A Perfect Universe

by Scott O'Connor

  Colnago Super

  I always thought of stealing as an art. By that I mean that when I was looking for something, or when I was taking it, the world transformed, it became a different place, in the same way, I think, as when people talk about how playing music or making a painting takes them somewhere else, at least for a little while.

  The bike was a Raleigh Gran Sport, gold with white trim, a ’74 or ’75, only a couple of years old. Newly washed, shining, its frame caught the sun, glinting like the rings on the fingers of the women window-shopping along Beverly Boulevard. The Raleigh was cable-locked to a parking meter outside of a coffee shop, and the tables outside the shop were empty, unoccupied in the unseasonable heat, so the bike stood there alone, unwatched.

  I pedaled a few streets up and stashed my Schwinn behind a gas station Dumpster. I always rode my own bike while I worked. I didn’t think that a teenage girl on a bicycle would be suspected of stealing another. So far, I’d been right. The Schwinn was a battered men’s Sprint that I’d taken a year earlier and had since painted sky blue. Light and fast and unremarkable, it was a bike no one in their right mind would bother to steal, which is exactly why I’d stolen it. I knew that whenever I returned, I’d find the Schwinn right where I’d left it.

  Walking back toward Beverly, I started to sweat, both from the heat and the anticipation, waiting for the change that came when I was in motion, pointing myself toward a bike. I was always afraid that it wouldn’t happen—that this might be the time where nothing changed. Turning the corner, though, I felt the shift. Colors became brighter—the sapphire reds and chromium blues of passing cars, women’s skirts in citrusy yellows and greens, the teal shine of office building windows reflecting the whitened sky. Sounds grew clearer and more distinct. I could hear every horn honk and bus engine and barking dog. The shoppers on the sidewalk began to move in blurry slow-motion, until the only thing in focus was the golden bike at the end of the block.

  This was my sign, my green light. I didn’t believe in religion or magic; I was only superstitious in that moment. Seeing that a bike I’d chosen was still there as I approached was the only time I could believe there were signals hidden in the world, and that this was one I had deciphered. Once I felt that signal, I never left a bike. If I left it and came back, I knew it would be gone. The signal put me in motion. There was no second-guessing, no turning back. All that was left were the mechanics—coming up on the Raleigh and pulling my bump key and springing the lock, letting its cord slither loose, then swinging my leg over the seat and standing, just for a moment, my sneakers on the pedals, our bodies together in perfect balance. No one on the sidewalk paid any attention.

  Perched on the Raleigh, the sound and color spiked, a crescendo, that note shivering up from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head. I took a breath, at the center of the secret, heightened world, then I pushed the crank and pedaled away.

  * * *

  The feeling didn’t last. It never did. By the time I reached the impound lot in Highland Park, the world had faded, and I was drained, achy, hungry. Donald, the guy who worked at the lot, would only give me fifteen bucks for the Raleigh. He told me that he couldn’t get more than twenty or twenty-five for it resale, which was bullshit by about half, but Donald was the only fence I knew, so I didn’t have much going in the way of leverage.

  I took the bus back to Beverly, getting off a block away from the coffee shop. The Schwinn was right where I’d left it. I rode back home to Atwater, and by the time I reached the entrance to the trailer park, even the last little jolt of the feeling was gone. The world was just the world again, slow-burning, dulled, smoggy with muted yellows and browns.

  Inside our trailer, I found my father in his wheelchair watching the news. There was a nearly empty bottle of vodka in his lap, and a little had spilled—or something had spilled—across the thigh of his pajama pants. But there were no other bottles or cans in the immediate vicinity, and Gary seemed fairly lucid, rolling his eyes toward me as I stepped up into the trailer and then raising his eyebrows by way of a greeting.

