Wit's End

by Karen Joy Fowler

  But no pressure on Rima. Though she too could buy in early. It wasn’t a request so much as an opportunity. It was a surefire moneymaker, in Martin’s opinion. Did Rima even know how many people came to Santa Cruz every year looking for the settings in Addison’s books, trying to find Maxwell’s home and office? He would love to talk to her more about it, either in person or by phone, Rima’s choice.

  Rima’s choice was none of the above. But she didn’t e-mail back. Her own rule was not to write e-mails after midnight and, if you couldn’t stop yourself from writing them, then certainly not to send them.

  This is an excellent rule. It probably should apply to paper mail as well as electronic.

  Chapter Twelve

  (1)

  That night Rima had her third dream about Maxwell Lane. She was walking with him on the beach below Wit’s End. The sky was starless, but the water glowed with an eerie green light. The waves broke on the sand like emeralds.

  Out in the middle distance, floating on that luminous green, was a boat. Rima could just make out the shadowy figure of a man on deck. He was sweeping the beach with a telescope, left, then right, as if he was looking for something in particular.

  Even in her dream, Rima remembered hearing that boats represent death. Lincoln had dreamt of a boat before he was murdered, or so people said. She had a feeling the man on deck might finally be her father, come to say good-bye. But the telescope stopped its sweep, settled on her, and she knew he wasn’t. The knowledge that this man could see her face and she couldn’t see his was terrifying. Around the boat the glowing waves rose in the air. The landscape turned to green towers with turrets, which became green high-rises with windows, which became a photograph of the gray buildings of downtown Cleveland.

  Maxwell stepped into the photo, turning as he did so, holding out his hand for Rima, so that was the way he stayed, with his hand out like that. She tried to follow, even though she didn’t want to be in the picture, because she didn’t want to be left behind either. But whatever door had allowed Maxwell in was closed to Rima.

  She was still frightened, but now it was mostly for him. Someone tried to kill him pretty much every goddamn book. Just how long could his luck hold out? It wasn’t as if Rima would save him; there was no one she had managed to save. The whole thing was so intense it woke her up.

  She was in her old Shaker Heights bedroom, wallpapered with climbing yellow roses, her mother calling her to breakfast. What a horrible dream, she thought, happy it was over, and then her mother called for Oliver to come down too, so she knew that her mother didn’t know about Oliver. The prospect of telling her was so awful it woke Rima up.

  She was in her bed at Wit’s End and Oliver was still gone, but now her mother was too. This was unbearably disappointing. Maxwell’s arms were around her. He whispered into her ear. “You think I’m real,” he said, “just because I’m here,” but when she turned in bed to find him, the pillow was empty.

  This woke her up for sure and it was four in the morning, but when she actually opened her eyes it was only three. So there was absolutely no way to know when or if the dream had ended.

  (2)

  You think I’m real just because I’m sitting across from you.

  —A. B. Early,

  interview with Rolling Stone, no. 372

  (June 1982)

  (3)

  The next morning Rima had breakfast with Scorch and Cody and the Good Times newspaper. Scorch was wearing pants that were all shaggy around the legs as if one of the dogs had been chewing on them. Rima would never dare wear such pants; she was bound to lose her keys in the fray.

  Scorch had been hit in the head with a tennis ball on the beach and was in a bad mood as a result. “The guy had one of those flippy things,” she told Rima. “One of those flippy things for dogs so you can throw the ball harder.” Those flippy things were called Chuckit!s. Rima didn’t know how she knew this.

  “Lots of people wouldn’t apologize for getting hit in the head,” Cody said.

  Scorch told him to fuck off. “I’m so sorry if I say the wrong thing when I’m in shock and my ears are ringing.”

  “Sometimes ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t an apology,” Rima said.

  “Thank you,” said Scorch.

  Cody’s T-shirt was blue and had “Mr. Toots Coffeehouse” written on the front. Rima could see that he maybe might be black, though if she’d had to guess, she would have guessed Italian. She thought Cody would go well with a glass of Chianti, and not in the Silence of the Lambs way.

