Viet Cong regulars would scramble over the barbed wire of American encampments by using the corpses of their dead buddies hung up in the wire as miniature bridges. The barbed wire had been manufactured in Philadelphia; the dog soldiers were constantly admonished not to waste it. All it took to defeat this feeble shield was one dead Cong. It seemed like such a monumental waste, in both directions.
Kristen’s spine stretched, then cracked apart like the slatting of an orange crate as a motorcycle boot stomped into the small of her back. Her breath whooshed out as though she were deflating.
Gas from a balloon, she thought. My life hissing out. Then came the waterfall of arms and legs and weighty bodies, the crunch point of herd chaos.
Maybe if I yelled fire—
“Your mom’s always hollering fire,” He had said to Kristen following the divorce. He shrugged.
“The girl who cried wolf,” Kristen had said. “The original. I think she just feels deprived of her flaming youth—y’know, the sowing of wild oats, all that great crap she thought she was supposed to have done before twenty-five? You guys just… I dunno…used each other up. Time to move on.” She had shrugged, groping for clarity. During the entire acrimonious split-up, everyone had done a great deal of very important shrugging.
“We outgrew each other in different directions.” He had stuffed his hands into his topcoat pockets.
“Let’s see if we can scare up some lunch.”
Kristen paced him, linking arms. She wore bright red woolen mittens. “Don’t want to talk about it, huh?” Her words had puffed out into the December air in chilly white clouds.
“Daughters are supposed to look like assholes when they learn from their mistakes in life. Not daddies. Daddies should know better.”
“Christ, don’t be so sensitive.” Then she had pounced on the straight line: “You’re my favorite asshole, Dad.”
He had made a face at her choice of words. Limousines whispered past them in an endless, taxpayer-funded procession. There were more limousines in this tiny city than at the Academy Awards.
Kristen kept wearing her mischievous grin, working to distract his mind and counter his glum mood. She could be frighteningly wise and manipulative—traits of her mother’s—but she lacked Cory’s meanness of spirit.
He forced a wan smile. “Lunch, huh.” He was staring at the Capitol dome in the hazy distance.
“Yep. We can venture forth into the great primordial stone swamp.”
“Interesting return address.”
She puckered up her face. “Better than writing Washington, D.C., on your letters. Like you live in a city that’s gay or something.”
“Whoa.” He was mocking her now. “You’re not supposed to be conversant in that stuff, yet.”
“Next you’ll tell me I’m too young for a gigolo.”
Teasing each other, they strolled on, blending with the cold. Eventually they scared up some seafood. Nine weeks later, Cory, Kristen’s mother, died of a barbiturate overdose. The whole time she was going down, down, she had lain in a hotel room bed, staring at her reflection in the desk mirror. She had left a note that concluded DIE AND ROT IN HELL YOU FUCKER THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT.
Shriek of feedback. A kid with a magenta Mohawk and a torn green leather coat achieves the stage and manages to grab an unmanned mike stand. He catches a shock from the coaxial connector and springs back. The stand tips over and THUNKS on the stage. Amplified feedback loud enough to shatter teeth reverberates from the back wall of the arena.
Bloodied now, Kristen attempts to turn her head to stare up through the assaulting chaos of bodies. Her double string of crystal beads, her dad’s most recent Christmas gift, is cinched tight, cutting off her wind, strangling her. Another stomping foot crunches into the hollow of her neck, at the place where her ear and neck blend delicately together. The force pushes her through the remnants of the barricade. She sees sparks and tastes floor dirt. There is no sound beyond a medium-pitch roar—perhaps her own rushing, oxygen-starved blood, still pumping.
A final thought: Is this what dying feels li—
Kristen had left him a note, too.
DADDY—OFF TO SEE “WHIP HAND” (OBSCENE, NO?) WITH MARTA AND SUKI. PROMISE TO BE BACK BY NEXT THURSDAY (HA HA). LOVE YOU. K.
