“Oscar season again,” sighed Ivan. “Is it March already?” They were in the back seat of a car, being driven to Century City for a morning legal meeting. Ivan was immaculately dressed and his skin had the shine of eight hours of drugless sleep. John’s face looked like a floor at the end of a cocktail party.
“What are we up for this year?” asked John.
“Don’t be facetious, John.”
John was doing lines of coke from a small oval of safety glass he stored in his attaché case. He noticed Ivan give him a glower. “So what is your point, Ivan? I’ve got to stay awake. You know lawyers hit me like animal tranquilizers.” Ivan waited.
A flatbed loaded with jumbo gold statuettes was headed off to the venue—a tourist’s dream photo. The truck paused beside them at a light. John caught Ivan eyeing the statues. “No, no, no, Ivan. I can see that ‘I wish we had an Oscar’ gleam in your eyes. Well, forget it. Oscars are for freaks.”
“You can’t honestly believe that, John.”
“Oohhhhh, look at me—I’ve got a little statue for being this year’s token Brit, or this year’s on-screen hooker with a disability. Oohhhhh, look at me—in twenty-four hours nobody’s going to remember my name. Oohhhhh, the studio can put lots of little Oscar™’s all over ads for my movie—not simply Oscars but Oscars with the little trademark ™’s up on top: Oscar™’s.” He chopped up a crystal. “Oops—excuse me, I forgot to put the ™ at the end of it. Off to Alcatraz we go.”
“John . . .” Ivan adapted his baby-sitting voice. “Go easy on that stuff. The guys we’re meeting are ball-breakers.”
“Oscars . . .” John began to mumble, not a good sign. Ivan began to brace himself for a crash-and-burn morning, and downgraded his expectations for the upcoming meeting accordingly. Ivan, like John, had been seduced by the rewards and extremes of filmmaking, but unlike John, he wanted a traditional life now. In his mind he was “officially disgusted” with his life up to that point. He was “officially through with carousing” and was now ready to begin “officially looking to settle down.” And it was at this point that he saw Nylla, at the foot of an office tower, tears trickling down her cheeks, swaddled in a printed silk scarf that fluttered over her right shoulder. Running up her neck and into her cheek was a mottled scar left by a massive jellyfish sting from off the Australian coast two years previously. Its trace had nipped her acting career in the bud. Her new agent, Adam Norwitz, had seen her jellyfish scar a month before and had finally succeeded, just minutes prior to her appearance on the sidewalk, in breaking her spirit. He convinced her that the scar would keep her out of work, “unless you want to do soft porn, in which case a scar like yours could be a definite asset.”
Ivan stared at her silk dress, patterned with gardenias, fluttering in a warm wind, and he felt sorry for her. Meanwhile, behind him, John’s sinuses and lungs clapped and glorted. Ivan watched Nylla chew her gum. She removed it from her mouth, and instead of flicking it onto the hot concrete, took a small paper from her purse, and placed the gum inside the paper, and tucked the result in her purse. It was the cleanest thing he’d ever seen anybody do.
“Look, she’s crying,” said Ivan, entranced, as though witnessing the world’s smallest rainstorm. He got out of the car.
“Ivan,” John said, “isn’t the meeting in the next tower over?” He heard Ivan ask Nylla if she was okay, and then say to her, “Can I help you out here? I’m Ivan. I’m on my way to a meeting, but I saw you here and . . .”
She said, “Oh God, I must look like an idiot.”
“No you don’t. Not at all. What’s your name?”
“I’m Nylla.”
“That’s a nice name.”
“It’s spelled N-Y-L-L-A. My father came to the States from Europe after the war. He wanted to name me after New York State because the States had been so good to him. My mother wanted me named after her mother, Bjalla. And there’s the result.”
“I’m Ivan.”
And they were married six months later.
Chapter Seventeen
Eugene Lindsay, Ford dealer of the gods, was alone in bed making a list in a small notepad:
No. 63: You can get almost any food you want at any time of the year.
No. 64: Women do everything men do and it’s not that big a deal.