  This week’s Good Times featured an article on the male pursuit of personal beauty, complete with photographs. But if sex was on Rima’s mind, the fault was not the Good Times’ but Maxwell Lane’s.

  “I dreamt about Maxwell Lane last night,” she said. She remembered lying in bed with him, his whispering into her ear. “A bad dream,” she added, just in case they were picturing the same thing.

  Cody and Scorch had given up eggs in deference to the dogs. Scorch was eating nothing but toast and marmalade, and she didn’t even like marmalade because of the orange peel, but the gesture was unappreciated. The dogs sat at her feet, keening their bewilderment. “I’m sorry,” Scorch told them. “But could you please shut up?”

  Cody turned to Rima. “You’re living in his house. I don’t think it’s too surprising he’d put in an appearance.” Cody had written a term paper on Addison. He’d read all the books, and he had theories. One was that the real mystery of the Maxwell Lane mysteries was Maxwell Lane. Each book had its murder, of course, and each was organized around the solution of same. But the overarching mystery was Maxwell himself. “It’s what keeps people reading,” Cody said.

  Scorch scraped some of her marmalade back into the jar with her knife. “Lots of them haven’t kept reading. She was selling less every book. She told me so herself.”

  “Because she stopped advancing the Maxwell Lane story. It’s what I’m saying,” Cody said. “She got so secretive, it’s like she doesn’t think Maxwell’s life is anybody’s business anymore. He’s hardly there in the last two books.”

  Scorch swallowed her toast and shook her head. “That’s not it. They don’t like the way she’d been writing him. You should read the forums.”

  Scorch said the chatrooms were well aware that Addison was getting older and that the day would come, though everyone hoped not soon, when one of the Maxwell Lane books would be the last of the Maxwell Lane books.

  “Harry Potter has everyone worrying about endings,” Cody said. “And there’s suspense because she hasn’t published in so long.”

  There was a woman who’d been in several Maxwell Lane novels now, sexual tension building delightfully, and then, three books ago, a consummation. Maxwell seemed to be opening up, letting someone in at last, which was very gratifying. The happy ending was so close people could taste it.

  And then, in the very next book, the girlfriend was gone.

  But there was still hope. The path to true love, et cetera, and she hadn’t, in the time-honored tradition of detectives’ girlfriends everywhere, been murdered. She’d merely dumped him. Even the news, one book later, that she had gotten married, didn’t destroy all hope. Wasn’t there also a tradition of ex-girlfriends’ husbands’ being murdered, so that they found themselves not only bereft but in need of a private detective?

  Time passed with no new book, and the last couple of novels were reexamined. They hadn’t been popular when published; they grew less so. Maxwell had done things in them, small things, but things people couldn’t see him doing. Addison didn’t seem to be on the same page as her readers; in fact, she seemed a little tired of Maxwell, or else she didn’t know him as well as people had thought. On Addison’s own site, someone posting under the tag LilLois was all but accusing her of character assassination.

  “She doesn’t want him to be happy,” other posters agreed. “She’ll destroy him first.” LilLois said that Addison wanted to take Maxwell with her when she went, like some Indian raj
ah who made his wife burn herself alive on his funeral pyre.

  Rima remembered how, in her dream, she’d been afraid for Maxwell; he’d seemed imperiled. How she’d thought that someone (not her) needed to save him. In her defense, she’d been asleep at the time. Awake, it was all a little too Stephen King.

  She was momentarily distracted by the description in the paper of Le Pétomane, a professional farter who played the Moulin Rouge in the late 1800s and outearned Sarah Bernhardt by a ratio of three to one. Someday that fact would surface in Rima’s mind, and she wouldn’t have a clue how she knew it. Not that this had anything to do with Addison’s readership. Rima was confident that Addison’s readers would be the ones buying tickets to Sarah Bernhardt.

