Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  Peter is waiting for him, dressed in a bold striped shirt with large French cuffs and cuff links that could take out a tooth. “You were sober,” he says. “That’s a good thing. And you took the breathalyzer so you’re clear.” Ever since they met in law school, Peter’s been working the spin. “This is my advice—friend and lawyer. Enter a clinic, voluntarily. Exhaustion, stress.”

  “I’m not tired,” Tony says. “I feel good.” Which is true, surprisingly. His legs aren’t cramping. His lungs feel clear.

  “No, you don’t. You feel like shit. Things have never been worse. It’s your job. Your wife. Get marriage counseling. The judge will love that.”

  Tony rolls down the window of Peter’s sports car, his midlife crisis on wheels, and sticks his head out.

  “What the hell are you doing? You look like my Labrador.”

  “I want to feel the air.”

  “You want to feel the air? Go to Santa Monica. Check in to Shutters for the weekend. Or better yet, move down to Laguna. Get a place near me. We have more air down there than we know what to do with.”

  But it’s not just the fresh air, which Tony has to admit isn’t all that fresh. He wants to see if he can glimpse what the naked man was running toward, whether this rotting neighborhood might hold some secret to that overwhelming sense of freedom he’d sensed wafting off the runner as he passed by on the 110.

  Peter stops at a light and Tony wedges himself farther out the window, craning his neck so he can look up and down the street. A man is urinating into the gutter. A woman is screaming scripture at every stopped car. He pulls back inside. Maybe he is having a breakdown after all.

  PETER LEAVES HIM AT HIS HOUSE IN BEVERLYWOOD. STEPHANIE IS OUT, which is a relief. Tony will have time to spin his story for her, give her the right lines to feed their friends should it ever come up.

  He changes into sweats and stretches out on the couch. The neighborhood sounds different in the middle of the day—the distant roar of a leaf blower, the rhythmic tap of someone’s home improvement project, a handyman speaking Spanish on the street.

  He turns on the television, hoping for news but getting the frenzied drama of daytime talk shows. So he surfs the Internet instead. Naked runner. 110 streaker. Morning commute.

  He finds dozens of grainy videos, some taken from cars stopped on the freeway, the disembodied voices of the people filming mocking and breathy. Some are taken from the streets. Others from office buildings. Then there is the official news footage—a bird’s-eye view from a helicopter of a beige speck gliding through downtown with the news crawl running below.

  A few of the videos capture Tony—a fully dressed man running down the middle of the street. But most turn away when the naked jogger has passed. Stephanie will be grateful for that.

  Tony is amazed by how many eyes are on everything all at once. And he’s fortunate that the speed of information flow is outpaced by how quickly things are forgotten in favor of a new scoop.

  He hits refresh on his browser, looking for updates on the naked runner. But the city is transfixed by a singer who overdosed in her hotel room, and has turned away from the morning’s first spectacle.

  TO SAY THAT STEPHANIE IS ANGRY WITH HIM IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT. “I wanted to do something,” Tony says. “Everyone was just sitting in their cars watching.”

  “So that’s what you do. You do what everyone else does. Especially after all we’ve done to get past that other incident.” She’s wearing her daytime uniform of form-fitting yoga clothes. Her hair is perfect, her makeup flawless. “They’ll drag it up,” she says. “They’ll start talking about that old stuff and people are going to know.” She wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. Her makeup doesn’t run. “I can’t face after-school pickup.”

  “Sorry,” Tony says.

  “What were you going to do if you caught him?” Stephanie lowers her voice to a whisper. “He was naked. You were going to touch a naked man? I told you it was on the news. That’s why I called. To warn you. You should have stayed in your car. Or maybe you wanted to be on the news?”

  “No,” Tony says. “I didn’t want to be on the news.”

  Stephanie checks her small gold wristwatch as if it contains the solution to the mess Tony’s created. “It’s Thursday,” she says, tapping the crystal. “The kids won’t go to school tomorrow. You call in sick to work. You are sick after all. We all go to Ojai or Malibu, maybe even Santa Barbara. Somewhere nice. Maybe stay through Monday. And you can spend the weekend praying that this will have blown over.”

