“It won’t work. Karen’s at least as sane as you are.”
“But I’ll drag you into court in the process, Krell. I’ll expose you for the phony yon are.”
Harry Krell laughed a strange bitter laugh and multicolored diamonds of stained glass seemed to flash and shimmer in the sun. “Shall I show you what a phony I am, Marvin?” he said. “Shall I really show you?”
Waves of thick velvet poured over Bill Marvin’s body. In Krell’s direction, he felt a radiant fire in a bitter cold night. He heard a chord that seemed to be composed of the chiming of a million microscopic bells. Far away, he saw a streak of hard blue metal against a field of loamy brown.
All in an instant, and then it passed. He saw the sunlight, heard the breakers, then the sound of a high-performance engine accelerating up in the hills that loomed above the beach house. Krell was smiling and staring emptily off into space.
A tremor went through Marvin’s body. I’ve been a little tense lately, he thought. Can this be the beginning of a breakdown? “What the hell was that?” he muttered.
“What was what?” said Krell. “I’m a phony, so nothing could’ve happened, now could it, Marvin?” His voice seemed both bitter and smug.
Marvin blotted out the whole thing by forcing his attention back to the matter at hand. “I don’t care what little tricks you can pull; I’m not going to let you suck up my money through Karen.”
“You’ve got a one-track mind, Mr. Marvin, what we call a frozen sensorium here at Golden Groves. You’re super-uptight. You know, I could help you. I could open up your head and let in all the sounds of the rainbow.”
“You’re not selling me any used car, Krell!”
“Well, maybe Karen can,” Krell said. Marvin followed Krell’s line of sight, and there she was, walking through the glass doors in a paisley muumuu that the sea breeze pressed and fluttered against the soft firmness of her body.
A ball of nausea instantly formed in Marvin’s gut, compounded of empty nights, cat-fights in court, soured love, dead hopes, and the treachery of his body which still sent ghosts of lust coursing to his loins at the sight of the dyed coppery hair that fell a foot past her shoulders, that elfin face with carbon-steel behind it, that perfect body which she pampered and honed like the weapon it was.
“Hello, Bill,” she said in a neutral voice. “How’s the smut business?”
“I haven’t had to do any porn for four months,” Marvin lied, “I’m into commercials.” And then hating himself for trying to justify his existence to her again, even now, when there was nothing to gain or lose.
Karen walked slowly to the railing of the porch, turned, leaned her back against it, seemed to quiver in some kind of ecstasy. Her green eyes, always so bright with shrewdness, seemed vague and uncharacteristically soft, as if she were good and stoned.
“Your voice feels so ugly when you’re trying not to whine,” she said.
“Bill’s threatening to cut off your alimony unless you leave Golden Groves,” Krell said. “He wants to force a sanity hearing and prove that you’re a nut and I’m a crook.”
“Go ahead and pull your greasy little legal stunts, Bill,” Karen said. “I’m sane and Harry is exactly what he claims to be, and we’d both be delighted to prove it in court, wouldn’t we, Harry?”
“I don’t want to get involved in any legal hassles,” Krell said coldly. “It’s cot worth it, especially since you won’t have a dime to pay toward your residency fee with all your alimony in escrow.”
“Harry!”
Her eyes snapped back into hard focus like steel shutters, and the desperation turned her face Into the kind of ugly mask you see around swimming pools in Las Vegas. Marvin smiled, easily choking back his pity. “How do you like your little tin guru now?” he said.
“Harry, you can’t do this to me, you can’t just turn me off like a lamp over a few hundred dollars!”
Harry Krell climbed out of his beanbag chair. There was no expression on his face at all; except for those strange, shattered-looking eyes, he could’ve been any aging beach bum telling the facts of life to an old divorcee whose money had run out. “I’m no saint,” he said. “I had an accident that scrambled my brains and gave me a power to give people something they want and fixed it so that’s the only way I can make a living—a good living.”
He smiled, and broken glass seemed to jangle inside Bill Marvin’s skull. “I’m in it for the money,” said Harry Krell. “So you better clean up your own mess, Karen.”