  Of course, in a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to choose.

  “Have you ever heard of Holy City?” Rima asked. And when she could see they hadn’t, “Old cult in the Santa Cruz mountains.” She didn’t mention the white supremacist stuff on account of Cody’s maybe being black. And its being too early in the morning for white supremacists. “Do you think Addison used a real murder when she wrote Ice City? I mean, did she do that sometimes?”

  “I don’t think you could really murder someone with a cat,” Scorch said.

  “Not that murder,” said Rima. “The first one.”

  “Here’s what I know about that. If she did, she’ll never tell you.” Scorch ate her toast. The part of her hair that was pink fell in a feathery web against her cheek. The part that was red took on a deep honey color in the sun. You couldn’t tell by looking that her ears were ringing. She was a transitory Rembrandt, the leaves in the window behind her just turning to yellow and a sparrow cavorting in the birdbath. The fig tree had a sweet sap smell.

  Outside, of course. Not in the kitchen. The kitchen smelled of butter and tea.

  “There’s a new site on the Web,” Cody said. “Some fan is trying to collect her obituaries. Of course, nobody signs an obit, they’re just guessing. But might be worth a look, go see if your Holy City murder is there.”

  “She’ll go nuts when she finds that site,” Scorch said. “She’ll make them take it down. God forbid that anything get on the Web without her approval.”

  So Addison had had that little word with Scorch about her blog. Rima tried not to feel guilty about this. Scorch had no business laying Rima’s drunken breakdown out on the Internet for anyone and everyone to see.

  Still, no one likes a tattletale, as Oliver used to say preemptively whenever he was planning something worth tattling about. Stanford was whining again, and higher; it was an awful pitch. Berkeley came and laid her head on Rima’s shoe, the picture of deprivation and despair. Was there anyone in the room not suffering because of Rima?

  “I’m sorry,” Scorch said, and Rima had no idea what she was apologizing for, but it probably wasn’t the thing she should be apologizing for. It made Rima feel even guiltier.

  The feeling receded when she put her own knife into the marmalade and found Scorch’s toast crumbs there. Rima hated toast crumbs in the jam. They were just plain thoughtless.

  Chapter Thirteen

  (1)

  www.earlygraveblogspot.com

  July 21, 1959. After a long, brave battle, Dr.

  Julius Mackler succumbed on Tuesday to cancer.

  The Morrison Planetarium has lost one of its

  brightest stars.

  Rima was on the second-floor computer, where connection to the wireless was automatic. She’d decided to check out the Wikipedia Holy City entry, but accidentally found herself on the Holy City Zoo entry instead. Apparently someone had taken the sign for the zoo to a 1970s San Francisco comedy club, which was then given the same name. Any number of famous comedians—Robin Williams and Margaret Cho—had performed there.

  Rima spent half an hour googling the Holy City Zoo, reading postings about its closing night and also a reminiscence from one of the emcees about how he once bought a drink for a beautiful woman, only to have some other comic move in while he was fetching the second drink, so he told the interloper to reimburse him for the two drinks he’d already bought, and the club owner backed him up, but the woman left during the ensuing kerfuffle over the six dollars, so in the end nobody got any value for the money spent. It was all quite sad.

  Eventually Rima remembered what she was about and that it had nothing to do with San Francisco stand-up or the expectations of men who bought women drinks. She found then:http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_City,_California Holy City, California, is located at 37°09”25 “N, 121°58”44 ”W (37.1568904, -121.9788476)GR3, in the hills above Los Gatos, off Highway 17 on Old Santa Cruz Highway. The current ZIP code is 95026.

