Panorama City

by Antoine Wilson

  C: Sleep, my Oppen, you need to sleep.

  O: Just a few more things, I’ve got a few more things to talk about.

  C: You need to heal, you need to come home and work on the house. [Laughs.]

  O: I’ll sleep when I’m finished, after I’ve finished telling Juan-George everything.

  C: There’s tomorrow, there’s always tomorrow.

  O: Yes, I’ll sleep tomorrow.

  C: That’s not what I meant.

  O: You sleep, Carmen, you sleep for the both of us, for the three of us, I’ll be done soon.

  C: Ridículoso.

  We drove toward home and so I thought we were going home, but instead of turning down our street Aunt Liz drove to a single-story mini-mall, it seemed like there was one at every intersection, if you ever make it to Panorama City you’ll see for yourself. This one consisted of a liquor store on one end, then two storefronts decorated with anchors and life preservers and a working miniature lighthouse up top, then around the L was a Laundromat, and at the other end was a dark window with a neon pyramid sign hanging in front, which your mother does not want me talking about. I didn’t know it then but we were headed for the Lighthouse Fellowship, Aunt Liz was introducing me to the Lighthouse Fellowship, she was introducing me to a surprise friend from that youth-oriented Christian organization, she was trying to wholesomely ease the loneliness she imagined I was feeling. We parked and I followed her through a door that had a porthole in it, I followed her into the Lighthouse Christian Fellowship coffee shop, the theme of cargo netting and life preservers continued inside, but the furniture reminded me more of the Madera St. Vincent de Paul on South B Street than anything you’d see on a ship, although I must admit I’ve never been on a ship. Later, I would learn that the furnishings themselves were supposed to look poor, they were supposed to reflect a sense of humility, they were supposed to display a Christlike indifference toward material things. But it was a mixed message, as they say, because the tables were all particleboard with fake wood veneer, the furniture itself was a lie, pretending to be what it wasn’t, an indicator, I didn’t notice it at the time, but it was an indicator that whatever was being achieved at the Lighthouse Fellowship might not be what it seemed. Not to mention that Jesus wouldn’t have settled for particleboard and wood veneer, being a carpenter, being the son of a carpenter.

  Aunt Liz scanned the room systematically, looking for the person we had come to meet, and when that person, whose name was Jean-Baptiste, who was bald and black and about my age, when he sprang up from the chair he was sitting on I knew he was going to be the surprise friend. I had just stepped into a dense nexus of invisible lines, and yet I had no idea, I couldn’t see it, I could see only the spirit of industry and exuberance, I could see only young people sitting in groups and discussing issues, or filling out forms, or sticking labels onto envelopes, or playing music, or making coffee. The Lighthouse Fellowship, on first glance, and without any knowledge of the invisible lines involved, seemed, in contrast to the world outside, more energetic and more transparent, a first impression probably colored by JB, by his springing up from the chair and greeting me as warmly and sincerely as anyone in Panorama City had greeted me so far. He shook my hand, then he put his palms together like he was going to clap, but at the moment his hands came together he held them in place, clasped them tight enough that you could see the tips of his fingers change color. He pursed his lips. I would come to recognize this as JB’s let’s get started gesture, he used it to establish himself as the facilitator of whatever group or situation he was in, to declare himself at the center but not in the center, which was how he put it. He liked dividing things with language, he was constantly clarifying his words in ways that made sense to me while he was talking but became more obscure with each passing second. As opposed to the words and ideas of Paul Renfro, which bloomed and grew and expanded in the mind, JB’s hair-splitting, which got more and more precise as it came out of his mouth, dissolved completely once he and his clasped hands and pursed lips had disappeared.

