Trick of Light

by Hunt-David

  His company, Kaleidoscopics, is situated in a cavernous brick building on Second Street

  , in the heart of the funky district around South Park which the press has dubbed "Multimedia Gulch."

  There're hundreds of cyber-oriented companies here, some large, most small, a few just one- or two-person shops. The list of tenants in David's lobby tells the story: BrainTools, Pixel People, GenXTronics, Ballz-Gamez, Web-Fleet... The lofts above, formerly occupied by coffee packers, are filled now with hip computer nerds — CD-ROM creators, game and web page designers, cyberartists, cyberanimators, people who write about people who are cool-wired, hard-wired, or just write code.

  Kaleidoscopics is on the seventh floor. The receptionist, a pretty Asian girl, buff and decked out in SoMa grunge, is playing a video game at her desk. I stand patiently before her. It takes her a while to notice.

  "David? Sure, he's in the shop." She gestures with her thumb. "Want some latte? I'm about to order up."

  I tell her no thanks, saunter toward the rear of the loft. A sad-eyed cocker spaniel, leashed to a radiator pipe, is peering at something in the gloom. I follow the dog's line of sight, spot some kind of horn-backed creature crawling among the bicycles stacked against the wall.

  "Hey, there's a reptile back here," I tell the girl.

  "That's Joe. He won't bother you. He's an iguana, so, like, he likes to roam."

  Figuring that explains it, I walk farther, finally find David by the back wall sitting at a computer workstation. Nearby, two employees, perched on stools before a bench, are busy assembling kaleidoscopes.

  "Hi, Kay! Take a look," David says, inviting me to peek at his screen. I lean forward, see a nine-pointed symmetrical chakra image slowly changing the way it would if one were rotating a manual kaleidoscope.

  "Now watch," he says, punching at his keyboard.

  Suddenly the changing process speeds up. David enters more data. The speed increases. He types more. The process becomes overwhelming. Then, when he types again, the image explodes, the pieces finally settling into what appears to be a pile of broken glass at the bottom of the screen.

  "Nice, huh?" he says. "You start out warm, get hot, then hotter, you start doing all this crazy stuff, then... release."

  "Cybersex, David — is that what you're up to?"

  The assemblers titter. David looks embarrassed.

  "I think it's an exciting work of cyberart," he says.

  I'm sure it is. I'm also sure it looks a lot better in color. Although I don't see colors, I have a sense of how they can enrich an image. My mother, who was a middle school music teacher, used to explain colors to me in terms of the harmonics of different instruments: the "golden" sound of the clarinets, the "crimson" of the flutes, the "maroon" of the cellos. All through school my art teachers told me how colors convey emotion. Monet, Renoir, van Gogh, Cézanne — each had his special palette. Literature too is filled with color analogues — Walt Whitman's greens, Conrad's blues, Hemingway's earth tones, the moody ochers in the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. And of course, I know colors from everyday speech: "He's a yellow belly." "She's green with envy." "He makes me see red." "Tonight I'm feeling blue."

  Since there's no privacy in the loft, David suggests we adjourn to a café. He chooses one right on South Park, where the décor consists of innards of old computers and discarded keyboards embedded in the walls.

  As soon as we sit down, I cut short the small talk.

  "Did Maddy ever mention getting a cell phone?"

  He nods. "She wanted one. I ordered it for her. She was killed before it arrived."

  "You drove her over to the Mission and picked her up there, didn't you?"

  He stares, stunned.

  "Come on, David. The house with the green door on Cypress Alley. You know the one."

  "Why are you asking me this?" he demands.

  "How many times did you take her there?"

  "You're not answering my question."

  "Hey! You're not answering mine."

  He turns away, can't look me in the eye. Though angry, I speak as gently as I can.

  "You knew she was going there. You even knew the house. You knew she was taking pictures. Why did you lie about it, David? Tell me. Why? "

  "You came all the way over here to corner me?"

  "What should I have done? Taken the matter to Kremezi?"

