Amnesiascope: A Novel Part 6

"You try that," Dr. Billy said, stepping up to Johnson around the desk and pressing his nose inches from the other man's, "and I will come back, and find you, and get you."

"Wh-Wh-What?" Johnson croaked.

"I said," Dr. Billy repeated very calmly, "that if you try that, I will get you." I don't know exactly what he meant, and I'd bet almost anything Dr. Billy didn't know either. But that didn't matter. None of us had ever seen Dr. Billy do anything like this, and it was a little frightening, every bit of his affability falling away to reveal a livid core-to which the color of Freud N. Johnson's face went from ill to cadaverous. If I had tried to threaten Johnson in this way, it wasn't likely anyone would have taken it very seriously, including Johnson, and if Ventura had done it, well, Ventura was crazy enough that while everyone would have taken it seriously, no one would have been shocked by it. Moreover, Ventura was taller than Johnson, and I was taller yet, and it would have been different for Johnson to be threatened by a taller man: it might have allowed him the luxury of seeing himself as a sympathetic figure, being bullied. But Dr. Billy was looking right into Johnson's eyes and Johnson was looking right into his, and in this moment Johnson was having one of the few true epiphanies of his life, one of the few true moments of clarity where he actually understood something profound, which was that Dr. Billy O'Forte could be a foot shorter and he would always be a big man, and Freud N. Johnson could be a foot taller and he would always be a little man. And that realization was almost too much for him; I wouldn't have been surprised at that moment if he'd run howling from his office out into the street and thrown himself in front of a truck, if only he had the self-respect to do it. Instead he cowered and fell back into his chair, far below Dr. Billy's gaze, at a height that suited him all the better, and said, "I want you to know I respect you for feeling that way. I want to thank you for telling me that, and I want you to know how much I respect that you said it." The next day he would call Dr. Billy again, just to make sure Dr. Billy understood how much Freud N. Johnson respected Dr. Billy for having told him that he would come and get him.

To their credit, in the next twenty-four hours two other writers quit as well. They included an English woman who had just pa.s.sed up a couple of other job offers the previous month, including a teaching position and a big-time gig at a newspaper in Chicago; and a guy who had just closed out his house with his wife and packed everything they owned off to Washington, D.C., contingent on an arrangement with the newspaper that he would continue to write from the East Coast as a staff writer. Without thinking about it ten seconds he quit anyway, he and his wife last seen driving off into uncertainty, neither prospects nor steady income anywhere in sight. I suppose in these situations you can always figure there will be people who, with the least leeway possible, will take a principled position anyway. Back at the suite, the messages came in on my phone machine over the next forty-eight hours. There was one from the noir blonde, apologizing for the conversation the night before, and as the news filtered out-like I've said, people three thousand miles away find out what's going on in L.A. before anyone here does-writers and journalists from other newspapers and magazines called to get the story. Those were the tedious messages, which I nonetheless returned. Much better were the outbursts from others on the paper's staff, a rare few of which were mature and consoling and regretful, most of which were frantic and resentful. "You've abandoned us," angrily sobbed one woman. Seethed another, "You're so lucky you could quit." There apparently seemed to be a general feeling among the staff that those of us who quit didn't really need these jobs, but worked at the paper as some sort of hobby. Over the coming days my machine recorded many more wails of woe about how terrible it was to have to still work at the paper, as well as expressions of alarm when it came to light that Shale had actually saved the jobs of a number of people that office gossip had it he was trying to get fired. I have to admit I had quite a good time with all these messages. I drove around the city playing them over and over on my car stereo, a long symphony of collective sniveling so rapturously shameless it verged on the transcendent. There was a genius about it, really, the way the kids had managed to turn themselves into the martyrs and still collect their paychecks. It seemed rather dim of Ventura and Dr. Billy and me that we hadn't thought of it.

According to Ventura, the universe doesn't know from random. "Happens all the time," he used to say confidently to the most peculiar instances of synchronicity. So there might well have been meaning-though I'm not claiming one-in the coincidence of the letter I received right after turning in my resignation. It was from the Committee of the First and Only Annual Craters of the Moon Film Festival, inviting me as a guest to the festival's opening night, where there would premiere the long lost but rediscovered and restored silent masterpiece The Death of Marat. The festival was also pleased to announce that the film's director, Adolphe Sarre, would himself attend. My first reaction, particularly given the timing, was that the joke had been taken rather too far. But then I remembered that I was, after all, the one who had taken it there.

From the summit of Laurel Canyon, the second light to be seen in the northern hills on the other side of the Valley-if you move your gaze westward-is my mother. She lives there where she's lived my whole life, in a two-bedroom flat above a little theater she used to run. From the summit of Laurel Canyon it used to be twenty minutes by freeway to reach this light; now it's a little under an hour by surface streets. Now the only ones who live in the Valley are the ghosts of the Indians who lived here to begin with, until the Spanish monks came and built the mission, and the keepers of the lights in the hillsides, of which I count no more than six or seven most nights, and on some nights not that. If her eastern neighbor, whoever he might be, leaves his house dark, then my mother becomes the first light rather than the second, and I have to backtrack.