  The three of us sat at a low table. JB asked Aunt Liz if it was okay if he gave me a little introduction to what he was about, then he went into an extended speech, some of which came out so quickly I do not remember it, he declared that he was not there for the hard sell, that he wasn’t trying to convert anyone, that he wasn’t trying to sell any product. He explained that he had the easiest job in the world, he had a product that sold itself, his job wasn’t even a job, he was just a conduit, he was just a facilitator, all his words. Being bald and black gave him a double whammy of wise man, his words, good thing God made him a talker. JB talked about God’s will and being reborn in Christ, the meaning of which I came to understand later, but which without any background sounded strange, every plain word he used had a secret second meaning unknown to me at the time. Then we turned to more concrete matters, as they say, we discussed my leaving Madera and coming to live with Aunt Liz. JB had lots of questions. He asked why I hadn’t decided to stay in Madera. Aunt Liz frowned at that. I explained that I had come to Panorama City to become a man of the world. JB said he too had wanted to be a man of the world, but after many years of pursuing that false goal he had discovered something better, something everlasting, something not subject to fortune’s shifting winds. You can imagine how appealing that was to me, you can imagine how appealing that would be to anyone whose whole life had been a concatenation, a Paul Renfro word meaning chain, whose whole life had been a concatenation of unintended consequences, you can imagine how JB’s words entered my head and bounced around in there, pinging and ponging against all the other words, knocking into the idea of being a man of the world, which was still a half-formed idea, knocking it off its pedestal, replacing it with the idea of a life free from circumstance. Once Aunt Liz could see that JB and I were getting along, she got up and said, You know where the house is. I said that of course I did, and as I was saying it I saw JB nod at her, she had been addressing him.

  JB thought we should have some fun before heading back to Aunt Liz’s, he thought we should be able to come up with something better than sitting around the Lighthouse Fellowship listening to guitar music and Bible talk. He suggested mini-golf, and then a shooting range, he seemed dead set on going somewhere together. I didn’t have an idea, I’ve always believed that fun can happen anywhere, anytime. All I could think of was how I’d like to share the details of my clinical trial with Paul Renfro, just to get his take on it, not as an interested party but as a fellow thinker and man of science. The problem, of course, was that one of the experimental conditions was that I wasn’t supposed to see Paul Renfro, but since I was the principal investigator I figured it wouldn’t matter if the experiment didn’t start exactly on time. It didn’t seem fair that I should abandon Paul without filling him in on what was happening, he was my friend, after all. In hindsight, which people say is twenty-twenty but which I think is not quite that clear, in hindsight I would have done a clinical trial of Paul’s ideas first, rather than Aunt Liz’s, but as Paul explained much later, Aunt Liz was the one paying Dr. Rosenkleig and in the so-called professional world research typically follows the sponsor. I told JB I had an errand to run, if he wouldn’t mind driving to North Hollywood, I told him I had left something behind on Paul’s rooftop patio, though I didn’t mention Paul’s name. JB said that he was game for whatever, his words, and we went to the parking lot to his fantastic car, a metallic gold car, which JB informed me was a classic, a Datsun, a 280Z. It was difficult for me to get into, physically, but once I got the seat reclined properly I was comfortable, my head was almost at the same level as my feet. Riding in it was like coming down a waterslide, except I was dry and the view was of the road ahead. I told JB that I was partial to bicycles, but that if I ever had a car I would want it to be this car. He smiled and said, his words, False goals, false goals.