  "I feel like I'm being interrogated."

  "Good! That's how I want you to feel."

  "For God's sake, Kay! I didn't do anything."

  "I didn't say you did. But you didn't share with me. And worse, you lied."

  "Okay!" He turns back to me. "You're right, I didn't share. I drove her over to the Mission a couple of times."

  "How many?" I ask sharply.

  "I don't remember. Maybe six or seven."

  "That's more than 'a couple'."

  "Where do you get the right to question me like this?"

  Embarrassed at being caught in a lie, he's doing the human thing, lashing back. Fine, I think. In fact, I decide, I'll pour on a little more contempt since anger seems to open him up.

  "You're fudging your answers," I tell him. "Why not give it to me straight?"

  "I want to. I'm trying..."

  "I want the story. Nothing more or less."

  "There isn't any story, Kay. She asked me to drive her a few times. I did. She didn't tell me why and I didn't ask. Twice too she had me pick her up."

  "How did she get home the other times."

  "Probably took taxis. I don't know."

  "What about the night she was killed?"

  "What about it?"

  "You drove her there that night, didn't you?"

  Again he looks away. For me that's as good as a confession.

  "Look, it's all right," I tell him, softening my tone. "You're not responsible for the hit-and-run. If you hadn't driven her, she'd have gone some other way. She was a strong woman, David — I think the strongest I ever knew. When she made up her mind to do something, she did it. She had tremendous will. No one, especially you, her loyal stepson, could stand in her way."

  There're tears in his eyes now. I take his hand. "Is this why you lied — because you felt guilty? Afraid people would blame you?" He nods. "No one's going to blame you, David. Least of all me. You'd do anything for her. She knew that. That doesn't make you responsible. You're not responsible. You must believe that or you'll go on feeling bad."

  He's gazing at me now. "I'm sorry I lied to you. I feel like such an asshole."

  I squeeze his hand. "I want you to tell me everything you know. Things she said, even if they seem unimportant. Her attitude in the car. Was she eager? Determined? Nervous? And on the way home the two times you picked her up, how did she act then? There were just two times, weren't there, David? Or could there have been more?"

  Asking these questions I've no particular goal in mind other than to accumulate information. But by being specific, I hope to get him talking. And, it seems, having prevaricated before, he's eager now to tell me all he knows.

  * * * * *

  Maddy was brooding — that much he knew. She was generally a cheerful sort... though, like anyone, she had her moods, what David's father used to call her "brown studies." Still, he had a definite sense the last few months that she was brooding over something, turning it over and over in her mind.

  She seemed distracted in a way he hadn't observed before. At first he thought it was her illness. She'd gone to a cardiologist the preceding autumn, learned she had coronary artery disease and wasn't a good candidate for bypass surgery. But even if surgery were possible, he doubted she'd have allowed it. She had too great a need to keep control.

  But then he realized it wasn't ill health distracting her, it was something else. He knew better than to ask; experience had taught him that the initiative for such a conversation had to come from her.

  However, she did give a reason for her requests for lifts. She said she'd recently encountered an old friend named Bea whom she ha
dn't seen in years. They'd run into one another by chance, renewed their friendship. Would David mind driving her to the Mission where Bea lived, and where she and Bea had agreed to meet for dinner?

  He was delighted. He'd do anything to help her, all the more because it was so rare for her to ask for help. The first time, she had him drop her off at Mission and Twenty-fourth in front of a bookstore, where, she told him, she and Bea would meet, go to a restaurant, possibly take in a movie; then Bea would send her home in a cab.

  David didn't question any of this; no reason that he should. He was so thrilled she was interested in going out it didn't occur to him to question her story.

  The first time he dropped her, he suggested he wait so he could meet Bea too. She told him not to bother, Bea was shy and often late; she'd amuse herself browsing in the store until her friend arrived.

  This was the routine: he'd pick her up early in the evening, drop her in front of the bookstore. After the first time, she told him it was easier to spend the night at Bea's, so he needn't call later to make sure she'd gotten home.

