In the morning, Troy returned to Lulu’s place, determined to re-write their ending. This time there would be no dialogue, only action. Clutching two vanilla lattes, he knocked on the door, but Lulu didn’t answer. He knocked some more. Nothing. He rang the bell. It gave a death rattle. He rang it again. Still, she didn’t answer. Troy set the coffees down and checked the door. It was locked, but he knew she was in there, avoiding him. He leaned out over the handrail and peered between the slats of the Levolors, where, through his own ghostly re
fl
ection, he spotted Lulu instantly. She was balled up in the mouth of the hallway in a slant of dusty light. She wasn’t moving. He could see little paw prints all around her, like they’d been stamped in ink upon the gray wood
fl
oor. The cat was nowhere to be seen. Troy said he got a sinking feeling right away. Pressing his face still closer to the pane, he tapped on it, but she didn’t stir. He rapped his knuckles on it to no effect. He hollered. His appeals only fogged up the glass.
“When I jumped off the porch, I kicked over one of the lattes,”
he said.
Troy twisted his ankle on a rut and skinned his hand on the walkway. He scrambled to his feet and circled the duplex. He fought his way through the hedges and wedged his
fi
ngers under the bedroom window, prying the bloated wood frame open as far as it would allow.
He wiggled his way through the window onto the unmade bed, and darted down the hallway. What he remembered best later—indeed, what he would never forget—was the prostrate
fi
gure of Lulu illuminated in a shaft of light, naked and coiled like a fetus in her own bloody slough. Her mouth was agape. Her eyes were closed. There was vomit in her hair.
“It was all so fucking unreal,” Troy recalled. He began to sob into the receiver. “There wasn’t any fucking dignity in her lying there like that, Will.” His grief picked up momentum until his voice gave out.
And when he spoke again, he choked on the words. “She just tossed herself aside like garbage.”
“Shhh,” I said. “What happened next?”
As far as Troy could tell, Lulu was unconscious, but still breathing.
He said he was afraid to touch her and he didn’t know why.
He remembered making the call, and how his voice sounded as though it came from outside himself when he spoke to the dispatcher.
“And after I hung up, I wanted to say something to Lulu as she was lying there. I wanted to go over to her and hold her hand, and tell her everything was going to be all right. But I was frozen. My teeth were clattering together like hell.”
Though Lulu had carved both arms lengthwise from the wrist halfway to the elbow, leaving no hesitation marks, she had missed the arteries. The blood had stopped
fl
owing to her extremities. And so Lulu was condemned to another day.
Troy was as devastated as if he’d lost her. “It’s my fault,” he kept saying.
“
How?
How
is it your fault?”
He began to choke on his grief again. “I didn’t know, Will. I swear, I didn’t know. Not until the doctor asked me if I knew anything about it, and I told him I didn’t.”
“What? You didn’t know what?”
“About Lulu being pregnant.”
“Jesus,” I said. And I actually had to sit down.
Troy groaned. “It’s all my fault,” he said miserably.
I knew I’d been there for that child’s conception, just as sure as I’d emptied myself into Lulu amidst the supernatural light of her bedroom, and just as sure as Lulu had cried into my armpit afterward.
And yet I let Troy suffer the belief—then and always—that it was his own loss, that he was the complicit party in pushing Lulu to the edge of the precipice.
I’m not proud of that.
Willow and Big Bill
fl
ew immediately to Seattle, where Troy picked them up at the airport. Nobody blamed Troy for getting Lulu pregnant, but it had to be uncomfortable. For three weeks Willow and my father roosted in Lulu’s apartment with Esmeralda. I was gently persuaded, overtly discouraged, and
fi
nally forbidden to make the trip to Seattle.
“You’ve done enough,” Big Bill reassured me.
Remanded to a clinic near the university, Lulu remained for two weeks under supervision, undergoing psychiatric evaluation and counseling. There she sat in circles, clutching a bear with button eyes to her chest. There she drew pictures of her emotions—trees like skeletons wrapped in barbed wire, faces without mouths.