No. 65: Anybody on the planet can have a crystal-clear conversation with anybody else on the planet pretty well any time they want to.
No. 66: You can comfortably and easily wake up in Sydney, Australia, and go to bed in New York.
No. 67: The universe is a trillion billion million times larger than you ever dreamed it would be.
No. 68: You pretty well never see or smell shit.
He was writing a list of things which would astound somebody living a hundred years before him. He was trying to persuade himself that he was living in a miraculous world in a miraculous time. Having taken early retirement from his job as a local TV weatherman, he’d subsequently retreated for a decade inside his mock-Tudor house in Bloomington, Indiana. He made art from household trash and watched TV. He jotted the occasional thought in his notebooks, such as the evening’s list. And in his basement he used a Xerox 5380 console copier and a CD-ROM–based computer to execute far more elaborate mail scams than he had ever dreamed of in the eighties.
His wife, Renata, had years ago moved to New Mexico, where she paid the bills burning herbs for neurotic urban refugees. She abandoned decades of starvation dieting, and had grown as big as a pile of empties on the back stoop. She wore no makeup and made a point of letting people know it. When she divorced Eugene, she had asked for nothing, which confused and frightened him more than a nasty divorce fight would have done.
No. 69: We went to the moon and to Mars a few times, and there’s really nothing there except rocks, so we quit dreaming about them.
No. 70: Thousands of diseases are quickly and easily cured with a few pills.
No. 71: Astoundingly detailed descriptions of sex acts appear on the front page of The New York Times, and nobody is ruffled by it.
No. 72: By pushing a single button, it’s possible to kill 5 million people in just one second.
Eugene looked at number 72. Something was wrong—what? He figured it out: buttons didn’t exist a hundred years ago. Or did they? What did people do back then—did they pull chains? Turn cranks? What did they have that they could turn on? Nothing. Electric lights? Eugene didn’t think so. Not back then. He made a correction:
No. 72: By pushing a single lever, it’s possible to kill five million people in just one second.
He looked at his clock—deepest night—3:58 A.M. He dropped his pen and marveled at his body, lying on the bed, still well proportioned and lean, still dumbly beautiful and betraying no evidence of inner weariness.
His bedsheets felt dry but moist, like the time he lay down on a putting green in North Carolina. Surrounding him was that month’s art project—thousands of the past decade’s emptied single-portion plastic tublets of no-fat yogurt, their insides washed squeaky clean, stuffed inside each other, forming long wavy filaments that reached to the ceiling like sea anemones. The finished piece was to go inside Renata’s old gift-wrapping room, a concept she’d stolen from Candy Spelling, Aaron Spelling’s wife—a whole room devoted to wrapping the nonstop stream of trinkets and doodads from her old gown business.
Eugene had to take his weekly bag of trash out to the curb. He looked at his clock—3:59 A.M. now. He procrastinated and added to his list:
No. 73: Bad moods have been eliminated.
No. 74: You almost never see horses.
No. 75: You can store pretty well all books ever published inside a box no larger than a coffin.
No. 76: We made the planet’s weather a little bit warmer.
Trash time. Since the episode with the crazy pageant mother back in Saint Louis, giving anything away to the trashman was cause for personal alarm. Trash night had never been the same since. To make his current bag of garbage s
eem fuller and hence more normal, he fluffed up its contents and carried the full bag, weighing no more than a cat, down to the front door. Eugene paused and tightened his robe, which bore the embroidered logo of the Milwaukee Radisson Plaza Hotel from which it was stolen during a meteorological conference. He darted out to the curb, lobbed the bag onto the concrete, then ran back to the door.
On the way back to his room he beamed with a creator’s joy at his three pillars made of Brawny paper towel shipping boxes, a trio that filled the front hallway from floor to ceiling. Take that, Andy Warhol.
Cozily back in bed, Eugene heard an unmistakable thump from downstairs. He knew the noise couldn’t be a tumbling mound of his art—he stacked his goods in stable piles, the way he’d seen them stacked in museums. Perhaps a raccoon had snuck in during his brief trash haul. Eugene reached for his gun in the bedside drawer and released the safety. Seated on the floor between the wall and his bed, he plotted his strategy.