“You’re such a rotten swine!” Karen snarled, her face suddenly looking ten years older, every subtle wrinkle a prophet of disaster to come.
“But I’m the real thing,” said Harry Krell, “I deliver.” Slowly and haltingly he began walking toward the doors that led to his living room, like someone moving underwater.
“Bill—”
It was all there in his name on her lips two octaves lower than her normal tone of voice, the slight hunch forward of her shoulders, the lost, scared look in her eyes. It was a trick, and it was where she really lived, both at the same time. He wanted to punch her in the guts and cradle her in his arms.
“If you’re crazy enough to think you’re going to talk me—”
“Just let me walk you to your car. Please.”
Marvin got up, brushed off his pants, sighed, and, suddenly drained of anything like emotion, said tiredly, “If you think you need the exercise that bad, lady.”
They walked silently through a slick California-rustic living room, where Krell sat on a green synthetic-fur-covered couch stroking a Siamese cat as if it were a musical instrument. On either side of him were a young male hippie in carefully cut shoulder-length hair and a well-tailored embroidered jeans suit, and a minor middle-aged television actor whose name Marvin could not recall.
Marvin kept walking across the black rug without exchanging a look or a word with Krell, but he noticed that there was quick eye contact between Krell and Karen, and at that moment he felt the fleeting taste of cinnamon in his month.
Krell’s private house fronted on a rich, rolling green plateau across the highway from the Pacific end of the Santa Monica Mountains. Rustic bungalows were scattered randomly about the property, along with clumps of trees, paths, benches, a tennis court, a large swimming pool, a sauna, a stable, the usual sensitivity-resort paraphernalia. The parking lot was tucked nicely away behind a screen of trees at the edge of the highway, so as not to spoil the bucolic scene. But the whole business was surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped by three strands of barbed wire, and the only entrance was a remotely controlled electric gate. As far as Marvin was concerned, that pretty well summed up Golden Groves. This area north of Los Angeles was full of this kind of guru-farm; the only thing that varied was the basic gimmick.
“All right Karen, what’s Krell’s number?” he said as they walked toward the parking lot. “Let me guess… organic mescaline combined with acupuncture… tantric yoga and yak-butter massage… Ye gods, what else is there that you haven’t been hung up on already?”
“Synesthesia,” she said in deadly earnest, “and it works. You’ve felt it yourself; I could tell.”
Uneasily, Marvin remembered the strange moments of sensory hallucination he had been getting ever since he met Krell, like short LSD flashbacks. Was Krell really responsible? he wondered. Better than turning out to be the results of too much acid, or the beginning of a nervous breakdown…
“Harry had some kind of serious head injury three years ago—”
“Probably fell off his surfboard.”
“He was in a coma for three weeks, and when he came out of it, the lines between his senses and his brain were all crossed. He saw sound, heard color, tasted temperature… synesthesia, they call it.”
“Yeah… now I remember. I read about that kind of thing in Time or somewhere…”
“Not like Harry, you didn’t. Because with Harry the connections keep changing from minute to minute. His world is always fresh
and new… like being high all the time… like… it’s like nothing else in the world.”
She brought him up short with a touch of her hand, and a flash from her eyes, perhaps deliberate, reminded him of what she had been, what they had been, when they first drove across the San Fernando Valley in the old Dodge, with the Hollywood Hills spread out before them, a golden world they were sure to conquer.
“I feel alive again, Bill,” she said. “Please don’t take it away from me.”
“I don’t see—”
Overwhelming warmth enveloped his body. He tasted the wine of her hand on his arm. He heard the symphony of the spheres, tone within, tone within tone, without end. He saw the dark of inky night punctuated with fountains of green, red, violet, yellow, fantastic flowers of light, celestial fireworks. He felt his knees go weak, his head reel; he was falling. The fountains of light exploded faster, became larger. He put out his hands to break his fall, smelled burning pine, heard the whisper of an unfelt wind.