Powerless during Lulu’s convalescence, restlessness moved me about in the world without purpose. All that was formerly meaningful and right in my world had been mysteriously altered. Hot dogs ceased to be a transcendental experience. Nothing, in fact, was transcendental. I was distracted behind the mic, never more than a few words ahead of the voice. My beloved events calendar, once the springboard for my wry witticisms and clever asides, was no longer imbued with a magical signi
fi
cance. My jokes weren’t funny. The blood drive sounded like a blood drive. The voice did not belong to me; it was alien and disembodied,
fl
oating unheeded through the Los Angeles basin, touching no one. And like the amateur I had become overnight, I could not even bear to listen to my air-checks.
The all-knowing Phil Spencer was quick to note the turnabout in my performance, and was even moved to pay me an unexpected visit at Hot Dog Heaven one afternoon during the tail end of the lunch rush. Spence ordered a chili-cheese foot-long, mounded it with onions and relish, and asked me if I could take a break.
I appealed to Joe with a glance. He nodded his assent, then grabbed his nuts when he thought my back was turned.
Even though it was my hot dog stand, Phil led me to the farthest plastic table, the one that always wobbled because of a lip in the concrete.
“Take a load off,” he said.
I should have taken my apron off, is what I should’ve done. A pro would have taken his apron off. Look at Phil. Even though it was a Saturday, Phil was still dressed for the of
fi
ce. He was always dressed for the of
fi
ce. That’s because Phil was a pro. Although, I must say, he had one chink in his armor in this respect. He always wore the same suit. And I think he just refastened the same tie knot over and over. Every Monday Phil was pressed and clean; he cut the buttoned-down
fi
gure of a hale and hearty radio exec. On Tuesday, he was still pretty sharp—good crisp lines and sharp pleats. By Wednesday, the fabric started to wilt a bit, and his tie knot started to go a little catawampus. Thursday lunch, maybe he got a spot of mustard on the lapel, and his pockets began to sag. By the end of the week, Phil looked like he’d just rolled off a couch and washed three aspirin down with some warm club soda. And by Saturday, all bets were off. Life wears you down, I guess. What I never
fi
gured out was—
when
did he dry-clean the suit?
How
was it possible?
It was Saturday when Phil sat me down at Hot Dog Heaven, so he was pretty rumpled. We sat quietly. A cloud of seagulls caused a fuss nearby. The tide was receding and the wind was kicking up, and you could really smell the ocean in the air, even over the myriad scents of Venice Beach: patchouli and sunscreen, hot dog gristle and barbecue smoke—the smell of my wayward adolescence. There was a steady
fl
ow of foot traf
fi
c along the boardwalk.
I kept expecting Spence to launch into one of his sage radio lectures, but he didn’t say anything for a while. He set to work on his foot-long, a little distractedly, I thought.
“You’re getting mental,” he said
fi
nally. “Losing your focus.”
“But I—”
“
Tut tut
,” he said, raising a
fi
nger. “Hear me out. See, what happens is you’re not distilling anything—you’re just opening your mouth and—”
“But, Phil, that’s all I ever did in the—”
He silenced me with the
fi
nger. “Listen.”
I listened.
“You hear that?”
“What, the seagulls?”
“No, your thoughts. Shush.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“I mean, when you sit still and shut your mouth, can you hear your thoughts?”
“Well, yeah, of course.”
“That’s your problem.” He nodded, as if to say,
yep, just as I expected
, and took a big bite of his foot-long, which he seemed to enjoy for the
fi
rst time. “Ev
fi
f
fi
ng feef ?” he asked.
“Huh?”
He rolled the big bite over into one cheek so that he looked like Sparky Lyle. “Is this thing beef ?”
“It’s everything,” I said, not real
izing the philosophical implica
tions of the statement.
He chewed a little more, nodding his head, and
fi
nally swallowed.
