The Orange Curtain

by John Shannon

  Jack Liffey seemed to have a permanent problem with receptionists. “I doubt it,” he said.

  Eventually she put him through, but there had been some sort of prologue because Art came on suspiciously.

  “This isn’t Bob Browning, is it?”

  “Naw, he’s off with Elizabeth Barret, writing poetry.”

  “Jack, for Chrissake. How come you won’t never announce yourself? I got to be careful, I got a pissed-off husband after me.”

  “I bet it’s not the first time.”

  “It’s not something I done. It’s what I found out. Anyway, you got to be more polite to young women.”

  “It seems to be an abiding problem. Anyway, I’ve got a small favor.”

  “Why else would you call?”

  He let that go. They’d met in the 1970s during a brief flirtation they’d both had with Viet Nam Veterans Against the War. Art tended to act hard and cynical but he still cared about a lot of things, and Jack Liffey knew he was working with the veterans group that was campaigning to get the U.S. to sign on to the landmine convention.

  “You’ve got vet friends down in Orange County, I’ll bet.”

  “Orange County. Man, you got to watch yourself down there. That’s wall-to-wall angry white guys.”

  “Uh-huh. There’s a particular angry white guy down there named Marvin Resnik. He’s eccentric enough that he’s probably pretty well known. He’s a paraplegic from Nam and he claims he hasn’t been out of his house in two and a half years. Anybody you could ask if that’s a crock?”

  “I can always ask. You still chasing down AWOL kids?”

  “That’s me.”

  “There’s no money in it, man.”

  “I’m beginning to figure that out.”

  “You should come on in and join the big league. I could introduce you to Manny here.”

  “I really love your outfit, Art. Union busting, going after the poor on behalf of the landed rich, investigating some beat-up wife who finally fell in love with a nice quiet guy at work. I think I prefer the peewee league. I’ll give you a call in a day or two.”

  “Sure. Don’t spend all your retainer in one place.”

  “Then if you turn the big knob, it’ll fast forward,” the production assistant said with an icy awkwardness.

  “Thanks.”

  “I thought you were coming yesterday.” There was a note of grievance as Jack Liffey sat down in front of the rolling cart that had a big complicated video player on a shelf and the monitor on top.

  “I called. I was busy being mugged. Sorry, did you set something up special yesterday?”

  “I was out sick.”

  Then what are you complaining about? Jack Liffey met his eyes for a moment. There was something a little off in them, but that was probably just his imagination after sitting up a lot of the night staring at a death threat. But there was something a little off in his clothing, for sure, a bright checked shirt and unfashionable tight polyester trousers that looked like they had come from Pic ’n Save.

  “Do you remember Phuong?” he asked the production assistant.

  “No.”

  “She signed the release for you.”

  “Everybody signs a release.” He walked away without another word, and Jack Liffey figured his social skills were going to keep him from advancing very far in the company, unless maybe his dad owned it, which would explain a lot.

  He pressed Start and nudged the big shuttle knob to speed up past a talking head-and-shoulders of a doctor, then he cranked a little more to fast forward over several shots of a black teen-ager who was drumming as if his life depended on it. Then shots of a Latino playing the guitar. Some of the shots got flashy, tilted off-kilter, or drifting back and forth. Suddenly there was a shot from behind the guitar player and he hit Pause. You could see a crowd of people against a garage wall, or more likely a stage set made up to look like a garage wall. A young Vietnamese woman was right in the middle, smiling with real enjoyment. Either she could act, or she really was getting a kick out of watching the band.

  The director was wrong, he thought. Phuong could easily have played young enough to be a high school student. There were several people around her, clapping and bobbing their heads, and he let the tape run again, but she didn’t seem to relate to anyone in the crowd at all. Tom Xuan must have gone home already.

  The end of the tape was a series of isolated shots of faces in the crowd. When Phuong’s closeup came, she called out something but she wasn’t miked so when he backed the tape up and brought up the sound, he found the music covered everything.

