Art's latest challenge was to create a commercial "dining complex" for high-end restaurants that looked like something other than a jumped-up food court, which is what it essentially was. The target clientele was people who wanted the same round-robin selection in eateries that they were accustomed to from multiplex theaters-if you're five minutes late for one show, pick another. Round-shouldered from malls, this imaginary demographic nonetheless insisted on completely secure shopping, entertainment, and eating "experiences." They feared crime and sought hermetic enclosure… but without feeling trapped. Their illusion of free will had been shaved down to a choice they could handle-usually which credit card would pay for the meal, since one must always be seen conspicuously advantaging a respectable piece of plastic. Gimmicky Vegas-style and amusement park restaurants had had their day. Consumers were hip to the hollow con of it all, and that meant a new con was required, and the promise of upscale respectability was the best con of all.
Art had been vetted onto the gig at the urging of Alex Street, a former partner in his old design firm who had talked Art up to the financiers. Another favor owed into the to-do file, Art thought. He scooped up the assignment for an outrageous advance, set his own schedule, and was now holed up in his secluded eyrie, awaiting the coming of miracles, and deploying every conceivable excuse to dodge actually devoting any hard pencil time to the damned thing. The sun rose and set while the army-ant march of checkup phone calls dwindled. Art walked his dog. Blitz loved any excuse for extra dog-fun. The work continued to confound him. What had seemed effortless before became forced and impenetrable, like the abrupt discovery that you have forgotten or misplaced the ability to speak a foreign language you thought you knew. Somehow, an essential capacity had evaporated, erecting a wall between Art and his life's work; lost while he slept, perhaps, or diminished in the demarcation between his married life and the life he had now.
Lorelle, for anybody who wanted to know, was three years dead. Therefore, the story went, she'd never gotten to see the complete retrofit of the house. Her death had been ugly, pointless, and prolonged-the heartbreaking kind, the kind that disallowed detail to outsiders or prying minds. Art managed his grief but was still frighteningly susceptible to being throttled by it at the weirdest times. Perhaps it would be better for him to swallow the feelings, bury the past, break the connections, and sell the house… but he never made it to that fourth step. It meant picking up the phone and initiating a long and eroding sequence of business events. So far he'd kept from making the first call and setting that engine in motion.
Two hundred yards to the north was a stone jetty composed of shattered granite, delivered to the location several times a year by a stonemason in San Jose. The guy's truck proclaimed him to be one of the
Sons of Chispa Verdugo Villa
, the company specialty being grave monuments. Leftovers, bad cuttings, and failed tombstones made up the jetty, which curved far out into deep water, a crooked, pointing finger of rock. At its terminus was a gigantic military microwave dish, its convex ear usually targeted straight up, like a birdbath stopover for rock-sized mythological predators. At different times, Art thought it resembled a huge sundial, which is what he generally called it. It was engirded by hurricane fence, razor wire, posted warnings. He'd never seen any staff or service guys, if there were any. Local scoop had it that a lighthouse had once occupied the spot. That was irresistibly romantic, and Art had sketched it more than once. He loved the idea of its beam circling far above his home, cutting some storm.
His nearest neighbor was the Spilsbury place, built on the adjacent property sometime in the 1970s, a more classic sort of timbered beach house on stilts and pilings. It sat closer to the highway; Art had given his own place a long and nonlinear driveway on purpose-an S-shaped double switchback that permitted distance and foliage to obscure the road over there… somewhere. The Spilsbury place was boarded up for the winter.
But that was the party house, half a mile downbeach, give or take. Half a mile was approximately 2,640 feet, or almost nine football fields; half a klick and change, or 160 rods, if you wanted to get totally ridiculous about it. Art didn't know much about the place except that it was slightly more modern that Spilsbury's, with a big show-off glass turret pointed toward the sea. It was usually a shadow in the mist, indistinct even when he peeked, using his telescope, from his own west deck. Lights had recently become visible at night. Somebody was there, right now, broadcasting occasional life signs without detail. No strays had yet wandered as far as the jetty.
High tide brought the Pacific Ocean swells to within eighty yards of where Art's house was dug in; safe distance, even for stormy times.
