Johnson winked. "See you at the movies."
After the next take, they lifted away one of the blue sawhorses and waved his car through. He crept past the double rows of parked vehicles, the tangle of film equipment, as if drawn by a chain at theme park speed past an animated spectacle he'd put down money and purchased a ticket to see with his own eyes. He continued on down the empty street, easing gently into his own driveway, where he parked. He sat inside his car and stared up at his house. He'd never really looked at it before. And now that he did, it looked like somebody else's. He had the odd impression that the fancy gray exterior was only a facade one board thick and that when you finally left your car and turned the key in the lock of the front door and passed through the door you'd find yourself still outside, facing the windy expanse of the open sea. Instead, he found, as he always had, the geometric patterning of the Navaho rug, the side table loaded with yesterday's mail, and the elegantly tortured shape of the cypress tree rising up through bright architectural space three floors toward the skylight built into the roof, its twisted branches and trunk the effect, over the years, of the psychic storms within. Even without the knowledge that Tia's car had not yet returned he would have known at once the house was empty. He could smell it, the cold still absence of animal life. He went through all the rooms and in none of them did he feel safe. He got a beer from the refrigerator and went upstairs and stretched out on his bed. He switched on the television. Dick Powell and Claire Trevor were battling badness in stark black and white. "I want to go dance in the foam," declared Powell, "I hear the banshees calling."
Sometimes, despite the alluring, unflagging flow of images, the surface tension would be broken for an instant, by an especially obnoxious commercial perhaps, or an overripe cliché
, and he would discover himself slipping down inside himself, below decks, into a complex of passageways of no clear design or intent, gray steel corridors, some no wider than the average auto tire, snaking up, down, and through fantastic tiers of cabins, holds, bays, compartments, some of which communicated with the bridge and some of which did not, and there the hatches were bolted and access denied to all, even he who roamed the tunnels like a fugitive expecting to find -- what? The missing charts? The classified cargo? A big scaly monster? Or bastard versions of himself running amok through the equipment? And other people? Well, other people were the doll-like figures who lived among the stick furniture on the lower levels. It was a solid ship, built to last, the message of its construction inhering to each impeccable rivet: your service here, like that of those who came before and those who will come after, is temporary duty only and can be terminated arbitrarily without warning. You hoped you had embarked on the correct mission.
At the raucous sounds of their entrance, Todd's shrill cries, Tia's singsong scolding, echoing up through the hollow interior of the house, he flicked off the set and drained his beer bottle and went downstairs to greet his nice family.
He found Tia in the kitchen, cutting an apple into slices for Todd. He came up from behind, startling her, and she turned, the knife in her hand missing his chest by inches. "My God, you scared me," she said. Gently, he removed the blade from her fist and laid it neatly upon the counter as if restoring a museum relic to its proper case. Then he took her in his arms and kissed her, his hands slipping down her back to knead with slow, suggestive purpose the plump cheeks of her ass. When they stopped, she looked up at him with eyes that touched his face like stroking fingers. "Yes," she said, murmuring then against his chest, "that's what I like. That's why men should sit home all day, elevating their testosterone levels. My God, the way Si worked, what that lunatic industry did to him -- he took phone calls sitting on the crapper -- and on those rare occasions his body surprised him by managing to produce the gift of an erection, we celebrated, we did a goddamn May dance around it."
Will pulled himself away. "Listen, do you think it would be possible to spend more than five minutes together without mentioning that man? No wonder you sense his presence, you blurt out his name in every other sentence."
"Well, you know what my reply to that would be."
"Yes, I do, and here's my rebuttal." They kissed again for quite a long while, and even as he felt her hand moving against the crotch of his pants, he was faraway, thinking of how a name was a prison, too, binding you to a place even after you were dead and he thought: I don't belong here.