  Jack Liffey looked up to see the production assistant in the doorway of the cubicle, watching him intently.

  “Need the office?”

  “No, no.”

  He seemed to want to say something, and some intuition told Jack Liffey to encourage him.

  “You’re name’s Billy, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What was your last name?”

  “Gudger. It’s not real. It was something longer and mom shortened it.”

  “Real is whatever you want it to be.”

  The boy smiled, with a kind of shy sarcasm peeking out. “That only goes so far. I was given a real body that turned out much shorter than my aspirations.”

  Jack Liffey flashed a big grin to put him at ease, though it didn’t seem to work. “I meant in names, but I get you. I wanted to be brilliant, and I drew a pedestrian kind of mind that just can’t handle abstractions. I need things concrete.”

  “That’s really too bad.”

  Most people would have volunteered one of their own weaknesses in trade, a nice unimportant one, but this was one strange young man.

  The PA in the hall honked. “Attention MediaPro employees, the catering truck has arrived.”

  “Where does the truck come?” he asked the young man.

  “Down the hall ’till you reach the far end of the building and right. You’ll see.”

  “Can I get you a doughnut? Coffee?”

  He shook his head hard, as if Jack Liffey had offered him something really distasteful.

  Jack Liffey stood up. “I left too quick this morning to eat.”

  Billy Gudger didn’t say anything, but he trailed Jack Liffey down the corridor, a few paces back, like a puppy not quite sure of being tolerated. Jack Liffey slowed up, wondering if the young man knew something about Phuong and was having trouble coming out with it, or if he was just flat desperate to talk to another human being. He did seem the sort of kid that most people would go to some lengths to avoid.

  “You planning a future in media? Directing?”

  “No. It’s just a job.” He walked in silence a moment and then blurted, as if a little surprised himself that he was so forthcoming, “My talents lie on other gradients.”

  I hope they aren’t all as steep uphill as this one, Jack Liffey thought. “What would that be?”

  “I’m teaching myself philosophy, calculus and languages. I’m into Sanskrit right now. And some other things. Not to want to improve yourself is an unspeakable sin.”

  Jack Liffey thought about that a moment. “Shantih. That’s the only Sanskrit I know, and that’s only because of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Peace, isn’t it?”

  “It’s grander than that. Peace beyond human understanding.”

  “No wonder I couldn’t understand it. How’s your Greek?”

  “That’s next year. It is important to be firmly rooted in the old before undertaking the new.”

  “I can buy that,” Jack Liffey said as he pushed out a glass door into a parking area in back where the lunch truck, side panels up, was swarmed by a couple dozen people. “And I can buy a nice Danish, too. Sure I can’t get you anything?”

  “No thank you.” This time there was no horror in the refusal. The young man took one look at all the people crowding the truck, closed up visibly like a sea anemone, and skedaddled without another word. Jack Liffey watched his checkered shirt disappear past a r
oll-up door into the gloom of a warehouse. There was no end to the varieties of human pain, he thought.

  An hour later he needed to see Billy Gudger again. He’d been scanning the last tape and suddenly he’d come bolt upright, slowing the tape to normal speed. It was toward the end of another crowd scene, and he’d rewound and cranked up the sound. Right after somebody off shot called “Cut,” and then, “Okay, new Setup,” a tall young man sidled through the crowd to speak to Phuong. He was tidy and blond and well-groomed, like a former Doublemint Twin, the sort of young man who looked like he’d end up one day running a Lexus dealership. The tape went black after they’d exchanged only a few words. She didn’t seem to be unhappy about talking to him.

  Jack Liffey had run it several more times, but couldn’t make out anything they said. He finally found Billy Gudger in the mailroom, copying his way through a stack of papers with yellow Post-its hanging out like limp tongues.

  “Billy, can I show you something?”

  “Uh, yes?”

  “If it’s inconvenient…”

  “It will not be inconvenient.”