  Gary was a blackout drunk before he was diagnosed with MS, but once he’d found out that the tremors and weakness and stumbling falls weren’t just caused by drinking, he took that as his own kind of sign, a green light to go all out. He’d finish a fifth of vodka before I’d finished breakfast. At the end of the day during a particularly bad stretch I’d find a grocery bag full of empties out on the trailer’s front step and Gary slumped inside in his chair. Sometimes he’d thrown up on himself, or wet his pajama pants, and I had to clean him up or wheel him to the shower to rinse him off. He was heavy and tall, but I was tall, too, like him, and my legs were so strong from riding that I was able to get him out of the chair and into the tub. I tried to keep my eyes on the spraying water, away from all the flesh and hair. Once he had passed out again in his chair, I’d shower alone, with the water as hot and hard as I could make it, as if I could hose the entire past half hour off of me, scrub it loose, wash it down the drain.

  Medi-Cal scheduled a nurse every Monday morning, and sometimes she showed up and took care of everything. But even then there were still six other days in the week.

  “Ellie,” he said. His voice tired and heavy with booze. He shifted his eyes back to the TV. “Another kid,” he said. “They got another one.”

  That summer, there were kidnappings all along the east side of the city. Poorer kids, mostly, taken from parks and playgrounds. One little boy was even taken from the children’s section of the library in El Sereno. There were so many stories and rumors swirling, it was impossible to tell what was real, who’d heard what on the news versus what they’d heard from somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody else. But it didn’t really matter. Just the idea was enough to create a blanket of fear over the neighborhood. Just the possibility, that threat in the air.

  The news switched to a commercial. Gary rolled his eyes to mine. “They showed his picture on TV,” he said. “The kid they took. I thought I recognized him, but I didn’t.”

  I wheeled him into the kitchen, backing his chair to the sink to dye his hair. This was something he insisted on, every month or so, though he never left the trailer anymore. He’d been a record producer in the ’60s, a handsome man about town, and that look was something he wanted to maintain, even though I was terrible at coloring his hair and the cheap dye we used looked like shoe polish: too glossy, too black. Little kids in the trailer park were terrified of him; they’d dare each other to run up to our windows and peek in to get a glimpse. Propped in his chair with his hair freshly dyed, he looked like a stiffened Dracula, long limbs splayed at odd angles, face twitching and spasming into violent frowns and grimaces. Sometimes I walked into the trailer and felt that same fear, like there was something terrible inside of him, trying to claw its way out.

  I pulled on the dye kit’s thin plastic gloves, shook the little bottle of Sable #5. Gary closed his eyes, listening to the familiar sounds of the ritual.

  “That kid from the front of the park was looking in the window again,” he said. “Marvin?”

  “Martín. You didn’t yell at him, did you?”

  “Doesn’t he have parents?”

  “They work.”

  “Ten years from now he’ll be holding up a liquor store. Boosting cars. He’s gonna be stuck here his whole life.”

  Tilting his head back into the sink, I ran my hands through the water, waiting for it to warm, and then through his hair, which was dry and brittle from the years of dye. He kept his eyes closed and told me what he always told me when he was sober, or sober enough: that I should go, I should leave, that one day when he was bad off I should walk out the door and never look back.

  I adjusted the gloves and said what I always said:

  “If I go, who’d do all this stuff? Who’d take care of you?”

  He shook his head, dismissing the questions. I started combing the dye into his hair.

  “When you go,” he said, “just go
. No goodbyes. That’s how you do it. That’s how it’s done. One day you’re here, and the next—”

  He struggled to lift his hand from the arm of the wheelchair, allowing the movement to finish his thought, raising his fingers a little, as if letting something float free.

  * * *

  When I was younger, I stole anything I could get my hands on. Candy, cigarettes, Bowie and Lou Reed 45s, paperback books. Whenever things got to be too much with my father, I’d get out of the trailer and head to a store or magazine stand. The stuff I took wasn’t important; it was the release I felt during the theft, like I’d made a crack in my life, opened a little hole in the way things were supposed to be.

