Wonder Valley

by Ivy Pochoda

  It takes ten minutes for Addison to appear. Tony’s cell buzzes twice but he ignores it.

  “You’re back,” Detective Addison says, leaning on the high desk. “Looks like you’re actually dressed to run this time.”

  “Did you find him?” Tony’s tightening up. He jogs from foot to foot to stay warm and keep loose.

  “You seem pretty concerned about a guy you don’t know.” The detective shifts his weight. His tie clip knocks against the wood.

  “I’m just curious.”

  Addison scratches his florid neck where his razor has run rampant over irritated skin. “Everyone turns up eventually.”

  “So that’s it?” Tony says. “It doesn’t matter what happens to him.”

  “It matters,” Detective Addison says, “but just not to the LAPD Central Division. At least not today.” He looks over his shoulder, like something is hovering behind his back. “Listen,” he says. “That naked guy is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the kind of crazy that came in overnight.”

  The waiting room grows loud. Two young men are looking for their mother who gets lost downtown. Someone is shouting that his tent has been set on fire. A good-looking young woman also in athletic clothes is standing at the desk, half shouting, half crying, and not listening to whatever the sergeant is telling her.

  Tony backs away from the desk. A woman with wild gray hair shoulders past him waving a photo at the sergeant, telling him that the man in the picture is her husband and that she has a restraining order but no one down on the streets bothers to enforce it because, she guesses, rules don’t apply down there. A middle-aged man complains that the government has stationed a spy outside his hotel room.

  Detective Addison catches Tony’s eye. Now you get it? Then he disappears.

  Tony begins to retie his shoes. He watches as the young woman steps away from the far end of the desk. She’s got glossy red hair pulled into a sleek ponytail. Her workout clothes are worn and faded.

  She’s yelling at one of the desk sergeants over her shoulder, telling him to do his job, asking them how the LAPD could lose someone in plain sight. But soon the crowd of people waiting with complaints of their own push past her, force her away from the desk.

  Tony’s staring. He can’t help himself. And he hates himself for being drawn to this person. She sits on a bench, exhausted or frustrated. She glances up, sees Tony, gives him a look that tells him to turn his attention elsewhere.

  He finishes tying his shoes then hurries out of the station. He can feel the woman driving him out with her eyes.

  Tony pauses on the steps to the precinct. The hiatus has nearly frozen his legs. The return trip is going to be brutal. He checks his phone. Stephanie has called three times. He should find a cab, spare himself the pain of the run. He’ll jog a few minutes, get himself into downtown, find a place he won’t mind waiting while his ride arrives.

  He starts slow, a walking pace. It’s embarrassing, but there’s no one around to call him out, no other runners to shame him. He passes Los Angeles Street. The pedestrian cross light is flashing. He’ll have to accelerate to make it. The effort nearly floors him.

  He is almost at the far side of Los Angeles when someone grabs him from behind. He’s jerked backward. He wheels around, fists up.

  The woman from the police station is clawing at his shirt. But the moisture wick fabric is slipping in her grasp. He swats her away, but she grabs at him again. A delivery truck is barreling down on them. Tony grabs her wrist and yanks her onto the sidewalk.

  She writhes and jerks in his grasp.

  She’s slightly out of breath.

  “What the fuck?” Tony says.

  “It was you,” the woman says. “You were the one chasing James.”

  “Who’s James?”

  “Where is he?”

  “Hold on,” Tony says. “Hold on.” He lets go of her wrist. “Just slow down.”

  “I saw you on the news. And now you’re at the station. Tell me where he is.”

  “I don’t know,” Tony says.

  “You don’t know? You don’t know?” The woman pushes him. “Don’t tell me you don’t know. You were chasing him down the street? Why?” She’s screaming now, hitting his chest when he isn’t quick enough to sidestep her blows. “Why?”

  “I don’t even know him.”

  “James. His name is James. And you’re lying.”