  I don’t want to worry your mother any more than she’s already worried, I don’t want to worry you in there, but she’s asleep right
now, she’s completely asleep, her breathing is deep and relaxed, and so I can tell you now what I know, what I know that she does not. Your mother, your sweet mother, she believes I’m being dramatic, she believes I’m worrying over nothing, or not nothing, exactly, but she believes I’m going to be coming out of this hospital someday soon, whereas I know that I’m destined to meet the terminus here. What happened was that yesterday, while your mother was in the cafeteria, she’s been by my side this whole time, but she has needs, you have needs, you stimulate her appetite, while your mother was out I heard the nurses talking. The curtain hung between us, I was out of their sight and so out of their minds, they spoke plainly in the hall, thinking nobody was listening, one of them said I wasn’t going to make it through the night, meaning tonight, meaning I will never see another sunrise. To tell you the truth, Juan-George, I never did spend much time thinking about death, I never really considered the fact that I was going to die, I always assumed that the terminus would be a far-off thing, and to hear that it was less than twenty-four hours away, to hear that I wasn’t going to make it through the night was a shock, it still is a shock. Yet I knew immediately what had to be done, I knew what had to happen to ensure that you would benefit from my experience. If you had asked me two weeks ago what would I do if I had only one night to live, I don’t know what I would have said, but when I heard those nurses talking there was no time for dreaming up an answer, I knew right away. The other nurse, when the first one said I wasn’t going to make it through the night, the other nurse said, Let nature run its course, at which point I knew I was being cared for by at least one fellow thinker. Bless that curtain! They never would have said these things to my face, Juan-George, they never would have told me these things directly, and yet, thanks to that curtain, they spoke freely, and in so doing they gave us a gift, they drew back another curtain.

  On the way to Paul Renfro’s building JB said he wanted to get everything out in the open, to clear the air, his words, he wanted to illustrate what he meant by false goals, what his life was like before he discovered the Lighthouse Fellowship, he always spoke in terms of discovering the Lighthouse Fellowship, as if it hadn’t existed until he got there. Before he discovered the Lighthouse Fellowship, he said, he’d hit rock bottom in his pursuit of false goals, he had become the lowest of the low, he had hit physical and spiritual rock bottom, which was one of the things that he had to do before he could seek recovery, he had to get to the point where he was living only for himself before he could give himself over to a life focused on others. He’d had false starts before, he’d always put too much emphasis on good deeds, he’d tried to hoard good deeds as a ticket to heaven, which wasn’t how it worked, you could do all of the good deeds in the world and if your heart was just adding them up, if your heart was just a calculator, it didn’t mean a thing, you couldn’t enter the kingdom. Before he was lucky enough to hit rock bottom without killing himself, his words, he drank too much and committed petty crimes, he hated himself and he self-medicated, because he had never come across a mechanism for effecting change in his life path. Little did he know that the mechanism was right there in front of him, the mechanism was let go, let God. One day he was flying in a small plane with some buddies, from L.A. to Las Vegas, and they were carrying a decent amount of cash and an indecent amount of cocaine, his words. Out over the desert something went wrong with the plane. Everything went silent, all they could hear was the wind, and his friend the pilot said they were going to have to make an emergency landing in the desert, he was going to have to glide it in with no power and land on the desert floor. Which was what happened, he radioed that they were going down, he guided the plane toward a flat spot on the desert floor, the silence of it was eerie, JB’s words, he knew something bad was coming, and he prayed, he hadn’t prayed since he was a kid, he promised to lead a righteous Christian life if God would spare him. The something bad came in the form of a large rock, a rock his friend did not see, a rock no one saw until they were right up on it, until it tore off the right side of the landing gear and the next thing JB knew he felt like he’d been punched in the face by the biggest fist you could imagine. When he awoke he was the only one alive, wreckage everywhere, no emergency vehicles in sight. He grabbed his buddy’s backpack, filled it with food, water, cash, and cocaine, and hiked out. What followed were two more years just like before, no praying, no righteousness, no gratitude for having been spared. But he was tested again. JB was always talking about tests, about ways in which the Lord was testing him, which is probably where I got the idea that I was being tested, I got this idea later, it has to do with Maria the Psychic, who your mother doesn’t want me talking about, I entered the whole Lighthouse situation thinking I was doing the testing, and somehow, I think it was JB, somehow I got the idea that I was being tested, too, I was being tested and tempted, more on that later. JB’s test came in the form of a stab wound, he was stabbed, someone stabbed him in the middle of a fight he should not have been in. In any case the knife punctured the sac around his heart and he nearly died. He woke up in the hospital and, standing at the foot of his bed, he saw. He stopped his story, I looked over at him, I was lying practically on my back in the Datsun, he stopped his story and stared straight ahead at the road, the sun was setting, the day was coming to an end. He told me that he saw the dead pilot, he saw all of his dead buddies standing at the end of his bed. They didn’t say anything, they only stood there, this was for the whole time he was in the ICU. The minute he got out of the hospital, which was just a year before I met him, he went straight to the Lighthouse Fellowship and started living a righteous Christian life, with humility, he was just a conduit, all he had to do was stay out of the way and let the Lord do his work through him.

