Amnesiascope: A Novel Part 5

"Why should I leave you anything?" he answered. "You're the guy who gets rid of everything. By the time you die, you won't have anything left to leave anybody. You've already made up your mind you're not leaving anyone a single f.u.c.king thing."

"Some of your movies, perhaps. The hysterical ones. The Naked Spur. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers."

Now he looked up. "That's what you want?" he said indignantly. "Out of all this"-he swept his arm splendidly over the disarray of his apartment-"you want The Naked Spur and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers?"

"I have a problem. I mean, besides the fact that I'm dying."

"You don't understand," Ventura said, pointing his finger at me. "It obviously hasn't sunk in with you yet. Besides the fact that you're dying, you don't have any problems."

"Do you want to hear my story or not?"

"Oh why not. Let's hear your story." So I told him about the Princess. "You mean," he said, ripping open a lettuce bag and shoving a leaf into his mouth, "this girl's been here the last two days?"

"In my apartment."

"Where have you been sleeping all this time?"

"On the floor."

"Does Viv know this?"

"No."

"Oh, Viv doesn't know this. Oh," he said with relish, "I like this story. Can I ask why she doesn't know?"

"Because I haven't told her."

"Can I ask why you haven't told her?"

"Well, she's been sick, and. ... Look, obviously I should have told her. I haven't done anything to feel guilty about, but by not telling her I've acted guilty, so now if I do tell her. ... She said the other night I sounded funny. If I tell her now, it will confirm her suspicions. Guys don't sound funny for nothing."

"No," Ventura agreed, "guys usually sound funny for something, and usually it's something women don't think is very funny."

"But if she finds out later," I went on, "even though I haven't done anything, I still tried to hide it from her, even though there was nothing to hide-"

"My G.o.d, and you think I'm more f.u.c.ked up about women than you are? A man who's a bad liar even when he's telling the truth." He shook his head. "Why don't you just kick the little hooker out?"

"She has nowhere to go. And she's afraid of the rain."

"Yeah, well, you know how long that would stop me. If she was in this apartment, which she never would have been in the first place, she'd have a New York minute to find somewhere to go before I threw her undoubtedly adorable, undoubtedly profitable little a.s.s right out in the street, rain or no rain."

"Yes!" I cried. "That's it! You could do it, you're much more of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d than I am-"

"Forget it," he shook his head, shrugging off the compliment and gesturing at the vegetables and papers and will. "I have matters to attend to. I don't need some pretty child following me around like a lovesick puppy."

"She won't follow you around like a lovesick puppy. I know you find this hard to believe, but she'll sit in a chair reading a magazine like you don't exist."

"Fat chance."

"Well then, even better if she's following you around like a lovesick puppy. It will make it all the easier for you to kick her out." Ventura ripped off part of a baguette and bit into a tomato, thinking. "She won't leave until it stops raining," I said, despondent.

"It's going to be raining a long time," he pointed out. "It's a big change in the weather pattern. All those volcanoes going off in the northwest last year. Where does she live?"

"She doesn't live anywhere. She has nowhere to go. She has no one to call, and nowhere she needs to be. She has no problems. Get this: I asked her where she stays, and she said, I stay wherever I am."

His mouth fell open. "She said that?" He took out his little notebook and wrote it down. "What's this existentialists name?"

"I don't know. I call her the Princess."

He abruptly stopped writing. "The Princess?"

"Can't you take her for just one-"

"Wait a minute, wait a minute. The Princess?" He closed his notebook, set down the tomato he had been eating and wiped his mouth with his hand. Then he threw his head back and laughed for five minutes. When he stopped laughing, his eyes had become lit by a deranged, nasty glint; I could practically hear the knuckles of his mind cracking. "Oh, well then," he sneered, "in that case, by all means. Bring the little Princess right over." Unwittingly I had put the situation to Ventura in the only terms he would have ever found irresistible. The Sicilian anarchist in him had been waiting his whole life for a princess to stray across his trained sights, or anyone so unlucky as to think of herself as any kind of princess, whether a local beauty queen or sorority row belle or Sunset Boulevard strumpet; and now, with his life practically pa.s.sing before his eyes, he wasn't going to let slip away one last opportunity to deflower her bourgeois pretensions. "I think," he snarled happily, drawing out every syllable and small spittles of foam forming at the corners of his mouth, "everyone should, just once, have a princess living in his apartment. I mean, if I should expire tonight in my sleep, who better to clean up the blood and bile and muck and s.h.i.t but a princess?"