My mother is in her late sixties. As one is supposed to do but rarely does, she seems to have gotten better at life as she's gotten older. With my father gone she hasn't had much choice, unless she was going to give it up altogether; and though in that first year following his death she may believe she came close to such an option, no one else who knows her is likely to think so. Give me the rest of my own life and I'll see if I can remember my mother ever giving up on anything. I worry about her being alone, of course-I still wince at how easily, just months after my father died, I almost left L.A. with Sally-though sometimes I think she worries about my solitude more than I do hers. For a woman of such strong ideas about things, it must have taken all of her will to resolve, sometime after I left home around eighteen, not to tell me how to live my life; but she hasn't, even if once in a while she hints gently. Driving out tonight I already know she isn't going to be happy with my two bits of news: that I've quit my job; and that Viv has left. Quitting a job on principle is the kind of grandstanding self-congratulatory gesture I've been making my whole life, so she'll probably get used to that one, but as for Viv, my mother is more partial to her than to anyone I've ever been with. The two of them have the same edge, as well as a nearly genetic hostility to ambiguity, however much wisdom may have taught them how much life is ambiguous. "If you ever let Viv go," my mother laughed not all that long ago, "I'm afraid I'd have to kill you." She was only half kidding when she said it. She had drunk only enough wine to inspire her to say the truth, rather than so much as to say what she didn't really mean. She fears and dreads, I think, what she senses is my true nature: to go it alone in the end. But recently I've come to suspect it's only part of my nature; just how big a part is what I've been trying to figure out for a while now, along with everyone else who blindly, haphazardly wanders across the firing range of my life.

My mother cooks dinner and we discuss movies, the empty theater beneath our feet and the days when it wasn't empty, and politics and the country. We disagree a lot about politics, except that as time pa.s.ses each of us moves toward what the other views as an evolving reasonableness. We usually have a good time in these discussions, though lately, as things in the country have gone the way they've gone, I guess I don't enjoy it quite as much. "Your father couldn't talk about these things without getting angry," she remembers correctly. We don't talk that much about my father; perhaps both of us sometimes wonder if we should, though it doesn't feel like there's something significant that's being avoided or left unsaid. When he died we didn't have a funeral or a memorial, since the one thing we all shared, my father most of all, was an abhorrence of ritualizing death. He was privately cremated and his ashes cast at sea, as I would want to be. Still, there are times I wonder fleetingly if maybe we should have done something after all. I don't know. I suspect not doing something seemed stranger to other people than it did to us. Having married the man when she was eighteen and spent over forty years with him until his death, my mother was baffled and a little annoyed with herself when, a year after he died, she wasn't over it yet. She may be the kind of person who couldn't function in her indomitable fashion if she allowed herself to believe that, in fact, she would never really be over it. Being the sort of person I am, I accepted that from the beginning, and that somehow made it easier.

Now when we speak of my father it's a fond reference, like to him getting p.i.s.sed off about politics. I'm sure I've thought about my father at least once every day since he died. It's in the most casual way, not with grief but rather as an aside: I'll say something to him as though he's there, something that would make him smile or laugh. In one way, as I imagine it is with all children, I've not accepted his death at all: his absence hasn't sunk in, the way it must sink in all the time for my mother. When I think about him I don't think of him as unhappy, the way I used to. My mother finally, gently corrected an earlier misimpression on my part that my father hadn't been all that content with his life; and as I've gotten older I've come to see she's probably right, because I've come to see how one makes his peace with the pa.s.sing of his dreams, or how those dreams are displaced by ones at once less grand and more full, at once more ordinary but no less profound. I was too haunted, after he died, by a confession he made fifteen years before, when I was about to leave for Europe and no one, including myself, had any idea when I would be back; and in the early morning hours before my plane flight, my father asked that I forgive his "feet of clay." I hadn't the faintest idea what he was talking about. I had never thought his feet were anything but stone, because what I admired about him wasn't the fulfillment of any big ambitions but the small moments that few people witnessed, like at his brother's funeral, for instance, when he stood up to all the a.s.sembled aunts and cousins to comfort my dead uncle's ostracized, grief-stricken ex-wife. Now I suppose if there's anything I do regret not saying to him before he died it's how much I admired that moment.

Either that, or I'd have tried to tell him it never really mattered to me that he couldn't read my books. I a.s.sume this bothered him a lot more than it did me. He just didn't know what the h.e.l.l I was talking about, any more than I knew what the h.e.l.l that feet-of-clay stuff was, not to mention that I wasn't always all that sure myself what I was talking about in my books. I never thought it was all that important that I completely understand what I was saying, I knew the books came from some place more real to me than any literal understanding; and if my father could have read them that way, well, then I guess he wouldn't have been the person my father was. For him to have confronted that would have been to further confront, as he must have already done, the most mind-boggling part of being a parent, which is that even the child who comes from you is not ever wholly of you, that there's always a part of the child that is always beyond the genes or shared soul of any father and mother. What my father did understand was that this was my dream, to write these books, and that I had held on to that dream long past the point any sensible person would have. He may have also envied my plain dumb luck that I always knew what my dream was, when I don't think he was ever sure what his was, until those last fifteen years when he realized it was the life he had had, the wife, the son, and that no other dream was ever likely to have been better. Maybe he suspected that, in knowing my dream, I also knew something else, something he didn't. What I know now is that he knew something I didn't, and haven't yet found the wisdom for.

They seem so slight now, so insignificant, my very specific dreams compared to his vague ones. One writes first to find himself, then one writes to find the universe. One writes for wisdom: the writing is the road and the wisdom is the place to where the road is going. This remains true until later when, over the course of much writing bad or good, inconsequential or important, one has constructed a literary persona, the purpose of which then becomes its own self-perpetuation. Then you begin to suspect that only the persona is the place to where the road has been going-which means you have not been on the road to wisdom after all. You begin to suspect you've only been processing wisdom, as you've processed all your experience, as you've processed and used all the material of your life in order to prop up an ident.i.ty, a shabby romantic image of yourself; and in the process you've missed everything. A few years ago I realized that while I had always written on my own terms, I had come to evaluate the worth of that work, and therefore my own worth, on the terms of others, and that not only was this corrupt, it was the very kind of contradiction from which insanity, the insanity of true lostness, is born. Faced with such a realization I was either going to, out of genius or courage, persist-or, out of genius or courage, desist altogether, disappearing like Rimbaud with nothing to say, although if that isn't a load of self-romanticizing horses.h.i.t, I don't what is. Fresh out of genius and running a tad low on courage, I've neither persisted nor desisted, which, whatever the dangling participle of life's sentence this has turned me into, has at least left me wondering; and brought me back to my father.

