“Oh, then you’ll have to listen to it again, but you have to watch it at a proper theater, and it will work, you know. You’ll reach alpha every time.”
“You did?”
“Well, yes. That’s one of my favorite films.”
Vanessa spoke with pleasure. “I liked it, too, but . . .”
“Oh, you know—you have to see it on a big screen. You really do. Maybe I’m being too forthright here, but let me ask you this—would you come with me tomorrow night? There’s a nine-thirty showing of Koyaanisqatsi at the NuArt. If you came here at eight, we could eat something vegetarian beforehand. You are vegetarian, aren’t you? I mean, your skin. . . .”
There was a weighted pause in which emotion and options blossomed before them like time-lapse flowers.
And they were off. They went to Koyaanisqatsi the next night. They went to more movies. Vegetarians, they refused to eat any food that might have tried to resist capture. Ryan was a screenwriter and woodworker, and he was the only Hollywood writer Vanessa had yet encountered who didn’t feel as if the world owed him both a Taj Mahal and a large clear rotating lottery ball stuffed with fluttering residual checks. “Tungaska” was genius. Vanessa twinged with the urgency felt throughout the ages by all women who have struggled to put their loved ones through med school or its equivalent. Vanessa was determined to be the one who discovered him, who pollinated his talents and supported him during his rise.
Then one night she snuck into the video store and found Ryan entwining his signature into that of her own. She felt sure it must be love. She had a few doubts about him—his Susan Colgate worship, his Caesar hairdo and his underwear, which looked not merely freshly laundered but freshly removed from the box. But no one whom she found tolerable had ever enjoyed her company before.
“Vanny look—it’s a Class 3 electrical substation with” (gasp) “a WPA bas-relief on the doors. Pull over!” They were on the way to a Hal Hartley re-release Ryan insisted they not miss. Ryan let Vanessa drive. Their children would be magnificent.
Chapter Thirty
The morning after John, Vanessa and Ryan had their numbers read by Dreama, John sat on a towel outside the guesthouse and bombarded Vanessa and Ryan with phone calls. It was an effort to spur progress in the hunt for Susan. On John’s fourth call to Vanessa’s office, her patience was taxed.
“John, I could get fired if the company learned I was using their system to track down two nut cases across south central Wyoming.”
“So they’re still in Wyoming?”
“Three hundred miles west of Cheyenne, passing through . . . at this moment . . . Table Rock, Wyoming.”
John then phoned Ryan and grilled him about Susan’s history in Wyoming.
“Susan’s mother returned to Wyoming after Susan left TV. But Susan’s originally from Oregon.”
“So her mother may be in Wyoming, then?”
“She was a few years ago, back when Susan recovered from her amnesia.”
“Amnesia—pffft.” John sounded disgusted. “Amnesia’s bullshit, Ryan. It’s only a movie device.”
“Either way, nobody knows where she went for that year. For that matter, where did you go when you dropped out of sight, John? You’ve still never told me.”
“I went nowhere.”
“Brush me, Daddy-O. Jack Kerouac, man!”
“No—Ryan—you know where I went? I really went nowhere. I ate out of dumpsters. I slept under bridges. I traipsed around the Southwest and got gum disease and my skin turned into pig leather and I didn’t learn a goddam thing.”
John hung up. He mulled the morning’s information over and became convinced the key to the mystery of Susan’s whereabouts lay in finding Marilyn. He phoned Vanessa and ran this idea past her.
“John, the LAPD tried locating Susan’s mother and they couldn’t find her. And besides, Susan and her mother hate each other. I’ve had two solid years of Sue Colgate trivia drizzled onto my brain. I’ve had to drive Ryan to the twenty-four-hour Pay-Less at two-thirty A.M. to buy two-sided mounting tape for his shrine. I’ve been forced to watch Meet the Blooms reruns on tape instead of going to chick flicks since around the death of grunge. Sure, I know all that stuff I pulled out of databases. But I know the tabloid stuff, too, and Sue Colgate hates her mother.”