"I'll be right back!" I cried. I rushed back to my suite to get her. If I hadn't been so elated I might have almost felt sorry for her, except that I knew, of course, it was Ventura who really didn't stand a chance. The Princess knew it too. She was long past being impressed by me or Ventura or any man; the only thing that intimidated her now was the wet two-hundred-foot journey from my corner of the hotel to his. "I like it here," she said matter-of-factly in the doorway of my apartment, staring down a dark hallway that had become as drizzly as a rain forest, before I made it clear that her only two choices were Ventura or the street. She dressed for the occasion. In her high heels and black skirt and tight silver sweater she slipped right past him into his apartment like he wasn't even there, and I thought I actually saw a flicker of doubt cross his eyes, like maybe now he was no longer the only person in the universe who didn't know that he didn't stand a chance. The rest of the day I hid behind lock and key, begging the sky to stop the rain before Ventura would be prying my door off its hinges with a crowbar and tossing her little body back into my flooded entryway.

Time pa.s.sed. The rain fell. The ceiling in the hallways appeared to sag. Small brown rivulets ran down from where my walls met the roof, and I could barely keep up anymore with emptying the buckets and mopping up the carpet. Sure enough, thirty-six hours later Ventura hadn't gotten rid of the Princess either. "After all," he tried to insist, most unconvincingly, "it's tempting fate or karma or whatever you want to believe in to just kick someone out on the street when you're dying. A little too close to the hour of judgment-right under G.o.d's nose, so to speak." As to whether he was sleeping with her, "well," he allowed, "of course she acts like she isn't interested in me at all, but I know better. I can't get mixed up in that, though. Besides," he added bitterly, "you didn't happen to mention to me that thing you told her."

"What thing?"

"That business about being treated decently for a change, or whatever it was. She told me about that, you know."

"I didn't think she had the faintest idea what I was talking about."

"That was a terrible thing to say. Now even if I wanted to sleep with her I couldn't, because you went and said this thing. Now if I sleep with her, I'm a heartless old f.u.c.k while you're some kind of ... paragon."

He was getting me back with that last part, of course; he knew how I felt about paragons these days. More time pa.s.sed. The rain kept falling. I crossed the storms and the city to the Bunker, where Viv spent longer and longer periods in her loft lying flat on her back in bed; the burning came and went like the weather, durations of pain growing longer as the durations of relief grew shorter. In the twilight of his life Ventura had taken up again with his Sufi G.o.ddess, so now and then the Princess was returned to my suite: he and I tossed her back and forth like a live grenade. By this time she didn't give the rain outside a pa.s.sing glance; rather she directed her attention to what she considered the growing deficiencies of her stay at the Hotel Hamblin. Eating her way through my refrigerator, she offered an increasingly sardonic commentary on the culinary selection. Considering the sheets and towels something less than mountain-spring fresh, she deposited them in a pile in the entryway, soaking up the rain water and waiting for me to launder them. For someone who had nowhere to go and no one to call the first twenty-four hours, she now talked on the telephone all the time, in conversations that were either interminable or unsettlingly businesslike, at peculiar hours of the day or night. One afternoon, another girl showed up. She had cropped black hair and wore thigh-high pink boots and a pink lace minidress with nothing underneath. When I answered the door she didn't say a word, slipping past me into the apartment like I was the doorman. She and the Princess had a touching reunion. The two sat around all afternoon eating cashews and crackers and calling out to the manservant for Diet c.o.kes, catching up on old times and, I suppose, old tricks. I was about to ask why the Princess didn't stay with this other girl, where they could reminisce about the glory days of Hollywood prost.i.tution at greater length, when it occurred to me with horror that the other girl might also be one of these Nietzschean I-stay-wherever-I-am streetwalkers, and Ventura and I could wind up stuck with both of them. I breathed a sigh of relief several hours later when the girl in the pink boots and pink lace dress finally left-at the very moment Dory happened to be coming up the stairs. Dory looked at her and looked at me and looked back at her, while catching a glimpse of the other nearly naked girl in my doorway.