  Only slowly did it dawn on him that these evenings allegedly spent with Bea might be a subterfuge for something else. There was an eager, almost voracious quality about her in the car which reminded him of the way she used to act years before when preparing to go out on a shoot. It was the same hunger, he felt, the same desire to capture and bring home coveted images. He remembered it well from his youth — the glint in her eyes, the glow in her cheeks, the way she actually seemed to vibrate with awareness. And though she was a lot older now and also ill, he felt the same vibrancy in her as she sat beside him in the car.

  His father, Harry Yamada, had once made a reference to that quality: "With a camera in your hands, Maddy, you remind me of a hunter with a gun." Maddy had immediately corrected him: "How 'bout a huntress with a bow and arrow? Maddy the Huntress." Then she'd laughed.

  There were only two times that she asked David to retrieve her. On both occasions they made the arrangement in advance. Would he be so kind as to pick her up in front of the bookstore at eight a.m.? She didn't give an explanation, didn't bother to mention the ever elusive Bea, whose existence, by this time, he'd begun seriously to doubt. She just made her request, then thanked him for helping her out.

  Both times there was a noticeable change in her, a mood quite different from the eager huntress quality she'd discharged when he dropped her off. Both times she was monosyllable, appeared depleted and fatigued. This too he recognized, for this was the way she'd acted in the early days on those rare occasions when she returned from a shoot without the images she had sought.

  He understood then that she was shooting film. And though he was worried for her, mystified by her secretiveness and her bogus explanations, he was also gratified. Though evidently she was not bringing home the goods, the chase itself, it seemed to him, was giving renewed purpose to her life.

  Never, during any of these forays, did he see a camera or roll of film in her hands. All drop-offs and pickups were made at the bookstore on Mission. He knew nothing of Cypress Alley or of a house with a green door.

  What he did know was that whatever had been troubling her was now being worked out in some private way. His only concern was that she be happy and fulfilled. In this latest quest there was, he felt, the possibility of fulfillment. In the face of that, her secrecy, the nature and details of the project, the issue of Bea, all seemed beside the point.

  * * * * *

  David and I leave the cybercafé to take a turn around South Park. Though the light is brilliant, forcing me to shield my eyes, I still enjoy the stroll. The elongated oval of the park is elegant. Trees are in full bloom. Half-nude sunbathers sprawl upon the grass. Young toilers from Multimedia Gulch sit on benches working at laptops propped open on their knees.

  David gestures expansively to indicate the neighborhood.

  "You know what they say about this place, Kay? That it's like Florence at the start of the Renaissance, a community of artists bursting with creativity, each striving to outdo the next."

  He may have a point. I certainly sense the energy. The differences, of course, are that now the medium is electronic rather than paint or fresco or marble, and that while the Florentine artists strove for fame and glory, contemporary cyberartists hope to make their fortunes by taking their software companies public, then cashing out.

  I have specific questions for David. The first is about what Maddy called "the gun."

  He shakes his head. "She really hated guns," he says, "which is why she corrected my father. A huntress with a bow and arrow was fine, a hunter with a gun was not."

  David's right about her dislike of guns. A lot of Maddy's work can be interpreted as antigun: her war photos of soldiers, weapons in hand; her numerous shots of angry cops with guns. It's as if, in these pictures, she's saying that guns corrupt, bringing misery and grief to those who hold them and use them.

  "I still don't understand why you lied," I tell him. "You could have said she had a friend named Bea and was probably visiting her."

  "I lied because I knew she'd lied to me."

  "Do you think she was killed deliberately?"

  "You mean like by a mugger who panicked after he ran her down?"

  "No, I mean singled out, killed because of what she was trying to shoot."

  He shakes his head. "I can't imagine it. I don't believe she had an enemy in the world. And always, when she took pictures, she was totally up-front."

  "You went through her papers. Did you find anything that might relate to this?"

