He tried finding shaded cafeterias in the drabber parts of Los Angeles, where there was no possibility of encountering old acquaintances. He occasionally spotted geriatric scriptwriters from the DesiLu and Screen Gems era beached like walruses in banquette seats eating Cobb salads, but he never made contact. John would sit and read the daily papers, but they held the same sterile appeal of grossly outdated magazines in a dental office reception area. He wanted to go home, but once he got there, he felt like a bigger misfit than he did out in the city. He tried but couldn’t think of any single thing that might make him feel better.
A few months passed, and nothing within him seemed to change. Then without at first being aware of it, he one day realized he was taking a measure of comfort in following a rigid schedule. He quickly developed a notion that he might just be able to squeak through if he could keep his days fastidiously identical. He told this to Ivan, who then lured John back to the production offices with the absurd promise that his days would be “utterly unsurprising.” Both Ivan and Nylla were at wits’ end as to how they might reintegrate John back into L.A. Mega Force finished while John was away, was scheduled for release, and there was no doubt that it was going to hit big. Test screenings in Glendale and Oxnard evoked memories of the old days of Bel Air PI—yet to John it was nothing, not a flash of interest.
Among industry people John was considered a mutant. Consensus had been reached that he really had been out crossing the country on some sort of doomed search. This made him seem charmed in an interesting but don’t-get-too-close way. In a deeply superstitious environment, John was bad and good luck at the same time. If people wanted to do business, they went to Ivan. If they wanted a bit of gossip to pass along at the dinner table, they popped their heads into John’s office.
Around Doris, John felt like a burden. She’d come to enjoy her privacy and unaccountability over the years. While she was patient with John, he couldn’t help but feel like an anchor roped around her waist—and yet the thought of being alone in a place of his own was inconceivable. Ultimately, beneath Doris’s Darling!-rich exterior John also sensed a veiled hostility—and he couldn’t quite identify its root.
Until one night, just after John had returned home from the offices of Equator Pictures—six fifty-five, in time for the news on TV—Doris came through the door in a filthy mood. Her car had been broken into during her lunch with a friend at Kate Mantilini, and her favorite dress, just back from the cleaners, was stolen, along with a sentimental cameo brooch she kept in the dashboard’s beverage caddie. She cut her fingers removing the pile of shattered glass strewn about the driver’s seat, and she’d driven to Bullock’s to meet another friend. There she realized, after waiting in a long lineup, that her credit cards and ID had also been swiped. She worried she was getting Alzheimer’s because she hadn’t noticed sooner. She had a fit, and during an angry drive to the police station, ran a red light, receiving both a ticket and a scolding from a traffic cop. She was mutinous.
“Oh God, do I need a drink,” she blurted as she scrambled for the liquor cabinet. “Want one?” John said no. “You don’t have to be such a priss about not having a drink, John.”
“I’m—not—drinking—these—days,” he said in precisely metered tones.
“Aren’t you a saint.”
Out the side of his vision, John watched Doris pour a Cinzano, gulp it down, pour another, this time with a lemon zest, gulp it down, and then in a more relaxed state, pour a third. He wondered what was going on with her, but he didn’t want to miss the news.
Doris was looking across the room at John, his posture self-consciously erect, sitting on a stool watching reports from some war-torn ex-Soviet province. It was like he was six and sick again, trying to be a good little boy. The emotions she’d been feeling about her crappy day did a 180, and without warning, her heart flew back to the New York of decades ago when John was the child who didn’t want to be sick or a burden.
The shutters were drawn, but late afternoon sun treacled in through the chinks. Doris had the sensation that the hot yellow air would feel like warm gelatin against her body were she to venture outside. She sighed, and suddenly she didn’t want to drink anymore. She felt chilly and old. She wanted to slap John. She wanted to hold him, and she wanted to chide him for his recklessness and to tell him how much she wished that she’d been out there with him, out in the flats and washes and foothills and gorges, begging God, or Nature or even the sun to erase the burden of memories, and the feeling of having lived a life that felt far too long, even at the beginning. She called to him, “John . . .”