A neighbor’s leaf blower turned off and John marveled at how quickly the world became silent. He walked back inside the house with the cordless phone. “Vanessa, please. Wherever the mother is, we’ll find Susan. You know it, don’t you, Vanessa?” Vanessa didn’t answer. “I know you know it, Vanessa. You’re the professional finder, not me.” He sat down on a couch and watched sun break through woven slots in the curtain, like a cheap hotel in Reno back in the seventies. An unwashed dish in John’s sink settled with a clank. John took a breath.
“You’re smart, Vanessa. You’re pretty. You could easily pass as a human being if you wanted to. It gives you a kick to fool the others. But I’m worried about Susan Colgate, and I’m worried about her in a way I haven’t been worried about anything before. You may not be worried, but I know you care. I know you do.”
Vanessa was quiet a moment and then said, “Okay.”
John sighed and looked at the ridges in his fingernails as he continued. “Susan. Shit—she’s been around the goddam block so many goddam times that it makes me cry. And yet there she is, still this glorious creature.”
The sun went behind a eucalyptus tree and John’s room became cool and gray. He could hear the leaves rustle behind him and through the phone line he could hear occasional office noises from Vanessa’s end.
“I need you to help me, Vanessa. You’re my agent of mercy. My oracle. You may be a space alien, but you’re a good space alien. Superman was a space alien, too. And this afternoon—this is the chance fate’s throwing your way to replace that uranium heart of yours with blood.”
Someone called Vanessa from across the office. She called back, “In a second, Mel.” John could hear her breathe. Vanessa said, “Her name’s Marilyn, right?”
“Yes.”
John went outside and lay back and basked in the sun. This was his first real solar exposure since the day he was sick in Flagstaff.
Ryan phoned him. “John, how’d you get Vanessa to agree to do an MSP?”
“A what?”
“I have to call Vanessa. I’ll call you right back.” Both men speed-dialed Vanessa, but Ryan got to her first. John’s body began to throb with curiosity, with an urge to know that felt like an urge for sex. He walked back inside the guesthouse, picked at a piece of cold pizza in the fridge and tossed some Chinese food flyers into the trash.
The phone rang. Vanessa said, “So I see that Number 11 has gone and blabbed about the MSP.”
“Not really,” said John. “But you know what? Here’s my guess. You and your egghead palsy-walsies have some scary new gizmo that can locate a lost hamster from outer space. Am I correct?”
“You’re a smart one. Meet me for lunch at the Ivy by the Sea. I don’t want to leave Santa Monica. Use your big macho clout and get a table for three.”
John was there early, then Vanessa arrived. They were surrounded by chattering dishes, tinkling glasses, car noises and seagulls screeching outside. Both were slightly twitchy with their own worries. Vanessa was speaking her thoughts aloud. “I’m going to lose my job if I get caught. What am I saying? I will get caught. It’s only a matter of how many minutes before they catch me.”
“Caught doing what, Vanessa?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.” She made a tetrahedron of cutlery, using the tines of her forks to join a spoon and a knife. John knew she wanted to ask him something, and he was right. “John . . .”
“Yes, Vanessa?”
“Do you think I’m—”she took a big gulp of breath—“cold?”
“What? Oh Jesus, Vanessa, please don’t go taking me too seriously. It’s not a good idea.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, John. But I mean it. Do you t
hink that I’m capable of —.”
“Of what?”
Vanessa blushed. “This is so embarrassing. Okay, I’ll say it: of being loved.” Vanessa looked as if she’d suddenly discovered she was naked in public.
“Yeah, of course you are, Vanessa. But—”
“But what?” Vanessa’s voice expressed weakness for the first time John had noticed.
“You’re lovable, Vanessa.” John tried to think of how to phrase what he said next. “But you’ve gotta rip your chest open and expose your heart to the open air, let it get sunburned, and that’s bloody scary.” He bit an ice cube. “Even still, most people seem to do it automatically. But you and I—it makes us balk.”
“And . . .?”