East, behind the house, sufficiently obscured by dunes and brush, was the coast road. San Francisco was an hour to the north. Once per week he could hear the distress siren that still sounded from the fire station in Half Moon Bay, as though air raids by the forces of Hirohito were still imminent. It was an evocative and mournful noise; it put Art in mind of blackouts, and vigilance, and staying prepared.
The nearest convenience mart, if you could call it that, was a
Toot 'N Moo
fifteen miles down the highway. It had begun life as a truckstop and featured enough rest rooms for ten people, with showers. The shitty coffee shop had shut down within one fiscal year and Art only stopped there for gas, once he'd quit smoking. The counter was usually manned by a former skate punk named Rocko (according to his handwritten name tag), who mopped up, played a lot of speed metal too loudly, and fed the slushie machine from a large, vile-looking bucket whenever he wasn't zipping around the parking lot on his board. Rocko had been known to shut the store down whenever he had band practice, so operative business hours were a hazy concept at best. There was a sort of smalltown market in Half Moon Bay, but it was only open from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon, administered by a couple who otherwise qualified as retirees. Instead of repairing to some bedroom community to play shuffleboard and watch cable, they invested their market with the sort of attention your grandma would devote to vegetable gardens, or quilt making. The market would die as soon as they did. Small, friendly groceries with creaky wooden floors were a last-gasp anachronism from the twentieth century, not destined to persevere.
Art drew a deep nasal hit of the salt air and felt his sinuses sluice. It was better than gulping heart-accelerating decongestants like MSM's from wake-up till sleeptime. A decade back he'd had his septum corrected, and polyps excised. A week following the minor surgery, a blood vessel high up in his skull decided to let go like a burst fire hydrant, liberating blood in fat, metronomic drops that obstinately refused to slow down, or dam up. This nasal apocalypse lost its comic value after about five minutes. What didn't drip out went down his throat in an unstoppable, inexorable, slow-motion torrent-now; that was funny, the thought that he could die from a nosebleed that didn't even hurt. All his blood would run out of his skull and he would die. Laugh riot. Just imagine the funeral for a guy who had croaked from a terminal runny nose.
He was vaguely ill and in the first stages of woozy shock by the time Lorelle drove him to the Half Moon Bay lire station and they caught an ambulance ride into the city, where a triage nurse estimated he had swallowed more than a pint of his own blood. A patient physician named Dr. Bloch had tried packing his nostrils with eight feet of some nonabsorbent material that looked like pasta. No good. Then, in one of those moments straight out of a 1950s sci-fi film-
it'd crazy, but it just might work!
-Dr. Bloch fed a catheter into Art's nose and inflated it with a hypodermic full of water, which applied the needed pressure to the unreachable rupture. The whole event was so comedic that it sharpened Art's appreciation of the fact that he could die abruptly, by ridiculous means. Death by absurdity, without hidden meaning or footnote.
Not so with Lorelle. Cancer wasn't as funny. He still said her name aloud, to himself, several times a day. Even now.
Art's sinuses mended and he was 100 percent okay. His cholesterol was negligible. Heart, lungs, blood, all fine. He was thirty-eight and could conceivably live to ninety; he just had no idea how he was going to get that far or last that long, for reasons having nothing to do with aging or his physical state. He was a lit, average man, hiding out in a sanctuary of his own making, logging work with little joy, mourning the loss of a revised director's cut of his own life-the version in which Lorelle had lived.
What he wanted now was a storm. A violent, freezing sky show, to inspire him. Thunder and fury. His stocks were good, and if catastrophe struck, his own garage was outfitted better than a bomb shelter. He wanted to bear witness while some black bitch of a hurricane cleaved around the battlements of his stormproof fortress, this product of his will. Then maybe he could return to the stoop labor of telling restaurant technology which way to swing.
Three mornings running, now, the sky had come up dour crimson. Old sailor sayings were apparently claptrap.
"Blitz!
Beweg deinen Arch hier ruber!
" he shouted on the return trek from Spilsbury's. The dog, having enjoyed a longer morning jaunt than usual, snapped to and obeyed. Art assumed his dog-voice: "You're a good boy, aren't you?
Guter Hund. Du bit halt mein Beter!
" Blitz loved the sound of the word good. He hung his tongue to the wind like a fluttering slice of ham, agreeing that he was, in fact, a good boy. Gulls winged about, buffeted mercilessly by gusts in their unending scavenge for refuse and dead things. Blitz wanted to jump high enough to snag them. Art saw the birds reflected in the dog's rich, coffee-colored eyes.