Then came another bump from below. Confident and collected, he slipped through the Brawny towel box totems. Sliding on his buttocks, he lowered himself into the foyer, lit only by the candle power of a half moon in the clear sky. He crouched behind some of the totems and scanned the living room. Somebody or something was rooting behind a 1:4-scale Saber fighter jet made of Bumble Bee tuna and SpaghettiOs tins.
Eugene swept across the foyer like a cartoon detective. Stealthily he maneuvered to the base of the statue, its wheels resting atop a plinth built of stabilized Kraft Catalina salad-dressing boxes. He was calm. He stood up and, with kickboxing speed, lunged over to the other side of the base shouting “Freeze!,” and pointed the handgun onto what appeared to be a drifter—a wino—who yipped like a squeak toy, and cowered against the boxes. Eugene flipped on the light switch, shocking the room and flaring his retinas. “Well fuck me,” he said. “If it isn’t Miss Wyoming.”
“Put down the gun, Ken Doll.”
“Lordy! Miss Congeniality.”
“Yeah, like I always keep a speech about world peace prepared.”
“Hey—” The adrenaline was wearing off. He grew confused. “You’re supposed to be—”
“Dead?” she laughed. “Well, technically yes.”
Eugene paused and crossed his arms while studying Susan, now hoisting herself up. “Boo,” she said. “I’m not a ghost. I’m real. I promise. Nice place you have here.”
Perplexed, Eugene asked how she got in.
“I scampered in while you were on the curb. I was sleeping outside your front door.”
“You were sleeping outside my front door?”
“No. I was waiting in the soundproof booth to answer a skill-testing question.” Eugene was still digesting the scene before him and was silent. Susan wanted a reaction and added, “Gonad.”
He lit a cigarette and relaxed just a smidge. “I can see you’re a feisty one. Ten out of ten for deportment.”
“Oh, let it rest. I came here on purpose. What do you think.”
“You came here? Why here? And as I said, you’re dead. I saw the crash on TV a hundred times.”
Susan stood up and removed the scarecrow’s down jacket. “You’ve been doing weather for how many years now, Eugene—how many times are you ever right?”
“I was a good weatherman.”
“Was? I guess your station saw the inside of your house and decided to can you.” Susan was both pleased and surprised that she and Eugene so quickly fell into patter. More to the point, the sense of powerful first-crushiness initiated with “the wink” back in St. Louis was in no way diminished by the physical sight of an aged Eugene. He’d aged in the crinkly, weather-beaten manner of action heroes, sheepherders and five-star generals. His eyes remained as gemlike and clear as she’d remembered. He was also a kook and already kind of fun.
“Susan, what could you possibly have come to me here for? I’ve never even met you.”
“Where’s Renata?”
“Renata’s not here anymore.”
A good sign. Susan’s insides thrummed. “You two split?”
“Years ago. You didn’t answer my question. Why did you come here of all places? You’ve gotta know dozens of people within hours of the crash site.” He threw up his arms. “Shit. Look at me, trying to be logical with somebody who’s supposed to be a ghost, fer Chrissake.”
Susan wondered herself why she had come there. All she’d known along the way was that she was in the Midwest and that Eugene’s house seemed like the only safe place between the two coasts. She had no plan prepared for what came next. As this dawned on her, the lack of immediate response goaded Eugene.
“So let me get this straight—you thought Renata and I would give you a blanket, some Valiums and a phone line to 911? Your crash was a week ago, Miss Wyoming. Something’s not right here. If you wanted blankets and cocoa, the time limit on that expired five days ago.”
Meanwhile, all Susan knew was that since her initial crush on Eugene she’d spent her life trying to find him in some form or another, mostly through Larry, and maybe now she wanted to see what the real goods were like. “Maybe I’m not sure myself why I’m here.”
“Oh, this is nuts!” He let out a breath. “Are you okay? After the crash? No broken bones? No bruises?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re going to tell me what happened?”
“Of course. Not now. Later.”
“You hungry?”
“Thirsty.”
“Come on. I’ll get you some water.”