I wait for wisdom; and still wait. It may be a while. I live in the shadow of my own life. Having developed a literary persona, the writer inevitably reaches the point where the only real remaining test of integrity is whether he or she is willing to smash that persona and see what's left when the dust settles-with the terrifying possibility that nothing will be left. Now I tire of never being old, never being young, never being either child or man. I tire of a perpetual adolescence, without either childhood's purity and wonder-not to be confused with innocence, since children are the least innocent of creatures-or adulthood's weight and power. I was an old man in my youth and I feel adolescent in my aging, old before my time and immature after it. Even as I imagine death always hovering, I still haven't reached the moment when I can really imagine my own dying, which is what I've always a.s.sumed the moment of true wisdom to be, even as it might also be the moment of true madness, or even as it might be a leap of imagination beyond even a madman's ability to leap. I've been caught between the certain knowledge that my dark impulses are destructive, and the certain dread that it's a collapse into a premature kind of death not to sometimes follow those impulses into sensual experience. I wait for wisdom and the moment when my life is revealed to have ballast, and in the waiting I'm left believing, fifty-one days out of a hundred, that G.o.d exists-or at least that life exists on the level of Mystery-but also just suspicious enough, just faithless enough that, in my suspicion and faithlessness, I'm bound to proceed through the remaining forty-nine on the awful, nearly unspeakable a.s.sumption that there is no mystery at all, only molecules.

In the pa.s.senger seat next to me, though, on the long drive back across the Valley, my father makes the case for mystery. On the long drive back through the wind-washed night, he doesn't have to say a thing, he only has to be there in the seat next to me: it isn't the first time. He's been there before, on other nights. I've dreamed of him often; in all but the first dream, I never had any doubt they were anything but dreams, dreams in which we were together again, back before he died. But in that first dream, not long after he died, I was quite aware he was dead, and we argued a long time about whether it was a dream at all. My father won the argument, the way the ghosts of Indians on the road back to Hollywood win their argument, making the case for their own mystery, before they scatter.

Then the ghosts of my beautiful dead city scattered. One morning Abdul's apartment was empty, except for the trash strewn across the hardwood floors he was so proud of; he and his pregnant golden Indiana girlfriend cleared out in the middle of the night, beneath the wrathful surveillance of the Hamblin's female tenants and under cover of a darkness that peers through the still unrepaired gash in the hallway ceiling. Veroneek sold Network Vs. and took off for Oregon, along with Joe the wolf who is possessed by the soul of a man. Shale moved his family back to Boston by way of New York, or New York by way of Boston, and Dr. Billy got a position at a university in Iowa teaching a course on s.e.x Addicts in American Literature, where to his dread everyone will feel compelled to call him doctor. His wife Jane is writing a novel.

I think Dr. Billy, and I know Shale and Ventura, had a fleeting hope the situation at the newspaper would become so galvanized one way or another that something radical would happen, a palace coup or a general uprising on behalf of justice. All of them are too smart to have placed much stock in such a scenario, but they couldn't help hoping anyway. I still get messages on my phone machine from people on the staff. A lot of the calls that come in are hang-ups, the line disconnected long seconds after the machine begins recording, some mysterious presence hanging in the air wondering what to say or whether I'm really not there. Word has it that the mood of the paper is ghastly, and that Freud N. Johnson walks around the Egyptian Theater like a dead man. I'd be a liar if I said I didn't find this satisfying, but beyond that I can't say I give the whole thing much thought at all. It almost never crosses my mind. It's pretty clear that, for me anyway, something is over.

Ventura has decided to go back to Texas, and there apparently isn't anything I can or should do to dissuade him, any more than I could dissuade Viv from going to Holland. He is planning to take a circuitous route there, the exact course of which is known only to the universe or the moons of Jupiter or the tides of Bora Bora, which he trusts will be divulged to him when the universe is good and ready. Ventura might be audacious enough to take on the Twentieth Century, but not the universe. He wants to tour the secret volcanoes of America and stand at their rims long past the dusk, staring into the craters. G.o.d help us when he divines their lava, deciphers their embers; he'll be d.a.m.ned impossible to live with. I worry about him. Of all of us his courage in quitting the paper was perhaps greatest, and now he is at the loosest of its consequences' ends. I want to shake him out of it; but Ventura does his own shaking. When the day comes for him to leave, we share a shot of tequila and, when I can't stand the tears in his eyes, I turn away, and pretend that when I turn back he won't be gone.

The sun has stopped hurtling toward Los Angeles, having come as close as it wants to get. The city swelters. The Santa Ana winds whip through and everything is as crisp as the kiss of a fallen live wire. The distant trees beyond my windows blow slow and soundless as though to a gust from the center of the earth, so primordial that its roar still rattles around the deepest pa.s.sages of the planet. The sky is a heat-shimmered blue, unviolated by smoke as it hasn't been in a decade, none of the rings having burned since before the rain. After the rains pa.s.sed, everything was soaked for weeks and then everything bloomed, gra.s.s grew, and then everything went very dry, so that one errant flicker of fire feels like it could set ten miles blazing in seconds. From billboard to billboard I see the Red Angel of L.A. peeling away in long strips that curl and hang, until all that's left of her are the vertical remains, as though behind the bars of a jail cell; all the billboards of the city taken together might add up to one whole Justine. All the time zones have subdivided into smaller and smaller time zones, until everyone is his or her own time zone and the city is alive with time, a maelstrom of a million uncoordinated clocks all set at different hours and minutes. Out of the dark, after the sun falls, through the hole in the roof of the hotel hallway, the movies come at me one after another on mysterious airwaves, never stopping until I'm the one who's hysterical: Touch of Evil, Johnny Guitar, Sweet Smell of Success, Point Blank, Pretty Poison, Mondo Topless, Cutter's Way, Lifeforce, Nightdreams, Wax, Twin Peaks Fire, Walk With Me, The Last Temptation of Christ. ...