A quick scan of the websites on his Favorites file yielded no new consumer temptations, merely an endless avalanche of pop-up windows, click-now hot links, and animated come-ons. The World Wide Web had boiled down to three basic constants-porn, advertising, and a smorgasbord of humans declaring themselves and their likes to a world they could not see, in a frantic attempt to leave a visual benchmark amid the digital waterfall of data; perhaps lend some humanity to all those invisible ones and zeros. He was aware he had not yet turned on the halogens over his drafting table; that would be too much like an acknowledgment of work. With a soft, rubberized Number Two he sketched a wandering maze, like a sky view of a rat's tubular exercise run. The pencil came from a galvanized container of twenty identical ones, all identically sharpened on a matte black device that emitted a coffee grinder noise and was guaranteed for life by its Swiss makers. Springboarding from the idea of his bulletproof acrylic windows, he wondered how the entire restaurant complex would "present" if its accoutrements were totally composed of transparent material. To walk on a world of glass would be precarious and disorienting; it made him crack a grin that only involved half his mouth. He thought of Carlsbad Caverns, of Indian pueblos, of making the search for one's favored watering holes into some kind of urban exploratory expedition, all beneath a ceiling of skylights.
For those people who didn't do all their shopping on the internet, anyway.
It was a game try, but Art knew he was in a rut, forcing half-baked inspiration to service a contractual obligation. It was grim, akin to a gravedigger filling a hole, instead of a landscaper sculpting a garden. He had begun to wonder whether anyone actually looked at his designs anymore. So long as they came in on time, filled space, and were attached to the cachet of his name, did anyone really notice, or care?
The mailbag offered Citibank, telephones, gas, power, insurance, and the usual hustles from strangers. He resented the way printouts could be programmed for a nakedly obvious faux-personalization, then "signed" with a patently bogus printed signature. It was deceptive and meant to entrap, like the many ad campaigns for most of the restaurants slated for Art's reinterpretation. Places to eat needed to be inviting, not demanding. Customers needed the humanity the internet rarely offered. They plodded into mall shops like convicts walking the last mile. Buyers should want to enter, not be forced by some grim need. They always slapped down cash or plastic as though making a sacrifice to the gods of materialism. The phenomenon was most pronounced come Christmastime-which was to say, the "holiday" period extending from the day after Labor Day until ten days into January. There was not much left that was enticing about a holiday that lasted four straight months, though merchants saw it the other way around. Art had given up Christmas a long time ago.
A postcard dropped out of the stack.
The Golden Gate
Bridge
, real tourist shit.
Written on the back, in marker, Art read: YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE. HAVE A BEER, YOU FUCK. Followed by the initial
D
with a flourish.
That would be Derek… whom Art had not seen or communicated with for several years. There was no return address and the card was postmarked more than a week ago.
Derek-Darius Centurion Hill-had dropped out of Art's life shortly after Lorelle died. He had gone from being a once-per-week dinner guest to an invisible man. He had shot pool and drunk beer and hung out during a time when Art kept virtually no male friends. Buddy structures often collapsed as a casualty of marriage, but Derek had remained steadfast. When Art had blown sour blood-alcohol for a state trooper, Derek posted bail, picked him up, and warp-speeded him home, violating the posted limits all the way. When Lorelle had first been hospitalized, Derek was the first outsider to visit, lying to the duty nurse that he was a family member. He could be counted on to hoist the opposite end when something needed moving. The day he came into his inheritance, he promptly quit his job at Lockheed, where he had specialized in aerodynamic design. He had collided with Art at some tech conference and they stuck to each other, opting out of the dry roll call of seminars to seek adventure in Tucson, which, at the time, had been a new city to both of them. Instead of titty bars and sleaze, they found an air museum of antique warplanes, a science-fiction triple bill of vintage black-and-whites at the New Loft Theatre, and an excursion on rented Harleys into the high desert, deep enough that they encountered real Lawrence of Arabia-style dunes, no litter, and saw a live rattlesnake just crawling around out in the open. They watched it prowl with a mesmerized, almost benevolent interest; then they left it alone. The snake never acknowledged their intrusion in any way, which pleased Art enormously.