  I was thirteen the first time I saw a bike in that way. I’d had the same flea market Huffy forever. It had gotten so small that I looked like a clown riding around on it, or one of those Shriners with their overlarge bodies on tiny bikes. I didn’t really care—the Huffy was just a way to get away from Gary and the park. I rode it to school, or out with my friends, or to the Sears on Santa Monica Boulevard or the liquor store on Brand to take something. But then I saw the man riding the Bertin up Glendale Avenue. Back then, I didn’t know it was a Bertin. I didn’t know anything about bikes, but I knew that I’d never seen anything like it, so thin and light, like a blade cutting through the air. It was a shiny caramel brown, and I felt like I could almost taste that color, its sweetness on my tongue. I’d stolen a lot of things, but I don’t think I’d ever really wanted anything until I saw that bike.

  I followed, pedaling furiously on my ridiculous little Huffy. It was hard to keep up. Riding the Bertin appeared effortless to the man; he seemed weightless. Finally, he pulled into a gas station and set the Bertin carefully against the outside wall and jogged in to get something. I knew he’d be back out in a second, he hadn’t even locked the bike, but I also knew what I had to do. A green light flashed somewhere in the back of my brain. I ditched the Huffy in the parking lot and ran the rest of the way. Clumsy, obvious, desperate, I climbed on top of the Bertin. I was tall even then, but the bike was still too big, and I had to stretch for the pedals and handlebars. Fumbling, I finally found my grip, my footing. I pushed away from the wall and that’s when it hit me, that first time, standing in perfect balance. Everything came into clear, bright focus, my body and the bike’s body sharing the same electric charge. Then I heard the man shout and I pedaled out from the gas station.

  I’d never gone so fast. It was like flying, what I always imagined flying would be like. I could hear the man shouting, but I knew he’d never catch me, that no one would ever catch me. The wind in my face, in my hair. I felt like if I lifted my hands from the grips I would keep rising, floating away. How could anyone catch me when I felt like that?

  I started selling the bikes and saving the money, not really knowing what it was for, or adding up toward. But a few months before that bicentennial summer, the summer of the kidnappings, the answer came to me at a little bike shop on Venice Boulevard. I was buying some grip tape and waiting for the guy behind the counter to make change, when I looked up at the wall behind him and saw the map. Mounted high on a pegboard, between posters of high-end Italian models, Tommasinis and Colnagos, was a wide spread of cross-country bike routes, what seemed like hundreds of multicolored lines radiating out from L.A. in every direction, stretching up into Canada, out to Maine, down to Florida. I stood there long after I had my change, tracing the routes with my eyes, imagining myself along each path, who I might meet or become at different points along those lines, what I would do when I finally reached the water at each color’s end.

  I started looking for higher-end models to steal, Masis or Wizards or Weigles. Donald would pay thirty or forty bucks for one of those in good shape. There were bikes everywhere—people were still spooked by the gas prices during the oil embargo a few years before, the endless lines and fistfights at the pumps. Most of what I saw was department store crap, but I kept looking for something great, a big score. I counted the money I kept hidden in a slit in my mattress, dreaming of the map, calculating how close I was to adding up enough fifteen- or twenty-dollar sales to buy a bike that could make that trip, one fast and light and strong enough to take me along one of those lines.

  * * *

  After dyeing Gary’s hair, I wheeled him back out into the living room, where he fell asleep in his chair, snoring to beat the band, his still-wet head covered with a shower cap. I was scrubbing the last of the dye out of the sink when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find Mrs. Romero—Martín’s mother. She smiled, or, actually, she was already smiling when I opened the door, standing on the single wooden step in the glare of our trailer’s outdoor bulb. She knew my name. She said, Hello, Ellie. She had a pretty thick accent, but her voice was gentle, musical almost. She was short, soft-featured, with light freckles across her nose. She continued smiling as she spoke. I’m sorry to bother you, she said, and I thought she was going to say something about my father, that my father had scared Martín earlier when he had peeked in the window, and I was just about to cut her off and apologize, but then she said, Do you have plans tomorrow?

  I said that I didn’t, or maybe I just shook my head. I was worried that she would look past me and see the vodka bottle in the living room, my father in his chair with the shower cap. She seemed so sweet and this would not be a sweet thing to see.