Later that night, after Todd had been fed and read to and tucked safely into bed, they "made love" in their usual manner, employing a number of devices to heighten their enjoyment, several of them stamped as authentic state property. Sex acquired an informative extra edge when you were utterly free to pretend that you were stark raving mad, the thrill of ecstatic liberation you were able to achieve blindfolded, strapped naked to the bed, a rubber gag muffling your cries so as to avoid waking the child, was positively otherworldly. "I love you," whispered Will, "I've always loved you, you are my goddess." He could smell the pine in her hair and then he came in a convulsive chain of brief explosions, as if something were being forcibly, almost painfully, yanked from his body.
Afterward, in the solitude of her room, lying contentedly atop the mussed sheets, Tia perused the pages of her secret scrapbook, a complete collection of photographs of the genitals of all the men she had ever slept with. The pictures relaxed her, prepared her for sleep as effectively as any drug. The act of looking without restriction at another's organs fulfilled a need she couldn't satisfy in any other way; pornography was generally too coarse and exploitative and penises were hardly ever revealed except when erect, in their maximum size. The lack of normal genital display was eroding the mental health of the society. We were being denied an important human birthright. On such reflections she passed into the warm waters of the dream.
And in Johnson's room the television set burned on all through the night. Earlier in the evening, in a dangerous moment of sexual abandonment, he had imagined that he was a different person and so was Tia and he had almost called out to her by a different name. The loss of control, however temporary, frightened him, and incidents like this seemed to be accumulating of their own accord. When you lost track of the names in your life, you relinquished contact with the reality of that life. It was a subject he had pondered in many a lonely room much like this one. A name was like a seed dropped into the saturated solution of time about which the shape of its letters, the sounds of its vowels, coalesced a particular, a unique identity, the fated actuality of a life. Change your name, though, and you change your reality. Events will begin falling into new, previously unthinkable patterns. Was that the meaning of this near-verbal slip, a message from the interior to refashion the design? He frowned at the television, waving the remote impatiently at it as if attempting to discipline a dog with a stick.
The next morning he scrapped his usual schedule and drove directly over to Le Gun Club, target range to the stars, a stop he wouldn't normally make for two more days. He liked the people there, and he liked the noise and the smell of powder. Names weren't a problem here, nobody used any. It was a members-only establishment for the financial and cultural elite of the city to pop some caps as other folk might drop in at the local range to hit a couple of buckets of balls. The woman on the other side of the wall in the Armani jacket and yellow shooting goggles was blasting away at her target with a Smith
&
Wesson 49, shredding paper. Will had two guns with him, a Sphinx AT-2000 and a Sig Sauer, both having once belonged to Si, who had bought the weapons, fired each once, and then locked them away in his closet. Why he'd decided to go out at the end of a rope was a mystery to Johnson. A bullet seemed so painlessly quick and certain. He started with the Sphinx, immediately placing six rounds into the target's B zone. Had cardboard been flesh he would have effectively demolished someone's exposed head. He enjoyed standing there in a two-fisted grip, exploding bits of metal toward a printed representation of a human body. Eye merged with mind merged with target in a deliberate and necessary yielding of self which was neither scary nor disorienting. He felt confident. He felt calm. The stresses of the last few days forgotten. Now he could go home and take a nap.
He remembered to go around the long way and enter Valhalla Drive from the north side so as to avoid that movie mess. He was a block from his house when he saw at last what he'd been expecting to see for too many months to count and he realized at the instant of perception that he'd always known, not in his consciousness, but in some deeper, truer way down in the blood because body knowledge was old, older than mind, it knew the marsh and the log and the meaning of the log and the crocodile dozing atop the log: parked in the driveway next to Tia's BMW was a strange car, a strange blue Tracer. Will immediately backed up and parked far enough down the street so that Tia probably wouldn't notice him. Then he sat and he waited. His mind was running on again and he tried to ignore it, the words forming and reforming and coming back at him no matter how often they were dispersed, circling around and buzzing his head like black predatory birds with the persistence of a truth that couldn't be fended off. He would not allow himself to hear in his ear what the letters were spelling out in his head, the sheer outrageousness of thought. He kept shifting around in his seat. He couldn't get comfortable. He couldn't keep still. Between the houses he could see the ocean, all that racket and agitation, a big heaving shape assembled out of boundlessly multiplying nervous little shapes.
