“You’ve lost me,” said Cindy.
“I’m going to start my own witness relocation program.”
“Help us out here, John.”
“It’s easy. I don’t want to be me anymore. I think I’ve gone as far as I can go in this body.”
“In this body?”
“Yeah.”
“Who gets your money?” Cindy asked.
“Probably the IRS.”
“Who gets your residuals and your copyrights?”
“I don’t know. Crack babies. Jerry’s Kids. Something like that. That’s a detail. Think of the bigger picture here.”
He would be gone. Completely. He would no longer be John Lodge Johnson. He would be—nobody—he would have nothing: no money, no name, no history, no future, no hungers—he would merely be this sensate creature walking the country’s burning freeways, its yawning malls, its gashes of wilderness, its lightning storms, its factories and its dead spaces. “Ladies, my atom’s stopped spinning. The twitching barnyard animal lies silent in a heap. The machine has stopped.”
Cindy and Krista made ooh . . . noises.
Two drinks later, John, Cindy and Krista were going through John’s house, with Cindy pushing a SmarteCarte and Krista holding a clipboard on which she recorded each item John tossed into a box on the cart, the contents bound for the local Goodwill drop box.
“DKNY blazer. Unworn. Charcoal.”
“Check.”
“Prada slacks, cocoa. Unworn.”
“Check.”
“Where’d you get a SmarteCarte?” Cindy asked.
“Stole it from SeaTac Airport up in Seattle. I’ve spent so much on those goddamn things over the years—I put the SmarteCarte children through beauty school. They owed me one after all this time.”
Cindy said, “You seem to put a lot of people through a lot of things, John.”
The doorbell rang—it was his business partner, Ivan McClintock, with his wife, Nylla. John buzzed them in and called from upstairs, Ivan and Nylla climbed a series of chilly aluminum slabs that led up to the bedrooms. “John-O?”
“We’re in here, Ive.”
The couple rounded a corner. “Guys, this is Krista and Cindy. Gals, this is Ivan and Nylla. Ivan and I have been making movies ever since we both had acne.”
The group exchanged hellos, and the work of emptying John’s wardrobes of conspicuously expensive clothing continued.
“See anything you want, Ivan?” John asked, holding out a nest of ties.
Ivan was doing his best to keep his cool.
“Our styles are opposite, John-O. That’s why we make a good team.”
Nylla, pregnant and wrapped in one of her trademark silk shawls, asked, “John, Melody called Ivan at work and then me at home. She said you were making plans to—.” She paused. “Erase yourself or something. Something radical.”
John was silent.
Nylla persevered. “So what’s the score?”
A TV-sized Tiffany box full of enema tools clattered down from an upper shelf, bouncing on the sisal flooring and rattling onto the white limestone hallway. “Why don’t we go downstairs?” John said to Ivan and Nylla.
From the landing, he shouted back, “Remember gals-everything goes.”
They went into the living room. It was night outside. Ivan and Nylla drank in the view. “I never get tired of looking at the city, John-O. It’s like we’re flying over it, about to land at LAX.”
“It’s like upside-down stars,” said Nylla.
John handed Ivan a scotch with branch water. Nylla took cranberry juice.
Ivan said, “Melody phoned. She told me about your name change application.”
“She narcked?”
Nylla said, “Oh, don’t be so corny. Of course she did. She’s worried sick about you. We all are.”
Ivan burst in. “Fortunately between me and Mel we have enough contacts at City Hall to retrieve your forms, no harm done.”
“John,” said Nylla, “You were going to change your name to ‘dot’?”
“Not ‘dot’—just a simple period. When I filed my Change of Name affidavit at City Hall, they told me I had to use at least one keyboard stroke. A period is the smallest amount of ink and space a name can be.”
Ivan put his drink on a glass-block table and made I-told-you-so eyes at Nylla.
“There’s more, Ivan. I’m going to renounce my citizenship.”
“Oh, John-O, that is a lousy idea—it’s—it’s—un-American.”
“What country do you want to be a citizen of, then?” asked Nylla. The three sat themselves down on Ultrasuede couches in John’s high-tech conversation pit. John clapped his hands and the fire started.
