by David Gordon
“Of course I saw Another Sunrise,” I told Buck. “It was great.”
“Thank you, Sam, but I wasn’t the one who was great. That’s my point. Just like in Toilet, it was the story, and the characters, they were great. Well, not the terrorists of course. Though they were great villains.”
“Right,” I said. “Exactly.” He’d lost me, but it didn’t seem to matter. He sat down, finally, and cracked his water. I drank some of mine.
“I get so dry out here,” he said. “Even though it’s by the beach. It’s this wind I think. Anyway, tell me your story, Sam. What are you working on now?”
I froze. I drank more water. I realized too late that I should have come up with something. It was the sort of thing one discussed at these meetings, or so I’d heard. With no time for a lie, I was stuck telling the truth.
“Well, Buck, I am in fact working on a novel, like you said.”
He smiled and nodded.
“This one’s called Perineum.”
“Nice. I like it. Sounds, I don’t know, sort of Latinate. What’s it about?”
“Well, that’s hard to say. I’ve just started really. It started as a cycle of love poems just focused on that one… word, and now it’s evolving. It’s about themes of betweeness really, of being in some way between two points, two places, between life and death for example, pleasure and horror, birth and I don’t know, waste.” I exhaled, exhausted by my own bullshit.
“Great theme. But what happens?”
“Well, I don’t quite know yet, Buck. You see, I start with the voice.”
“Yes! Your voice.”
“Not exactly.”
“The character’s voice.”
“More the book’s voice. I’m trying to hear the book talking, the voice of consciousness talking, to itself, in a void, while no one listens.” I wanted to cry. As I rambled on, digging my grave deeper, I wanted to think my ideas were beyond this guy’s understanding, but the truth was I didn’t understand them either. No one did. Not really. I’d been working on this new novel for a year. I’d written ten pages of nonsense. I was done. I was an unnovelist. My grand experiment was over, the results were in, and the conclusion was: I suck.
Buck sat back. He looked at me, hard. I expected him to laugh or tell me to fuck off and get a real job, like private detective. He nodded. “OK,” he said. “I’m in.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Call me crazy but I love it. Look, I’ve heard a lot of pitches. A lot. And what are we always saying we want? Originality. Something we never heard before. Something that knocks our socks off. Well, I never heard anything like Palladium before, and believe me, my socks are off!”
“Really? Thanks. I can’t believe it.” I wasn’t sorry to hear he’d changed the name, in case he looked it up later, but I couldn’t picture myself delivering ten inscrutable pages. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
“You’re a writer, Sam. I want you to write. Write Pandemonium, here, with me. Let’s tell that story, together.”
“Wow.”
“Now.” Buck stood again and started pacing. “I’m not going to bullshit around with you, this idea is great but it needs a lot of, I don’t know, a lot of meat on its bones. Are you committed to anything else? Writing for anyone else?”
“No.” As a storyteller I was unemployed, but I thought of the fictional crime I was investigating and the obese madman who was waiting for me to report my latest dream. “No, nothing. Well, I kind of have this day job.”
“Fuck it.” Buck toasted me with his water. “Sorry but really. A day job is to support the writing. The night job, that was your real life, right? Well, from now on it’s going to be all night.”
Buck said he’d have someone call “my agent,” Margie, and work out the details, but essentially I’d get a weekly salary plus various tasty “pieces” of “development” as well as a nice fat slice off the “back end.” Although it all seemed sure to fail, I couldn’t help but float back out to my car in a delirium of affluence. I could get a new car stereo. Or a new car. I could get a new wife. Or buy the lost one back. I was finally the man she’d meant to marry all along.
At the exit of the drive I met a new Prius coming in the narrow gate and stopped to let it pass. It paused beside me. Russ, the handsome hunk from Dr. Parker’s office, was behind the wheel.
“Yo, Sam. Great to see you!”
“Hey, what brings you here?” I asked.
“I work here, with Buck. That’s what brought me to Green Haven. Buck’s on the board. He’s a huge supporter of mental health issues. Usually I work in development though, so I’ll be seeing you around. We all love your stuff.” He winked, as though I were a young starlet in a bikini. “Welcome to the winning team.”