He looked around. “Yeah, Ma?”
“John . . .” She tried to find words. John pushed the MUTE button. “John, when you were away—out on your jaunt a few months ago, did you . . .”
“Did I what, Ma?”
“Did you find . . .” Again, she stopped there.
“What, Ma? Ask me.”
Doris wouldn’t continue.
“What is it, Mom?” John was now alarmed.
And then it just flooded right out of her, in a rush: “Didn’t you find even one goddam thing out there during the stint away? Anything? Anything you could tell me and make me feel like there was at least one little reason, however subtle, that would repay me for having been sick with fear all those nights you were gone?”
Doris saw John open his eyes wide, religiously. She immediately felt queasy for having been so vulgar, and apologized, though John said there was no need for it. But John knew his mother was mad at him because he was still seemingly unchanged at thirty-seven, because he was still alone and because she’d pretty much surrendered hope that he would ever acclimate, marry and procreate like the sons of women in her reading group.
“It’s my back,” said Doris, thumping the base of her spine as though it were a misbehaving appliance. “It hurts like stink and I have the one Beverly Hills doctor who doesn’t like to overprescribe for his patients.”
“It’s still that bad?”
“As ever.”
“I thought you were trying a new—”
“It’s not working.”
“Can’t you go to another doctor? Get more pills?”
“I could. But I won’t. Not now. I’d feel so—I don’t know, slutty, openly hunting for drugs like that. And Dr. Christensen knows my life story. I’m in no mood to start from scratch with someone new.”
“So you’d rather be in pain?”
“For the time being? Yes.”
Her temper was brushed over. When the CNN news ended, John had an idea. He went into his room and looked through his old address book. All these numbers and names and not a friend in the lot. John wondered why it is people lose the ability to make friends somewhere around the time they buy their first expensive piece of furniture. It wasn’t a fixed law, but it seemed to be an accurate-enough gauge.
He flipped through pages of numbers and memories and meetings and sexual encounters and deals and washed cars and flights booked Alitalia and Virgin, and tennis games catered—a small stadium’s worth of people who would find John Johnson whatever he needed.
He removed his working clothes and shed them into a pile in the corner. He was sick of being Mr. Corporate Office Guy. He rooted about his cupboard and found some old clothes Doris hadn’t thrown out—old mismatched shirts and pants used for painting the kitchen drawers and for yard work. Every day was now going to be casual Friday for John.
He returned to his old address book. In it he located the name of Jerr-Bear, a child actor of the Partridge Family era who as a grown-up had gone terribly skank, dressed in the homeless version of Milan’s latest offerings, with matted hair that smelled like a barn. John tried to remember Jerr-Bear’s full name and couldn’t, yet he fully remembered Jerr-Bear’s portrayal of the loyal son on a long-vanished cop show.
Jerr-Bear may have gone skank, but the goods he carried were the finest. John looked in his bedside table and found eighteen hundred dollars remaining from a five-gran
d float Ivan gave him for the month. It was all in twenties and looked sleazy sitting in a heap the way it did. He dialed Jerr-Bear, and against the odds, Jerr-Bear answered.
“Jerr-Bear, it’s John Johnson.”
“The happy wanderer!”
“Yeah, that’s me.” John heard chewing sounds. “Are you at dinner now? Do you want me to call back?” The thought of Jerr-Bear at a nonrestaurant dinner table seemed almost impossible for John to visualize.
“Yeah, it’s dinner, but big deal. What are you, a telemarketer? How can I help you, John?”
“Call me back.”
“Right.”
Jerr-Bear maintained a complex system of cloned cell phones so as to avoid tapping by authorities. A minute later John’s line rang. Even then, the two spoke in veils.
“Jerr, what do you give someone who’s in a lot of pain?”
“Pain’s a biggie, John. Life hurts. Specifically—?”
“Back pain.”
“Ooh—most people need heavy artillery for that one.”
“You have any artillery?”
“I do.”