  From 1919 to its disincorporation in 1959, this was the site of a religious community founded and run by William E. Riker, a salesman turned palm reader turned cult leader. During his 96 colorful years, Riker was charged with numerous crimes—bigamy, tax evasion, murder, and, in 1942, after writing several admiring letters to Adolf Hitler, sedition—but was never convicted of anything. The philosophy on which Holy City was based was called The Perfect

  Christian Divine Way. Its defining principles were celibacy, temperance, white supremacy, and segregation of the races and sexes. Followers turned all material possessions over to Riker, who was known to his flock as “The Comforter.” Exempt from his own rule of celibacy, Riker lived on the property in a private house with Lillian, one of his wives.

  The town incorporated in 1926, with all property and income held in Riker’s name. Its heyday came during the 1920s and 1930s, when it was a popular stop for motorists on their way to and from the beach. Holy City offered the traveler a place to gas up, grab dinner or a soda (William Riker claimed to have invented Hawaiian Punch), see a peep show, look through a telescope, and visit a petting zoo. The annual take from this sideshow is estimated to have been around $100,000.

  From July 1924 to December 1931, Holy City operated its own radio station under the call letters KFQU. Though the call letters appear obscene, they were simply sequential. The programming featured several musical offerings, including a popular Swiss yodeler. Its license was later revoked for “irregularities.”

  In 1938, Riker ran for governor of California for the first time. He ran again in 1942, despite the sedition charge. His defense attorney was the famous San Francisco lawyer Melvin Belli, who won an acquittal by reason of insanity. In lieu of payment, Riker offered to procure a seat in heaven for Belli. When Belli demanded cash instead, Riker sued him for defamation of character—Belli had named Riker the “screwiest of the screwballs”—but lost. Riker ran for governor again in 1946 and 1950.

  In the 1940s, Highway 17 was opened and traffic on Old Santa Cruz Highway dropped suddenly, sending Holy City into rapid decline. The town disincorporated in 1959 after Riker lost the property in a complicated real estate deal. This was followed by a season of arson, in which several of the buildings mysteriously burned.

  Riker died on December 3, 1969, at Agnew StateHospital, having converted to Catholicism three years before. There were, at the time of his death, only three disciples still living in Holy City.

  Holy City promised a world of perfectgovernance. A sign welcomed all visitors. “See us if you’re contemplating marriage, suicide, or crime,” it said.

  The popular fictional detective Maxwell Lane, creation of mystery writer A. B. Early, is widely believed to have grown up there.

  (2)

  Addison was working at the breakfast table on a speech for the library; the studio was reserved for her real work, her books. She scribbled on a yellow pad, writing a few words, striking them out, writing a few more. Rima had come downstairs to ask her about the reference to Maxwell Lane on the Wikipedia Holy City entry. Instead she found herself listening to a story about Addison’s uncle, who was her father at the time, and how he worked on a commercial fishing boat but sometimes borrowed a friend’s boat and took little Addison out fishing or whale-watching or something.

  In th
is story he shot a sea lion. Addison had all the tender feelings of a child toward sea lions, their faces so much like dogs’, intelligent, unfathomable. With a look at Berkeley and Stanford, who were sitting at her feet hoping for crumbs, because it was the breakfast table, even though no one was eating on it just now, Addison clarified that dogs weren’t unfathomable, dogs were all too transparent in their hopes and dreams, but a sea lion had the sea in its eyes. So to see such a creature shot, especially by a man she loved, was horrible to her. Yet so ordinary to him that he hadn’t even stopped to think how Addison would take it. To this day, she told Rima, she could still see the body, blood floating on the surface of the water like a veil.

  Rima recognized the veil image from H2Zero and also Absolution Way. It was an image Addison was fond of.

  In Addison’s story, her father/uncle woke her before dawn the next morning. They drove to the wharf and cast off, and there, in the dark, a hundred pairs of glowing orange eyes opened around them. Demon eyes.

  He was trying to make her love them less. There were too many of them, he said. They were picking the ocean clean, and the hungrier they got, the more aggressive they became. They’d follow the fishing boats, swim into the nets, eat their fill, and then destroy the net in the process of escaping it. “You have to take sides sometimes,” her father/uncle said. “The fish or the sea lions.”