by Mel Gilden
Then the doorbell rang, and I was off the floor and down the hall before Godzilla had a chance to stomp out so much as another cigarette butt. I opened the door on a person compared to whom the Sylvia Woods I had seen that afternoon was only a pale imitation.
She was wearing a top that shone like metal, moved like cloth, but looked as if it had been poured on to her. Every curve was in sight and gleamed like the highlights on a new car. Wrapped around her hips was a skirt in a gaudy print showing red birds and blue flowers and some very jagged green palm fronds. I had seen bigger washcloths. Her hair fell to her shoulders in tight red curls. She still had the same face, but deftly applied makeup made every feature more so. The one clinker was the glasses, but they didn’t clink much.
While I was taking all this in, she was going over me the way a jeweller might look for a rhinestone in a diamond ring. She smiled while she did it, which made it all right. We left Sylvia’s car in the tiny car park in front of the house, and I drove her and the Chevrolet deeper into Malibu.
It was a beautiful night. The air was cooler than it had been during the day, but it was the soft coolness of a silk scarf that had been wrapped around a cold champagne bottle. The brisk traffic was ghostly despite the constant thrum of engines. You could pretend the engines were just the wind.
Far out, a couple of lights flashed on a small boat. Looking across the curve of coastline, I could see lights strung out like a necklace against the black water. Inside it, moving headlights weaselled around curves.
We passed beyond the clutch of small stores and restaurants called downtown Malibu, and darkness closed in around us. High on a hill, a floodlit castle built by a doctor with too much money stood out against the night like a pasteboard cutout.
My headlights swept along the road, carving a tunnel through the engulfing darkness. Though I could not see them, I could still feel a cliff rising to one side, and the openness of the ocean on the other. A pungent smell of low tide blew in through the whistling crack at the top of my window.
‘Turn left here,’ Sylvia said. It was the first time either of us had spoken since we’d left the house.
I waited for traffic to pass, then turned in to a private road that led down to a car park. A young man in a short red coat and white trousers ran out of the darkness and up to the car. He opened the door for Sylvia. Then, without waiting for her to get out, he ran to my side, opened the door, and held it open. ‘Good evening, sir,’ he said in a peremptory way in a heavily accented voice. He looked back along the road. I did the same, and I could see that I was holding up the parade. There were three cars behind me now and another one turning in off PCH. As I got out of the car, the parking attendant shoved a claim check into my hand.
Before I’d walked three steps the tyres of my car squealed as the young man broke several traffic laws racing my car around the corner into the park. Sylvia joined me. As we followed the crowd out on to a pier rimmed with Christmas lights, I said, ‘Puffy lives off-shore?’
‘Not as such.’ I raised my hat so that I could look at her more carefully.
Her lips were pressed tightly together, trying not to smile. Sylvia pointed out at the water just off the pier. A moment later, a bug-eyed sea monster rose from the ocean, sluicing water down its smooth sides.
Chapter 15
Hard Work
A FEW people in the crowd laughed as if this were all good clean fun. More of them, like me, just looked worried — smiling like good sports about to undergo a quiz show prank while we wondered if the indignity would be worth the trouble.
What had risen from the water wasn’t a sea monster, of course, but a diving bell with thick glass portholes. A door swung open and clanged against the side. A man dressed in a dark uniform but for his glowing white shoes and white peaked cap threw across a tiny bridge that clamped to the edge of the pier. He invited us to cross over.
Like a trained pig, I trotted across with the others and stepped over the coaming. The man in the uniform glanced at me, glanced again, and seemed about to make a comment. Instead, he looked away and said, ‘Step lively, folks. The fun’s already begun.’
The inside of the diving bell was lined with a thick shag carpet that was blue in the blue lights that glowed gently between the portholes. The place was damp and smelled as if it had never been dry. We sat with our backs against a raised lip that ran under the portholes and our feet towards a transparent pillar enclosing water that stood about halfway to the ceiling.
The captain called, ‘Don’t get too comfy, folks. It’ll all be over in a minute.’ He laughed as he shut the door and dogged it down with a spoked wheel, then walked to one side of the compartment, where he grabbed a big lever.
‘I want a drink,’ a big man in a suit and tie said as if he were demanding liberty and justice for all. The pudgy woman next to him tried to shush him, but he wouldn’t be shushed, ‘I’m thirsty.’
‘No drinking in the bell, sir.’ The captain threw the lever, and water bubbled up in the central pillar. I was chilled by the sensation that we were dropping rapidly through the cold black water, though I’m sure the temperature of the air in the bell didn’t change. We all looked like frozen corpses in the blue light. No one said anything, but looked around. If they were like me, they were watching for the first sign of leakage.