After that, the women in the building began to take more note of the nymph who didn't wear very much and constantly crossed back and forth the length of the hallway from Ventura's place to mine. My mind became bombarded by epic, ever-maniacal fantasies of johns showing up in the middle of the night and crazed vengeful pimps banging on my door and vice squads crashing in through the windows on ropes. Desperate, Ventura and I cooked up a scheme to try and foist the Princess onto Dr. Billy. We took him out to dinner at a fancy restaurant with high chandeliers and roaring fireplaces and waiters who wore capes, where we kept buying him snifters of imported Armagnac which he happily consumed while waiting for the other shoe to drop. Naturally it turned out to be a waste of time; we had counted too much on a nature that wasn't nearly as debased as he liked to profess it was. "Let's pretend first of all," he said, savoring his Armagnac, "that I'm not married. You remember Jane, the woman I married? Even if I wasn't married, as I understand it, you," by which he meant me, "went and said a thing to her. Isn't that right?" he asked Ventura.

"He definitely said a thing," Ventura confirmed.

"It was a slip of the tongue," I replied miserably.

"You can't go around making outbursts like that," Dr. Billy argued, "without ramifications. By saying this thing you've tied all our hands, if you see what I mean. Even if I wasn't married, there's nothing I could do now with this girl anyhow, after you've gone and said this thing, without me being some sort of vile a.s.shole."

"She's used to vile a.s.sholes," I a.s.sured him.

"Let me ask you something," he went on, drinking faster now. "What do you suppose will happen when word of your little arrangement gets out? What will Viv think? What will your girlfriend think," he said to Ventura, "whoever she happens to be at the moment? What about the women living in your hotel, or the ones at the newspaper? If they think there's a Cabal now, wait till they find out you're pa.s.sing a hooker back and forth between you."

"It's not an arrangement. We're not doing anything with her."

"May I have another Armagnac please?" Dr. Billy called to the waiter. "You know as well as I that no one will believe that," he said, turning back to us. "No, it's obvious you guys are sitting on dynamite, and you just want me to climb on with you."

"It's absurd," Ventura growled. "We've got a hooker we're not having s.e.x with who we have to keep secret because no one would believe we're not having s.e.x with her."

"Worse than that," I said, "we have to keep her secret because no one would believe that we kept her secret in the first place because no one would believe us."

"I hate to tell you this," Ventura declared to me with enormous satisfaction, like he didn't hate it at all, "but this is your fault."

"What made you bring a hooker home anyway?" Dr. Billy asked.

"I explained that," I said.

"Oh right," Dr. Billy replied, "I remember now. You were saving her life or something. It was a humanitarian mission. You were a regular ... what was the word?" he said to Ventura.

"Paragon."

"You were a paragon."

"He felt sorry for her," Ventura snorted.

"The guy who keeps telling us he's not a romantic anymore," Dr. Billy guffawed. Ventura guffawed back, although I don't know what the h.e.l.l he was laughing at, slumped over his desk at night and snoring in his spinach leaves while the Princess slept in his bed. At any rate, the only thing Dr. Billy was going to help us do was empty our wallets while he drank everything put in front of him, so Ventura and I went back to taking the Princess off each other's hands whenever we could, while waiting for the rain to stop. Instead it just came down like a drumbeat for the approaching moment when the whole thing would blow up in our faces. The women in the Hamblin were giving us dirtier and dirtier looks every morning the Princess strolled down the hall from Ventura's place to mine, in her heels and tight little black shirt; and on the phone with Viv I was sounding more funny, not less.

One night I took the Princess with me to a movie I had to review. In a screening room up on the Strip, not far from where I had first bailed her out of the water that fateful afternoon, a ponderous Czech film engaged her attention ten or fifteen minutes before she began squirming in her seat. "This movie's boring," she finally complained at a clearly audible volume; I ignored her. "This movie's really stupid," she insisted a few minutes later, to which I leaned over and whispered "Be quiet" as the other people in the screening room began looking at us. "I hate this!" she cried after another minute, and in the seat behind us the long-time film critic of the city's big daily paper leaned forward and warned, "If you can't be quiet, I'll have you removed."