  Tony searches the block for somewhere where they can continue this conversation in private. Because the last thing he needs is for the cops to see him in a confrontation with this woman. The last thing he needs is to be hauled back into the station. Up the street, he sees a door open to what he hopes is a coffee shop. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go somewhere and talk.”

  His calm tone seems to quiet her and she follows.

  A few people are coming and going through the door on the corner. The sign says THE KING EDDY SALOON, but Tony figures that’s got to be some sort of hipster joke because it’s only eight o’clock and no bar would be open this early.

  But he’s wrong. The King Eddy is the diviest bar he’s ever seen, let alone entered. He can imagine Stephanie’s reaction if she saw the cracked vinyl booths, the sticky floor, the bar smudged with greasy soap and thousands of fingerprints.

  Tony orders two beers that come in cheap plastic cups. He takes a seat at the bar; the woman sits next to him and sips her drink as if boozing with a stranger at breakfast time is the most natural thing in the world.

  The bar is dark. The only window is a floor-to-ceiling gate in a far corner that lets smoke out onto Fifth Street from a cabin walled off from the rest of the space by dirty plexiglass. Except for the clientele, the place isn’t too different from a college bar, dirty and cheap with stiff pours in plastic cups.

  “So,” Tony says when he’s finished half his beer, “let’s start over.” The booze hits him hard. “I’m Tony.”

  “Britt.” The woman is drinking almost as fast as he is. “Now tell me how you know James.”

  “I don’t,” Tony says. “I really don’t.”

  Britt is about to object when he cuts her off.

  “I promise you the first time I saw him was when he was running down the freeway. Then I got out of my car and chased him.”

  “Why?”

  The same damn question he’s been trying to answer for twenty-four hours. But the beer is helping. “Because I hate my job. Because I should have gone running over the weekend, but instead I drank too many beers and pretended to be interested in my daughter’s friends’ parents and their school fund-raiser. Because I have to attend the damn fund-raiser to make up for the fact that my wife and I are in the bottom tier of contributors to a school I already pay too much for my daughter to attend.” Tony takes a sip of his beer.

  “Yeah?” Britt says. “And?”

  “And your friend James. It’s like he was giving a big fuck-you to the everyday.”

  “And that’s what you want to do?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Tony says.

  “So why’d you come to the station?”

  “I was just passing by on my run.”

  Britt looks at him over the top of her plastic cup. “Sure you were,” she says. “So you really didn’t know him?”

  Tony finishes his beer in two big gulps. “Swear,” he says.

  “What happened?”

  He tells Britt how he left his car on the 110 and began to run after James. He explains how they jumped the barrier so they were running with traffic then ran up the ramp and emerged on Seventh Street. He tells her that he made it up to Alvarado before the cops brought him down.

  “Then what?” Britt crushes her cup on the bar.

  “That’s it,” Tony says. “I got arrested.”

  “I mean what happened to James?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What—”

  He can hear her energy ramping up, her voice about to get loud. He puts his hand on hers. Somehow in the dark bar
, in the morning, the intimacy of this gesture, of touching a stranger, doesn’t seem out of place. “All I know is the cops got me instead of him.” He signals for the bartender and orders two more beers. Stephanie would kill him. In fact, she will kill him when he gets home late from his run, stinking of beer and other odors from the King Eddy.

  The beers come. Two drinks in and Tony’s finally able to admit to himself that he had been unable to catch up to the runner. He didn’t have the strength for that final acceleration, that last kick. Or maybe he did but he was too complacent, too happy to trail behind the guy instead of reaching him. Coasting, almost. Doing just enough but failing at the final hurdle. He still runs regularly but he’s losing ground, letting go of the college runner he used to be. He’s growing solid. Soon he’ll be grounded like the commuters stuck in their cars he’d left behind on the 110.

  “You promise?” Britt is staring at him.

  “Promise what?” The beer is making things fuzzy and making him loose and a little floppy.

  “That the cops didn’t get him.”