  His story made an impression on me, Juan-George, I had never heard of ghosts appearing at the end of hospital beds, I thought the Lord must have had something special in store for JB. I wondered, too, what it would be like to be a conduit myself, what it would be like to have that experience, it was more of an idle curiosity in that moment than a deep feeling, but then again the ground was stable under my feet, I hadn’t yet been buffeted by what JB had called fortune’s shifting winds. I was concerned about Paul, we had pulled up to his building, I wasn’t sure how I was going to explain to JB that I needed to talk to Paul about the clinical trial, JB hadn’t given me a chance to explain while we were in the car, he had talked the whole time. And so I told him I’d left something on the roof, on the penthouse patio, which was true, I don’t like to lie. We took the elevator to the top floor and went out the door I’d used before, the one with the alarm bell on it, but this time a bell rang. JB didn’t seem fazed, he pulled a card from his wallet and wedged it into the door jamb and the bell went silent. Old habits, he said. The patio looked so different I wondered if I’d accidentally come into the wrong building. Everything was gone. Everything was cleared away. Later Paul would explain to me that zoning issues had resulted in a total impasse between him and the building’s owner, which was the reason he had been arrested, which was the reason the charges had been trumped up, but at that moment I couldn’t comprehend why someone had taken all of Paul’s things and disposed of them like this, especially the massive supply of valuable antioxidant cream and ultraviolet penlights, we had amassed an arsenal of rude commerce in the war for time to think and now it was gone. JB asked whether I was okay, he asked me if I needed to sit down. Before I could answer, a man appeared on the roof, holding an aluminum baseball bat, he asked if we were with the asshole who’d made a mess of his building. I couldn’t speak, my tongue swelled in my mouth, I couldn’t make words. The man informed us that if we were looking for all that shit it was gone and that we should get gone too. We could take the stairs or he would send us down the quick way, his words. JB and I walked to the door, we walked past the man with the baseball bat, he smelled like coconut and mint.

  I couldn’t believe that Paul’s entire penthouse patio was gone. It was as if I’d found out that th
ere never had been a Paul Renfro, that I’d made up everything, that those late night conversations about the scientific method with a fellow thinker had been figments of my imagination. I came to my senses, Juan-George, I mean it was ridiculous to imagine that I’d made him up, but the feeling stuck with me, the feeling of showing up on that roof and seeing nothing left, everything swept away. JB started the car and we drove away and while I was feeling shattered, completely shattered, JB laughed, not at my being shattered but at what had just happened. He told me that I knew how to have fun, that he’d never had so much sober fun in his life. He told me that back in his heyday he would have thrown that guy off his own roof, no questions asked. I told him I couldn’t believe there was nothing left, I couldn’t tell him about Paul Renfro, I told him I couldn’t believe the roof had been swept clean of everything. He didn’t ask me to explain, he only said that I should stick with the Lighthouse, that I needed the Lighthouse. I had the feeling he was right, that feeling stayed with me for a while. Later, Dr. Rosenkleig told me that on the roof I had experienced the loss of the father all over again, a so-called variation on a theme. He suggested that discussing my father’s death through the lens of Paul’s disappearance might help us dig deeper, which made no sense to me, I couldn’t see what one had to do with the other, but then again Dr. Rosenkleig lacked insight into the workings of the human mind, which was why he had become a professional in the first place.