He was crouched on the grass supporting his body-weight on his hands, staring down at the green blades. “Are you okay? Are you all right?” Karen shouted.
He looked up at her, blinked, nodded.
“What Harry never let the doctors find out was that he could project it,” she said.
Marvin got shakily to his feet. “All right,” he said, “So I believe that that greasy creep Krell can get inside your brain and scramble it around! But what the hell for? What dumb spiel does he throw you to make you want it, that you’re experiencing the essence of Buddha’s rectum or something?”
“Harry’s no mental giant,” she said. “He doesn’t know why it opens you up—oh, he’s got some stupid line for the real idiots—all he really knows is how to do it, and how to make money at it. But, Bill, all I can tell you is that this seems to be opening me up at last. It’s the answer I’ve been looking for for five years.”
“What the hell’s the question?” Marvin said, an old line that brought back a whole marriage’s worth of bad memories, like a foul-tasting burp recalling an undigested bad meal. Acid trips that went nowhere, two months of the Synanon game learning how to stick the knife in better, swinging, threesomes both ways, trial separations and trial reconciliations, savage sex, battle sex, dull sex, and no sex. Always searching for something that had been lost somewhere between crossing the continent together in that old Dodge and the skin-flick way of life that meant survival in Los Angeles after it became apparent that he wasn’t the next Orson Welles and she wasn’t the next Marilyn Monroe.
“What I think is that this synesthesia must be the natural way people are supposed to experience the world. Somewhere along the way our senses got separated from each other, and that’s why the human race is such a mess. We can’t get our heads together because we experience reality through a lot of narrow windows, like prisoners in a cell. That’s why we’re all twisted inside.”
“Whereas Harry Krell is the picture of mental health and karmic perfection!”
They were nearing the parking lot now; Marvin could see his Targa, and he longed to be in it, roaring along the freeway away from Golden Groves and Karen, away from one more expensive last hope.
Once again, she presented him with her flesh, touching both hands to his shoulders, staring full face at him until something inside him ached with yearning. Her face was as soft as it had been when they had been lovers instead of sparring partners, but her eyes were full of an aging woman’s terrors.
“All I know is what I feel,” she said. “When I’m living in a synesthetic flash, I feel really alive. Everything else is just waiting,”
“Why don’t you just try smack?” Marvin said. “It may not be cheaper than Krell, but at least it’s portable ”
“Harry claims that eventually we can learn to do it on our own, that he can retrain our minds, given enough time—”
“And enough money.”
“Oh, Bill, don’t make me lose this! Don’t let me drown!”
Her hands dug into his shoulders, her body slumped toward him, wrinkles formed in the corners of her mouth, the stench of pathetic desperation—
He saw huge woman’s hands knotted in fear raise themselves in prayerful supplication toward him from a forest of sharp metallic edges. He felt her flesh moving over every inch of his body in long-forgotten personal rhythms, and how it had felt to snuggle toasty beside her in bed. He tasted bitter gall and the nausea of panic, smelled musky perfume.
He heard his own tears pealing like church bells as they rolled down his cheeks; he drew the giant hands to him, and they dissolved into an armful of yellow light. Wordless singing filled his ears, and he smelled a long night by the fireside, felt the freshly warm glow of nostalgia’s sad contentment.
He was holding Karen in his arms; her cheek was nestled against his neck. She was crooning his name, and he felt five years and more younger. And suddenly scared silly and burning mad.
He thrust her away from him. “It won’t work,” he snarled. “You’re not going to play me for a sucker again, and neither is Krell!”
“You felt—”
“What you and Harry Krell wanted me to feel! Forget it, it won’t work again! See you in court.”
He sprinted the rest of the way to his car, tearing little divots out of the moist turf of Golden Groves.
With four underground films totaling less than ninety minutes to Bill’s credit and with Karen having “starred” in the last two of them, the Marvins had left New York to seek fame and fortune in the Golden West. What they found in Hollywood was that beautiful women with minor acting talent were a dime a dozen (or at best fifty dollars a trick) and that Bill’s “credits” might as well have been Cuban Superman flicks.