Their images fill a life that has apparently begun to vanish. I got two interesting letters just the other day. The first was a confession from K in Virginia. She's been alluding to this approaching confession for some time now, it's been on the tip of her tongue in the midst of a long fragmented story she's been telling me about a love affair she's having with a prison guard. Since I somehow seem to have missed the beginning of this story, I'm not clear whether the prison is real or metaphorical. It may not matter because, as K puts it, "it could be that nothing I tell you is true," though I don't know whether that's part of the confession or a preemptive denial, undoing the confession before it's made. For a while I thought the confession was going to be that she's not beautiful; and indeed when she hints at this-"It's ironic, you wouldn't look at me 2X"-I'm ashamed that she believes this matters to me, that I've somehow made her believe it matters and my shallowness is so transparent. But that isn't the confession either. The confession is this: "I'm a fraud," she writes. "Not in things I've said necessarily, but in how I first got your attention. I had been given, as a gift, a letter you once wrote to someone else ten or fifteen years ago. In this letter you listed several areas of concern that seemed to be on your mind. So I decided to address those same concerns, one by one, and in the same order, so that, in effect, you were receiving a letter from yourself. This was the pa.s.sword into the secret room. When you received my first card, you thought you had found someone on your wavelength. You had, and it was you."

Along with this confession from K, the second piece of mail I received was a package from Shale (a New York postmark). It accompanied an article that ran in a magazine back east about what had happened at the newspaper. "A good piece," Shale wrote, "the writer got most everything right; but there's something I should tell you ..." and then, as delicately as possible, went on to explain that the piece mentioned-and quoted-every writer who quit except me. It was curious. Well, no, it wasn't just curious: it was breathtaking, how irrelevant I actually was in the scheme of things, so uniquely insignificant that my resignation alone among all the others was not worth noting. And then I could only wonder: was it moral vanity on my part after all, to have quit? Was the point of my gesture simply to catch someone's attention? Perhaps I had really begun to vanish long ago, like the lights blinking out on me in Central Park, without knowing it, my solipsism too consuming to notice my own vanishing until I was now presented with this incontrovertible evidence, the void of my name. Perhaps it was that, after I distanced myself from memory, memory now distanced itself from me. I began pulling out old newspapers. I began pulling out all the issues where my reviews had run, to rea.s.sure myself of something I had probably never been a.s.sured of in the first place: and that was when I saw it, or, more accurately, saw what there was not to see. I couldn't find a single review I had written. "I'm sure I had something in this issue," I was babbling to myself, the front room frantically strewn with newspaper: but there was nothing in any of them. Nor an entry in any table of contents. I checked the staff box; I wasn't listed there either. Had they inadvertently omitted me some time ago, and I just hadn't realized? There was no indication at all I had ever written for the newspaper, with a single exception; and I don't have to tell you, do I, which particular piece that was.

I called Viv. She was living in a suburb of Amsterdam, searching the Dutch marshes for the exact coordinates where to erect her Memoryscope pointing at Los Angeles. It was midnight; she answered sleepily, eight o'clock in the morning on her side. We talked from the opposite sides of consciousness, hers the side of waking, mine the side of somnambulism. I think I called to prove to myself I was still here, but talking to Viv just proved to me she was there, and made me crave her all the more, tormented both by how close she sounded and how far away. So everything I did and everywhere I went for the next few days all I could think of was Viv, in the market and at the cafe down the street, walking along the Strip and staring at the old St. James Club outside my window. It was Viv I was thinking of the afternoon at the car wash, when I was watching the two Mexican guys dry my car, wiping down the fenders and tires; in the distant hills to the east was the first fire I had seen since back before Christmas. I couldn't quite place which ring was burning, it looked farther than Silverlake, over around the empty high-rises of Downtown northwest of the Glow Lofts; and I even said to another guy standing there waiting for his car too: I guess they're burning again-and he said no, rumor had it this was not an official fire but rather accident or arson, what with everything so dry; and I was watching the smoke, my mind following its circles up into the sky, when it occurred to me, I'm not sure exactly when, that only one of the two Mexican guys was actually drying the car, the other wasn't doing anything but walking around looking at it, and that he was quite well dressed for a car-wash attendant. In fact I was thinking he was probably the best dressed car-wash attendant I had ever seen, when he blithely got into the car. The first attendant looked at him blankly, with no real alarm; and it was just about the time the well dressed guy in the drivers seat was turning the key in the ignition that I finally got out of my chair and began walking toward him, a message now having finally, lazily blurted across my brain: This guy who's starting your car right now does not work for the car wash. I was at a dead sprint by the time he was pulling my car out the driveway, and I was running alongside pounding on the roof as he hit the gas up Hollywood Boulevard. He was already flipping the ashtrays, raising and lowering the power windows, fine-tuning the ba.s.s and treble on the stereo and generally enjoying all the snazzy accessories of his brand new clean car, adjusting the rearview mirror for a particularly good view of me running helplessly after him.

In retrospect it wasn't such a big thing. People get their cars stolen in L.A. all the time, and worse. My running alongside the car as he was driving off, trying to get the door open and my murderous hands on him, wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done; for all I know he might have pulled out a gun and shot me. Far more serious to me was that, as it happened, I had a lot of personal effects in the car, clothes and tapes and books and papers, though I don't really remember why. It was as though I had consolidated my whole life in one place just for the taking. At any rate, I plummeted. Whereas in any other circ.u.mstances the theft of the car would have been just a colossal drag, now it took on an unbearable weight after everything else-Viv leaving, quitting the paper, the dispersion of the Cabal. And then all the other things. The other things that had been there all along, the slow vanishing of my life one thing at a time, one person at a time, one moment at a time and one dream at a time. I lay at home in bed watching the fauna and spores grow out of my walls and ceiling, feeling at the same end I felt in that dream when suicide was not so much a radical emotional act as a sensible one, one that would get me in sync with the true status of my life. That's all the theft of my car was, the last straw; in another frame of mind I would have absorbed it or taken it as a sign of something. But I wasn't in any frame of mind to take anything as a sign of anything, so I lay on the bed listening to hang-ups on my phone machine, silences so long and ominous that even the machine couldn't stand them, and began hanging up first.