  Tony scrolls through the KTLA news blog. “That was Peter’s suggestion.”

  “You should be more like Peter,” Stephanie says, peering over his shoulder. “You’re Googling yourself?” She snaps his computer closed.

  Be more like Peter. Bimonthly cigar nights with the boys, followed by a trip to an upscale strip club and a lap dance everyone pretends didn’t happen, a faster, more ridiculous car every couple of years, Sunday afternoon sex dates with his wife while he’s thinking of that week’s stripper, and a dangerous flirtation with his secretary. Monthly sex dates with his secretary when he’s thinking of his wife. Then there are the biannual Indian princess retreats with his daughters where the girls play Pocahontas, the dads try to teach them to tie knots or tell a beaver from a woodchuck but are secretly counting down the minutes until the kids’ bedtime when they can all go to the main lodge and get loaded.

  Stephanie doesn’t know this side of Tony’s buddy. She only sees the perfect dad and father—the man who gives the right gifts for the right occasion or for no occasion at all, who is happy (or pretends to be happy) to man the grill, serve drinks, even take the girls to the nail salon. And maybe it’s better to see the parts that please you and overlook the rest. Hell, if only Tony had that skill.

  But the real world has a way of slipping in and popping the pristine bubble Stephanie is always erecting around their family. Tony knows too well that their bank account sags under the strain of the right private schools and how their older daughter, Danielle, isn’t doing well in school to begin with, isn’t trying hard enough and doesn’t care. He knows that he’s lazy when it comes to asking more of her, content to let her slide, chat to boys on the phone, and online shop instead of studying. He doesn’t want to anger her, upset the balance, even though common sense tells him it will be better in the long run. On top of it all, he knows his job is a dead end, that if he’s lucky he might make a lateral move to a similar department—maybe something in talent contracts or product placement. He’ll never have the attractive bonuses and the seven-figure salary of his old job. That dream crashed and burned when he remained in the banquette with the bottle of Grey Goose and let the intern leave on her own.

  HE STAYS ON THE COUCH AFTER THE KIDS COME HOME FROM SCHOOL. Stephanie maintains the ruse that he’s sick. The television is still tuned to the local news, the volume low. A reporter is posted outside the hotel where the singer ODed. The banner at the bottom of the screen now reads FOUL PLAY? The crawl keeps him up on all the developments—the arrival of relatives, the cancellation of tomorrow night’s private performance, a press conference by the singer’s estranged father, a vigil being held in the Alabama town where the deceased got her start singing gospel. Then there’s a break and the broadcast pulls back to the studio where two lacquered newscasters with laminate smiles and orange tans are bantering.

  “Did you ever have one of those dreams where you forgot to get dressed before leaving the house? Well, would you believe this one,” the female presenter says in that incredulous and hokey way permissible on the local news. “Traffic was stopped on the 110 today when a naked man began running down the freeway.” The shot changes from the studio to the bird’s-eye view of the runner as he cuts across two lanes of stalled traffic to exit toward Pico-Union. “The man led the police on a chase along the freeway before they lost track of him near MacArthur Park.”

  There’s a quick shot of the large indoor swap meet across from the park.
Tony sits up on the couch, wondering if he’ll glimpse himself prone in the middle of Alvarado. But in no time, he’s looking at the newscasters. “Gives new meaning to the morning rush,” the male newscaster says, shaking his head at either the naked runner or his lame joke.

  “Turn it off,” Stephanie says from the kitchen. “Just turn it off.”

  Tony mutes the set but opens his laptop, scrolling for more news. He checks downtown blogs, traffic sites, highway reports. Nothing. When Stephanie pops out to the patio, he places a quick call to Central P.D., where he’d been booked. “Has someone located the naked runner from this morning?” he asks.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “He looks like someone I know. I’m concerned.”

  “How concerned? You want to give us his name or yours?”

  Tony hangs up the phone as Stephanie comes back into the room. “Who was that?” she asks.

  “Work.”