46
BACK ON THE ROAD, my euphoria dissipated as I joined the endless creep of cars, their owners staring out at each other like captives sealed in glass. I checked my phone and found an urgent summons from my still current employer. So I rushed, very slowly, to the Lonsky headquarters, mentally composing what I figured would be my final report. Bucky’s job was almost as odd as Lonsky’s, but I had to consider seriously an eccentric billionaire who won Oscars over an eccentric hermit who lost competency hearings.
I arrived to find the big man in an agitated state. Where had I been? A roast was in the oven, and he was worried my traffic problems might delay feeding time. I apologized and, without explaining, dove into my review of Succubi! He sank in his chair, low like a hippo in muddy water, eyes shut. The giant hands were chapeled before his lips, propping up the flying buttress of his nose. Then I told him about Mona’s appearance at my window that morning. As I began reasoning aloud, “I know what you’re thinking, horror movie plus beef jerky after midnight equals bad dream,” he raised a hand.
“I find little profit in wondering over that small difference,” he said.
“Life and death? It’s a big difference,” I said.
“A very important one yes, but perhaps not so big. In any case, what I intended to say is that there is no way for us to objectively establish the fact here and now, since you were the sleeper. Let’s say it was a dream? What of it? It is often in dreams that we perceive the truth. She will come again, I suspect, and then you can ask. Please continue.” His eyes slid shut.
I told him about Kevin. He remained impassive until I was done. Then his chins lifted, one by one, and his eyes opened on me. “One thing is certain. It was shortsighted of you not to take the tapes. You will have to return and obtain them.”
“What? How?”
“There are any number of ways. Perhaps if you disguise yourself as a census taker or, better yet, a worker from the public utilities company come to investigate a gas leak. I have a nice collection of mustaches and eyebrows…”
“Huh…” I tried to change the subject by mentioning Doctor Parker’s sad demise, but he was even more vexed. He sat almost nearly upright.
“You should have called me immediately as soon as you found out he’d been killed.”
“I didn’t think it was urgent. It was an accident.”
“When will you learn, Kornberg? There are no accidents. In The Case of Dora, Freud’s patient spurns an amorous advance from a young man. Distraught, the fellow dashes into the street without looking and is nearly run down by a carriage. Freud interprets this as an unconscious suicide attempt. Genius!”
“Yes, well, the cops say Dr. Parker had a blowout. Your unconscious can’t burst a tire, can it? On the other hand, Mona, who everyone says did commit suicide, you interpret as murder. Know how Freud would interpret that? Meshuggeneh.”
“Perhaps. But unlike your scientific speculation as to whether you are dreaming or not, my meshuggeneh ideas are based on evidence.” He drew a letter from his desk drawer. “I received this in today’s mail. It’s a letter Mona left for me, to be delivered after her death. Her final testament. I believe it is what Dr. Parker was hiding in his safe, and what, fearing for his ow
n life, he meant to give you. When you didn’t respond in a timely manner, he mailed it, perhaps on his way to work that fateful morn.” He unfolded the letter and cleared his throat. “My Darling Solar…”
47
WHEN WE FIRST MET, you reminded me of my father, though I know that’s a cliché. And I only met him once, my real father, assuming he even really was. I was seven. I remember because it was my birthday. I was having cake with my mom. We were about to light the candles, and she said to wait, that someone was coming. I didn’t know who she meant. It was just she and I, like always. I didn’t have many friends, and we had no family. For some reason, I got this crazy idea it was Big Bird. I was in love with him then and watched that show obsessively and I’d heard at school other kids talking about the amazing figures who came to their parties, parties I was not in vited to, and I guess it occurred to me that maybe my mother had arranged for Big Bird to come as a surprise. Imagine my disappointment when it was a human man, though I had to admit he was very large. And despite his lack of feathers, I was also impressed with his general hairiness. Of course he brought a gift, a big box wrapped in pink paper with a red bow. It contained a My Pretty Pony, which is what I wanted most of all. I was shy but the Pony won me over, and I consented to sit on his lap and blow out the candles. I recall he ate two huge pieces of cake, which also impressed me enormously. After he left, my mother told me that he was my father, but that he was a very famous and important man who was too busy working to come visit and that for the same mysterious reasons we had to keep it a secret. Though I wonder if it was at all true. Maybe he thought it was. Unfortunately, just because my mother tells you something is no reason