His life, summed up by two scraps of paper.
His mind almost craved the pain of playing it all back again. It was important not to forget a single detail. Seeing Kristen on the brink of her death, over and over, was better than never seeing her at all. The dream never changed. Things were shaded differently sometimes, but she always died. Twelve other concertgoers had died with her; the goddamned disaster had even made the cover of Time. He wondered whether a less notorious group than Whip Hand would have rated a cover spread. The band’s lead singer, the iron-pumping blond with the Grecian profile, had made the Wall Street Journal a year previously, when Lloyds of London decided to cover him for $1.5 million in paternity suit insurance.
The hospital-sterile sheets were gummed with sleep sweat; the man groped them in the wide, retarded motions of deep yet troubled slumber. His breath began to hitch. He was almost gasping.
What he needed was the ability to change the dream, to alter the configuration of the past.
The rock god strips away his golden vest like a carapace. The new vantage point is distant, higher, providing a godlike overview of the arena. At this distance the vest resembles a sheath of a thousand gold doubloons, polished, metallic. From here, Kristen cannot be seen. He can see the rock show, but not his daughter.
He sees his feet, realizes he is standing in a spotlighting nest or on a girder high above the broad crescent of stage. Too far away to grab the singer, or save his daughter, or prevent the whole sequence from happening one more time.
I’m packed, he thinks.
He feels weight in his hands. Looks down, resenting the necessity to tear his vision from the imminent tableau below. He would miss the horror of Kristen’s death. He saw in his grasp an abbreviated, foul-looking machine gun, a nasty, ventilated thing reminiscent of a Russian AK-47, with a curved banana clip.
And he thinks, Thirty slugs should take the bastard down all right.
He sockets the weapon into the hollow of his shoulder. His index finger brushes the trigger. Squeeze, don’t snap. Be ready for the gun’s tendency to kick toward the sky.
Write a jerk-off wet-dream child-molesting love ditty about this, you overpaid baboon…
He cut loose.
(Don’t fritter away your ammo. When you see the lead goon drop, chop the reinforcements. Fire selectively to generate panic and confusion. Make sure you’ve maximized disorder by the time you have to reload —you may need the extra two seconds.)
He was holding a longer, lighter weapon now. A rifle with a powerful Leupold stretch target scope. Better. His marksmanship medals were no joke.
Light flooded in, spoiling his aim, startling him, making him wince.
Blood dribbled from the rock god’s head. Spatters of it despoiled his gray three-piece suit. His palms were skinned from his abrupt tumble down the rough-cast stone of the courthouse steps. He is surrounded by bodyguards. Just like Reagan. Guns materialize from nowhere.
The gentle gush of unconscious orgasm warmed the sleeping man’s belly.
He is standing on the courthouse steps below the rock god and his throng. He drops the pistol he has brandished. It is plastic. It cracks apart on the stone. He smiles a bitter smile of loss. Then they swarm over him.
Lucas Ellington huffed mightily and woke up.
“Do you want the candle?”
“Yes,” he said. The candle was a bit of mumbo-jumbo he had requested. It helped him focus his thoughts.
“The same dream again?”
“I did it again, Sara. More explicit. Jumbled details. Scary, like a roller coaster. Almost a helplessness—as though I had no say, no control.”
He stared at the wavering flame of the strawberry-scented votive candle. Near the desk
, Sara fired up one of her filtered Salem l00s. He could smell it. The leather of the Stressless recliner crunched as he shifted around, eyes on the candle flame, riffling mental indexes to recapture the salient emotional high points of last night’s hellish internal videotape replay.
“I’m afraid that while I was wielding all that phallic firepower in the dream, I came all over myself.” He noted this unselfconsciously. Sara understood.
He heard her get out of her chair while he talked. Now she was behind him somewhere, near the office door. He heard her hose swish together as she moved. She was adorned with some light, spicy scent that was easy to pick out in the dark. She had a unique insight into his clockwork, he thought. Or, at least, she was convinced of that.