They arranged for lunch the next day at the Ivy.
Chapter Twenty-six
After the scuff with the other Chrysler, Vanessa took the wheel of the car and John sat in the back seat spinning theories about Randy and semipacked luggage.
“Drugs. It has to be drugs.”
“No, John,” said Vanessa. “There’s nothing in Susan’s banking or Visa card patterns that indicates a consistent drain of drug-caliber discretionary cash.”
“You got her banking info?”
“I gave her Susan’s Visa number,” said Ryan. “It was in the video shop’s computer. I mean, once somebody’s got your Visa number, they can pretty well clone you.”
“Not really,” said Vanessa. “In order to clone you they’d also need your phone number.”
“Why do I bother even trying to generate ideas?” asked John. “You two are the most drag-and-click people I’ve ever met. You’re wearing the pants here, Vanessa. Why don’t you tell me what we ought to be doing next?”
“Okay, I will. We are currently en route to the North Hollywood home of one Dreama Ng.”
“She’s a numerologist,” said Ryan.
“Is she going to give us potatoes, as well?”
“Oh, grow up,” said Vanessa. “Susan’s been giving Dreama Ng twenty-five hundred bucks a month for a few years now.”
“I told you, it was drugs.”
“Your naïveté yet again sickens me,” said Vanessa, adding, “You, who spent maybe 1.7 to 2 million dollars on both drugs and drub rehab programs over the past six years.”
“Oof. That much?” asked John.
“Probably more. I wasn’t able to access one stream of data out of Geneva.” Vanessa continued steering the car with a pinky around a sharp curve. “You know as well as anybody, John, that drug consumption only escalates. It does not remain stable month in, month out over several years. I also ran a check on Ms. Ng’s finances, and, lo and behold, who do you think she signs over her check to each month?”
“Drum roll . . .” said Ryan.
“Randy Hexum.”
“Well, I’ll be fucked,” said John.
“A bit less color, if you please,” said Vanessa. “Anyway, we’re almost there. I already phoned ahead and made an appointment to get our numbers read.”
“What else have you done that I don’t know about?”
“When you two were out unlocking the bumpers a few minutes ago, I phoned my brother Mark, and he is now parked across the street from Randy Montarelli’s house, and you’re paying him twenty-five dollars an hour plus meals so that he can maybe get an inkling where that luggage is headed.”
“Where were you when I was making The Other Side of Hate?” asked John. “If you’d been running things, it could have been a hit.”
“No, John. It was unsavable.”
Vanessa and Ryan plunged invisible peacock feathers down their throats. John went quiet. They spun onto and then off the Hollywood Freeway, and parked outside Dreama’s apartment building. John had a déjà vu, but then realized it was actually a flashback to the beginning of his film career. The smell of Dreama’s elevator was identical to the hallways of his first apartment in a building off Sweetzer, a blend of cat piss, cigarettes, incense and other people’s cooking. Vanessa asked John, “What do we do once we’re in there. John?”
John shrugged. “We’ll know when we get there. I hope. Look for clues.”
“Hi.” Dreama answered the door. “Come on in. You’re Vanessa?”
“I am. This is Ryan and this is John.”
“The apartment’s a mess.” The most obvious aspect of Dreama’s apartment was luggage on the kitchen table, evidently in the final stages of packing.
“I’m sorry,” said Vanessa. “Are we interrupting you? Are you heading somewhere?”
“Yes, but to be honest, I need the money. I hope that doesn’t sound crass. I don’t want you to feel exploited.” She moved a stack of dreamcatchers off a stool.
“Where are you going?” asked Ryan, feigning nonchalance.
A lying flash passed across Dreama’s eyes. “To Hawaii. To a seminar on square roots.”
“Hmmm.”
“Well, let’s get started. Who first?”
“Me,” said Vanessa. “Vanessa Louise Humboldt, that’s one N, two S’s, with Louise spelled the normal way, and Humboldt spelled with a d, as in Humboldt County.”