The day after my car was stolen I was lying there on the bed-from time to time I think I must have been vaguely aware I could smell smoke, from somewhere out the window far away-when, with the fall of darkness, the phone machine clicked on again, once again to no voice on the other end; and I grabbed it. I'd had enough. It was time to let the world know who it was dealing with: a man who had had his car stolen from a car wash. But when I answered, right before I heard her voice, I was thrown back in memory by the sound of her breathing; I was in Berlin again, answering the phone in my hotel room in Savignyplatz. And then she said, in her slight German accent, "Can you smell the smoke?"

"What?"

"Can you smell the smoke?"

"Who is this?" I said, but I knew who it was.

"You know who it is."

"Yes, I can smell it."

"Do you know what it's from?"

"It's from the fire."

"Of course. But do you know what the fire is from. ..."

"Are you all right?"

"It depends," said Jasper, "what you mean by all right." Her voice sounded hollow and strange. "In a way, I'm all right. In a way, I'm better than ever, I'm free. But in another way, you know, I guess it's not all right."

"What are you talking about?"

"I guess it's not really all right ... you know. I mean, considering."

"Considering what?"

"Considering what I've done."

"What have you done?" I said. But I didn't have to travel very far around the dark side of my imagination to guess. I could see him standing on the stairs looking down at us in the dark, the night that Jasper, Viv and I were at her house.

"Help me," she said.

"Are you at your house?"

"Yes."

"Is your father ... is your stepfather there?"

"Well ... it depends what you mean. In a way, yes, he's here. Could you please come now?"

"No, I can't. I don't have a car. It was stolen yesterday. From a car wash," I added.

"I need you to come," she just said, in the same tone of voice. "For me. It's not for him. There's nothing to do for him anymore. But before whatever happens next, it just seemed right that I should call you, of all people."

"Jasper-" I said, and she hung up. I put down the phone, picked it up again to call the police, but replaced the phone before I did. I checked the cash I had on hand which, with a little bartering with the cab driver, might be enough to get me to her house; how I would get back I'd worry about later. As I left the Hamblin the Santa Anas were blowing more fiercely than ever. Maybe it was just the hour but the city had never seemed so debased and deserted; I had the feeling the only ones left were Jasper and me and the cab driver, and maybe the a.s.shole who stole my car, a.s.suming he wasn't already half way up the coast with it. The Korean cab driver seemed agitated the minute I got in the taxi, and grew more so as we crossed town. The whole noisy night had turned itself inside out, the usual cacophony of alarms and helicopters blotted up into emptiness and only the wind coming through the taxi window and the sounds of running footsteps and cries in the dark that sounded neither human nor animal. Through the branches of the trees stripped by the Santa Anas I could see shutters banging and windows being closed to keep the night out; through the windshield ahead of us the sky was red from fire. Are they burning tonight? I asked the driver, but all he answered-he must have repeated it five times between Hollywood and the switching yard east of Downtown-was "Strange city tonight, strange city," and the way he said it I couldn't be sure if it was a coded message or just broken English. Half a mile from Jasper's house he refused to go further, glancing fearfully at the ravine of flames. I walked the rest of the way, crawling over railroad tracks and crossing the plain that surrounded the house, the dark form of which I could now see in the distance, a wood and steel stalagmite jutting up out of the wasteland, the dark form of Viv's Memoryscope just beyond that. At the time, the fire in the hills seemed far away.

The door to the car tunnel was open. I went in and every few feet called out. The front door of the house was open but there was no light on beyond it, and I kept calling Jasper's name. I went up the stairs to the second level, my legs so wobbly I could barely climb. Jasper was waiting in the large circular room lined with windows, seated in the black chair in the room's center. No lights were on but I could see her clearly in the light from the fire in the hills that had seemed far away just minutes before. Just beyond the windows, the long tank pool was dark. She was wearing the same simple dress she had worn at the filming of White Whisper, the room was hot and with one hand she kept pulling her hair up on top of her head to cool the back of her neck, while the other hand held a cigarette. She didn't appear crazy at all. She was very calm. She didn't even glance at me as I came in.

I was looking around. Whatever I expected, there was no sign of anything amiss. I wasn't sure if I was relieved or angry. "What's going on?" I said.

"Thank you for coming," she said calmly from the chair.

"What's happened?" I kept looking around me.

"What do you think has happened?" she flirted. I was paralyzed by this feeling of wanting to strangle her and wanting just to get out. Her face changed at this, and she said, "Don't leave. You can't leave." She added, "Please help me."

"You have to tell me what's happened," I snapped. I kept looking for him. "Where's your father?"

"Please help me," she kept saying. She stood up and walked toward me in the dark, through the red light of the fire through the window. "Right now you can help me most by not asking too many questions. There will be lots of questions later. Right now what I need most is someone who won't ask lots of questions, who will just be here with me awhile before everything changes." I crossed the room to the windows. Outside, Viv's Memoryscope was silhouetted in the flames, which seemed to become less distant by the moment. "I could smell the smoke this morning," she said, coming up behind me, "the minute I woke. I could smell it with the break of day. It's Viv's smoke."

I turned back to her, away from the window. "What?"

"Did I show you my sc.r.a.pbook?" she said. "That night you were here? Yes."

"You showed Viv."

