Ernst spoke in a strange, almost parodic accent, something Slavic or Germanic with a heavy overlay of Oxford: “Mr. Nels, I food like to intrrroduce you to Lisa Sturrrrm. Lisa, this is Harrrmon Nels, a grreduit schtudnt who hess brrought us some ault folumes off poooetry for appresl.” Silly, as I have said: He sounded like Alistair Cooke doing a bad impression of Henry Kissinger, but who among us has flawless speech? Certainly not I. In allergy season (which in Southern California is nine months out of the year) I resemble one of those cardboard losers in Restoration farce, a puffy cove with a clownish nose and a perpetual case of the grippe or the rheum or even the choryza, and my voice is positively adenoidal. So when I tell you I responded, “Nice to meet you, Lisa Sturm” to Ernst’s introduction, what actually came out was this: “Dice to beet chew, Lisa Sturb.”
The woman looked up and fixed me with eyes the deep pupilless brown they used to call shoe-button when shoes had buttons. Her regard was expressive of nothing in particular yet stunning, almost overwhelming in its intensity, as if the responsibility of gathering and storing visual images fell in the category of religious duty. She said without a hint of reproval, “It’s pronounced ‘Lissa.’ Two esses. I’m glad to meet you, too, Mr. Nails.”
If Lissa knew she was beautiful—how could she not?—it didn’t seem to matter to her. She wore no makeup, left her light brown brows full, and her faded print dress was shapeless. She was youngish. Women’s flesh (and maybe that of males as well; I haven’t paid that much attention) takes on a taut, gessoed-canvas quality at adolescence, when budding sex swells the insides but the outer covering is still too baby-new to have much give to it, so that it acquires the surface tension of a ripened honeydew, shiny and firm, and retains this for perhaps ten years, when the skin begins making barely noticeable concessions to entropy. I guessed Lissa to be at this latter stage, around my own age, twenty-five maybe. She was furthermore so fair-skinned that one could make out on her forearms the ghosts of blue vessels below.15 At first sight one had to perceive in Lissa a certain purity, as if she had had at some time a too-intimate knowledge of others’ petty pathologies and had rejected all that in favor of being .… nice: a word much maligned in these competitive times, when it’s taken generally to characterize the pushover or easy mark, but which should, at least in Lissa’s case, suggest nothing less positive than a sunny disposition.
I was getting carried away. This was not the first time an open smile or a pointed glance had sent my imagination soaring. In fact, it’s been soaring since third grade, when I was appointed class spelling monitor, a singular honor and the first concrete indication Ma had that her son was, as she has been insisting for the last two decades, “something of a genius in the word department.” The verbal prodigy was making his rounds during composition period, and Jeannie Kraepelien, an eight-year-old darling in patent leather pumps and a fount of fine dark hair, regarded me adoringly as I explained to her with all the authority of a sixth grader that “weird” was one of the few words for which one had to break the recently-imparted “I before E” dictum. It’s because of The Look that I always trap myself, and even at that tender age it started me entertaining domestic fantasies: Jeannie Kraepelien accompanying me hand-in-hand to the weekend fright-show matinee where we’d share a box of Jujubes in the dark; Jeannie Kraepelien sitting demurely next to me on the living room sofa where we would suck on fudgickles and read comics in the afternoon; Jeannie Kraepelien smothering me with chaste kisses cool and all-enveloping as fresh linen bedclothes.
The same jejune idealizing, carried to the stupider extremes of which only grown-ups are capable, is the reason behind my having married by the time I was twenty-two and divorced within a year. Made real, the dream wears thin and the dishes take over, and the dirty clothes, and then another female gives you The Look. You see the present as a blank wall spray-painted with the dripping graffiti of regret, and in these enlightened times divorce is no big thing to do. Dump one slightly-used fantasy into the toy chest and find another. But the process does take its toll, as witness the three months after Brenny left, when I languished in bed, incapable of anything more strenuous than watching sitcoms and digesting Ma’s soft-boiled eggs and buttered white toast.