"f.u.c.k you," the Princess answered.

At that moment a plan hatched in my head by which I figured if she could just get herself kicked out of the screening, in our brief but significant separation that followed I could duck through the other exit at the front of the room, make a beeline for the car before she got there, and drive away with her running tearfully after me waving her arms. The problem with this plan was that when the publicist finally came along to eject the Princess, the Princess refused to leave without me, and so in short order I was being ejected too. I protested, of course. The big-shot critic in back, becoming more and more outraged with every bit of commotion, finally exploded, "Get out and take your little wh.o.r.e with you!" to which the Princess, rather than flying into the scornful fury I might have predicted and suggesting within earshot of everyone that she had "done" him a couple of weeks before in the back seat of a car down at the corner of Sunset and La Brea, instead began to sob pitifully. "Call her that again," I managed to answer before I felt the hands of the security guard on my back, "and you're going home with your eyeb.a.l.l.s pinned to your lapels," but the next thing I knew the Princess and I were outside, and I was sprawled on the sidewalk in the rain.

"Are you all right?" she said in her little voice, standing over me a few seconds before scurrying back under an awning, where she watched the rain fall on me for a while. I picked myself up off the sidewalk. We drove home in seething silence. Even though she had never particularly cared before about having a conversation, I could tell now she would be happier if I said something, so I didn't, because I didn't want her to be happier. When we stopped at a traffic light I turned to look at her and she recoiled, not as if the look in my eyes was something she had never seen before, but as if she had seen it plenty of times, all too often. I was about to reach over, open the pa.s.senger door and give her a good shove when the light turned and the car behind me honked. I was still thinking about it as we drove down Fountain Avenue picking up speed-ten, twenty miles an hour, thirty, forty. ... In the garage we sat for a while, the dark quiet of the car welling up around us.

"I'm sorry I cause you so much trouble," she finally murmured, picking at the ends of her hair. "I know you've been nice to me."

Just as Ventura and I were at our wits' end, the episode with the Princess resolved itself rather ironically. For days we had been waiting for the rain to stop so she would leave, but instead it just kept coming down, harder than ever; and then the morning after the incident at the screening, when Ventura was at one end of the hallway and I was at the other, and the Princess was walking from me to him or him to me-I had long since lost track of who was transferring her to whom-suddenly the ceiling gave way and a hundred gallons of rain collapsed into the Hamblin. Like the day I picked her up out of the rapids of the Sunset Strip, it nearly washed her down the stairs; she only barely sidestepped the deluge in time. She began screaming like a banshee. Still screaming, water flooding the hallway around her, she fled down the stairs and out the front of the building, and down Jacob Hamblin Road where we could hear her all the way to Santa Monica Boulevard. Ventura and I ran down to the hotel lobby behind her, where we locked and bolted the doors and silently thanked the rain, which had condemned us to her in the first place, for now delivering us from her.

The day she erected the Memoryscope, Viv had lunch in the Glow Loft District with a guy she had known since art school. He had been married for a long time, with a couple of children, and worked for one of the few studios that were still left in L.A. He wasn't someone with whom Viv had an especially close friendship, but they got along well enough that, once beyond the cordialities, he felt free to tell her the story of a woman he had loved very much, since around the time his marriage had gone bad. He never had an affair with this woman but thought of her as his best friend and confidante, and dreamed that once his children were grown he would spend the rest of his life with her. One day, only a few months before, the woman had been killed in a car accident with her husband; their child, a little girl, had been in the back seat and emerged miraculously unscathed. Another couple driving by when the accident took place pulled their car over and held the little girl until the police and ambulance arrived, praying with the child and protecting her from the sight of her dead parents. Now the studio executive could only live with the realization he would never have the time with this woman he had longed for and dreamed of.

