine. Just hectic traffic.”

  She nodded, although she didn’t seem convinced. Then her eyes widened and her hand went to her mouth.

  “Oh, God, I’m so stupid—I never even thought about this,” she said. “I hope it’s not because of Nick. You know, the swimming thing.”

  “No, no, that doesn’t have anything to do with it. I’m pretty much bulletproof about pulling people out of the water, even my brother.” I pulled a bathing suit out of my backpack. “Is there a designated changing room?”

  “Right here’s fine, honey. I hate it that we even have to wear the fucking things, but you never know when there’s some creep up in a tree with a camera.”

  “I hate it, too, but it’ll help me stay on task.”

  I put on the suit and followed her downstairs to the pool. The house wasn’t either big or fancy, but comfortable and tastefully furnished. A few features did set it apart from the norm—a big comfortable screening room for viewing daily rushes and other professional needs, a hardwood-floored dance and exercise studio, and a lot of closets, all of them packed.

  The lower level of the house was set back into a hillside and surrounded the swimming pool patio on three sides, with the fourth side an open view west to the ocean. It was nicely private except, as she’d pointed out, for the possibility of paparazzi or stalkers. She loved to paddle around, but she was afraid to go deeper than her waist, which, I assured her, was very wise. I probably sounded pompous, but it was something I felt strongly about, for good reason.

  “When something goes wrong, you’re talking seconds, and it can happen in a little pool just like this one within a couple of feet of the edge,” I said. “Usually people panic, start thrashing around, and wear themselves out.”

  That was also a prime way for would-be rescuers to get drowned. Victims would cling to them with desperate strength and pin their arms, or try to climb up on them and submerge their heads, until both went down. Lifeguards who had to make that kind of a jump were trained to surface dive several feet in front of the victims, grab their ankles, turn them facing away, then get them in a kind of sleeper hold.

  “You’re supposed to try to float, right?” Lisa said. “Like on your back? I’ve tried it, but I can’t make it work very well. Maybe if I had bigger boobs.”

  “Well, they did call those old lifejackets Mae Wests.”

  She rolled her eyes. “So now am I going to have to listen to breaststroke jokes?”

  “Not unless you start them. Okay, there’s the back float and the dead man’s float, and they’re both good to know, especially if you’re stuck out in open water for a long time—your boat capsizes, something like that. But first line of defense is to thrash efficiently.”

  I hopped into the pool’s shallow end and took her hand as she came down the ladder, then led her out a little ways and had her wait there while I went on out shoulder deep.

  “This is called the eggbeater kick,” I said, demonstrating. “It’s sort of like pedaling a bicycle except more side to side, and you’re shaking your ass. Use your hands, too—palms down flat, back and forth like you’re doing the Charleston.” The eggbeater was natural once you got the hang of it and also very powerful, the mainstay of water polo players; a good goalie could lunge up above the surface to midthighs. Strong swimmers could keep it up indefinitely, and just about anyone in reasonably good physical condition could do it for the critical couple of minutes that might separate rescue from death.

  Lisa came out toward me, a little timidly as the water deepened, then turned around and gave it a try while I held her waist.

  “It is kind of like dancing,” she said after a minute. “Good workout, too. Monster thighs.”

  “You’ll pick it up in no time. It’s tiring at first, but you learn to slow down and let the water carry you.”

  “I’ll keep practicing.”

  “Stay where you can touch bottom.”

  “Don’t worry. So let me catch my breath a minute, and why don’t you go ahead and swim? I can probably learn some things just by watching.”

  We moved back into shallower water; then I took off for a leisurely freestyle lap. I felt a little shameless about showing off, but what the hey. I glided into the deep end wall and rolled, swinging my legs up over in a flip turn. My feet touched the side, and I shoved back out.

  And Lord—in that instant, out of nowhere, my head got jolted by a violent shock. It was like nothing I’d ever felt or imagined—not exactly painful, but creepy, nasty, like every cell in my brain was suddenly writhing.

  I let out a yell, or what would have been a yell except that I was underwater, and came within a heartbeat of doing just what I’d been preaching about—panicking and inhaling a mouthful. I completely lost my bearings and my sense of up and down; it took me several seconds of twisting around before I found the surface. I grabbed the pool edge and clung there, sucking in air.

  By then the sensation was ebbing. I realized that Lisa had gotten out of the pool and was hurrying toward me anxiously.

  “I’m okay,” I managed to say, and tried to believe it.

  Thirty-Three

  A few minutes later, I was dressed again and sitting on the upstairs deck watching the sun make its slow dive to the Pacific horizon—and trying to figure out what the hell was going on with me. I tried to find a feasible explanation—that while I was twisting around in the flip turn, I’d sharply pinched a nerve. But that was bullshit, and I didn’t believe either that it was evidence of a brain tumor or ministroke or any such thing. It crossed my mind that I could have caught a disease from Nick when I was giving him mouth-to-mouth, like a rare virus that attacked the meninges and caused hallucinations or agony. “Worms eating my brain” was a damned good description of what I’d felt, and goddamned savage worms. But I’d never heard of any such condition, and with all the tests the hospital had run on him, there’d been no suggestion like that.

  Lisa came out of the house and handed me a brimming glass of Bombay gin on the rocks with a lemon wedge.

  “I canceled our dinner rez and ordered a pizza,” she said.

  I nodded with relief. I didn’t want to face the world right now anyway, and if I had another episode like that in public, it would not be a pretty scene.

  “Now tell me what’s going on with you,” she insisted. “Have other things like th
is been happening?”

  “Nothing like this, no. There was something weird earlier today.” I told her about the incident with the cats, and finished, “I know that had me on edge, and there’s still all the fallout from Nick bouncing around in my head. It all must have made something slip for a second. But you can’t help wondering if it’s going to keep on slipping.”

  Lisa’s face had taken on a look I hadn’t seen before—like something was dawning on her that she found very unsettling.

  “Has anything happened that involved Parallax?” she said.

  Parallax? What could that have to do with this? But she had to have a reason for asking. I thought back over the past week, shaking my head—then stopped.

  “Not directly,” I said. “I did have a run-in with Paul this morning where Parallax seemed to figure in, or at least he seemed to think so. There’s nothing mysterious about why it happened, although it was pretty strange how he handled it.”

  “Tell me.”

  I hated holding out on her, but the blackmail story had to stay secret, so I hedged about that.

  “The family lost confidence in his business judgment, so we cut him loose,” I said. “It was a righteous bust—he’d been screwing up. We treated him well money-wise, but of course he was steamed. I’m sure Cynthia’s not happy, either. Anyway, he half-assed threatened me—told me it would piss off the Gatekeepers.”

  Lisa’s face was getting more somber—with a touch of alarm in her eyes.

  “Maybe it did,” she said.