Susan brushed herself off and looked at Eugene’s sculptures. “All this stuff made of trash. But it’s so clean. How do you keep it all so clean?”
“It’s my art. It’s what I do. Come on. Kitchen’s this way. How’d you get here from Ohio?”
The house was warm and dry. “It’s pretty easy to get anywhere you want to in this country. All you have to do is find a truck stop, find some trucker who’s flying on amphetamines, hop in the cab, drive a while, and then start foaming about religion—that way they dump you off at the next truck stop and you don’t even have to put out.”
“I remember seeing you on that stage, you know.”
“You do?” Susan was thrilled.
“Hell, yes. The night you won, you would have even if your mother hadn’t done her little blackmail routine.”
Susan didn’t want to dwell on Marilyn. “I’m thirsty, Eugene.”
Eugene gave her some water. The kitchen ceiling’s lights wore milk carton shades, beacons of missing children, and cast a yellow light on the sink. She checked the expiry date on one of them. “April 4, 1991. That’s when you started to become Picasso?”
“Sunshine, you’re crazy as a fucking loon. And your voice. Your manner. You probably don’t even know it, but you’ve become your mother. I only met her for maybe five minutes, but baby, you’re her.”
Susan closed her eyes. She had a small puff of recognition. “Oh God—you know what, Eugene? You’re right. I actually do feel like her right now, the way she moves. Funny—this has never happened to me before. It took me a plane crash to bring out my inner Marilyn. All it took her was fifteen years being the youngest daughter in a hillbilly shack full of alcoholics.” She put down her glass. “Now where am I going to go sleep?” They could hear a garbage truck outside, bleeping and throbbing.
Eugene was curious but exhausted. They inched back into the dining room. “My brain feels like Spam. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah.”
Eugene became officious. “How’d you manage to survive that crash?”
Susan took a sip. She was beginning to feel level. The sense of having taken flight was gone. “You know, I’ve been thinking about that for seven days solid. I drew ticket number 58-A and won. I don’t think there’s anything more cosmic to it than that. There just isn’t. I wish I could say there was, Eugene.”
“But where were you this past week?”
Susan yawned and smiled. “Save it for the morning. I’ve been up thi
rty-six hours.”
Eugene was too tired to probe further. “There’s still a guestroom with furniture in it. Probably a bit dusty, but it ought to be fine.” Eugene led her there. Susan, meanwhile, was inwardly glowing: Eugene was single, retired and, like her, didn’t have too much interest in the outer world. Once in the room, she lay her aviator glasses down on the bedside table and sat on the bed.
“You know, if it hadn’t been for Mom pulling that stunt with you, then I never would have stolen your 8-X-10 and fallen in love with you.”
“Love!” Eugene seemed amused but then yawned. He said to Susan, “I phone in my grocery order tomorrow afternoon. Think of what you want to eat over the next week.”
“Why not go out and just buy them?”
“I don’t like leaving the house.”
Susan hadn’t heard such good news in years. It was all she could do to contain her sense of sleeping on Christmas Eve. “Good night, Eugene. Thanks.”
“Night, sunshine.”
Eugene sighed and walked down the hall. He loudly thumped the top of a totem. “And the winner is . . .” he said, “Miss Wyoming. What a fucking ride.”
At noon the next day Susan awoke to the sound of an electrical rhythmic thunking sound coming from the basement. Eugene’s house. She rolled over and faintly purred.
A minivan drove by outside. The rumbling beneath her, precise and gentle, continued. She found an old housecoat on the guestroom door peg and walked down to a paneled oak door beneath the main staircase. Blazing green-white chinks of light escaped from around the door’s edge, as though the door were shielding her from invading aliens. She opened it and discovered the basement. Eugene was dressed in slacks, socks and a polo shirt, orchestrating the Xerox 5380 console copier’s collation of hundreds of mail-outs. There were shelves of blank paper, file folders and CD-ROM’s containing thousands of U.S. and Canadian names and addresses Susan would soon learn were culled by a demographics research firm in Mechanicsville, Virginia, accompanied by information on incomes and spending patterns.
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