For days and weeks Viv was haunted by this story. She was terribly shaken by the chance he had had to be happy, and how that chance was now gone forever because he had never taken it. It was after hearing this story that she began to feel the pain in her stomach, below her heart. Doctors couldn't tell her what was wrong; a few suggested nothing was wrong. But I knew something was wrong. If anything, Viv was the kind to try and minimize something, ignore it, so that even when she called in the middle of the night in agony, she couldn't quite bring herself to ask me to come. One night I was shocked to find her doubled up on her bed, her face as yellow as her hair and both streaked with sweat; the pain had spread from her stomach to her back, where the muscles had convulsed so long she couldn't stand it anymore. She hurt so much that when she cried she hardly made a sound. I put some of her things into a bag and took her down to the car, and drove her back to the Hamblin slumped and dazed in the seat next to me; and as I kept trying to tell myself I had had no idea she was so sick, she kept murmuring over and over, under her breath so that I could barely make it out, "I guess you're not such a bad guy after all." It didn't make me feel any better.

After a day or two in my apartment, I realized she was starving. She couldn't eat anything; anything the least bit solid seemed to cut right through her. I concocted one gruel after another that she wouldn't eat because it hurt too much, and no amount of badgering on my part could force her. When she wasn't sleeping she was bent in pain, a terrified look in her eyes, and when she did finally fall asleep, the pain woke her up. "What's wrong with me?" she cried. For days this went on, and I got it into my head that one last No from those first days at the Seacastle, one last No that had been hiding up inside her that she had never released, was devouring her from the inside out. ...

Finally, though, after time, the general sense of crisis began to pa.s.s. Finally the rains stopped as unequivocally as they had begun; down the hall Ventura appeared to survive, at least for the time being, the creamy blood frothing in his veins. Perhaps there was nothing left of Viv for the No to consume, and so it was the No that starved, wasting away; perhaps a predatory doubt inside her had evolved into a winged resolution that was suddenly poised to take flight. After a week of my pabulum she slowly graduated to hot cereal, mashed potatoes, rice and bread and ice cream. Still exhausted she slept all day and night, and in the new sunlight through the window she looked about six or seven years old. Viv always hated it when people told her she sometimes looked like a little girl; but sitting in the corner of my bedroom watching her sleep, I was surprised by a momentary desire to have a daughter someday, if only she would look just like Viv. Then one afternoon she sat right up in my bed from out of her sleep, as if from out of a dream. "I have to go to Holland," she announced. It was the first fully coherent sentence she had said in a week.

"Holland?" I stood by the bed looking down at her, and put my hands in my pockets, not sure what else to do with them. If I were to have put them on her, it might have been mistaken as an attempt to restrain or suppress something. My heart sagged like a ceiling full of rain.

"To build the other Memoryscope," she explained.

"Why Holland?"

"Because that's where the one here is pointed."

"How do you know?"

"I dreamed it," she said. I nodded. We could pull out a map and check; but what was the point? I had no doubt that any map would say Holland as certainly as her dream did. "So I have to go to Holland," she said, "to build another one, pointing back."

I sat down on the bed beside her.

"Come with me," she said.

"I can't."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

"It seems," she said, "like you should know."

"Yes, it does."

"But you don't. So you can't."

"Not yet, anyway. Something's not finished here for me."

"What?"

"Well," I tried to smile, "that's what I don't know."

"So how long do you have to stay here before it's finished?" and then, irritated, she answered herself, "I know, you don't know that either. You don't know anything."

"I don't want to lose you," was all I could think to say.

She asked, "Do you believe, after all your disastrous romances, that you're capable of loving deeply?"

"Yes. Maybe more," I answered, though I didn't want to have to explain that, because I wasn't sure I could.

She seemed unconvinced. "I need your undying pa.s.sion, like you had for Sally and Lauren."

"You make me happy."