When I recovered enough to take careful steps around the block, I decided that love always hurts, frequently stinks, and never lasts, and I insisted that I wouldn’t ensnare myself again. But here I was anyway, less than a minute into my relationship with Lissa, already convinced of her utter nobility of character and previewing a lifetime of marital contentment. In my defense, there truly was something unique about her: Even the smartass, critical part of my psyche—the one that usually watches me play the infatuated swooning fool and makes snide comments like, “You really have a knack for picking ’em, don’t you, Nails? That one looks like she’d be purring in three-inch spiked heels and goose-stepping across your chest; check her arms for cigarette burns or tattoos …”—had to stand open-mouthed, hand over heart, at the first sight of Lissa.
It was at this moment, as I was falling in love again, that the masked brute with the shotgun appeared in the scrotal catastrophe already related. That I had already, in my mind, had a brace of kids with Lissa, a station wagon to carry them in, and a shake-shingled summer cottage at Lake Arrowhead to carry them to, may explain a little better my rash leap into an onrushing gunstock. A male stands between his family and danger, and what better way, what more primally powerful instinct than to interpose the very simian territorial essence of his manhood, his evolutionary equipage, his symbols?
EIGHT
The urologist examined my wounded symbols carefully. With gloved hands he probed, twisted and thumped ducts, reservoirs and vessels, requested and got the traditional cough, came up finally with a diagnosis of acute epididymitis, an inflammation of the ductile tissue of my right testicle. He recommended I wear a suspensory, a supportive device which he predicted wouldn’t lessen the pain but which would promote faster healing by allowing more blood to the traumatized area. In this prediction he was half right: The device didn’t lessen but instead focused the pain, which when I tried to walk felt like a meal sack thudding into my groin with every forward movement of my right leg, sending in turn a shock up into my lower bowel area, with the sensation of a long barb-legged parasite lodged and taking lusty nips at my appendix. In short, the suspensory was killing me.
I stayed in bed and took my temperature frequently, as I do whenever I’m bedridden. If healing oneself is passive, taking my temperature at least gives me a tiny attic window on my body and its autonomic processes over whose governance I have no vote, not even an absentee ballot. With this latest malady I never went a degree above normal, but I kept on checking since constancy, at least in this one quantifiable corner of the human condition, comforts me. I took my temperature, did crosswords, checked my temperature again, watched a game show, ate, checked, slept, checked, and after a few days developed a bursitis in my right arm from shaking down the thermometer, a hypochondriacal variant of the fashionable tennis elbow, the pain of which took my mind off the original injury. The inflammation had begun to subside anyway. My movement was still severely restricted, but I could walk to the icebox now without wanting to retch.
I determined to confine my initial stabs at investigating the theft of Doctor Syntax to one location: Ernst’s study, where I could, with a minimum of painful movement, uncover crucial clues,16 and where I could get next to Lissa, who played a hot romantic lead in my dreams during the brief convalescence. I phoned Echo Park, and Ernst answered, “Cerrrtenlee, come oferr eni time. I enchoi to hoff a prrromising jung creetic arrround see haus.” I didn’t have the heart or the physical energy—or even, at that time, the perspective—to explain to him that I was mired in a crisis of intellectual self-doubt, that my future life as a scholar depended on whether or not I could retrieve a ganja-induced revelation on a shred of paper, so I let it slide and said I’d be over the next day.
Everything was the same
as last time. The books were fixing themselves breakfast or just hanging out, humanity filed away in what little space was left.
Ernst led me to the desk, where Lissa was typing a transcript from the dictaphone, and said, “Fie don’t you tell Mr. Nels fot feef lernt so farrr about Doktor Seentox. I sink I shall rrretire to my betroom. I feel my afterrrnoon knap apprrroachng.”
He shuffled off, picking his way through the stacks of cartons and leaving me alone with Lissa and a feeling that somehow encompassed both silly grammar school infatuation and supernal adoration. She said, “I’m glad you came back, Harmon. I wanted to thank you for what you did.”
I said something rural like, “Twernt nothin’ to it.” and, too shy for further discourse along this personal line, I turned to business: “What’s Dr. Gablonzer found out about my books?”