What they also found out after four months of starving and scrounging was that Los Angeles was the pornography capital of the world. For every foot of feature film shot in Hollywood, there were miles of split beaver, S&M, and just plain stag films churned out. The town was swarming with “film makers” living off porn while waiting for The Big Break and “actresses” whose footage could be seen to best advantage in Rotary smokers or the string of skin-flick houses along Santa Monica Boulevard known as Beaver Valley. Porn was such a booming industry that most of the film makers knew less about handling a camera than Bill. So when the inevitable occurred, he had plenty of work and the Marvins had an abundance of money.
Seven years later, Bill Marvin was left with his excellent connections in the porn industry, a three-year-old Porshe Targa, a six-room house in Laurel Canyon which he would own outright in another fifteen years, enough cameras and equipment to live well off pornography forever, and no more illusions about Making It Big.
He was set for life. Sex, both instant and long term, was certainly no problem in his line of work; four months of screwing around between serious relationships that averaged about six months in duration seemed to be his natural pattern. In the porn business, you connect up with a good lawyer and a tricky accountant early if you know what’s good for you, so he had come out of the divorce pretty damn well: fifteen grand in lieu of her share of the house and one thousand dollars a month, which he could pay without feeling too much pain.
He had felt that he could breeze along like this forever, happy as a clam, until that scene last week at Golden Groves. Now he was rattling around the house as if it were the dead shell of some enormous creature that he was inhabiting like an overambitious hermit crab. He couldn’t get his head into a new project, sex didn’t turn him on, drugs bored him. He could think of only one thing: Harry Krell’s head on a silver platter. And the fact that his lawyer had told him that the sanity-hearing ploy probably wouldn’t work certainly hadn’t improved his disposition.
What possible difference can it make to me that Karen is throwing my money away on Krell, he wondered as he paced the flagstone walk of his deeply shadowed overgrown garden. If it wasn’t Krell, it’d be some other transcendental con-man. The hills are full of them.
If this were
a Universal TV movie, I’d still be carrying a subconscious torch for Karen, which is why Krell would be getting under my skin—guru-envy, a shrink might call it. But I wouldn’t have Karen back on her hands and knees. No, it’s got to be something about that crazy creep, Krell—
That crazy Krell!
Bill Marvin did a classic slow-take. Then he double-timed through the ferns and cacti of his hillside garden, trotted around the edge of his pool, through his living room, and two stairs at a time up to his second-floor office, where he called Wally Bruner, his hotshot lawyer.
“Look, Wally, about this con-artist my wife is—”
“I told you, you miss one alimony payment, and she’ll have you in court as defendant, and unless you succeed in getting her committed—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know I probably can’t have her declared incompetent. But what about Krell?”
“Krell?” Wally’s voice had slowed down about twenty miles per hour. Marvin could picture him leaning back in his chair, raising his eyebrows, rolling the word around in his mouth, tasting it out. “Krell?”
“Sure. This guy had a head injury so serious he was in a coma for weeks, and when he came out of it, he claimed he could see sound, hear light, feel taste, and then he goes into business claiming he can scramble other people’s brains the same way. What would that sound like in court?”
“Who swears out the complaint?” Bruner said slowly.
“Huh?”
“The only way to get Krell into court is on a fraud charge, claiming that he can’t really project this synesthesia effect, and that he’s swindling the marks. That puts him in the position of having to defend himself against criminal fraud by proving he’s got this strange psychic power, which, let me tell you, is not a position I’d care to defend. If I was his lawyer, I think I’d have to plead insanity to try to beat the felony rap. If he wins, he spends a few months in the booby hatch and this Golden Groves thing is broken up, which is what you want. If he loses he goes to jail, which you’d like even better. If he tries to convince a Los Angeles judge that he’s got psychic powers, he won’t get to first base, and, if he tries it before a jury, I’ll get him and his lawyer thrown in the funny-farm.”
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