"That's not the same as undying pa.s.sion," she said, and I couldn't think fast enough to explain that while my pa.s.sion for Sally or Lauren might have been undying, the man who felt those particular pa.s.sions had died, and that while I bore him a resemblance, I was different, and that the pa.s.sion I felt for Viv was a new kind of undying pa.s.sion, of a new man, and that it was better because she was better, because I trusted her in a way I could never trust anyone else. I remembered a night she had come to me, long ago, in our early days when I was at my most mute and we weren't really getting along; it was late one night, and early in the morning Viv had to catch a train out of town-a business trip or family visit, I don't remember, or maybe one of those little Viv impulses that was going to take her wherever she happened to wind up, b.u.t.te or Madagascar or Holland. On this night I had one of my headaches, and she sat in the dark stroking my brow till I fell asleep. There are a few things I know I'll remember at the end of my life. Some of them may be things I would as soon forget, things so small they should have been forgotten a long time ago, but so sharp they can't be; others are things like Viv exhausted, sitting in the dark for hours on end stroking my brow until I fell asleep. She probably doesn't think twice about it now. She's probably forgotten it completely. But I think about it all the time, every time my head feels like it's splitting down the middle: it is the soothing touch of trust and forgiveness; and if any other woman has ever touched me like that, and in retrospect I can imagine one or two might have, I was neither smart nor old nor unselfish enough to recognize it. Thinking back on it, it makes me ashamed to have ever suggested that a woman wouldn't die for love.

Right before Viv left for Holland came K's most recent correspondence. Now, you understand I don't necessarily cop to everything K has to say; she has only seen the secret room, after all, and the literary one I suppose, so her perspective must be considered accordingly. But after copping to everything else, I don't have much reason to conceal anything anymore: "S, I fell into a river of thought about you this morning, and this is the current I fell into. ... Your sense of love is overwhelming and imprisoning. You contrive both release and relief from it, which then makes you feel guilty. Then you suffer for your guilt, but it's preferable to the suffering of a great love. You are powerless in the throes of a great love so you're compelled to a.s.sert yourself in various ways, eventually gaining your freedom. The price of freedom is guilt. The price of love is guilt. The pain of separation is preferable to the stress of obsession. You're possessed and obsessed until you break away-so, from feeling powerless and resentful, you gain a sense of mastery and control through domination and bondage. But conversely it's her love that dominates and binds you. Love courses through you with such intensity (you may laugh) that you rebel against it, and against the feeling of being controlled by something or someone else. In one way or another you are going to free yourself, in order to feel that you're not powerless. So you'll force yourself on her and derive satisfaction from it, and when you try to subdue her, you're trying to subdue that which subdues you; but you are really the one you're subduing. ... Pretty good for a Sat.u.r.day morning, don't you think?"

G.o.d, I can't stand it.

I can't stand that she had to go. After she told me she was going, she was angry, I think; I was not; and she was angry, I think, because I was not, not to mention that I wasn't going with her and couldn't offer a good reason why, even as I could have offered a hundred good reasons why I should. We didn't talk about it after that. We didn't talk about anything. In the void of our talk I thought furiously, to formulate a reason that we could talk about, but I couldn't think of any that counted. Over the next couple of weeks, as she prepared to go, the sun hurtled toward L.A., to fill the hole in the sky where the rain used to be. The city became a swamp. Buildings buckled and roads turned to glue. Fauna grew from the Hamblin floors and walls; toadstools erupted from the cracks of my baseboards and lichen layered the ceiling. A radiant red moss covered my windowsills and strange mounds rose beneath my carpet. I weeded the kitchen and pruned the bathroom, and hacked my way to the refrigerator with a knife. Sometime during the night before she left, I finally got angry but I didn't know at what; I had been getting angry a lot lately without knowing why. Nothing had broken the silence between Viv and me through all the recent weeks, or through the night before her departure; and even after I got angry it could not break through the silence of the drive to Union Station to catch her train to St. Louis, where she would then catch a plane to Europe. Even walking to the train there was nothing I could think to say that was worth breaking the silence for: the small talk in my head only felt like it would trivialize everything we felt and everything we held back. I kept wishing she would tell me again I wasn't such a bad guy after all. On the train we found her compartment and I helped her with the luggage; she was still a bit weak. And then, all I could finally say was, "G.o.d, I can't stand it," and she looked at me with the hope there was more. And there was more, and I wanted to tell her, but I couldn't just now, just yet.

She threw her arms around my neck. She pulled her face to mine, and put her little mouth to my ear. "I'm still so hungry for you," was the last thing she whispered, before she disappeared like a ghost of the Seacastle, who had stepped from the shadows just long enough to show me not who I was but who I could be, before she stepped back.