“I don’t want to be a citizen of anywhere, Ny.”
“Can you do that?” she asked. “I mean, be a citizen of nowhere?”
“I don’t know. I’m seeing an immigration lawyer tomorrow. I’m wondering if I can get citizenship in Antarctica.”
“Antarctica?” said Ivan.
“Yeah. It’s not like it has a king or queen or president or anything. I want to give it a try.”
“I think Antarctica’s presliced into pieces from the South Pole outward,” said Nylla, “and a different country regulates each slice. So maybe not there. Maybe you can get citizenship in a country that’s so useless it’s almost the same thing as being stateless. Some country that only exists when the tide’s out.”
“Nylla,” Ivan interrupted, “you’re only feeding his bullshit idea.”
“It’s not bullshit, Ivan,” John said.
“How about Pitcairn Island?” Nylla suggested. “One square mile in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, the most remote inhabited place on earth.”
“My wife the Jeopardy champion.”
“England owns it,” said John. “I checked.”
Ivan asked listlessly, “How about one of those African countries held together with Scotch tape and Popsicle sticks?”
“I’m considering them, too.”
“John-O—if you renounce your U.S. citizenship, you’ll have no protection. With citizenship, the U.S. government can step in and help you wherever you go. And besides, you’ll always have your Social Security number no matter what else happens.”
“Not if I renounce my citizenship. I do know that.”
Ivan was sulky: “Just try renting a car with no credit card and a passport from Upper Volta.”
“It’s called Benin now,” said Nylla.
Ivan glowered her way: “Please phrase your answer in the form of a question.”
“Ivan, you’re getting distracted. You’re missing the spirit of the thing. I won’t be wanting to rent cars anymore. I’ll be completely gone.”
“You’re really pushing me with this new hobo kick, John-O. Sleeping in rain culverts and stealing fresh clothes from laundry lines is going to wear thin awful quickly.”
“Ivan, let me pitch it to you: This is the road we’re talking about—the romance of the road. Strange new friends. Adventures every ten minutes. Waking up each morning feeling like a wild animal. No crappy rules or smothering obligations.”
Ivan was appalled. “The road is over, John-O. It never even was. You’re thinking like a kid behind a Starbucks counter sneaking peeks at his Kerouac paperback and writing ‘That’s so true!’ in the margins. And if nothing else, Doris is freaked out by this totally.”
“You told my mother?”
“Of course.”
John paused. “Another drink, Ivan?”
As he looked for ice cubes in the kitchen’s two deep freezes, John considered Ivan and Nylla. He heard them talking back in the living room. They were now discussing carpeting: prices per square yard, World Book Encyclopedia–style. “I want the good type,” said Ivan, “the kind that looks like pearl barley packed together. Really smooth.”
“But if the wool’s too smooth, it looks like Orlon. It needs character. A bit of sheep dung mixed into it maybe.”
“We’re g
oing to have Beverly Hills’s first Hanta virus carpet?”
“Sheep don’t get Hanta virus. Just rodents, I think. And raccoons.”
John listened in and ached to have somebody to discuss rugs and raccoons with. He felt intact but worthless, like a chocolate rabbit selling for 75 percent off the month after Easter. But it went beyond that, too. He felt contaminated, that his blood stream carried microscopic loneliness viruses, like miniscule fish hooks, just waiting to inflect somebody dumb enough to attempt intimacy with him.
His mind wandered. There had to be hope—and there was. He remembered the woman in his hospital vision had made him feel that somewhere on the alien Death Star of his heart lay a small, vulnerable entry point into which he could deploy a rocket, blow himself up and rebuild from the shards that remained.
In the second freezer John found the ice cubes clumped frozen together inside a sky blue plastic bag. He opened up the bag and tried to pry a few cubes away from the lump. Daydreaming, he wondered if he could ever be unselfconsciously chatty and loose with someone. If Ivan=Nylla, then John=blank. Maybe his mother Doris’s years of prayers had begun to inch their way onto God’s “To Do” list: Dear Lord, please take care of the late Piers Wyatt Johnson, a king among men. Also bless the pesticide industry, our boys in Vietnam, (still, even at the century’s end) and please find a nice young wife for John, preferably one who doesn’t mind the smell of cigarette smoke, which is so hard to find in California. . . .