“Shit. Like I’m the person to speak? Thirty-seven and single. But I did make The Other Side of Hate, and you know why it bombed?”
“Why?”
“Because I thought I could fake it. It was so humiliating when it tanked. People think I don’t care, but I do. Those reviews were just—ouch.”
“But now?”
“I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice it. Like a flop movie. Or they’ll borrow your heart and they’ll forget to return it to you.”
The air between the two of them was thick and warm like in a tent. Neither knew what to say next. Ryan came in out of breath. “Try finding a taxi in L.A. My car battery’s dead.” He made does-he-know? eyebrows at Vanessa. She shook her head. John had the desperate look of somebody who’s about to quit a job they’ve held for twenty years.
Vanessa explained to him what an MSP was—a complex computer program, the opposite of a SpellCheck—a MisSpellCheck. The premise of the MSP is that all people consistently misspell the same words over and over, no matter how good a typist a person might be. Misspelling patterns are idiosyncratic—unique like fingerprints, and the MSP also takes into account punctuation patterns, rhythms and speeds.
“You could log on as Suzanne Pleshette or Daffy Duck, but the MSP will identify you after about two hundred fifty words. It’s so finely tweaked, it can tell you whether you’re having your period or if your fingernails need trimming.”
John asked why the cops hadn’t run an MSP already. Vanessa said: “This is hush-hush stuff, John. They only do it if they think you might be linked to a missing plutonium brick or to trace you if they think you’re violating your position in the witness protection program. It’s not a standard security check, let alone for a starlet missing a few days. It also sucks up so much memory that all the in-office computers develop Alzheimer’s while it’s in use.”
John slapped a $100 bill on the table. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going to Vanessa’s office.”
John and Ryan were in the car following Vanessa. John phoned Ivan to see if he’d fly them in his jet stowed not far away at Santa Monica Airport. John could feel Ivan’s sigh on the other end. “To go where, John-O?”
“Wyoming, probably—I’m only guessing. For Susan.”
Ivan hesitated. If nothing else, the Susan Colgate fixation had brought John back from the dead after Flagstaff. “There’s the European marketing meeting for Mega Force this afternoon. You said you’d be here.” Ivan was silent a moment, then spoke. “Okay, John-O.”
“Great. We’ll be on the tarmac in a half hour.”
It was a brainless sunny day, and the high noon sun flattened out the world. The trees looked like plastic and the pedestrians like mannequins. Patches of shade formed deep holes. As arranged, Vanessa parked her car in her company’s lot while John and Ryan parked across the street. “It’s Security City in there,” said Ryan. “They don’t just take your picture when you drive in there. They take your dental X-ray.”
“Do you have any idea what Vanny’s doing right now, Ryan? She’s going to get fired for using this MSP thing.”
Ryan said, “You call her Vanny?”
John waved his hand in a well-of-course-I-do manner. Ryan then asked John, “Well, we knew she might get fired. Is she doing it for me, or is she doing it for you?”
John laughed a single blast of air.
Ryan fiddled with the rearview mirror outside the passenger door. “You know, John, when you grow up these days, you’re told you’re going to have four or five different careers during your lifetime. But what they don’t tell you is that you’re also going to be four or five different people along the way. In five years I won’t be me anymore. I’ll be some new Ryan. Probably wiser and more corrupt, and I’ll probably wear black, fly Business Class only, and use words like ‘cassoulet’ or ‘sublime.’ You tell me. You’re already there. You’ve already been a few people so far.
“But for now—for now me and Vanessa—Vanny, really do love each other and maybe we’ll have kids, and maybe we’ll open a seafood restaurant. I don’t know. But I have to do it now—act quickly, I mean—because the current version of me is ebbing away. We’re all ebbing away. All of us. I’m already looking backward. I’m already looking back at that Ryan that’s saying these words.”