The day after Viv left, Shale called with the news that Freud N. Johnson had finally fired him.

He was quite calm about it, which is not quite to say pa.s.sive. As usual, he seemed most concerned about how to prepare the staff for the news; he had already told both Dr. Billy and Ventura, and asked that I not say anything to anyone else for twenty-four hours, until the firing became effective. "I know," he concluded, "that this doesn't come at an easy time for you. I don't want you to do anything stupid. There's absolutely nothing you have to prove to me." Of course, I muttered. I hung up the phone and typed up my resignation. I waited for Ventura to call, which he did, and then Dr. Billy; both asked what I was going to do, just to make sure, I guess.

I didn't presume anything of anyone else. I was close to broke, but my circ.u.mstances were no more dire than others': Dr. Billy's dead millionaire money ran out some time ago, and he hadn't been able to get his latest doc.u.mentary about s.e.x addicts in Anchorage off the ground. No one had more at stake than Ventura, who confided he was deeply in debt. As Ventura suspected might happen, Freud N. Johnson did offer him the editorship of the newspaper; thus he was confronted with a choice between dest.i.tution and not only security but something that I think had always represented to him a secret dream, to run the paper he had started. I don't think Ventura had ever given up on that dream. He always thought it was really his newspaper and, in a way, he had always been right. Now the tone of his voice was both funereal and charged, or whatever pitch suits the man who has to decide between having everything and having nothing, and finds for vague, almost inexplicably moral reasons that what should be the easiest decision in the world is the hardest.

By that evening the rumors were rampant. Around midnight the noir blonde from the advertising department called almost giddy with excitement; I finally hung up on her, because she was just enjoying the whole thing too d.a.m.n much. The next morning it became official, and I got ready to head down to the newspaper. More than just wanting to get it over with, I also didn't want anyone to think I had wavered, and I suppose it's possible, though I honestly don't think so, that I didn't want to waver on my own account either. The Hamblin was in full bloom this morning, the sun blasting in through the hole in the hallway ceiling where the rain had collapsed; exotic vines wound up out of the elevator shaft. Ventura was strolling up and down the hallway lost in thought, his hands in his pockets. I told him I was heading down to the newspaper. It wasn't until then I was completely sure what his decision was; he said Dr. Billy was on his way over and I should wait and they would go with me. Billy had phoned this morning, Ventura said, "wanting to know if we would be quitting if you weren't." Obviously I didn't have an answer for that. Half an hour later Dr. Billy showed up, and for a while we stood around looking at each other in the hallway before Ventura said, "Let's go." The newspaper office was in a tizzy by the time we got there. The official word was now definitely out. I didn't feel like talking to a lot of people about it, holding their hands and repeating ad nauseam my little speech about how everyone had to make his or her own decision. I certainly wasn't going to try and rouse the rabble. I wanted to get in and get out. The three of us confronted Freud N. Johnson in his office with our resignations. His face went a distinctly sick shade of pale when we walked in. He sat behind a huge gleaming black desk that appeared to have been chosen both to a.s.sert his importance and protect him from moments just like this one, and on top of this mammoth desk was absolutely nothing but a digital clock and a video ent.i.tled How to Fire People. After a while he couldn't bear sitting any longer, so he stood up. We didn't beat about the bush. I had no illusions about the impact of my own leaving; of the three of us I knew I'd be the least missed. Dr. Billy was a much bigger blow, to both the paper and the staff, not only because of his popularity but because his departure dramatically contradicted what some might have misperceived as a survivalist's amorality about office politics. It was Ventura's loss, however, that the paper would find especially devastating, not to mention extremely inconvenient for Freud N. Johnson to try and explain, since the paper was not only losing a prospective editor but its most famous and mythic figure. So now Johnson was too shocked to say much, and while it surprised me at the time, in retrospect it's entirely predictable that his main concern was not trying to talk us out of quitting, or making sure others didn't quit, but preempting whatever bad publicity might come out of the whole thing. He tried a bit of strong-arming that was frankly beyond him. If there was any trouble about all this, he warned, he would put out any number of stories about Shale: embezzlement perhaps-his mind was whirring like a little wheel with a rodent inside, racing in place-or hara.s.sing female employees.