Clink. Her coffee mug on the glass desktop. The dark, the candle, seemed to open up all of his senses. “You ready for tomorrow?”
“Ready for tomorrow…” He sounded almost wistful. “Yes. It’s time I got back in the world. That was what we used to say. The place where the bad stuff was going down was not the world. And I think I can successfully leave the bad stuff here.” It was his speech from yesterday and the day before.
“The nightmares?” She was interested. In more ways than one.
“Those, too, Sara. I really think I can do it. And you’ve done all you can for me here. It’s time for me to prove myself to the world.” He sensed she was waiting, so he added, “Besides, I can’t invite my shrink to dinner while I’m still a patient, can I?” It was a good diversionary wedge.
“Mmm-hm.”
On her desk was a small stand-up calendar, courtesy of Mission Street Flowers. The next Monday was circled in green felt tip. That was the day Lucas had decided to become normal again.
“This’ll be the acid test of your ministrations,” he opined lightly. “Technically, how am I?”
“Good. Not self-destructive. Not suicidal. The extreme fits of depression are no more. There’s just the nightmares to worry about. This place focuses your attention on them. I think you just need to get back to work.” In a more conversational, personal tone, she said, “I’ll have you know I’ve pored over your files for hours coming up with this brilliant summary, sir. And I think this place has done all it can for you.”
“And I’ve managed to develop a good healthy lech for my doctor, as well.”
Lucas did not know how important a factor that had been in his progress. His death wish, the product of the suicide of his wife and the death of his daughter, had finally been elbowed aside by something more life embracing.
Sara had felt the attraction, too, a reciprocal force that manifested itself in a thousand little flirtatious gestures. One reason she wanted to get Lucas back in the world had nothing to do with his files and charts.
“Like, I had this other dream. I was getting gobbled up by a big green iguana with a name tag that read ‘Sara’ on it. Mean anything, doctor?”
“Ho, ho, ho,” she said, deadpan. “That does not deserve the satisfaction of a retort.”
“Is it time for lunch yet?” It seemed Sara had been satisfied. Or adroitly misdirected. It was all the same to him.
Papers rustled at the desk. The orange coal of the cigarette swooped from mouth level to light on the edge of a clunky geode ashtray.
“We’re done. You’ve given me everything you can on the dream. It fits with all the preceding.”
Lucas smiled to himself in the dark. It was time to stop dreaming. And start doing, at last.
2
The North Hollywood offices of Kroeger Concepts, Limited, had maintained an unchanged facade since the completion of its construction, some seven years past. On Vineland Avenue, a stone’s lob from the Black Tower of Universal Studios, Kroeger had flourished with Lucas Ellington on their squad. Without him for the past year, it had fared comfortably enough. Or that was how it seemed. The facade leaked no secrets.
Lucas stood on the curb of the Vineland crosswalk through four changes of the traffic light, watching the building. Nothing had altered unduly here. At least nothing obvious enough to hurt him.
Kroeger Concepts had been born in 1970 as Burton Kroeger’s ticket to the movie industry. Burt was a film buff, mesmerized, like many, by the idea of actually dipping into the filmmaking mainstream. Then he discovered the truth about his fourth favorite thing (after sex, spicy food, and sports cars). By daylight, the industry was a fetid cesspool of graft and lowball deals, a sausage factory run by soulless accountants and bankers who chewed and spit out creative talent like old chaw. In Burt’s deathless, impassioned words, the business “spent all its time whoring with starlets and snorting dream dust and fellating the unions and bending over for the Mafia.” Upon acknowledging this Great Truth, Burt had opted to make the giants approach him, rather than go begging to people he despised. He founded his own company, a publicity and promotional outfit, and things were bone lean through 1974, when two fundamental changes were implemented. The company got mixed up with three promising movies. Burt hit the technical journals hard, with a series of creative advertisements that built on reader familiarity with the previous ad. The spots were aimed not at the public, but at the professionals. Kroeger’s ads for film stocks and new camera lenses tripled the company’s revenue in eight months. How to induce executives to seriously consider recruitment drives from other studios? How to prove that saving the imbibition Technicolor process could be made cost-effective, so current color films would not fade to red within the decade? Then the promising movies carted off a number of minor Academy Awards. All that was the first thing that happened to the company. The second thing was Lucas Ellington.