  “You told them you’re not coming in tomorrow, right?”

  HE WATCHES HIS WIFE SETTLE THE KIDS INTO THEIR AFTER-SCHOOL routine, monitoring their homework, the number of phone calls they are making or receiving. He watches her prepare dinner using the ingredients that come from the upscale subscription service that allows them to eat home-cooked but easily assembled meals. He has to admit there’s an unusual grace to the way Stephanie organizes their house, the way she interacts with their material possessions. He’s entranced by how, in her presence, their hundreds of objects and gadgets acquire a symphonic precision, even a strange sort of beauty. He’s always bumping up against these things, opening packages with the dedicated kitchen scissors, making his power smoothie in the old baby food blender instead of the Vitamix, storing leftovers in plastic instead of glass containers.

  And it’s not just the kitchen. The whole house yields to Stephanie as if it has agreed to give her the exact amount of comfort she has asked of it with her carefully chosen carpets, couches, and solar shades. The house knows that Tony doesn’t care, that he’d be just as happy on his law school futon or in the worn-out La-Z-Boy he’d lugged around since his frat days. So the house makes no concession to him, doesn’t allow him to get comfortable on the eight-thousand-dollar couch although he knows there’s comfort to be had there, won’t let him in on the secret of the plush pile carpets or share with him the joys of the rain shower in the remodeled bathroom.

  Stephanie serves dinner. It looks exactly like the picture on the box that came with the ingredients. Tony is so entranced by her perfect replica that he barely tastes the food. He marvels at the orchestra of dinnertime, the way even Danielle, his disenchanted daughter, passes dishes and clears the table when the meal is over.

  “You okay, Dad?” she asks. “You seem kind of spaced.”

  “Your father’s fine,” Stephanie says. “His job has worn him down, that’s all.”

  “I feel you, Daddy,” Danielle says, pausing at the door between the dining room and kitchen. “It’s a grind, right?”

  Tony isn’t sure whether to laugh or to cry.

  After dinner, Stephanie disappears into their bedroom to watch the junk TV she doesn’t want their children to know she craves. “Just keep the news off,” she warns Tony, “until we know this thing is behind us.”

  Tony obliges. The story seems to have disappeared from the evening news cycle anyway. He checks his work e-mail and does some damage control—making an excuse for his unexplained absence that sounds serious enough that no one will ask questions but vague enough that he won’t be caught in a lie.

  He reclines on the couch, keeping the news off but riding the remote just in case something pops up. He drinks a beer he knows he’ll regret in the morning.

  “Daddy?” Danielle is standing in the doorway between the hall and the living room. She’s holding her laptop.

  Tony sits up, puts the beer on the side table, and holds out his hands for the computer, ready to be the dad who helps with homework. But when Danielle sits down next to him on the couch, he sees that it’s not an essay or a science project on her screen, it’s a YouTube video posted on one of her many social media outlets. Danielle presses play.

  Tony knows what’s coming before the video starts. Unlike most of the footage on the news, this clip has been shot at street level. The runner passes by and the person filming begins to follow. The frames bounce and jerk as whoever is holding the camera tries to keep the naked jogger in the shot. Then another person comes into view. Tony recognizes his dress shirt, his chinos, his hair still damp from his shower.

  Danielle presses her finger onto the screen. Stephanie would reprimand her for leaving a print but Tony doesn’t bother. “That’s you, right, Daddy?”

  The person filming jumps out of the way. The camera catches a city bus, the palms in MacArthur Park. Then there is the sound of police sirens and the footage ends.

  “I don’t think—” Tony says.

  “There’s other clips,” Danielle says. “In one of them you can totally see your face. It’s like a thing online right now.”

  “A thing?”

  “Daddy, don’t you know people film everything these days?”

  “I guess I didn’t, sweetie.” He shuts the laptop and hands it back to her.

  “Don’t worry,” Danielle says, “I didn’t show Mom.”

  Tony wants to bury his face in his hands; instead, he runs his fingers through his daughter’s hair.