  It was as if he’d learned the language from books and never actually had much opportunity to speak it, Jack Liffey thought. The young man followed him back along the corridor and just as he turned into the room where the playback monitor burred, he heard Billy Gudger ask softly, “Do you know what a toadstone is, Mr. Liffey?”

  “Call me Jack. No, I don’t.” He expected a follow-up, but nothing came. The machine had cycled down out of Pause on its own, and he had to fire it up again and wind the tape to before the cut. “What’s a toadstone?”

  “Actually it can be two things. Geologists use the expression to mean a dark inclusion or a layer of basalt that is trapped in limestone.”

  Jack Liffey had reached where he wanted to start the tape, but he waited a moment for the boy’s other shoe to drop. It didn’t seem to be coming on its own. “That’s one.”

  “It also means a kind of little stone you find that’s made up of fossilized fish teeth and palate bones. Superstitious people have treasured them since the middle ages as jewels and good luck charms. It was once widely believed, even by the scientific community, that they formed in the head or body of a toad. An old Romany superstition suggests that toadstones may form in the heads of some extraordinarily lucky people, too.”

  “Do you have one?”

  The young man’s face darkened so fast that Jack Liffey realized he must have misunderstood. He chuckled. “I don’t mean in your head.”

  Billy Gudger seemed relieved and smiled uncomfortably. “No, I wish I had ownership of one. I’ve never even seen one.”

  “Do you feel lucky?”

  The same conflict seemed to arise in him. It was clear the young man had some dragon guarding his portals of speech. But Jack Liffey was running out of patience for dragon work.

  “I’m very lucky,” he said finally.

  “I’ll let you pick my next lottery ticket. In the meantime, look here.” He ran the tape forward slowly and paused it just as the Doublemint Twin approached Phuong and opened his mouth to speak. He tapped the screen. “Who’s that?”

  A palpable wave of apprehension swept over the young man again and his eyes shifted away abruptly. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve got the releases. Can you find out?”

  He hurried away without a word. Jack Liffey decided it was a good time to call Tien Joubert and arrange lunch. He expected a song-and-dance out of her receptionist, but she came on the line herself. She must have given him her direct line.

  “Oh, Jack Liffey, oh oh! I been trying reach you, but no way. You must come now, hurry. Poor Phuong dead. She very dead. Oh, it’s too terrible!”

  A chill swept through him. “You’ll be at your office?”

  “Yes yes, here. Don’t go see Phuong father now. He very upset. Come here, see me. I know all what’s up.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Dead, he thought again. After all his forebodings about the Angel of Death visiting himself, the Dark Animus had been hard at work elsewhere. He wondered when and where and how, and he hoped Tien would know.

  On his way out he found Billy Gudger sitting abstractedly in a very tidy cubicle.

  “I’ve got an emergency and I’ve got to go. Can you give me the name?”

  He was reluctant, but he wrote on a slip of paper. Mark Glassford, and an address in Garden Grove.

  “Thanks.”

  It was very disquieting, Billy Gudger thought, this strange new conflict in his feelings. A part of him had attached itself almost immediately to Jack Liffey that morning, the way the man’s deep blue eyes searched him out and waited peacefully for him to speak, wanting him to speak, wanting to hear what he had to say and responding to it, too, with what seemed patience and concern and real interest. And a part of him, an equal part, feared the curiosity he saw in Jack Liffey and the malice that always waited beyond curiosity.

  And, of course, Jack Liffey had come to MediaPros about that laughing Oriental girl and that meant trouble. Billy Gudger had tried time and again during the morning to hold back and ignore the man’s presence, but he couldn’t. Something in him had been desperate to drag him into Jack Liffey’s presence, to make him talk, to share ideas, even to listen to what the other thought about things.

  He sat at his blue desk but could not read. And then, miraculously, there was a knock on the door. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew it was Jack Liffey out there, and when he opened the door, sure enough it was, big as life.

  “Hi, Billy, how are you doin’?”

  “Pretty good. Do you want to come in?”

