Vineland (36 page)

“Only to let 'em know we've been here's all,” muttered Roscoe, hooking a U and peeling away, halfway to the gate getting into a skid, leaving behind a set of big S's that remained awhile on the wet blacktop.

A provincial whiz kid called early, brass choirs on the sound track, to power in the white mother city, where he would become, as he had dreamed, the careful product of older men, Brock, of medium height, slender and fair-haired, carried with him a watchful, never quite trustworthy companion personality, feminine, underdeveloped, against whom his male version, supposedly running the unit, had to be equally vigilant. In dreams he could not control, in which lucid intervention was impossible, dreams that couldn't be denatured by drugs or alcohol, he was visited by his uneasy anima in a number of guises, notably as the Madwoman in the Attic. Brock would be moving through rooms of a large, splendid house belonging to people so rich and powerful he'd never even seen them. But while they allowed him to stay there, it was his job to make sure that all doors and windows, dozens of them everywhere, were secure, and that no one, nothing, had penetrated. This had to be done every day, and finished with before nightfall. Every closet and corner, every back staircase and distant storeroom, had to be checked, till at last there was only the attic left to do. The day would have grown, by then, quite late, the light almost gone. It was that phase of twilight, full of anxiety, when mercy in this world and the others is apt to be least available. Energies were on the loose, masses could materialize. He climbed the attic stairs in the dusk, paused in front of the door. He could hear her breathing, waiting for him—helplessly he opened, entered, as she advanced on him, blurry, underlit, except for the glittering eyes, the relentless animal smile, and accelerating leapt at him, on him, and underneath her assault he died, rising to wake into his own rooms, the counterpane white and neatly folded as butcher's paper around a purchase of meat—face up, rigid, sweating, shaken by each heartbeat.

Out in the waking world, of course, he was an entirely different fellow, so thoroughly personable, in fact, that maintaining even dislike for the Prosecutor was always a chore, even for the criminal degenerates he helped put away. He projected a charm that appeared to transcend politics, and was known both inside the Beltway and out in the field as a sought-after raconteur and bon vivant who appreciated fine distinctions in food, wine, music. Women found him intensely appealing for reasons they later could or would not specify. Colorful little third-world grandmothers tending flower stalls on forlorn city street corners would rush to embrace him and present, curtsying, bunches of violets to Brock's invariably impressed dates, usually beautiful high-fashion packages to the memory of whose merest peripheral appearance in the street that day any number of men would already have rushed back into some kind of privacy to masturbate as quickly as possible, without asking too many questions.

Well, what a life, you'd ordinarily say. But Brock coveted more. He'd caught a fatal glimpse of that level where everybody knew everybody else, where however political fortunes below might bloom and die, the same people, the Real Ones, remained year in and year out, keeping what was desirable flowing their way. Prosecutor Vond wanted a life there, only slowly coming to understand that for someone of his background there would be no route to this but self-abasement, fawning, gofering, scrambling for tips and offering other such hints of his eagerness to be brevetted on life's battlefield to a rank higher than he would ever, by the terms of his enlistment, have deserved. Though his defects of character were many, none was quite as annoying as this naked itch to be a gentleman, kept inflamed by a stubborn denial of what everyone else knew—that no matter how much money he made, how many political offices or course credits from charm school might come his way, no one of those among whom he wished to belong would ever regard him as other than a thug whose services had been hired.

But Brock didn't feel like any thug or, more important, look like one either. Whenever he shaved, the humming small life solid in his hand, what he saw was Lombrosian evidence of a career plausibly honest enough to sell his ideas, his beliefs, to anybody, at any level. And the same went for his body image, Brock in those days being known as something of a recreational-area Don Juan, for whom sport and sex were naturally connected. Over time he had learned to extend his Lombrosian analysis from faces to bodies, and discovered that there were such things as criminal bodies. He would see them often in his line of work and would also, less consciously, look for signs of transgressor status in women he met and even desired, the guilty droop of head, the bestial turn of an ass-cheek, the spine furtively overflexed. Some of these women turned out to be “great fucks,” as Brock later described them, mainly for the sake of his reputation, because secretly, though he enjoyed and even got obsessed about sex, he was also—imagine—scared to death of it. In nightmares he was forced to procreate with women who approached never from floor or ground level but from steep overhead angles, as if from someplace not on the surface of Earth, feeling nothing erotic but only, each time it was done, a terrible sadness, violation . . . something taken away. He understood, in some way impossible to face, that each child he thus produced, each birth, would be only another death for him.