He heard Krista and Cindy come downstairs and begin chatting with Ivan, then returned his attention to the ice. He lifted up the bag of fused ice cubes and dropped it, shattering its contents into individual cubes. The noise was fearsome, and Ivan called from the living room asking if John was okay, and John called back, “Fine—couldn’t be better,” and it was easy to take as many cubes as he liked.
Chapter Seven
Standing alone on the sidewalk, John watched the police car drive Susan away. He was as still as a statue as the sun went down behind the hill. Had he left a car at the restaurant? No, Nylla had dropped him off there. So he decided to walk the rest of the way home. Home was temporary digs in Ivan’s guesthouse, the house he grew up in and in which his mother still lived. John had been staying there since his return two months earlier from his disastrous experiment in hobodom.
He headed along Sunset Boulevard and was oblivious to the stares of passing drivers, many of whom punctuated their cell phone calls with such comments as:
“Good Lord—it’s John Johnson—walking—yes, that’s right, with his feet—on Sunset!”
“Yow, he looks like crap—what were the numbers on Mega Force in the end?—yeee—that much?”
“Maybe he’s doing his walking thing again—I mean, he looks like a Mexican gonna sell you a bag of oranges at a streetlight for a dollar.”
“Yes, I’m absolutely sure it’s him—he looks really thin, or should I say, not sort of bloated like he was before detox number 239.”
“Wasn’t he in the hospital?—pneumonia? AIDS?—no, if it was, we’d all know.”
“Maybe he’s gone and found God again. Whatta case.”
Ivan spotted John from his Audi and pulled over just past the corner at Gretna Green. “John-O, what the fuck are you doing? Hop in.”
“Ivan, what do you know about Susan Colgate?”
“Susan Colgate? TV—rock and roll. Get in the car and I’ll tell you. Jesus, you smell like the carpet in a Gold’s Gym changing room.”
“I walked here from the Ivy.”
“The Ivy? That’s, like, a jeezly number of miles away.”
“Ivan, what do you know about Susan Colgate?”
Ivan cut the car back into traffic. “Later. Later. Did you see the weekend numbers from France and Germany? Whoosh!”
“Ivan—” John was firm: “Susan Colgate.”
“Everybody in town is going to think you’ve gone crazy again. Walking. On Sunset, no less. Shit.”
“I don’t care, Ivan. Susan.”
“What—you want to, uh, cast her in a movie?”
“Maybe.”
“You’re gonna make her a star?” They both laughed. Ivan pulled the Audi into his driveway, entered a code into his dash panel, releasing the gate. They drove through, depositing the car by the front steps instead of the garage. They got out. Ivan stopped and grabbed John’s arm before he walked down the hill to the guesthouse. “God, whatta gorgeous day, John-O. Look at the light coming through that mimosa tree. It looks backlit, like it’s on Demerol.”
Both men sat down on the front entryway’s limestone pavers and watched the late afternoon’s solar aureoles around the plants and birds and insects of Ivan’s garden.
“Where were you coming from just now?” John asked.
“Temple, temple, temple.”
“Three times a week still?”
“Sí.” The sprinklers kicked in by a dahlia patch. Ivan said, “So you’re in love, then, John-O? With Susan Colgate—ha!”
“I’m in . . . need. Desperate need.”
“Where’d you meet?”
“The Ivy. Today.”
“Lunch? Today?” He whistled. “That’s a quick turnaround.”
“A half-year ago in Cedars when I, you know—she’s who I saw when I died.”
Ivan’s body locked upon hearing this. “Now, John-O—I thought you were over that stuff.”
“Over what, Ivan? I have no regrets, but what I did only took me so far. But Susan—she’s it. She’s gotta be the one.”
Ivan was both worried that John was relapsing back into his despondency of the months before, and slightly excited at the idea his friend might be making an emotional connection, something he’d never done before. “What do you know about her, John-O?”
“That’s what I’ve been asking you.”