They sat and stared at the low-slung corporate-plex. The tension of waiting for Vanessa was becoming too much. They didn’t talk. They tried the radio, but it came in choppy so they turned it off. A bus stopped beside them and John and Ryan watched the passengers inside it, all of them focused forward and inward. The bus pulled away and they saw Vanessa burst out of the company’s front door carrying a cardboard bankers’ box. Her stride was off as she speed-walked to her parked car. She pulled away onto the main road, up beside John’s car. She rolled down her window and said, “C’mon, let’s go to the airport.” Her eyes were red and wet.
“Are you okay?”
“Just go. I’ll meet you there.” She sped away.
By the time they reached Vanessa at the Santa Monica Airport’s parking lot, she’d composed herself. “Shall we go to Cheyenne, then?” she asked.
“Honey?” said Ryan.
“It’s okay,” Vanessa said. “I didn’t like it there anyway.”
“I never even got to see your cubicle.”
Vanessa opened up the bankers’ box and Ryan looked inside. There was a Mr. Potato Head, a framed four-picture photo booth strip of her and Ryan, a map of Canada’s Maritime region, and several plump, juicy cacti.
Ivan was at the airport. John slapped him on the shoulder and introduced him to Ryan and Vanessa. Ten minutes later they were up in the air.
“I found her,” Vanessa said.
“Where?” said John.
“She’s working for a defense contractor. In the paralegal pool. Radar equipment. Guess what name she’s using.”
“Leather Tuscadero.”
“Ha-ha.” She looked out the window below at the warehouse grids of City of Industry. “Fawn Heatherington.”
“That’s so corny,” Ryan said. “It’s like something right out of The Young and the Restless.”
“Ivan,” said John, “make sure we have a car waiting for us on the tarmac at the other end. And make sure there’s a map inside it. We’ll be there in a few hours.”
Vanessa said, “There’s something else strange I found out.”
“What?” asked John.
“Judging from various spikes in her typing speeds and frequencies compared against her other data—she used to do data inputting for the Trojan nuclear plant up on the Columbia River back in the late eighties—particularly as regards her use of SHIFT key and the numbers one to five, I’m going to make an educated guess here.”
“What would that be?”
“Marilyn’s going through menopause.”
John looked at Vanessa and then turned to Ivan. “Ivan, Vanessa now works for us.”
“Good,” said Ivan. “What will Vanessa be doing for us?”
“Running our world.” John felt a bit better for having conspired to make Vanessa lose her job. He was smoking furiously now.
“I thought you quit last year,” said Ivan.
“I smoke when I’m worried. Yo
u know that.”
Ivan noticed that John made no connection between his current posture in the jet, alert and driven, versus the crumpled heap he’d been on the floor months previously.
They landed in Cheyenne. An airport worker directed them to their car. Ivan asked Vanessa to be navigator. “No time to start your new job like the present.” She sat in the front, and Ivan leaned over and whispered to Ryan, “The secret to success? Delegate, delegate, delegate—assuming you’ve hired somebody competent to begin with.”
Ryan felt like a thirteen-year-old being given advice by a cigar-chomping uncle.
They drove through the city. It was a cold hot day on the cusp of a harsh autumn. The air felt thin and they managed to hit every red light as they wended through this essentially prairie town that was more Nebraska than Nebraska, certainly not the alpine fantasia conjured up by the name Wyoming, or from John’s prior experience in the deepest Rockies filming The Wild Land.
“Over there,” said Vanessa, “the blue sign. Calumet Systems—purchased just last week by Honeywell.”
They encountered yet another low-slung corporate glass block surrounded by a parking lot full of anonymous-looking sedans and a wire fence topped with razor wire. A security Checkpoint Charlie precluded their entering the lot. Vanessa made John pull the car into the Amoco station across the street. John said, “Ivan, did you bring the binoculars like I asked?”
John looked, but didn’t know what to expect to see—Marilyn making coffee in the cafeteria? Filing a letter? Readjusting her Peter Pan collar?”
“Can I see those, John?”
He handed Ryan the binoculars and Ryan scoured Calumet’s lot. John turned on the radio and settled on a Spanish dance station, which Vanessa turned off. “This is no time for the Cheeka-Chocka.”
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