Going Native (38 page)

Sometime before dawn he must have slept, but he couldn't be sure.

In the empty kitchen of the empty house he sat at the breakfast table spooning in a bowl of fortified oats and staring at the color portable on the counter. It was a Tweety and Sylvester cartoon. "He don't know me very well, do he?" said the clever bird. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. He drank a beer, then another. The ocean rolled and crashed.

Out in the garage he removed the board with the old license plates nailed to it -- Illinois, Colorado, Nevada -- and from the niche in the wall drew out a battered leather briefcase which he carried over to the Intrepid, the spare car Tia allowed him to drive, and flung into the seat beside him. Time to get to work. Out of the house and onto the road, a solitary in his cage, he joined the other solitaries locked and buckled into their cages, hundreds, thousands of them, all streaming determinedly along in a credible masquerade of purpose and conviction. How many understood, as he did, the true function of the car as a secret device for finding yourself?

He drove south along the coast road, the sea on his right playing peekaboo with him at the bends and curves, the city ahead lying obscured in the splendid yellow smoke of its own wastes. Every minute or two he reached out to change the radio station. Every pop tune was a monotonous fraud; every voice bellowing through the megaphone of a morning talk show issued from the mouth of an idiot. He wanted to hear something he hadn't heard before. Sometimes he imagined he could even feel the media microwaves bombarding his skin, as if he were being literally baked by encoded cliché
s. Here was the not so otherworldly source of Tia's intuitions about ghosts; indeed, we
were
surrounded and we had no wagons to put in a circle or any effective exorcists to fend off the assault. But these disagreeable thoughts, he well understood, were merely that -- thoughts -- the fleeting vagaries of an unstable moment; later in the day he would welcome the contrary opinion. This life was a merry-go-round in which you passed through the same thoughts, the same feelings, over and over again until you died. He reached out to switch radio stations. Who at this unfocused hour of the morning could bear the synthesized corn of the title track from a movie about a famous Top 40 singer who witnesses a murder and after an hour and a half of harrowing contrivance ends up sucking the nightstick of the glamour-boy detective assigned to protect her? He watched his hand move toward the dial, he glanced back at the road, he watched his hand, and then, without warning, he was invaded by a sensation, it began like an injection of black dye at the base of his spine and it rose swiftly up his back and spread, darkly hooded, out over the top of his head. Who was he? What was his name? Where was he now? Because it had happened before (everything had happened before), he knew enough to ignore the questions and stay with the car, maintain control of the machinery, because when a moment splintered like this into a million riddles, every ? was a doorway into another world, and the experienced traveler kept a firm hand on the wheel, secure in the knowledge that eventually he would catch up with himself. Even as a child, he had been subject to such irruptions, accepted their normality, and had come to see these "gaps" as the holes in the sieve of personality through which something important but undefined was being systematically strained.

In the city there were a dozen or so places that made up his city, the stops on his daily rounds. Since his mood, and often his behavior, seemed to vary so from one location to the next, he needed to visit at least three or four of these places in order to feel like a semiwhole person by nightfall, as if his being lay scattered in pieces about the town and required fresh recollection every morning.

The Adonis Health and Racquet Club was situated at the end of an asphalt drive winding in a graceful S curve through an artificial landscape of manicured shrubbery and gently rolling fairway grass. The building itself resembled one of those suspiciously low-key corporate headquarters defacing suburbs from coast to coast in the popular defensive architectural style of contemporary nondescript.

"Good morning, Mr. Talbot," said Jeremy, the boy at the front desk, above his curly-haired head the club's motto in lurid rainbow script: DESIGN YOUR SELF!