“Hmm. Not bad. See, now, your thoughts should be quiet, Miller—
as quiet when you open your mouth as when you close it. The brain is not so good at distilling—fucking thing spins in circles. You wind up with more in the end, not less.” He tore into his foot-long again.
He was really beginning to like it. “Vif
fi
ng if big,” he observed, wide-eyed and masticating contentedly.
He then raised the
fi
nger to buy a few chews. When he
fi
nally choked down the bite, he wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket and looked me in the eye.
“It doesn’t come from up here,” he said, aiming the
fi
nger at his head. “It comes from in here.”
I’m still not exactly sure if he meant to say it comes from the heart or the gut, or even the rumpled shirtfront, because Spence was pointing just a hair below his solar plexus, but I de
fi
nitely caught his drift.
“So how do I turn my thoughts off ?”
“Beats me. How did you do it before?”
“I don’t know.”
Phil went thoughtfully back to work on his foot-long. He turned it around in his hands, inspecting it between bites. “Let me tell you a story, Miller,” he said, with his mouth full.
A momentary calm washed over me. Finally, I thought, the answer. Straight from the oracle. I leaned forward attentively in my plastic chair.
But he waved the idea off. “On second thought, forget about it.”
I was a bit crestfallen, and I’m sure Spence could see it, because I could see real empathy in the folds of his crow’s feet. “Look, Miller, I’m just guessing here, but I’d say you’re having doubts. I’ve seen this kind of thing before—and understand, it doesn’t matter the nature of the doubt—maybe you think you’ve got genital warts, maybe you think the world is poised on the brink of nuclear holocaust, hell, maybe you’ve fallen out of love with radio.”
“No,” I assured him.
He gave me a searching look. Spence was the master of pause. He understood pause like Gary Owens understood pause, like Balance understood pause, like Billy Graham understood pause; he understood that the effective pause was not all about the pause itself, or even the act of pausing, but about where you left the pause, what kind of English you put on it. In its rudimentary form, pause was punctuation, slightly evolved it became a question, but suspended just right, left out there long enough, it became a turning point for the listener. I’ll bet you that back in the day Spence could give his listeners a searching look right through the radio dial—he’d done it to me on the telephone.
“You just gotta look doubt in the eye, Miller. On second thought, don’t look at it at all. Just lower your head and charge at it. You need to
fi
nd your center again, that’s all I know. That, or discover a new one.”
“How am I supposed to—”
“Shh.” He stopped me in my tracks with the
fi
nger. “Whaddaya hear?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
I listened distractedly. “Questions, all right, I hear questions. A lot of them. And, yeah, okay, doubts. Nagging ones.”
Spence nodded gravely. “Miller, you’re depressed, okay. It’s pretty simple. Here’s what I want you to do. Here’s what you
need
to do.”
“I’m not depressed, I’m just
…
”
“I want you to take some time off.”
“But I don’t think I need to take—”
“
Tut tut
. Shh. I insist. Just a week or two—however long it takes for you to stop thinking.” Phil set the last three inches of his foot-long down and patted his belly. I noticed a little chunk of pickled relish poised on the lip of his shirt pocket.
“We don’t think our way out of corners, kid. We act.”
Upon Lulu’s discharge at the beginning of August, she accompanied Willow and Big Bill back to Sausalito, where she agreed to remain inde
fi
nitely—or at least until the beginning of fall semester. According to Willow and Big Bill (only one of whom I had reason to doubt), a critical bargaining point in negotiating Lulu’s extradition was her stipulation that she receive no contact from either Troy or myself during her convalescence. Not until she was ready to initiate the interaction herself.
“She’s healing,” Willow explained over the phone. “Women
feel
their way through grief, Will. You have to respect that.”
“But when can I see her?”
“That’s not for me to say. Whenever she’s felt her way to that point.”
Thus, Willow and Big Bill withheld my letters and disregarded my Trojan horses, all for the sake of defending the sanctity of Lulu’s grief. I could forgive them a lot of things—their judgment, their hypocrisy, their deceit—but I couldn’t forgive them for shutting me out when I scratched on the door.