  He hesitates a moment. "There were some letters from a woman way back when. She signed herself Bea."

  "So Bea did exist. But didn't you just say you thought she didn't?"

  "What I meant was I didn't believe Maddy was seeing her, or that this Bea, whoever she is, had anything to do with her visits to the Mission."

  Maybe David's right, maybe Maddy just pulled an old name out of her memory, then spun a fib around it.

  "A final question — did she tell you why she wanted a cell phone?"

  "She said so she could call me to come and fetch her." David's eyes started tearing up. "It came the day after she was killed. I still have it. The number's active — I had to sign her up for a year. It's no use to me, I already have one. I suppose, since she died, I could turn it back into the company, make some kind of a deal. But for some reason, I don't know why, I just don't have the heart."

  Maybe, I think, he's hoping it will ring, and she'll be at the other end.

  "Transfer it to me. I'll reimburse you and take over the contract. What d'you say?"

  "Gee, Kay." He nods. "I think that'd be great."

  There's still something wrong with his tale, I think, as we walk back to Kaleidoscopics, something false in his offered reason for lying about Maddy's forays to Kremezi and to me. But though I'm not convinced he's told all he knows, I'm certain I won't get more out of him today.

  Back in the loft, he hands over Maddy's cell phone, shows me how to use it. To test it I call Joel, who picks up on the first ring. He tells me he's in San Pablo checking on an oil spill. I give him my new number.

  "Now you're ready for the twenty-first century," he says.

  "What I'm ready for," I tell him, "is to take urgent calls from you in the middle of the night."

  It's time to go. David hugs me. "Thanks for understanding."

  As I head for the door, Joe, the house iguana, scampers across my path. The pretty Asian girl at the desk, engrossed in her video game, doesn't look up as I depart.

  * * * * *

  It's only in the elevator, on my way back down to the street, that I realize how weird our conversation was. At the start, David wanted to know why I was asking him questions and how I knew he'd chauffeured Maddy to the Mission. But once I started pressing him, he didn't ask again.

  Why not? Wasn't he curious?

  David, I decide, played some role in the implicate order of Maddy's final days, a role I've y
et to comprehend.

  5

  My new regimen: spend nights in the attic room on Cypress Street

  ; taxi back to Russian Hill at dawn; sleep until two p.m.; eat breakfast; attend four p.m. aikido class; return home; prepare and eat dinner... then take the bus back to Cypress, where, again, I spend the night.

  It's a weird existence, and I think the weirdest part is that after six nights, I've yet to see a single thing in the apartment across the alley — not a person, a movement, a flash of light.

  * * * * *

  Dad calls, says his old partner, Rusty Quinn, is with him at the bakery.

  "We got goodies for you, darlin'. Come on up. Rusty went all out for you, as you'll see."

  I take a bus up to the Richmond, find Dad and Rusty lounging around Dad's office telling old-cop war stories. They look relaxed.

  Dad adores Rusty. The feeling I think is mutual. They worked the Chinatown bunko squad together for five years, bonding closely as two Irish guys would do in such a situation. Over those years Dad learned a smattering of Cantonese; Rusty learned to speak it well from his numerous Chinese girlfriends. Now he's married to a pretty Chinese girl, Soo-Lin, former nightclub singer and exotic dancer, and they have three gorgeous kids.

  After Dad hugs me, Rusty hugs me too. He's a short stocky guy, almost squat, with blocky football player's shoulders. His Irish eyes dance with merriment as he appraises me. The strong cologne he wears reminds me of my mother's funeral: I recall smelling it on him when he hugged me that damp and sorrowful day.

  Rusty, due to retire from S.F.P.D. this summer, is getting involved, he tells me, in an import-export venture. "You know, mainland bric-a-brac," he says. "It's mostly junk, but I love it. So I figure other folks'll love it too."

  "Well," I ask him, after the hugging and exclamations over what a fine woman I've grown up to be, "what've you got for me, Rusty?"

  He smiles. "Always the bottom line, eh, Kay?"