  “I—” Tony says. But then he has an idea. He pulls out his cell phone and dials Danielle. She picks up on the third ring.

  Tony can hear the tail end of a disagreement with Stephanie in the background. “Jesus, Mom, it’s Dad calling. Hold on.” He can hear Stephanie fall silent or maybe Danielle left the room.

  “Danny?”

  “Mom’s losing it. Where are you?” Danielle’s tone is both curious and tickled.

  “You know that thing you were showing me last night?”

  “Are you okay, Daddy? You sound funny.”

  Tony clears his throat and tries to find his sober dad voice. Britt’s looking at him across the bar, mouthing—You’re calling your family?

  “You know that thing you said was a thing online.”

  “The thing I said was a thing?” Danielle says.

  Tony holds the phone away from his mouth and sips his beer. How fast must information and interest pass by for these kids? How many things have come into Danielle’s orbit since last night? How many other things have there been since the thing she brought to his attention?

  “Oh,” Danielle says, “the video.”

  “Yeah,” Tony says. “That.” He hopes he sounds casual. But there’s nothing casual—nothing innocent—about calling up your daughter from a dive bar at eight A.M. where you’re drinking with a strange woman. “How do you find that stuff?”

  “It’s called a hashtag, Daddy. You just type in hashtag whatever into whatever place you’re searching.”

  “Hashtag whatever?”

  “I mean not literally whatever. So, like, hashtag nakedrunnerLA, hashtag freeballingonthe110, hashtag lettingitallhangout, hashtag—”

  “Oh,” Tony says, “I get it.”

  “So are you coming back soon?” Danielle asks. “I think Mom is going to blow any second now. She already packed your bag.”

  “Tell her I’ll be home in less than an hour.” He’ll rinse off in the bathroom of the King Eddy. He’ll take a cab. He’ll tell Stephanie to upgrade them to a suite.

  He pulls his seat over closer to Britt and clicks on one of the social media apps Danielle installed on his phone and types #nakedrunnerLA. It takes a while for the results to load. Britt’s angled away from him, like she’s unsure of what he’s going to show her, like she might have to watch baby videos or something much worse.

  A few videos load. Tony selects one that from the blurry still seems to show the moment after he was arrested. He clicks on it. Britt watches a ten-second clip of police cars and shouting. She clicks on another video and another. The bartender brings them new beers they didn’t order. Tony drinks his without thinking.

  Britt keeps scrolling through the videos until she lands on one that she replays several times. Tony can hear two people shouting in Spanish. Then someone catcalls and the video ends.

  Britt turns the screen toward Tony. “Where is that?”

  He watches the video—the naked runner passing down the middle of a two-way street with two lanes of traffic in each direction. The man holding the camera seems to be the one who catcalls. “Looks like the edge of Koreatown maybe.”

  Britt watches the video one more time. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. So he got away.”

  “So I’m off the hook?” Tony says.

  “For now.” There a song in Britt’s voice, a lilting note that Tony doesn’t find unpleasant. It’s been so long since he had a playful conversation.

  “So?”

  “So what?” Britt says.

  “Do you live around here?”

  “Tony,” Britt says. “Let stop pretending to get to know each other and just have fun. Because in a couple of hours you’re going to come to your senses and head back to whatever west side neighborhood you jogged over from and you’re not going to care about my life story.”

  They sip their beers while Britt keeps scrolling through Tony’s phone, clicking on new videos and replaying ones she’s already seen.

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “James?” She laughs, spraying beer on his screen. “No, his father.”

  “His father is your boyfriend?”

  “Was.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “Fucked up is relative.”

  Music comes on. The bartender flips a switch and a disco ball that’s missing half its mirrors rotates, bathing Britt in intermittent, lurid light. “Smoke?” She glances at the smoking cabin.

  She slides off her stool and Tony follows her to where two smokers are caged like zoo animals in the plexiglass box that looks into the bar. Even though part of one wall is open to the street, the air is revolting.

  Britt pulls some hippie-dippie cigarettes out of her bag—thin coils of brown paper.