Lissa responded softly but with a fire born of evident enthusiasm for her work, “Actually, I did the research on this case. For some reason Ernst seems convinced the books aren’t valuable. I think he probably wants to spare you the grief you’d feel if the books did turn out to be valuable but the police can’t find them. I think Ernst has taken a liking to you. Or maybe he just empathizes with your … condition. Are you feeling better?”
She glanced toward my tenderized pud and smiled consolingly. My neck got hot and my face flushed. Out of consideration or pity Lissa pretended to miss my embarrassment and adopted the dry and practical tone I had chosen. “Anyway.” she said, “I thought I owed you at least a good job of research. All I have so far is preliminary pricing data, which means I found what I could about your books from bibliographies and auction records available at the university library. But I’m hoping for more. There’s a sort of underground network of collectors, bibliographers, rare book nuts, and they’re the best source when you want to know about current demand. That’s really how the prices are set.”
As she spoke I rested my elbows on the edge of the desk, cradled my head in my palms and, hopeless romantic that I am, lost myself in her eyes, dark cisterns of boundless depth. Lissa’s voice seemed distant, as though she were talking into a Dixie cup. I heard just enough of what she was saying to follow. Lissa opened a desk drawer and took out a folder. She opened it. “This is what I’ve got so far: Doctor Syntax was published early in the nineteenth century by the poet William Combe. It’s the story, in verse, of a poor, eccentric scholar, Dr. Syntax by name, who goes out looking for adventures so he can write a novel about them.”
This sounded like a good idea to me, although highly improbable. In real life people don’t risk their lives for literature. Or so I thought then.
She continued. “The writing is considered second-rate by the few critics who bother to mention it. The books probably wouldn’t be worth anything at all, if it weren’t for the engravings. They’re by an artist named Rowlandson, and they’re quite a bit better than the poetry. In fact, it seems Combe wrote the poetry to accompany the pictures, rather than the other way around. Rowlandson would send Combe a sketch, and Combe would write verses to go with it. They went on like that for years, until all the books were done.”
Still adrift in her eyes, involuntarily I made a moony face. Lissa looked unmoved, either positively or negatively, by it and turned a page in the folder. “You wouldn’t expect anyone to pay much for books of bad poetry, even if the pictures were good, and until recently that’s been true. Fifteen years ago, you could pick up a mint set of Doctor Syntax at auction for around three hundred dollars. Then for some reason interest picked up. You can never predict the market. Within three years, the price of the volumes more than quadrupled, and a set went at auction ten years ago for around two thousand dollars. Those are the latest figures I’ve found, but there’s no reason to suppose the books have stopped appreciating. At that rate, conservatively, your set might be worth between fifteen and forty thousand dollars.”
In spite of my mooning I heard enough of this for my former nausea to resurface. Forty grand lost, maybe more, and the thief probably had no idea: He just picked up my tennis tote as a convenient receptacle for the pitiful little tchatchkes he managed to bag on his way out, and Doctor Syntax went along for the ride. I saw My Own Place reduced to rubble, my custom-tailored slacks rent to rags, my kidney-shaped blue tile pool buried under muckslide, and all by the theft of my books.
I croaked, “That much … for third-rate poetry? I could understand that much for a really good writer—some engravings by Blake, maybe—but some unknown jerk like Combe?”
With sarcasm light and pointed rather than cruel, she said, “I guess some collectors don’t share your sophisticated tastes or care what the ivory-tower critics say is ‘really good’ writing. And forty K is a lot of money for a set of books, first-rate or not. But remember, that figure’s just a guess. It all depends on current interest: simple economics, supply and demand. If demand has dropped, as Ernst seems to think, your books are worth less; if demand is higher, they could be worth more. A lot more.”
PART TWO
DÉJÀ VU
NINE
Whenever I experience déjà vu, I expect my life to end. Neural researchers trash the terrifying mysticism of this phenomenon simply: One half of my brain is lagging just a nanosecond behind the other in reaction to some outside event, with the resulting illusion of passed time between the two acts of perception. Some Buddhists like my friend Chainsaw argue it’s a faint recollection of a past incarnation, the intrusion of a former life—and death—on the present. Russ Thrasher has an even more absurd answer. I’ve plugged into a parallel dimension, he says, in which my life is unliving itself, in reverse, from future to past, like the Bizarre characters in the Superman comics, beings who live on a planet just like ours and look like clumsy metallic replicas of us and do everything backward.17 Simultaneously I’m moving from present to future and from future to present, and the déjà vu is the point at which those two temporal planes intersect. Or so it seems to Thrasher, whose life is a Zap comic. Whatever … whether the ghost of an earlier existence, or trans-planar projection or jumped relay on this burnt-out circuit board my brain, déjà vu always carries the same disturbing piece of baggage: I get killed at the end of it.