to believe it. I’m afraid I have inherited this trait, though often I’m the one that I lie to. In fact, now that I think about it, I am not even sure that this incident ever occurred. It’s quite likely that my mother merely told me about this mythical meeting much later. Or maybe I dreamed it up myself, high on my medications, after seeing a movie here in the hospital on TV. So you see my dear how it is when you are lost. Even your memories are not your own. Where are they? Where did they go? Who took them? My doctors, my lovers, my captors, my enemies, my friends? I sometimes imagine that late at night, they come into my room and erase my mind, like a disk or a sheet of paper, and imprint the clean white surface with the image they want to project, the image of Mona. I imagine that I do not even look like I think I do, that the face I see in the mirror is not really mine. Is this other face the one you see and love? Or are we both caught in this same delusion? I imagine when Dr. Parker takes me in his office for a session, that he is hypnotizing me into believing who and what I am and that he does the same to you. Maybe we are both really asleep, and dreaming all this. That is my sweetest fantasy, that I am napping in the library right now, close to you.
Sometimes I dream that I am the widow of a famous artist, a great filmmaker. I’m a glamorous and beautiful woman, being taken to parties at nightclubs and grand dinners in castles, seduced by men and women, given the finest wines and drugs, then rushed off to a yacht at midnight to sail into the middle of the sea, and drink champagne at sunrise. I imagine that is my life and that I just got a bit too drunk and high, a bit too tired to lift my eyes, but when I do, in a moment, this hospital room will be gone and I will see the sun, the empty blue sky, and smell the clean ocean air. This is Fabricio’s yacht, or his father’s, some sort of count who owns a shoe factory and a vineyard. The son does nothing but collect motorcycles, gamble, and chase girls, while he waits to inherit the title and the money. Does this make him a viscount or is that different? He takes me riding on his Ducati and we go so fast I think we will lift off into flight. I feel the engine pulling up, up, like a winged stallion, while we lean over the neck, holding it down. I am so terrified I leave claw marks in Fab’s sides where I clutch his rib cage, but the vibration of that machine, that power beneath is almost unbearably exciting. Like all of the men I meet, he is fascinated with my husband, with his work, with our life together, my young marriage, his suicide. I refuse to discuss it, which they love. It makes it even more mysterious. Some propose but I refuse them. I consider myself still married and in the end, after five years abroad, I return to Los Angeles, to Hollywood.
I never should have come home. I thought it would save me, ground me, pull me out of my dreams, but it only buried me alive in them. Hollywood is my graveyard, and this hospital, this bed, my grave. It all began that summer, my summer of Fabricio, troubling dreams I couldn’t shake and worse, little cracks in the daytime, in reality, moments when I’d forget where, or even who, I was. Sometimes I’d feel, lying with my eyes closed in the sun, that I’d open them and be by the pool in Laurel Canyon, the old house, with Zed beside me, reading out loud. Sometimes I’d think I was here, in my room at the hospital, hearing the soft step of the nurses in the hall. Then it got to be I was wide-awake, walking down a street in Paris or stepping into a nightclub in Berlin and suddenly I’d blank out and not know my name or why I was there. It was terrifying. I’d play along, nodding at my companions, laughing at their jokes, letting them put me in a cab, but all the while I’d be screaming inside. Then just as suddenly, it would all come back, and I’d be OK again for weeks. But I lived in constant dread of an attack, and maybe that fear and anxiety even triggered them, which lead me to fear the fear, to become anxious over the anxiety, around and around, in a spiral, headed down into nothingness. Finally, I snapped. I had what the doctors called a psychotic break and ended up in a hospital in Germany. They shipped me here, old friends, people I didn’t even remember, paid for it, and Dr. Parker began to teach me about myself again. I learned who I was, about my childhood, about Zed. He said the trauma of witnessing Zed’s suicide had triggered a breakdown, and I’d tried to control it with drugs and alcohol and reckless sex and that had all made it worse. He said he could help me remember. And I suppose he did, he had the evidence, the passports and newspaper clippings. But I always suspected there was something more to my story. I should have hired you then, my darling Solar, to solve my case. For a crime had been committed. A missing person case. Me. True, I am dead now, as you read my words, but do not mourn, my love. Long before my death, someone had already stolen my life. I was lost. Find me, detective. Save me. Please.