An hour later he watched a man emerge from the house, his house. He removed the binoculars from the briefcase on the seat and focused in. Tia stood in the doorway, the good hostess to the end. The man, the stranger, stood beside his Tracer, jingling his keys in his hand. He was young, of course, and fit, a generic California boy with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, who seemed to be receiving with intent gratitude every valuable syllable dropping from Tia's mouth. Will watched: the animated movement of her lips, the immediate response of his, that old Ping-Pong game in which there were no losers. Then the lips stopped and Tia's hand went up in a friendly wave and the strange man climbed into the strange blue car and drove away.
Johnson waited until he had passed before starting his engine and pulling out after him. He was not angry. He was not unhappy. He was concentrated. There were no other vehicles but the boxy blue shape weaving about before his eyes and connected as if by an invisible cable to the front fender of his own car. Up and down, over and through, the twisting concrete spaghetti of the Greater L.A. freeway system, all the way out to Long Beach and a secluded singles apartment complex called the Sol y Sombra Courts.
Johnson followed the Tracer into the parking lot and, from a discreet distance, watched the strange man emerge from his car, lock it, and stroll casually down the shaded walk, one hand in his pocket, to turn in at a door like any other door and fumble with his keys and finally disappear into an apartment like any other apartment. From his seat in the Intrepid Will stared at the door. It was a door like any other door. He looked to the left, he looked to the right. The parking lot was empty. He looked back at the door. There was a brass number on the door. With his binoculars he could read the number. The number was 42. He got out of the car.
On the way home he stopped at Vons to pick up some avocados -- he felt like guacamole -- and while lingering near the produce counter he noticed a curious willowy woman in gray sweats, squeezing the plump cassava melons, one by one. He edged toward her. He smiled. "Your hands," he began. . .
When he returned at last to the sanctuary of his own house, he found Tia upstairs, giving Todd a bath. "Where have you been?" she asked. Her face drawn, her voice flat.
"Christmas shopping," answered Johnson. "Don't look in the car."
Todd stood up in the tub, pink and sleek, stubby penis protruding from beneath his belly like the plastic valve on an inflatable toy. "Look, Daddy!" he cried. "Look at me!" Hands tucked up in his armpits, he began flapping his elbows as if they were wings. He made a harsh squawking noise with his mouth and deliberately flopped back into the tub, splashing soapy water up against the wall, onto the floor, and over his mother. "Todd!" she cried, wiping blindly at her eyes. "Todd, sit!" The boy continued to giggle, watching Will for his reaction. Tia looked up. "He's been like this all day" -- she turned to grab her son and shake him as she spoke -- "and he's going to hurt himself."
"Do what Mommy says," urged Johnson. "She's a good mommy." He bestowed smiles like blessings to these supplicants at his feet.
"He's excited," she explained. "Santa came to playschool this afternoon."
"He did!?" asked Johnson with mock excitement.
Todd nodded his head solemnly.
"Did he have a red suit and a big white beard?"
Todd's eyes grew large with memory. "Yes!" he exclaimed.
"And did he go 'Ho-ho-ho'?"
"No!" cried Todd. "He FARTED!" The last word screamed out as he collapsed down into his suds in an exaggerated fit of helpless merriment.
"It was after lunch," explained Tia with a half-suppressed smile. "Santa had a little problem."
"It's the kids," said Will, "who keep us honest."
She looked up at him. "How are you doing?"
"Good," he said, "I'm good."
Tia began soaping Todd's back. "I had one of the guys from work out to the house this afternoon."
"Yeah?" asked Johnson blandly. "Who?"
"New man. You don't know him. Anyway, he's interested in buying that awful heap of yours."
"Really? But it doesn't run."
"It's his hobby. He likes fixing up old wrecks."