"I showed Viv." There was the whistle of a train; but it sounded like a shriek. "I don't think Viv liked my sc.r.a.pbook."

"I don't want to stay here," I said. "If something has happened, you need to call the police, and if you want I'll stay with you until they come. But otherwise I don't want to stay."

"It was you in Berlin."

"No," I said.

"Yes," she insisted evenly, "it was." The train shrieked again. I turned from her and went outside onto the patio where the pool was. I peered over the wall.

I was astounded to see the train rumbling in from the north toward the switching yard. It wasn't moving especially fast or slow, but its whistle was increasingly shrill and strangled. The caboose was on fire, and the fire was moving up the train very fast, car by car; like a snake on fire the blazing train coiled across the dry field where the bloom of the rains had already turned to kindle. Everything behind the train went up in flames, and it appeared to be heading straight toward us when it jumped the track and skidded for the Memoryscope. Stopping just yards from the sculpture, it toppled onto its side in a blinding white din, and the field exploded as though soaked in gasoline.

Embers sailed toward us over the wall. They caught on the tower of the house and in their light I almost thought I saw a motionless human form stuck on the towers pinnacle. One part of the house after another was burning, and I don't remember whose idea the bathysphere was; since I was becoming more and more panicked it might have actually been Jasper's, which seems remarkably cool-headed on her part. But it was obviously the only place we had any chance before we were overwhelmed by fire, and now it bobbed in the water as though having been placed there all along for just this moment and purpose. Without saying anything she stepped briskly around the flickering black water of the pool; and when I had clambered down into the module behind her, groping in the dark, she pulled the hatch closed. It was pitch black inside. In the dark the faint outline of the dials and meters looked like ancient etchings on the wall of a cave. Through the sphere's gla.s.s porthole we could see the red sky above as we sank to the bottom of the pool; a huge red bubble floated up from beneath us. For a second it enveloped us, and then disappeared toward the surface.

In the windows and gla.s.s hatch the water shimmered bright red, and I could see the flames sweeping overhead. The question was whether, escaping incineration, we were just going to cook to death. Even with the air cranked to maximum, the heat from the water of the pool came through, and without a thought Jasper ripped off her dress. In the fiery red glow her body was as absurdly fecund as ever, like a seed about to burst. Soon I peeled off my own clothes. We'd been lying there several minutes on opposite sides of the small compartment, faint from the rising heat and the dwindling oxygen, when she said, not long before I pa.s.sed out, "Tell me. ..."

"What?" I murmured.

"I know it was you on the telephone in Berlin," I heard her say from the other side of the bathysphere. "But ... that night ... it was you who came to the hotel, wasn't it?"

"Why?"

"The last time you were here, you said-"

"Forget it," I whispered.

"You said ... what did you say? You said, how did I know it was the same man. How did I know the man in the hotel room was the same as the man who was on the telephone."

"We shouldn't talk," I croaked.

"But just tell me," she said. "I mean, why did you say that? It was you who came. It was. Right?"

"Yes, it was," I said. Maybe she knew it was a lie and maybe she didn't. Lying to a woman isn't easy; she knows when you sound funny. And it would have been too much to explain, there under the flames, that between the phone call and the rendezvous in the hotel I had died in Berlin, though not for the last time, and perhaps not even for the first time. Each time you die, the old skin falling away to reveal someone else, it's not such an easy question to answer, how much remains of the man who once was. So even if I had made it to our rendezvous, it still isn't so certain that the man in the hotel room would have been the same as the man who was on the telephone. But I wasn't going to explain all that now, even if I was naked with her in a bathysphere at the bottom of an old tanker full of water, everything above us burning. I wasn't going to use up the last bit of the air we shared to tell her all that. It wouldn't have mattered, and it wouldn't have been what she wanted to know anyway.

Right before I pa.s.sed out, I suddenly understood what she had meant about the smoke. Slumped across the bottom of the bathysphere, staring up through the gla.s.s hatch, I suddenly realized what she meant when she said she had smelled it with the first break of day. Whether she was crazy with her demons or crazy with the truth that night, or crazy with both, I don't know; so I can't be sure that it was really the Memoryscope that started the fire. I can't be sure it was the first ray of dawn, coming over the eastern hills, that cracked the mirrored length of the Memoryscope and ignited the fire at its cross hairs, in the hills of the distant ravine at the flashpoint where memory meets amnesia. But right before I pa.s.sed out, staring up through the gla.s.s hatch, I saw streak across the sky not the light of fire, not the light of electricity, not the light of combustion, but the light of the last memory Viv's sculpture ever broadcast; and naturally it was the memory that explained everything. It was a memory from so far back in my life as to have been seemingly beyond remembering; but there it was, through the gla.s.s hatch of the bathysphere in the red sky above me: the first word I ever stuttered. When I saw it, just before my eyes closed, I murmured, "Of course," and I'm almost sure I heard Jasper whisper back, "G-G-Goodbye."

But when I opened my eyes, the memory had vanished again. I don't know how long I was unconscious; it was certainly a while, because when I regained consciousness the bathysphere was floating back on the surface of the water and the hatch was open, and the sky was not black or red but the pale gray of morning. I could still smell the smoke from the smoldering house and the fire that had moved south. The fireman and paramedic who revived me gave me a blanket to wrap around myself, and I was as wobbly climbing out of the bathysphere as I had been climbing the steps of the house when I arrived the night before. Up above, a cop was waiting for me; the charred house was crawling with cops and firemen. If there had been a human form in the tower the night before, there wasn't anymore; there wasn't a tower anymore, just a black stubble. Wouldn't you know that the Memoryscope came through it all, though it didn't exactly have the same shiny l.u.s.ter, scorched black as it was. I was led by the cops through the house and down the stairs, and out the car tunnel to a van where they let me put my clothes on, and then to an unmarked squad car that waited among half a dozen cop cars and several fire engines and ambulances. One squad car was pulling away, and I thought in the back seat I briefly saw Jasper. But I couldn't be sure, and she was nowhere else to be seen, and I didn't see her again.

