The Orange Curtain (23 page)

He dug frantically in the papers he kept in five color-coded cardboard banker’s boxes, and finally he found the latest version of the big treatise. It was his
pièce de résistance
, rewritten dozens of times until he had got it nearly bang on. He knew there were a few things about it that still didn’t seem quite right, and maybe Mr. Liffey could help him on those.

He stopped at his door and looked back. All of a sudden, the cottage where he had lived for so long had come to seem utterly alien, the home of someone else who was not him at all. He looked at the obsessively color-coded desks, the reading schedule on the wall, the mussed bed. It was a place unquiet and out of kilter. The room was suddenly a secret festering place, not a sanctuary. And there was a sense, not a vision exactly, nor a fully formed hallucination, but an insinuation of some sixth or seventh sense that from far in the back corner of the room something dark was coming toward him. He felt a chill all the way down to his toes.

Something had changed, torn loose inside him, and he felt he was not in complete control of himself any more. The darkness seemed to get closer before he made himself turn away. It was very unsettling.

It felt odd sitting manacled in that decrepit living room with no one else present. It was like being made part of an exhibit of some past civilization, pinioned amidst all the abandoned pots and grinding stones of a defunct race. The ancient TV on its wheeled cart, so old it still had a rotary channel dial, the flight of brass ducks stuck to the wall, the fringed floor lamp, a hook rug and leather ottoman, and the huge blond wood phonograph cabinet with doilies on it. In the dining room there was the big cut glass stemmed fruit bowl, an array of napkins in little round napkin rings, a print of a little girl with huge eyes and the egregious Highland bull. It was American working class, circa 1957. To his left there was a heavy plum-colored tapestry on rings walling off a big alcove of the house, probably where she had done her tea-leaf reading. He decided he had better discreetly find out what the young man’s relationship to the woman in the freezer had been, and what had led him to snap.

On the TV he saw a dark staircase and looked away. There was a rush of footsteps at the back of the house and then the kitchen door slammed and he realized it had been standing open all this time. Billy Gudger skidded into the room breathlessly and looked around as if he half expected police crouching in the corners. When he was satisfied, he pushed the ottoman back into the middle and sat down facing Jack Liffey, holding what looked like a screenplay, about 100 sheets of paper bound at the edge with big brass brads.

“You sure you want to participate?” he said.

I always want dangerous fruitbats to read their deepest thoughts to me, Jack Liffey thought. He nodded, but wondered if this was going to be like sharing a cabin in Montana with the Unabomber.

“‘The Theory of the Oscillating Substrata,’” Billy Gudger read, then looked up. “I think it needs a catchier title, and we can make that the subtitle. I’m not good with titles.”

“Maybe I can help when I’ve heard it.”

“I hope so.” He took a deep breath and set in dramatically. “‘The greatest philosophers have always begun with the study of absolutes and ideas and what is real and how ideas relate to what is real, and they have generally and often learned that they have to move their bright searchlight of concentration to the primary task of phenomenology, or what we can generally assume we can know, before you can decide how real what you know is to be.’”

Inwardly Jack Liffey groaned. It was going to be even worse than he’d thought. He had never had much tolerance for listening to prose read aloud, but when it was not only abstract prose but a weird logical and grammatical mishmash, it was going to be just about impossible for him to follow. And follow it he would have to.

“‘It came to me one afternoon shifting gears in my car that processes always tend to go one way, but then they return and go back over the same ground, but in a different form, or a different level in some way. It’s only a very absurdly simple example, but there’s first gear up at the top, then second down at the bottom, but to go higher or faster, you have to go to the top again for third gear.’”

After a bit more of this, Jack Liffey had to bite his lip to suppress the mirth that had bloomed suddenly. The tension of his captivity must have made him woozy. Yes, there was an idea in there somewhere, he thought, but it was an idea that was punch-drunk with all the customary failings of the self-taught, all the wrong-headedness of isolation. A perfect argument for going to college, he thought, and exposing yourself to the whole gamut of ideas available from the past. It was so easy to direct a lonely study along some avenue that caught your fancy and to miss all the other avenues that made up the map, the slow accretion of the civilization. One idea explained everything: it was the conceit of the crank, the solitary prophet who refused to relate his one or two insights to the body of what others had discovered.