When news of Frenesi's escape from PREP reached him back in the great marble plexus, Brock went right around the bend—flew back to L.A., came storming into the fortress at Westwood with this out-of-control mind-hardon, and for a brief time acted like a terrorist holding the place hostage. Nobody knew anything. At that point they were all running around trying to manage the public-relations overtime arising from his “success” at College of the Surf. All the files on the 24fps film collective, including Frenesi's, seemed to be temporarily out of the building. The case was no longer Brock's, and he couldn't find out whose it was. By the time he might have, he'd driven himself past exhaustion, adrift in the unsleeping clockless iterations of some hotel near the airport, where men in wrinkled suits, jet-lagged and aimless, populated the corridors and the uproar in the sky never took a break. He cried, he beat himself with his fists on head and body, did all that old stuff, feeling like a skier on an unfamiliar black-diamond slope, seized by gravity, in control, out of control . . . this descent took him all night and wore him at last into unconsciousness. On the plane back to Washington, the little girl he sat down next to got one look at his face and started screaming. “He's gonna molest me, Mom! We're all gonna die!” Brock, croaking something about being a U.S. Attorney, went fumbling for his ID, though some onlookers thought it was for a weapon and began wailing and crossing themselves. The plane wasn't even moving yet. Too depressed to believe he had anything to lose, Brock doggedly proceeded to bully flight attendants and crew into ejecting the little girl and her mother from the airplane. “Snotty bitch,” he whispered as, trembling, the child arose and had to slide the backs of her thighs past his knees.

In Washington again, scrambling to explain his behavior and protect his back, Brock really might have had no time to track Frenesi down, as he told it later, but it didn't stop him having fantasies about her. Pretty soon he was jerking off every night to images he remembered of her, lying in bed, sitting on the toilet, walking down the street, on top and bottom, dressed and naked, Brock lying all alone in the air-conditioning on a rented psychedelic-print sofa in his new apartment out on Wisconsin, in the sullen Tubeflicker, straining into his past, feeling the pressure of tears he was confident would never come. It wasn't that things weren't fine on the job, the compartments in his brain were all Frenesi-tight as far as work went, though now and then lust's drowsy watchman left a latch open, usually around the full moon, when he'd find himself heading down to Dupont Circle and other gathering spots of the young and uncritical, trying to mingle with the hippies, blacks, and drug abusers, to put up as sportingly as he could with their music and closeness, looking for strong slender legs, a fine rain of hair, with luck, fatally, those eyes of Pacific blue, hoping in light cooperative enough to find a girl to project Frenesi's ghost onto, someone who'd hand him a flower, offer a joint—groovy!—agree to be led back here, to this come-stained couch, and be taken, and—

Brock, Brock, get a grip on yourself! But some other adviser lay coiled in ancient shadow, whispering
Kick loose.
Brock knew how much he wanted to, feared what would happen if he couldn't contain the impulse. Once, not too many years ago, sober, wide awake, he'd begun to laugh at something on the Tube. Instead of reaching a peak and then tapering off, the laughter got more intense each time he breathed, diverging toward some brain state he couldn't imagine, filling and flooding him, his head taken and propelled by a supernatural lightness, on some course unaccounted for by the usual three dimensions. He was terrified. He glimpsed his brain about to turn inside out like a sock but not what would happen after that. At some point he threw up, broke some cycle, and that, as he came to see it, was what “saved” him—some component of his personality in charge of nausea. Brock welcomed it as a major discovery about himself—an unsuspected control he could trust now to keep him safe from whatever his laughter had nearly overflowed him into. He was careful from then on not to start laughing so easily. All around him in those days he was watching people his age surrendering to dangerous gusts of amusement, even deciding never to return to regular jobs and lives. Colleagues grew their hair long and ran off with adolescents of the same sex to work on psychedelic-mushroom ranches on far-away coasts. Stalls in the glass-block and travertine toilets of the Justice Department itself boomed and echoed with Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix. Everywhere Brock looked he saw defects of control—while others, in their turn, were not so sure about Brock.