I was down at police headquarters several hours, almost all of it waiting for something to happen. Then a couple of detectives came around and asked some questions. They asked what I was doing at the house and what I had seen there, and how I knew Jasper. I told them exactly what had happened, from the phone call on, summarizing the gist of it while leaving out my own suspicions. They asked if I had an intimate relationship with Jasper and I said no; I wasn't sure exactly what they meant by intimate, and decided to take a chance and leave Berlin out of it. They pointed out that the two of us had been naked in the bathysphere: "It was hot," I explained. I was surprised they didn't press me on it. As I look back, they must have known everything they wanted to know, and nothing I was telling them contradicted anything. At the end, when they said I was free to leave, the investigating detective in charge added, "By the way. Did you report a car stolen a day or two ago?"

"From a car wash," I said abjectly.

Five or ten minutes later when they finished laughing, the guy in charge said, "Well, we have it." They had found it on Cahuenga between Sunset and Hollywood, a mile and a half from where it had been stolen. It was still warm when the police got there, apparently abandoned only moments before by whoever had been driving; inside had been a knife and a streak of blood. They gave me a ride over to where the car was impounded, and after signing for it I was led through a maze of several hundred other cars. The car was pretty well trashed, just this side of undriveable. The side was caved in, the right front fender dented so that it barely obstructed the wheel. Driving it off the lot, I was sorry the detective had told me about the knife and the blood. I actually thought about taking it to a car wash, but that seemed to be tempting fate.

Instead I just drove with all the windows down, to blow the evil spirits out. Everything that had been in the car was gone, of course, the clothes and books and papers probably pitched into a side alley somewhere, and all my tapes discarded too; the musical taste of someone dippy enough to get his car stolen right before his eyes at a car wash was probably a little too quaint for guys who drive around all night knifing people. In the stereo was the only tape the thieves apparently found too fascinating to toss: my ca.s.sette of the phone messages I received after quitting the paper. So I drove on listening to the messages over and over, heading for Downtown and pa.s.sing the seared ruins of Jasper's house and Viv's Memoryscope, and then on down the highway toward San Bernardino, all the way to Fontana before turning north into the Cajon Pa.s.s. An hour later I was in Victorville and an hour after that Barstow. In a phone booth in Barstow I called a woman in Texas whose number Ventura had given me in case I needed to leave him a message. I told her to let him know the next time he checked in that I was heading for Vegas, and when I got there I would call her back for any message he wanted to leave me. I could stand to see him.

I don't know how many of the evil spirits I lost in the Mojave, but it wasn't enough of them. An hour and a half after Barstow I crossed the state line, and a little less than an hour after that I was in Downtown Vegas, off the Strip, where I checked into one of the casinos there. Even in seedy Downtown Vegas, the casino valet did not look very impressed with my bashed-up car. I telephoned the woman in Texas again, who confirmed that Ventura had indeed called from somewhere in Monument Valley, got my message and was heading for Vegas, where he had a reservation at another hotel nearby. He would meet me the next night at the Golden Garter. I drew every cent I still had out of an automated teller and went and bought myself some underwear and a new shirt and toiletries, since I had nothing like that with me, and then wandered around Downtown the rest of the night playing blackjack and winning just enough to keep playing and wandering and drinking, On a corner some guy handed me one of those flyers that has pictures of beautiful naked women with phone numbers, so you can call them up and have them come to your room and if they bear the remotest resemblance to the picture you can pay them a hundred dollars to get naked for you and perhaps f.u.c.k you for several hundred dollars more. I called one and when she said h.e.l.lo, I hung up.

The next night I waited at the Golden Garter. While watching the strippers I got into a fragmented conversation with a guy I thought was about sixty years old until I saw him better in the light, which revealed that beneath his white hair he was probably closer to my age. He was a nice enough guy, kind of sweet in the purely unvarnished way of someone who has a screw loose. Soon I was waiting for Ventura to show up just to extricate me from the situation; but instead another guy came along who looked like he stepped out of one of those old Fifties or Sixties mob or private eye movies, very dapper-the last guy I knew this dapper, before the one who stole my car that is, was Abdul. Everything about him was sharp from his tailored clothes to his shoes, in striking contrast to the dimwit with the white hair, who it became clear was the older brother that the younger one looked out for. After that a couple of other guys walked in who looked like they were about to shoot up the joint. I was beginning to think I should get out.

"You should get out," the well dressed private-eye said.

"I'm waiting for someone," I explained uneasily.

"Oh. He's not coming."

"What?"

"Guy named Ventura? He's not coming."

Amazed, I finally managed to sputter, "You know Ventura?"

"Let's say we cross paths now and then, whenever he's in Vegas. Anyhow I have a message for you: he's not coming." He went on, "His car blew up on the Arizona highway, somewhere in the desert."

I was flabbergasted. "Is he all right?"

"Yeah, he's all right."

"But is he all right? He's very attached to that car."

"Now that you mention it, he sounded oddly serene when I talked to him." He said it like the sort of guy who didn't say the word serene more than once or twice in a lifetime, not to even mention the word oddly. "Anyway," he looked over his shoulder at the other two guys near the doorway, "you really should get out of here now."

So I got out. I went back to the hotel room and called the woman in Texas, getting no answer, and then tried to call Viv in Amsterdam, also getting no answer. I knew then I was going to do one of two things, which was call the girl in the flyer I had hung up on earlier, or slip out of the hotel without paying my tab and get in the car and keep going up the same highway I had come in on. I don't know how long it was before I crossed the corner of Arizona that leads up to Utah. I was well into my tape of phone messages for the umpteenth time before I impulsively ejected it from the tape player and threw it out the same window all my other tapes had gone out, five or six hundred miles back in Los Angeles. At some point I pulled over to the side of the road and slept a bit; I woke to the sun coming up over what I presumed was the distant southern tail of the Rockies, the rocks of Utah glimmering an iridescent rust. I drove on.