He walked on by with a curt nod. The guy with the permanent smile on his face was not a guy to be trusted. He went straight to the locker room, changed into his standard uniform of Northwestern T-shirt and USC shorts, and strolled on out to the weight room to begin his daily circuit. Toning citadel to the stars, the Adonis was crowded at every hour of the day and night. Will ignored his conditioning peers, including the famous woman on the treadmill muttering metronomically to herself, "I am fat, I am fat, I am fat, fat, fat," and went immediately to work, moving methodically from one gleaming machine to the next, carefully exercising each major muscle group in turn, watching himself in the mirrors, he enjoyed looking at himself, it was like watching someone else, squeezing the sweat from his body like juice from a lemon, day by day flushing the impurities from his soul. He was clarifying himself, he was becoming. He was always aware of his body now, its center of gravity, its stride, its stance. It was this awareness, in fact, that had finally liberated him from the prison of "normal" life.

In the shower afterward, a man with too little to look at noticed the seven blue dots arranged in parallel series on the white inside of his upper left arm and inquired if they were tattoos.

"Birthmark," said Johnson. "My lucky stars." He rubbed at the skin vigorously. "Itches when it gets wet."

"How odd," said the man. "They're perfectly symmetrical. I thought nature abhorred a straight line."

"That's a vacuum." Johnson turned off the water and grabbed his towel. "Excuse me."

"Why, yes, I believe you're correct. I was never any good at biology, anyway." He hurried to keep up, following Johnson back to his locker. "Now, what have I seen you in? Wait -- don't tell me, you were the renegade cop in
Renegade?

"No."

"The crippled ballplayer in
Diamond in the Rough?"

"Afraid not."

"The alien prison warden in
Condemned Planet?"

"No, look --"

"One of the prisoners? One of the scary monsters?"

"Who do you think I am?"

"Why, Ridley Webb, of course."

"If I give you an autograph, will you go away?"

"Listen, I didn't mean to bother you, Mr. Webb, and I wouldn't want you to interpret our little exchange here as the product of an intrusion. I'm not that kind of person."

"You have a piece of paper?"

The man looked down helplessly at his dripping, towel-wrapped body. "Well, I. . ."

From inside his locker Johnson withdrew a felt-tip pen and a soiled one-dollar bill. Hastily he scribbled a signature across George Washington's placid face and handed it to his astonished fan.

"I don't know what to say," he said, examining the note front and back like a cashier checking for counterfeits. "I've seen all your films, but this" -- waving the bill in the air -- "this is just so like you. Thank you" -- offering a moist hand -- "thank you very much."

"My pleasure," said Johnson, "but don't let this get around, if you know what I mean, I'm solvent for now, and I'd like to stay that way."

"Hey, that's good. Always the joker, eh, Mr. Webb?"

"I find it's the easiest way to go. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gone."

Out in the parking lot, Johnson, in an expensive red wig, sat in his car, the briefcase full of hairpieces, cosmetics, and prosthetic devices open on the seat beside him. He was trying to adjust a matching red mustache in his rearview mirror. His skill in applying disguises did not seem to be improving with experience. He found it difficult to judge what looked most real. Finally, when his patience was spent and he'd convinced himself he could pass as a red-haired, red-bearded kind of guy, he cranked up the car and drove on over to a downtown block of several used and rare bookshops. He parked and put on a pair of sunglasses, a set of false uppers, and a cowboy hat that was lying on the backseat. The first store was owned and operated by a pair of burly twins who both happened to be present, so he walked right back out again.

In the second store, Gemstone Books and Rarities, he found a small young woman sitting all alone at a big desk. She was reading a paperback copy of
The Idiot.

"Pardon me," he asked in a ludicrously affected voice, "but do you happen to have a
Ben-Hur
1860 third edition?"

"The third edition?" she repeated, with the dreamy disoriented quality of someone surfacing from a dangerously long dive. "I don't know," she said. "I'll have to check."

"With the erratum on page 123," he added. She typed into the computer on the desk before her. "We have a first," she said, shaking her head, "but, nope, no third. I'm sorry."

"I thought so," said Johnson. "How about the Chevalier Audobon 1840?"

She typed. "No listing," she said, looking up at this odd man with an open, pert expression as if eager to see how she could be further diverted. "That last title," she asked, "what kind of book is it?"

He leaned toward her confidentially. "To tell you the truth, I don't honestly know. They're Christmas gifts for my parents. I'm working off a list." He waved a scrap of paper apologetically in her face.