  “Is that a joint?” Tony asks.

  “Do you ever get out of the west side?”

  “How do you know that’s where I’m from?”

  “Because it’s where you’re from,” she says. “I’m guessing Brentwood.”

  Stephanie wishes. “Beverlywood.”

  “Beverlywood.” She drags out the name of his neighborhood, making it sound as contrived as it is. Then she pops the brown cigarette in her mouth.

  “That’s really not a joint?”

  “I thought all you middle-aged rich folks had medical marijuana cards and vape pens you charge off your computers.”

  Tony only has the vaguest idea what a vape pen is. But he can imagine the look on Stephanie’s face if he started plugging marijuana devices into his laptop.

  “It’s a bidi. From India.” She flashes a pink package covered in Sanskrit. “They’re supposed to be healthier than regular cigarettes, but they’re not.”

  “So why do you smoke them?”

  “Because fuck it.” She lights the bidi, takes a drag, then places it between his lips. “Live a little,” she says and pulls out another for herself.

  The cigarette isn’t awful. It’s harsh and unfiltered and tastes a bit musty like a spice jar. Tony exhales and watches his smoke join the communal cloud hovering over his head.

  The smoke makes the bar swim and sway. Tony feels as if he’s floating inside himself. Then everything takes shape. And this whole adventure suddenly makes sense. And Tony realizes why he’s here, what he’s doing here. Now it’s essential that he tell Stephanie about this, tell her that what they’ve been doing wrong in their attempts to “reconnect” with each other (her word)—their overnights to Ojai or Shutters in Malibu, their dinners in pricey West Hollywood—only dig them deeper into their mutual isolation. What they need to do is to come close to each other without the swag of their comfortable lives.

  Something like what he’s doing now—as crazy as it is. Because he feels real. Like really real. Like himself, but better. Like how he was before he got distracted by all the crap that clogs up his calendar.

  He wants to tell Stephanie this. Needs to. Right now. He looks around for his phone and see
s that Britt’s holding it. He forces himself to focus and sees she’s watching another video. The video ends and she replays it.

  “That’s right up the street,” she says.

  The video seems to be shot by a tourist who’s speaking Italian. It starts with a shot of another tourist—a woman wearing her backpack on her front—standing at a bus stop. She waves at the camera. Then she points at something over the cameraperson’s shoulder. The shot whips and finds the naked jogger coming down the street. The person filming says something like Forze Los Angeles before he’s shouldered aside. A man in a black hat blocks the shot. He turns and scowls at the person filming, then takes a few steps in the direction James was headed. Then the clip ends.

  Britt yanks the phone away. She presses play. Her mouth is hanging open. She watches the video two more times. Then she hits pause as the man in the black hat scowls at the Italians.

  “Oh my God,” she says. She holds the phone toward Tony. “Oh my God.”

  The guy looks mean, sure. In fact, he looks like he might bite the head off the tourist with the camera phone if the guy takes a step toward him.

  “Oh my God,” Britt says again. She takes a sip of her beer. Her hand is shaking. She nearly spills the rest of her drink. “Did you— Do you— This man . . .”

  Tony takes the phone from her. He squints at the screen. “What about him?” He looks like the kind of guy who might be hiding out in the corners of the King Eddy.

  “Did you see him?”

  “Just now. In the video.”

  “But not then? Not yesterday.”

  “No,” Tony says. “The only person I saw was James.”

  Britt replays the video again, then makes Tony watch—the Italian woman, the naked jogger, the mean-looking man stepping into the street. “You didn’t see Blake.”

  “Who’s Blake?” Tony asks.

  Britt holds out the phone and makes Tony watch the video again. “Does it look like he’s chasing James?”

  It’s hard to tell. It certainly looks like the guy takes a few steps in James’s direction. But then the clip ends. He might have chased him or he might have resumed waiting for the bus. “Maybe,” Tony says.

  Britt watches the clip over and over.