48
LONSKY SET THE PAGES down on the desk. I could see the sheets covered in a feminine scrawl.
He knit his hands over his belly and set his eyes on me. They were tearless, of course. And pitiless.
“So, now that you have heard her last words, you, the last to see her alive, now that you’ve received this message from beyond the grave, a letter delivered by the dead hand of another, begging for our help, now, Kornberg, what say you?”
His gaze bore down on me like Moses on the Mountain. My phone buzzed relentlessly. Milo 911. Perhaps I was out of beer or there was a Cheech & Chong marathon on TV. My friends were right. I had to seize control of my fate from everyone, including them. And him. And her. And her. Losing my wife, I had begun to lose my mind, letting Mona invade my dreams, and my dreams invade my life: madness lay ahead. Look at Lonsky, thumping his desk with a paw.
“Well, have you fallen mute or have you something to say?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, with a smile of relief. “I quit.”
49
WALKING OUT OF the Lonsky residence a free man, I did feel a lot better. I’d explained, as best I could, that as far as I was concerned, the background dossier on (Ra)Mona was complete. Without going into specifics, I said it was time I focused on my own career. I knew all I was ever going to about The Subject. I called Milo back from the car, preparing to fire him too, but he wasn’t at my house after all. It was worse.
“Good news. I went ahead and got those movies for you.”
“What movies?”
“From that old queen. I called and said I was your assistant, which she believed no problem, ha, and asked when you could come by for a follow-up interview. The witch said she was going to be ou
t at a soiree or whatnot, probably picking toadstools all night, but you could come by for a tea again tomorrow. So I just waited till she cleared out, hopped in, and got them.”
“Hopped in? How?”
“I remembered what you said about the closet and all.”
“You broke in?”
“What’s the big deal? I break into your house and borrow things all the time. We just watch it, dupe it, and return it before the old bag knows.”
“You break into my house?”
“I have to, you won’t give me a key. Anyway, I’ll close the shop early and get the Beta decks set up. We’ll watch downstairs. Jerry’s not well. But I bet he’d be proud, if I told him. Which I probably won’t.”
“Jesus, Milo, I never told you to do this…”
“This isn’t about you, man. Or me. Or who broke into whose house. This is cinema. Just be here at ten. And don’t worry. No one will ever know.”
50
I HEARD TROUBLE COMING before I reached the parking lot and sniffed it in the air before I touched the door. It sounded, and smelled, like Led Zeppelin, “Immigrant Song” pounding through the store’s sound system, so loud I felt its galloping rumble in my belly and heard Plant’s cry ring out, even as I turned into the lot, which was packed, despite the closed sign and drawn shades. I squeezed in between a black pickup on monster tires and an old primer-spotted Nova. The dark air around me was thick with roasted meat smoke and the sweet funk of good weed. Either there was a party going on or someone had run over and then incinerated a skunk.
Everything doubled when I opened the door. The music blew my brain back in a blast of reverb. Smoke billowed out. The scene resembled a combination Dungeons & Dragons convention, High Times thirtieth-anniversary reunion, and summit between black metal war clans. Grim reapers lurched around with beers in their hands, talking through beards of white, black, green, and red. An albino wraith tottered by in Goth rags and Frankenstein boots, holding hands with a pink haired pinup in fishnets and a crimson corset. Through the smoke, I could make out a chubby tattooed lady, topless and bouncing up and down to the sonic thunder, her tremendous breasts atremble as she shook her fists at heaven. I put a tentative foot inside, but a hairy monster in a leather vest blocked my path with what looked like a real sword.