“There are distinct intrinsic patterns to the world and our activities satisfy those patterns, first in simple ways and then in more well-developed ways. It’s like a marble running down the little zigzag ramps of one of those clock-timers.”

There was a lot more like that. The general idea seemed to be that the world worked itself out in a series of hiking trail switchbacks. These paths—paths to what? he wondered—climbed the cliff—what cliff?—in a repeated zigzag. If you looked at the big picture from above, it might seem you were following the same path back and forth, but in fact each dogleg was at a slightly higher place or taking a higher form. It was all so vague that it made Jack Liffey’s teeth ache. Alas, there were hints that before calling it a day, the young man was going to apply his grandiose theory of the oscillating substrata to every aspect of mind, will, history, science and political science.

“In an oak tree, for example, the Idea of a Big Strong Oak is carried by the DNA and then the gene and then the chromosome, and then the acorn, the twig, the stem and then the big solid trunk of the tree. Each level yearns upward to repeat the essential idea of a big solid Oak Tree in a new form.”

And then Jack Liffey lost it for a while, his mind going numb with exhaustion. His eye went to the twitch in the young man’s right hand, the pistol abandoned on the floor, the way the headlights of a passing car threw a little light on the big tapestry on his left, the sharp cheekbones and nose of Richard Widmark as he leered. None of this seemed worth much as a Houdini-esque aid to escape.

“You’re drifting.”

“I’m thinking about what you’re saying. It’s extraordinary. Have you read Hegel?”

“A little,” the young man said darkly. Perhaps he felt it was demeaning to be compared to other philosophers.

“I think you anticipate him in some ways.”

He glared but didn’t speak. Somebody on TV screamed not far behind the boy’s head, and he winced and reached behind to lower the volume. “Don’t get any ideas. I can put the sound up in a lickety-split.”

“No problem.”

“Why am I like Hegel?”

“He wrote about forces that moved to higher levels, too.” And as Jack Liffey was speaking, improvising desperately in fact, he realized all of a sudden where Billy Gudger’s madness lay. Hegel spoke about opposing forces colliding out in the world and giving rise to something new. Billy Gudgers’s philosophy, if you could call it that, was only about the working out of some freewheeling inner logic. There were no outside forces impinging on his actors. It wasn’t megalomania exactly, it was just that the young man—out of his colossal loneliness—could not really imagine social interaction. And if you couldn’t see interaction, you couldn’t really envision transformation. Everything was stuck with its own inner nature. Billy Gudger’s oak trees would never bend to the east on a windswept Monterrey shoreline or wither from an iron-poor soil. It wasn’t something he wanted to point out to the young man, however. “I think you might have a more interesting way of looking at it than Hegel. He was a long time ago.”

A chill traveled from the top of his head down to his toes. Jack Liffey found he was really quite frightened all of a sudden, as if the danger had just come home to him. If he just let things slide, he knew he would be doomed, but it was hard to see what he could do about his peril. He’d tried withholding fellowship and that had inflamed something in the young man. Perhaps he could worm his way into Billy Gudger’s psyche and make himself indispensable in some way.

Jack Liffey thought of himself as something of an outsider, too, at least since he’d lost his comfortable marriage with its comfortable suburban home and comfortable middle-class aerospace job, but he knew he didn’t really have a clue what it was like being trapped inside the fog of this young man’s mind. He could imagine loneliness, a fragile self-respect, maybe a buzzing that came and went in one ear, odd keepsakes kept in a drawer, solitary thoughts that spun away in eerie directions on their own, but he guessed that he had no real idea of the thwarted needs that reeled around in there, banging against everything.

“I wish I could read your manuscript. Honestly, I have a hard time following groundbreaking work like this when it’s read aloud.”

“I’ll read slow.”

“It’s something about seeing the words. It’s just the way my mind works.”

“You can read it later.”

He set in reading again and Jack Liffey could see that the point of the exercise wasn’t really critique, it was audience.