Internal review boards within Justice had had him under surveillance at least since his early gypsy jury days, when he was spreading around the smart-assed charisma on local TV news, call-in radio shows, and speaking engagements before “private” groups in the banquet rooms of suburban eateries known for forms of red meat. When Frenesi came into the picture, interest perked up. Here was entertainment—a federal prosecutor carrying the torch for some third-generation lefty who'd likely've bombed the Statue of Liberty if she could. Weeks' salaries were wagered and lost over how long Brock could hold on to his job, with the over-under line usually reckoning his longevity in days. Brought in, at length, for the Basic Little Chat, he was exactly as forthcoming as he knew he needed to be to quiet the Board, but not a word beyond. If inside a certain radius all lay camouflaged and deeply fortified, nonetheless he did deny her, joked about her with his interrogators, about her tits, her pussy, refusing to react, to seem to defend her. “Next time, Brock, just come on in, let us know, we can punch you up anything you want, you like radical snatch, hey, no problem, bro.” He got crazy enough once in a while to take them up on it. They offered a wide choice of sizes, colors, and ages, not to mention neo-Lombrosian face and body types. But he chose women most likely from their files to have crossed paths with Frenesi, living for the off chance of finding her name tucked casually into small talk over drinks. With a patience and gentleness that cost him, Brock tried to steer the dialogue always toward that one dim star.

Still, eyes were upon him, and if he'd actively initiated any search after the Gates woman's whereabouts, most easily through her mother in L.A., a longtime Person of Interest, Brock's overseers would have known about it immediately, and what the memos referred to as a fecoventilatory collision might very well have ensued. It was the old, unhappy tale, Brock would insist, of romance versus career. He didn't want to choose and so he temporized, pursuing his PREP master plan, clearing the brush and leveling the lots. By the time things were solidly enough in place and he could finally get back to California for an extended season of mischief, the ache was no worse than a Beltway sinus, the lunar prowls among the hippies had all but ceased, and sometimes a week would go by in which he only took hold of his penis for pissing.

In the year that had elapsed, Frenesi had met and married Zoyd and given birth to Prairie, none of which Brock had known about, none of which she volunteered when at last they were face-to-face again. The year before in Las Suegras, standing at the edge of a gas-station apron watching DL in the Camaro ascend to the freeway and vanish, rolling blind into her own future, Frenesi had considered calling Brock, going back into PREP. There was no way back to 24fps, or to the person she'd been—beyond any way to clear it she had set up Weed's murder and was in the federal law-enforcement files now and forever, shared with every last amateur cop groupie in the land, listed as a species her parents had taught her to despise—a Cooperative Person.

“It's what you want, isn't it?” the dark apparition of Brock Vond questioned her from continental distance. “‘Forever,' isn't that supposed to be as romantic as it gets? Well, we can provide you with Forever, no sweat. What DOJ promises, we deliver.” Did he know what she wanted? Even have any right to say he did? Just because she didn't? As night fell, she'd wandered down to Phil's Cottonwood Oasis, which was a tavern with a motel in back, beside a darkening green piece of creek-bank crowded with Fremont cottonwoods, with a dance deck built out over the creek. She sat in front of a beer bottle and a glass and couldn't focus on anything, while twilight drinkers technically on the way home came drifting in, and motel occupants looking for supper, some famished, some quarreling, and then the Corvairs, billing themselves here as the Surfadelics.

As standard practice, just to get it over with, the band started off the set with “Louie Louie” and “Wooly Bully,” whether or not anybody wanted to hear these traditional favorites. By then Zoyd, in those days a generic longhair with a Zappa mustache and wire-rimmed yellow shooting glasses, casing the room, had spotted Frenesi, called one of his own compositions, taken the mike and the vocal.