By 1978, Lucas’ drafting table served more for strategizing and less for drawing. By 1978, Kroeger Concepts commanded industry respect in the only way that counts in Hollywood—they were making money fist over pocket with high-quality, deftly targeted promotions. By 1978, Burt Kroeger was telling the studios how to go about their business, and he was happy. Disillusioned, but gruffly happy. Lucas remembered a sweltering August afternoon when he and Burt had bellowed laughter at a trade article detailing Kroeger’s “meteoric rise” to prosperity.
“I thought meteors fell down, not up.” Burt clinked his glass with Lucas’. Perrier-Jouët.
“Yeah, and they flame out on the way.” Kroeger had founded its reputation on beheading clichés like “meteoric rise.”
Lucas took time off to function as an independent contractor, redesigning Kroeger’s offices for renovation. On a boulevard of eyesores, the new Kroeger building caught the eye the way a snappy commercial is intended to. It rose from a man-made hummock of real greenery that was landscaped to blend with the planes of the structure. The reflecting wall of windows was either ahead of its time or still a mistake. The structure was flat and efficient without being a cracker box. The rectangular, high-tech, soft-lit sign had anticipated the new billboard ordinances. Kroeger’s self-proclamation did not despoil what remained of the city’s skyline. It was mounted on a sandstone planter base next to the redbrick front walk and was modest enough to hint quietly at the company’s true level of success. It prompted a tiny pang in Lucas now.
The receptionist’s switchboard rig was new, too, and no larger than an electric typewriter had been in the olden days. The office decor had been logically reconsidered. In the beginning it had been a riot of paneling and hanging plants. There seemed to be an unspoken office pact around Hollywood that required the maintenance of a lush indoor jungle in every building. Maybe it was to counteract the smog level in the valley. The jungle wearied Burt quickly. It too readily reminded him of the jungle of paperwork cluttering up his office. In sober tones the employees later recited as a sort of company punch line, Burt bustled into the foyer one afternoon and made his pronouncement.
“The Black Lagoon has got to go.”
Today there were still decorative plants to be seen. But each one drew the eye to it. They were more individualized. Burt’s instinct for arrangement and subtle dramatics had prevailed. No
w, the reception area left on visitors the impression that here was a company lacking even an ounce of fat.
Burt himself left a similar impression. He was a compact, honed man topping off at a neat five feet eight.
His eyes were hawk-like and direct, oiled ball bearings of intensity, a soft gray that accommodated a variety of moods and complemented the iron-colored thundercloud of fluffy hair that seemed to float around, rather than issue from, his head. Around the office, his voice always preceded his entrance. It was his advance guard now, booming from the corridor leading back to the office maze. Lucas knew he did not need to be announced.
“Emma, is he here yet? It’s ten after, and the son of a bitch hasn’t—”
“The son of a bitch beat you to the punch, Burt,” called Lucas, feeling light-headed and happy.
Burton Kroeger burst into the reception area just behind his own pleased blurt of laughter. He was wearing a big, stupid country grin, and his eyes were alight with welcome. “Lucas! Goddamn my eyeballs, son, it’s great to see you!”
Lucas executed a modest bow. He couldn’t chase the smile off his own face.
“Emma, Lucas and I are out to lunch for the rest of the day.” He clapped his hands around Lucas’s shoulders; big, facile hands that could smother a grapefruit. “This is one of them extravagant business lunches you’ve heard so much about, Lucas.” He was genuinely charged up by getting his cohort back.
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