“Okay . . .” Dreama sat down and reached for a box of sparkly pencils and a light-powered calculator bearing a $1.99 price tag.
“Do you always let people in here?” asked John. “Strangers? Right into your home?”
“You’re friends of Susan. That’s good enough for me.”
“Yes, John,” Vanessa cut in, “Susan’s been wanting us to do this for years.” Vanessa turned to Dreama: “Just ignore him. Susan says your accuracy is chilling.”
“I guessed the Seneca plane crash the day before it happened.”
“That’s amazing,” said Ryan, who suppressed an itch to tell Dreama that his message on Susan’s answering machine had been the last before the accident.
“I got the message to her too late,” Dreama said, “but she made it anyway. Her prime number that day was so high she could have been struck by a Scud missile and walked away with no more than a nice new set of bangs.”
“Prime number?” asked Vanessa.
“That’s how I work. With prime numbers—they’re the ones that can only be divided by either one or themselves. Like 23, 47, 61 and so on. There’s a prime number for all people and events.” Dreama’s fingers twiddled the calculator’s buttons. Her pencils produced spidery loopy letters and numbers so faint they were like strands of thin hair fallen onto the page.
“What’s mine? asked Vanessa.
“Give me a second here.” She fiddled a bit more. “One hundred seventy-nine.”
“That’s good?”
“That’s excellent. You have strong instincts, you’ll never lack money and, as I understand the psychic makeup of 179s, you’ll probably go through your life with a man as your slave.”
“Why a man?”
“All 179s are het.” To emphasize this, she said, “It’s a fact, but not one you should let dominate your choices.”
“I’ll remember that.”
John was standing in a corner, pretending to read the spines on Dreama’s CD rack, a blend of folk and earth sounds, as he tried to think up a probing question. He spun around, a touch overtheatrically, with his face caught in a patch of light coming off a paper lantern. “Your last name is Ng. That’s a strange name—Asian—you don’t look Asian. Is there a Mr. Ng?”
Dreama was nonplussed. “ ‘Ng’ is the Cantonese word for the number five. I chose it for that reason, and also because it doesn’t have any vowels. And there is no Mr. Ng anywhere. I’m a lesbian.” She paused. “Does it bother you . . .?”
> “John.”
“Does it bother you, John, to have a strong fertile woman shed her father’s name and assume one on her own?”
“Uh . . .”
“What’s your full name, John?”
“John Lodge Johnson.”
Dreama began doing John’s number, then dropped her pen and stared. John asked what was wrong, and Dreama told him she’d made a mistake. She redid his numbers and said, “Well, I’ll be . . .” Dreama looked up at him with fresh eyes now, as if he’d been revealed as the murderer at the end of the final reel. “I have to ask you a question, and you have to give me a straight answer. Are you lying to me?”
“What?”
“Are you here under false pretenses?”
“What are you . . .?” John was adrenalized.
“Let me see your driver’s license.”
He pulled out his driver’s license, just one month old, and handed it to Dreama. She looked at it, handed it back to him and said, “Sorry. I had to see if that was your real name—if this was a hoax of some sort. You’re a 1,037, John Lodge Johnson. Do you know what that means?”
“No. You tell me.”
“You’re a four-digit prime number. Most numerologists go their entire lives without encountering a four-digit prime.”
Dreama grilled John, asked what he did for a living and took a distinctly arch manner with him. Ryan then asked to have his number done. It was 11.
“Eleven?”
“Sounds like you’re set for a career in the dynamic and fast-growing world of fast food, Ryan,” said Vanessa.
“Eleven?” Ryan was crestfallen.
“Eleven is a perfectly good number,” Dreama assured him.
“I hear 11s are really loyal,” said John.
John paid Dreama, who gave them a sheet describing their prime number’s characteristics. Dreama became fidgety and scuttled the three out of her apartment.
Back in the car, John said, “Well, that was a fucking waste of time.”
Vanessa’s phone bleeped and she answered it. “It’s my brother,” she told the other two. She finished the call and pressed END. “Randy is in a minivan headed this way.”
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