  “Sure, thanks.” And Jack Liffey came in, carrying a six-pack of Cokes.

  “Have a seat on that other desk chair. The one with the arms is pretty comfortable.”

  “Thanks. You’re very considerate. Have a Coke.”

  They both opened cans of Coke. It felt very cold. Jack Liffey tipped his head way back and drank with gusto then burped once with his mouth covered decorously and excused himself. “So, what’ve you been reading?”

  He glanced quickly at the desk. “Do you know Hall’s The Invention of Romance?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  “It’s amazing. It seems a lot of what we think of as romance was invented in the middle ages, based on a big religious heresy.”

  “Really?”

  “These people called the Albigensians in Southern France sealed themselves into caves and starved away in longing for the perfect and unattainable life of Christ. It was really strange, and it seems to come out of some kind of Mediterranean belief in a duality of body and spirit, and a rejection of the body.”

  “I’ve never heard that.”

  “The Pope declared their beliefs a heresy, but they carried on anyway, and then the troubadours sang songs about them and little by little over the years the story got shifted away from religion toward earthly love, and the troubadours changed the heroes so they were pining away for their perfect unattainable lovers and never touching them. Isn’t that weird?”

  “It sure is. Maybe we can trace all our lipstick commercials and romantic novels back to this medieval heresy.”

  “That’s what’s so strange, isn’t it?”

  “You read an awful lot, don’t you, Billy?”

  “I try to. It’s what I’m good at.”

  And then, Jack Liffey wasn’t there any more, just a sensation of Billy’s will to believe. He stared at the small irregular black stone on his desk. It was a nothing, really, found beside a dirt road in the Tustin Hills, just a simulacrum of an idea. He wasn’t even sure any more if he believed in the toadstone. The part of him that could believe in it seemed to have evaporated some time ago along with that first death that he had actually witnessed. In a way it had seemed a relief. The loss of that belief had taken a burden off him.

  But now, after talking to Jack Liffey that morning at MediaPros, he no longer wanted not to believe. Perhap
s belief was wriggling back to life inside him.

  There was an image of the virgin. At the feet was a toadstone, indicating her victory over all evil and uncleanness.

  —Murray’s Handbook to English Counties (1870)

  ELEVEN

  The Real State of the World

  As he pulled into the lot next to the mall, his eye went by chance away from the mall to a half dozen young Vietnamese men in black who stood with crossed arms guarding a storefront in a strip mall nearby, like Secret Service men waiting for the president to buy his wife some perfume. But this wasn’t a perfume shop, it was the Mekong Star Night Club, with big neon stars on the wall, discreetly back in the dogleg of the strip-mall. The black-clad young men bore a strong resemblance to the Quan Sats who had beat him up. He did a u-turn and their eyes followed his car as he drifted past and parked not far from them.

  The leader with the pink eye wasn’t there, but two others sauntered in his direction. He headed for Tien’s office and then about-faced as if he’d forgot something at his car and caught them peering into his window. They didn’t know quite how to react as he came back. He got in the face of the nearest.

  “Can I help you? I know it doesn’t look like much, but it’s a mean customer. You should see what happened to the other car.”

  “You not supposed be here.”

  “Are you fucking with me, small man?”

  The second one stayed rooted in place but spoke harshly in Vietnamese, probably some curse or threat. Jack Liffey’s temper was right on the knife edge where it climbed whenever he ran into this kind of petty menacing.

  “Ooo-tay,” Jack Liffey said. “Other-may ukers-fay an-cay lay-pay is-thay ame-gay, asshole. Catch that last word, did we?”

  They turned and walked back toward their friends, and he found his hands wanting to strangle something. “Have a nice day, kids.”

  The mall seemed strangely empty of shoppers as he crossed the entrance to get to Tien’s place. He’d expected a bit of hubbub at her office, too, but it was pretty quiet, the receptionist looking askance at his black eye for a moment as if contemplating some awkward fashion choice, and then sending him straight in.