  Stephanie is calling him from the bedroom. He gets off the couch. He uses the electric toothbrush and the oat scrub. Then, after removing the bolster and the two decorative pillows on his side of the bed, he slides in next to his wife.

  6

  REN, LOS ANGELES, 2010

  Ren slept deep and long. He hadn’t crashed in a bed proper since he didn’t know when. The bunks in juvie barely counted—thin-ass, rubber-coated mattress, scratchy sheets, and a floppy pillow with about as much cushioning as a flip-flop. When he got out, he’d camped on a lumpy futon on the floor of a shipping container, then floated around Brooklyn’s dwindling supply of abandoned buildings. It might have been private, but it wasn’t exactly high comfort. So the bed at the Cecil was about as close to luxury as he’d ever come.

  He knew there were better mattresses out there with softer sheets and blankets that didn’t smell of flame retardant. He knew that pillows probably shouldn’t crackle when you put your head down and that comforters shouldn’t have plastic threads poking out. But that didn’t mean he didn’t descend into the sort of blackout slumber he hadn’t experienced since before he was locked up.

  Ren climbed out of bed, for the first time aware of how much the springs complained. He wondered why they hadn’t kept him up at night. He pulled back the curtain. The view looked out across the air shaft toward an identical building with identically spaced rooms, most of which had their curtains drawn. He tried to push one of his windows open, but it was bolted shut.

  The shower was down the hall, communal but private. Here’s another thing people who’ve never been locked up take for granted—being able to stand under a stream of hot, or at least warm, water without worrying someone was going to mess with you, that someone was looking at you, mocking you, that someone was just too close for comfort. Washing up surrounded by boys who laughed and hit and tormented you with a wet towel had helped Ren master the art of efficiency—a quick scrub in the places it mattered. And the cold water had its uses—it kept him alert rather than got him clean.

  The shower at the Cecil wasn’t great. It smelled of mold and some sort of industrial cleanser. The vinyl curtain stuck to Ren’s legs if he came too close. There were water stains on the walls and hair clogged around the drain. But the door locked. The water was hot. And there was even a window that let in the outside world.

  The warm water kicked up the cheap floral scent of the small bar of soap as Ren worked it into an impressive lather. He washed parts of himself he’d probably never bothered with during his eight years of army showers. He scrubbed until the water coole
d then turned cold then reduced to a trickle. He wrapped himself in the institutional towel. What he wouldn’t do—no, really, he’d do anything—to keep clean day in, day out.

  Back in the room, his room if only for a few more hours, Ren was tempted to flop back on the creaky bed, flip through the channels on the old television, relax. But he was only a guest of the Cecil for a few more hours, only allowed to sit in the lobby waiting and watching for Laila until check-out time. He packed his few possessions in his backpack and rode the elevator to the lobby.

  From where he sat in the lobby, Ren could tell there were three types of guests at the Cecil—tourists who were expecting somewhere better, long-term residents who shuffled through the lobby in their robes and pajamas, and folks from the surrounding streets who looked like they’d barely scrounged enough cash for a week inside.

  Two hours passed. Then three. Then there was only one hour left until Ren forfeited his right to the Cecil’s lobby. He watched an older gentleman in a threadbare navy suit enter from the street. He’d seen the same guy three times already, twice passing by in his pajamas, then on his way out in his suit.

  Ren intercepted him on his way to the elevator. “You live here?”

  “Depends on who’s asking.” The man smelled like stale cigar smoke.

  “Me,” Ren said. “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Someone’s always looking for someone.”

  Ren fumbled with the strap of his backpack. How to describe his mother? The last time he’d seen her she’d seemed weather worn, as if the years of late nights, sweet booze, and 120 smokes had finally had their way with her. She still had her fancy foil curls but her makeup seemed to be falling down on the job, barely hiding her puffy cheeks and swollen eyes. Her curves had overflowed, no longer youthful but fat.

  “Her name’s Laila Davis,” he said. “Looks a little like me.”

  The man gave Ren the once-over, peering at him through crinkled eyes. “Could be I’ve seen her.” He pulled a stained satin handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed his dry brow. “But it’s not my business who all’s coming and going.”