The water reached the top of the pillar and began to fall.
The bell was rising now. I leaned across and whispered in Sylvia’s ear, ‘It was a swell party. Thanks.’
‘You just wait,’ she said. When the water was at the halfway mark again, the captain bounded across the bell and undogged the door. He flung it open and stood aside. ‘Last one out’s a rotten egg,’ he said and laughed.
The diving bell was now docked at the edge of a big pool inside an enormous cavern. Waves slapped up and back. The place looked natural but may have been just as phony as the coloured lights illuminating it from behind outcroppings.
Across a wide shelf of rock was the front of a house. Its smooth wall swelled from the rugged cavern wall as if the house had burst through from inside the rock but had been too big to escape. Laughter, talk, and loud music recommending that we ‘all go surfin’ now!’ because ‘everybody learnin’ how!’ poured from an open door along with the smell of liquor and of the same strange smoke that my friends rejoiced in. Dim shadows moved behind the windows.
The thirsty man led our group across the shelf. His pudgy companion toddled after him, working hard to keep up. Couples clutched at each other and giggled as they shared private jokes that needed this particular moment to be funny. In our turn, Sylvia and I walked through the doorway and were hit with a wall of noise and smell nearly physical enough to lean on. I couldn’t see much — nobody could in that confidential, suggestive light. It was so indirect, it seemed to be coming from another state.
A woman not much taller than I glided towards us with her arms outstretched. ‘Bro’s!’ she cried as if she had discovered us after a long search through dense jungle. A blue dress — blue seemed to be a popular colour that year — that fell in a straight line from her broad shoulders to the floor covered her bulk. The dress wasn’t just blue, of course. Macaws with their banana beaks intact cavorted across it. Hair of indeterminate colour — at least in that light — was braided and wound around the top of the woman’s head like a crown.
She took a hit from a small brown cigarette she pinched in one fleshy hand and cried out again. This time, she cried, ‘Heavenly!’ We could barely hear her.
‘Not Heavenly, Puffy,’ Sylvia shouted back. She introduced herself like a quarterback shouting signals. My throat became raw just listening to her. At that, I could barely hear what she said. Puffy must have been a lip reader.
Puffy made a quick recovery. She said, ‘Radical, surfer girl! Heavenly always wears her hair like that! Always stoked about that hair!’ She looked at me with friendly curiosity and said, ‘And who is this?’
‘Zoot Marlowe,’ Sylvia said, ‘meet the Empress
of ‘Bu, Puffy Tootsweet!’
‘Radical,’ I said. I couldn’t hear myself.
‘Bitchen costume,’ she said and lost interest in me. She invited Sylvia to have a brewski and circulate. She nodded at me and cried, ‘Bro’s!’ as she greeted the next couple to come through the door.
Sylvia took me back to a bathroom hung with nets, spiny globular fish — now dead and stiff— and seashells. The fish had been rigged as lamps. The bathtub was filled with ice and drinks and cups of what I suspected was yoyogurt. We selected cans of brewski, popped our tops, and circulated out into a bedroom. The bed was heaped with coats, and copies of some slick publication called Brown Genes Magazine were fanned across a dressing table. On the cover, a healthy woman was surfing to shore, her open lab coat flapping in the wind. One hand was raised and holding a test tube.
‘If Heavenly’s anywhere tonight, she’s here,’ Sylvia said.
‘Sure. Be here or be skwere,’ I said, using a crowbar to force the words to rhyme. We shouted at each other. I could see a long night of shouting ahead.
Sylvia nodded and glanced around. I doubted Heavenly would be at the party. Not if she’d been abducted. Not if she wanted, for her own reasons, to stay missing. But somebody who knew her or knew about her might be there. Leads are everywhere if you keep an open mind. I wanted to tell Sylvia this, but right at the moment, it seemed to be a lot of work.
The thirsty guy in the suit no more belonged at that party than a polar bear belonged at a luau. However, I fit right in. Most of the guests wore the chino trousers and boisterous T-shirts that my surfer friends wore all the time. But I was a really aggro dude, I can tell you. More than one dude or chick fingered my groovy threads and smiled with approval. My nose and height didn’t seem to be an issue. They were, after all, part of a bitchen costume.
The house was a maze of rooms. It seemed designed to get lost in. Sylvia and I passed through a zone of loud music where dancers shook as if with some rare disease. ‘Two girls for every boy!’ the recorded singers roared.
Right next door, guests who had all the energy of fallen trees watched scenes from Endless Summer on a big-screen TV. They couldn’t listen to it because the music from the room next door threw itself desperately against the wall, causing the video room to vibrate like a bass drum. The more athletic of the people in the room lifted brewskis to their mouths or spooned yoyogurt.