"They must be serious collectors."

"The house is full of books from the attic to the basement, if that's what you mean."

"Sounds like a wonderful home to be raised in."

"Oh, of course it was -- and they gave me a precious gift, a lifelong love of reading."

"You're a lucky man."

"Yes, I suppose I am."

"Of course, my life here is relatively narrow, I only come into contact with people who read. Sometimes it's easy to forget there's that whole horrifying world of illiterate couch potatoes just right outside these walls."

"The Kartoon Kultur, yes, difficult, though, to avoid its vile contamination."

Then the phone rang and she took a call about a book that required her to search through the computer file. Johnson wandered the aisles, glancing at titles and listening to the soft modulations of her voice. Unlike people, books were so quiet. Through the spaces between the shelves he stared unseen back at Ms. Antiquarian, the impassive lenses of his eyes registering the special light and shape of her without judgment or editing. When your look went out in secret without possibility of being returned, you were at that moment nobody and there was safety in that state and a certain measure of contentment, but also the ever-present danger of a forgetting deep and prolonged, permanent losses beyond resuscitation, the person who goes in is not necessarily the same one who comes out. Under his quivering nose swam the names of hundreds of authors, too many -- who were they all, this garish spectacle of ranked identities? -- and suddenly the great black snake began climbing the naked tree of his spine and he had to get out of this tiny shop and he had to do it now, hurrying past whoever she was before she could hang up the phone and utter a word, any word, the word that spoke the end.

As soon as he was back in his own car, he was fine again. He understood himself, he knew how to handle such breaks in the transmission. He felt hungry now, and he needed a drink, so he drove over to The Smoking Mirror on Wilshire for lunch, best burritos in town (this month at least), and stood coolly at the bar, nursing a glass of "Precious Water," the house specialty, a bizarre concoction of tequila and red mystery juice, and eyeing on the wall this grotesquely sculptured face with a mammoth dog's tongue hanging lasciviously from its grinning mouth. He was waiting for the wheel to turn. He would remain in place until the press of human bodies, the noise, the smell, the plain animal heat, became absolutely unendurable. He sipped his drink and listened to the conversations around him. The chatter of presumptuous parrots. He noticed the fingers clutching the bar, long, elegant, expertly manicured, before he even heard the voice. "Skull-crusher," it said, and there was something special in its tone that caused him to glance over, but she had already turned away and all he could see was a dark river of gleaming hair flowing down a well-dressed back.

"Excuse me," he asked, "but I have a rather curious request which I hope you won't mind indulging."

She turned back, studied him skeptically for a moment, before the harsh set of her features softened a notch, as if some air had been let out of an overinflated balloon. She had dark eyes and thick eyebrows and a thin mouth too wide for her face. She waited for him to continue.

"Would you allow me to examine your hands?" He smiled easily, as if embarrassed by his own question.

"This isn't some new perversion going around, is it?"

His gaze went directly into hers. "No, no, not at all." He extended his own pliant hand. "I'm sorry. The name's Lyle. I'm a sculptor. I specialize in hands. Heads and hands."

"Oh, so you're not a pervert, you're a professional." The remark amused her.

"I've never heard it put so succinctly."

"I don't like to beat around the bush."

"Well, fancy that, neither do I."

The bartender arrived with her drink, a parasol-crowned, skull-shaped mug of pink foam.

"Here, let me get that," offered Johnson.

"Sorry," she said, "I don't allow strangers to buy me drinks."

"Good policy," he agreed. "The roads are fraught with marauders."

She took a sip through her straw, watching the movement of his face. "You know, I thought you wanted to read my palm. I had an old boyfriend once who went around doing that to every woman he met. He was an asshole."

"Yes, well, I'm a professional, don't forget. I deal in visions, not prophecy. Visions and Things, that's the name of my gallery."

She laughed. "Why do I have this eerie feeling that everything you're telling me you're just making up as you go along?"

"Isn't that what we're all doing? C'mon now, let me see."