  She was still wearing her work uniform, navy-blue pants and a matching shirt with the supermarket logo across one heavy breast. She and Mr. Romero worked at the same store in Hollywood. I knew this because once, a few years before, I saw them both in that market, in a little back hallway by the deli that led to the restrooms. They were standing close together, on a break maybe, and Mr. Romero was eating a powdered doughnut and saying something with his mouth full and Mrs. Romero was laughing so hard and so quietly that it looked like she was crying. I had just shoved about fifteen packs of gum in my pockets, so as soon as I saw them I turned the other way and hustled out of the store.

  Standing on the trailer’s step, still smiling, she asked if I would be interested in babysitting Martín the next day. At first, I didn’t know how to answer. I’d never babysat for anyone. There were a million little kids in the trailer park, but no one had ever asked me before. Maybe they were afraid of Gary, or maybe they just didn’t trust me. People in the park kept to themselves mostly, kept their mouths shut, but everybody had eyes, they knew that I didn’t really hang out with the other kids my age, kicking around the flagpole after dark, laughing and smoking; they all saw me with a new bike every few days, and have to have wondered where those bikes came from, where they went.

  Mrs. Romero’s eyes stayed with mine. She didn’t try to look past me into the trailer. Either what was behind me didn’t matter to her or she was being polite. I appreciated it, whichever it was, and I liked the memory of her laughing in the supermarket hallway, tears in her eyes, Mr. Romero’s powdered lips, so I said yes, I’d be happy to babysit Martín.

  * * *

  The next morning, I got up early and walked to the Romeros’ trailer. It was already blisteringly hot, the sky bright white, the asphalt shimmering with little wavy pools of mirage. Mr. and Mrs. Romero met me at the door. They were both wearing their uniforms. Martín was back at the kitchen table, eating some Kix, his bowl piled high with little golden balls. Mrs. Romero gave me five bucks, which was more than she said she’d pay the night before, and told me to use the rest of the money to take Martín to a movie. Get out of the heat, she said, still smiling. I wanted to press my face to that smile, feel its shape on my cheek, my neck.

  After they left and Martín finished his cereal, we took the bus up to a theater in Glendale. Martín was five; he’d just finished kindergarten. He told me all about it on the ride. It sounded like he had some kind of little kid crush on his teacher, who he said was secretly a princess, and that he knew this because of how her hair smelled when she hugged the kids goodbye at the end of the day. Strawberries, he said
, and then he leaned over in his seat and pushed his face into my hair and inhaled. When he sat back I asked him what my hair smelled like and he said, Not strawberries.

  The movie was Martín’s choice, a science fiction thing he’d seen commercials for on TV. I didn’t care much for movies, I didn’t like to sit still for that long, but Martín was completely absorbed by it. I spent most of the time watching him. He leaned forward in the seat beside me, his little hand grabbing the armrest or my wrist, eyes wide, his face bright with the light bouncing back from the screen. With every explosion or shout or laser blast he jumped, gripping my arm tighter. At one point, I leaned over and asked him if he was scared and he nodded and so I asked him if he wanted to leave and he turned to me for the first time since the movie started and looked at me like I was crazy. He turned back to the screen but didn’t let go of my arm.

  After the movie we went to the park across the street. I chased Martín around the playground and bought a couple of ice cream cones with some more of the money Mrs. Romero had given me. Riding the bus home, I wondered if babysitting Martín might become a steady job. It wouldn’t bring in as much as selling bikes to Donald, but I liked spending the day with Martín. He was a smart kid, and I liked his stories about kindergarten, his weird questions about things that seemed obvious at first but ended up being pretty hard to answer. Like, How long would it take to walk home from this park? Like, Where’s your mom, Ellie?

  But the day after Martín and I had gone to the movies, his grandmother came out to the park to take care of him. It was cheaper, Mr. Romero told me, when I saw him carrying out his garbage. He seemed apologetic, a little embarrassed. And also, he said, my wife’s mother needs someplace to live.