“I think her agent’s Adam Norwitz. She was with Larry Mortimer until a few years ago. An ugly split. She stalked him. And I don’t think she’s worked since the grunge era. Say, 1994. A slasher flick? No, wait, it’s some new one—Dynamite Bay? I’m glad for you, but I’ve gotta say up front, John-O, she’s real C-list. She can’t act her way out of a paper bag.”
“Ivan, you ought to know not to slag somebody’s loved one to his face.”
“Loved one?”
“Word games.”
They heard steps behind them—Nylla, holding a silent baby. “Having our funzies out here on the front steps, are we, boys?”
“Hey, Nylla.”
“John, hello. Will you be eating with us in the big house tonight?”
“Nah. Thanks. I’m having Metrecal and celery with Ma down at the house.”
“Congratulations on the French numbers over the weekend. Ooh-lah-lah.”
“We did okay over there?”
“John-O, I tried to tell you back when I picked you up at Gretna Green. Hey Nylla, guess what—John-O’s in love! Lovesy-dovesy. Susan Colgate.”
“Susan Colgate!” said Nylla. “Oh John, that’s so weird. So exciting. I used to love her in that old show of hers, Meet the Blooms.”
John’s face confirmed the truth.
“Well, I must say,” smiled Nylla, “nature works in mysterious ways to get us to propagate the species.”
“They met at Ivy today at lunch.” Ivan couldn’t contain himself.
She’s the woman I saw in my out of body experience when I was laid up in Cedars.”
The smile muscles on Nylla’s face changed like a tide, ebbing from real into phony. “Well then. Really now,” she trailed off. Ivan, sitting behind John, shot her a worried glance. “Be true to your heart. You two want to come in for a drink?”
“I’m in. You, John-O?”
“Nah. I’m going to go phone Adam Norwitz.”
“Adam—” said Nylla. “Say hello for me. He represented me for about six minutes a few years ago.”
“Hey. I was talking to his agency today,” said Ivan. “His number’s still in my cell’s memory.” He pulled out his ce
ll phone and punched some digits. Two seconds later he said, “Adam Norwitz, please. John Johnson calling.” He handed the phone to John. “Here.”
John gave Ivan the hairy eyebrow and took the phone. “Hello, Adam?”
Adam was on: “John Johnson. Good to meet you today. How can I help you? And congrats again on Mega Force.”
“Yeah, yeah, thanks. Hey, Adam, I need a home number from you. Susan’s.”
Adam hemmed and hawed as though his morals were in serious conflict.
“Adam, don’t give me that discretion routine. I need Susan’s phone number.”
“I’m not sure if I can . . .”
“It’s personal, not business. Call and ask her if it’s okay if you want. And I’ll owe you a big favor.”
“Of course I’ll give you her number. But it’s not”—he rustled some papers into the phone’s receiver—“right here right now. Give me five minutes, okay?”
“Five minutes or no deal.”
They hung up. Adam immediately called Susan’s line and got her machine, where he left a message: “Susan! Swimming with the big fish now, are we? None other than your strolling companion John Johnson just phoned asking me for your number. He says it’s personal. Hmmmmm. Well, just so you know, I’m going to phone back right now and give it to him. A protocol breach, but that’s what I’m here for. And phone me, why don’t you, and let me in on the buzz. I’m on cell all night. Bye.”
Adam called back John and gave him Susan’s number, which John wrote on the back of one of Ivan’s business cards. He hung up. Ivan and Nylla stared at him.
“Yes?” said John.
“Call her,” said Nylla.
“What, with you guys here?”
“Yes, with us guys here.”
John dialed and got Susan’s answering machine. He whispered the words “answering machine” to Ivan and Nylla. And then he left a message: “Susan, it’s John—Johnson. I hope you got home okay. Man, was it ever hot today and—oh jeez, I’m stuttering into your machine.” He paused to gather his thoughts. “Well, you know what I feel like today? It’s like this: the last little while I’ve been feeling as if—as if I’ve come back from a long trip away—and I’ve been continuing on with my life again, but it’s only today that I realized something went missing while I was gone. And I think it’s you, and I want to see you again so badly I think I’m going blind. So call me.” He left his number.
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