Somewhere north of St. George, in the middle of nowhere, I was chased for a while by two maniacs in a black sportscar. They pulled up inches behind me and stayed with me for thirty miles; at one point I suddenly swerved to the side of the road and stopped, and then took off again as fast as I could when they stopped too, a couple of hundred yards ahead. I kept trying to shake them like this until they finally drew up alongside me, looked me over very carefully and, apparently determining I wasn't whoever they had thought I was, shook their heads and then sped on, leaving me in their dust. An hour outside Salt Lake City I got a speeding ticket. I was sure the cop was mistaken when he said I had been going ninety-five miles an hour; surveying the damage of my car, however, only seemed to confirm his suspicions. I tried to tell him about the psychos stalking me in the black sportscar; he couldn't have been less impressed. An hour later I was stopped for speeding again: "I just got a ticket!" I almost sobbed to the second cop, who looked at me like I was a mental case. Nearing the border of Idaho I finally checked into the last motel room in a little town where every other motel had a No Vacancy sign in front. The motel room reeked of the sweet smell of insecticide and before I crossed the street to the local steak house, where I had a filet and salad and three straight vodkas, I opened the window to air the room out. When I came back after dinner I found the room swarming with bugs. A cloud of gnats had blown in through the open window, attracted to the bathroom light, and a strange sense of hysteria welled up inside me as I closed the door of the bathroom trying to shut the bugs off from the bedroom. I took off my clothes and got into bed, and lying there in the dark I felt gnats covering my entire body.

I knew I wasn't actually covered with gnats. But it didn't matter that I knew it, I could feel them anyway; I could feel them from my feet to my chest, crawling all over me. I kept telling myself I wasn't really covered with gnats but it didn't matter how often I said it, I didn't believe it. That was when a black wave of fear came over me, because I knew at this particular moment I was losing my mind. It was the most peculiar and terrifying thing, to hear the arguments of my rational mind and know they were true and still reject them, to bear cool, almost a.n.a.lytical witness to my own breakdown. My psyche simply did not believe my brain. I was seized with an almost overpowering impulse to get out of bed, dress, jump in the car and speed down the highway in exhaustion, as I had been speeding ever since Vegas, piling up speeding tickets because I could not make myself slow down. And I knew-there wasn't a doubt in my head-that if I succ.u.mbed to this impulse I would run the car straight into the side of a mountain. I knew without any doubt whatsoever that I was moments across the line from sanity and moments this side of killing myself; and yet it was everything I could do to resist the impulse anyway. There in the dark, crawling with gnats I knew were not really there, everything came rushing back to me, the onslaught of memory and all my failures; and for the first time in my life I felt something that was unique to me: a loneliness to which I had vainly prided myself as being untouchable. I didn't have any doubt I was moments away from this being the last night of my life.

I turned on the light. I threw back the sheet and looked at my naked body for a long time, pointing out to myself over and over again that it was not covered with gnats. After an hour I finally began to believe myself; and finally I pulled the sheet back up, turned off the light, and went to sleep.

The next morning I got back in the car and continued on up the highway. That afternoon I got another speeding ticket, which I accepted as jauntily as the cop delivered it, since this was a particularly ridiculous ticket; this time I was quite certain I hadn't been going a mile over eighty. I was on a small road out in the Idaho countryside, because the map said it was the only road to where I was going, and just before dusk I reached Craters of the Moon, and the line of cars backed up for the festival.

I waited in the line for a little over an hour before I finally reached the entrance booth, only to realize I hadn't brought with me the letter of invitation that I received the day I quit the paper. But the guard had my name on a list and let me pa.s.s anyway, and I cruised through the black craters and rolling charred valleys where everyone was waiting for the film to start, a lunar drive-in of a thousand cars stretched before me. People were sitting on their hoods facing a huge white sail that had been hoisted from a mast in the earth. I parked my car and got out. Darkness fell.

The film was projected onto the white sail. Now and then the film would fill with a wind blowing from Canada through the craters; we were a black ghost ship called Marat sailing the Idaho plains. There was no sound from either the film or the audience until the end, which was greeted with a rising, sustained roar. I was relieved the movie was nothing like I imagined it. Somewhere between my review and this moment it had become its own thing. Afterward a tiny old man stepped in front of the blank white sail and, in the lights, merely waved; and as the people and cars were leaving I wandered toward the screen, drifting against the tide of the exiting migration. Just as I was beginning to think I was wasting my time, I saw him, surrounded by a crowd of festival officials and photographers flashing their cameras, and I stood there a while watching, ten feet away, only because I wanted to get a look at him.

G.o.d, he had to have been a hundred. But he seemed as sharp in spirit as he was feeble in body, basking in all the attention even as he looked like he had been around a little too long to take it all too seriously. And then in all the hubbub, there in the dark where I wouldn't have thought he could possibly see me, he saw me. He turned, looked right at me and smiled expectantly, as though he was waiting for me to say something. I came closer and one of the officials stepped up to keep me back, but the old man signaled to let me through. People stopped for a moment, thinking he was about to say something and wanting to hear it; but I was the one who spoke. "Everything is gone from my life," I told him. "Everyone has left. And I don't know what I'm supposed to do anymore. And I've driven all the way from Los Angeles just so you could tell me."

For a moment I thought he didn't hear me. For a moment he turned back to all the other people trying to talk to him; but then he raised his hand and- And Adolphe Sarre turns back to me with the same smile, no longer expectant but fulfilled, and at a volume I should not be able to hear but which I can make out perfectly, all he says is: "Embarra.s.s yourself." And we look at each other for one more moment before the crowd swallows him up.