The first time this happened, I was sitting at the dining room table with Ma and Pop and Brenny and all the maternal relatives at a Passover seder. It was a Monday evening, and I was still under the cruel heel of a migraine, the odious hangover from my first and last experiment with psychedelic drugs the previous day.
Thrasher had phoned and invited me to come over and watch a special unedited replay of the Superbowl, which the Dolphins had won a couple of months earlier. In those days Miami was our favorite team because they vindicated our freakdom: More than any other pro team they flaunted hair. It flowed down out of their helmets, peeked through earholes, napped out from under faceguards and chinstraps. The Csonka-Kiick Dolphins had hair and they kicked ass. We could project ourselves into that collective persona, envision ourselves as the misunderstood but righteous vanguard of a New Age bowling over the rest of the crewcut retrograde NFL rednecks who represented the blind respect for authority that we held repugnant.
Since Brenny was going to play duets with her flautist friend, Dee Trottoir (on whom I had a crush at the time), I had no trouble getting away for rerun football this Sunday. Brenny and I agreed—O rare and felicitous event—to get together with Dee and her husband early in the evening and go out for Italian, which sounded like a good day to me: televised sports, maybe throw the Frisbee after, a plate of linguine with clam sauce, longing glances at my wife’s honey-blond best friend across a candlelit table, and maybe some snarling, butt-slapping sex with Brenny later on as a purgative for my unrequited adulterous lust.
Thrasher and his girlfriend, Lauren, rented a little place in the part of Venice that still had character, since it had not yet been reached by the condo blight that had germinated at the Marina Del Rey some fifteen years earlier and metastasized fast in all directions.
From the airport to the sea, an unbroken expanse of two-level townhouses, self-serve gas stations, twenty-four-hour convenience markets and nine-hole pitch ’n’ putts. Non-natives believe all of L. A. conforms to this cinder-block graveyard image, and the hungry developers work unrelentingly to prove them right, leveling quaint little sub-communities built in the twenties and thirties, displacing recourseless low-income residents, reaping huge, X-rated profits.18
Russ and Lauren’s house and property had up to now been spared the bulldozer and backhoe, and on the dandelion-weedy front lawn Russ was bathing Moby in an inflatable polyethylene wading pool festooned with pictures of barnyard fowl waddling with umbrellas and canes. Moby, a cocker-mutt, mostly black except for the Rockwellesque white patch over one eye and muddy white booties, frequently scratched himself sore and bleeding because of a year-round infestation by unseen vermin, fat fleas and rat mites, which is why the insecticide dip. The ordeal over, Moby twisted from Russ’ grasp and shook medicinal bathwater all over my Levis. Russ dried his hands on a towel and we went inside.
Unlike me with my bag of pharmacological allergies, bizarre drug reactions and exaggerated fear of losing control, Thrasher was never not stoned out on something. He smoked pot constantly, ate pills in handfuls from a lumpily overstuffed argyle sock he hid under the TV. He even managed to wheedle a five-foot tank of nitrous oxide out of a dental student friend of his. Thrasher kept the laughing gas by the living room couch. He would slip a little rubber five-and-dime balloon over the nozzle, fill it with gas, put it in his mouth and inhale until the balloon was empty, and then you could watch in horror and fascination as human self-abasement reached new depths. Thrasher’s head would loll on his chest, his tongue would protrude from a corner of his mouth, from which he would drool down his chin while his arms twitched convulsively. All of this would last maybe ten seconds, and he would then awake brightly, shouting, “I’ve got it!” He said the universe revealed its mysteries during those seconds, which seemed like full hours to him. It was in one of his NO2 reveries that he formulated his now-famous déjà vu hypothesis.
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