“‘In political science, it is possible to imagine a person who was raised to be kindly and empathetic, who is drawn as a young person to the Democratic Party that he sees as the party of sympathy for the poor. Then this person might be exposed to someone who argued that it is the health of capitalism that helps the poor, as in the famous saying that a rising tide lifts all boats, and he would become a Republican for a while. Then he meets someone who explains the work of, say, Franklin Roosevelt, and he decides that it is the Democratic Party that is going to save capitalism
malgré lui
. He might even be exposed to an even more sophisticated argument for the Republicans, and so on. It is not a question of which party is the correct embodiment of his sympathy, but how his inner sentiment works itself out in ever more refined forms, forcing his political course into what an outside observer would see as a seeming zig-zag of loyalties.’”

He looked up and Jack Liffey nodded. There was at least a sense of the social world in this example. He took a stab at his intuition. “I see your argument. It’s good. Did your mother change parties at some time?”

“Why do you mention my mother! Damn you!” He hurled down the essay and it tented open on the hooked rug.

Wrong again, Jack Liffey thought. His intuition was working overtime but it wasn’t getting him anywhere very useful.

“Damn it, damn it! People like you are always reducing things to the personal level, as if I couldn’t think them out myself!” He was working himself into another paroxysm, flushing badly.

“No, I didn’t mean that—”

“Shut up!” Billy Gudger picked up the pistol, and the barrel hovered and looped erratically in the air in front of him. “You’re no good. You don’t care who I am!”

“Of course I do.”

“Tell me about your
moth
-er!” he said in a wrenching parody of a psychoanalyst, his face screwed up in sarcasm. “Tell me about m-m-masturbating!”

It was the first stammer Jack Liffey had heard from him. He’d blundered into his own raw nerve on that one.

“Well, fuck you and your mother theories and the horses you all rode on! Sit back!”

Gone into attack-dog mode again, he seemed now to zero in on the papers in Jack Liffey’s shirt pocket. He stood up and wrenched at the pocket, tearing it and coming away with the little appointment book that Jack Liffey picked up free every year from the Hallmark shop. The young man thumbed brutally through the date book until he got to the current month. “‘Meet Tien,’” he read aloud. “‘See Tien, Tien Tien Tien.’ Who’s Tien, I wonder?”

His brows were furrowing, and he was making a humming from somewhere deep in his throat. Jack Liffey wondered if he even knew he was making the noise.

Then Billy Gudger shook the little booklet and several business cards fell out, which he retrieved. Jack Liffey caught a glimpse of a green one he didn’t remember at all that the young man tossed over his shoulder, then one of his own cards, tossed, a coupon for bar soap that Marlena had given him on his last trip to Von’s and he’d forgotten all about, then Billy Gudger wound down staring at the oversized card Jack Liffey remembered all too well. He felt a chill on his spine.

“Sleepy Lotus, Import/Export, Facilitation, Tien Nguyen Joubert.” He read it aloud, pronouncing it Tine Na-goo-yen, like most English speakers. “I’ll bet this is the Asian girl’s mom.”

It was the first time Phuong had come up in a long time. So the young man had a pretty clear idea what this was all about.

“No, she’s just a businesswoman the girl once worked for.”

He glanced up at Jack Liffey with a cunning leer. “Sure. That’s why you been seeing her every ten minutes this week. Man, you must think I’m stupid. I bet she knows where you are right now. I bet you tell her everything.”

“I know you’re not stupid, Billy. Phuong’s mom, like a lot of Vietnamese women over here, is so quiet and timid she rarely leaves the house. She can’t even drive a car. She could never run an import business.”

The young man flapped the card thoughtfully across his fingers, then studied it again. “Look here, it’s even got a home address in Huntington Harbour. Do you think she could maybe
facilitate
things if she came here for a consultation?”

“I promise you, she’s
not
Phuong’s mother. Phuong’s family name was Minh. You can read it in the newspaper or your own files from MediaPros.”

“They all use different names all the time. You can’t rely on foreigners. They’ve got different customs.”

“Billy, don’t make this any worse. We can find a way out of it the way it is right now.” But he cranked the TV sound up again, a commercial blaring away about long-lasting deodorant, and Billy Gudger went into the next room. Jack Liffey had a terrible premonition of doom.