Beyond that, we rounded a corner, and the music was suddenly far away. I banged the side of my head with my hand. ‘I’ve gone deaf,’ I said. My voice was lighter than feathers in the sudden void.
‘No,’ said Sylvia. ‘It’s the baffles. They keep the music from spreading to places you don’t want it.’
‘I don’t want it anywhere.’
Sylvia opened her mouth to make a comment when something snagged her attention. ‘Look,’ she said.
She was pointing into the next room, where a big crowd was gathered around a golden robot crouched into the classic Quasimodo surfing position. Bitchen, I thought. A surf-bot, I thought. I was wrong, but just barely.
The big golden robot was part of a game called Slamma Jammer. A squat, solid guy with cannonball muscles was holding a small box that was nearly lost in his fist. With it, he controlled the actions of the robot, who danced and weaved on a surfboard attached to a set of pneumatic pistons. The board ripped through a convincing holographic pipeline synchronized with stereophonic ocean sounds. Spectators dodged realistic spray that disappeared at the limits of the projected image. If the robot wiped out, the big guy lost. The game looked like fun, but it was no more surfing than chess is war.
‘Wipeout!’ the crowd cried as the mechanical board flipped the robot into the air. In the air, the robot turned like a cat, landed lightly on his feet, and froze standing upright on the motionless surfboard. The big guy shook his head and smiled goodnaturedly. A pretty girl, wearing a hot pink bikini that made Sylvia look overdressed, mussed the big guy’s hair and led him away.
That evening, I talked to the big guy and as many other people as I could about the Slamma Jammer game. The big guy didn’t know which end of a screwdriver to grab, and he was not alone. But anybody who claimed to know anything about surf-bots or robot holo-games told me that the Slamma Jammer robot and surf-bots were different. You could not fix one with parts from another. SSR wouldn’t even dirty their corporate hands manufacturing a surfing hologame.
Later, Sylvia and I were sitting on a couch in a room where galaxies and amoebas of light floated across the walls and ceiling. Slow, contemplative music no louder than birdsong droned from a pair of speakers. It seemed about right for our mood. I felt as if I’d just spent three hours rolling down a mountain in a barrel. All for nothing. The whispers of conversing couples hissed at us from a matching couch across the way.
A woman wearing tight black trousers and a T-shirt with the legend OFFICIAL KANSAS CITY SURFING TEAM walked in and stopped abruptly, probably shocked by the lack of noise. She backed into a corner and stood there, lost in the hypnotic light and the soft music. A moment later she cried, ‘Heavenly’ and hunkered down next to us. She didn’t wait for Sylvia to respond, but balanced herself with a hand on Sylvia’s knee and went on, ‘It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. I should have called, I know, but you wouldn’t believe how busy I am; with Arno sculpting in iron these days. It seems we never get out of the foundry.’ She yammered on, barely drawing breath. In her own way, she was amazing.
After going on about Arno and the ironmongery he was welding together, she said, ‘And I was wondering - ’ She sounded tentative, as if she were picking her way across a wet floor. ‘I was wondering if you were done with this month’s copy of Brown Genes Magazine.’
When the woman began, Sylvia had tried to slip in a word of explanation. She might as well have tried to slip between two coats of paint. After a while Sylvia gave up and nodded politely to the woman’s chatter. People had been mistaking Sylvia for Heavenly all evening. It didn’t bother her, but she wanted to set the record straight. Setting the record straight the fifth or sixth time was boring.
The woman waited for a Comment. Sylvia said, ‘I’m not Heavenly, Isadora, I’m her social secretary, Sylvia Woods.’
Sylvia’s voice was tired, mechanical. It had been dredged up with difficulty from deep inside her. Being social all evening is hard work, even for a social secretary.
Isadora never missed a beat. She said, ‘Of course.’ Silly her. She looked at me. ‘And who is this?’ she said with the predatory intonation of a chicken hawk asking about the chicken on the next roost.
‘Zoot Marlowe,’ I said and stuck out my hand. She took it, held it briefly, as if it were made of bone china, and let go. She told me that she was charmed. Maybe she was. She looked at me while she spoke to Sylvia.
‘I hate to be a bother,’ Isadora said, ‘but I can’t afford Brown Genes myself. All my money goes for supplies for Arno’s work.’
Sylvia shook her head and said, ‘Art’s a bitch, isn’t it?’ Isadora snapped her head to look at Sylvia. Sylvia’s expression was one of mild sympathy, as if Isadora had announced that she had a hangnail. Isadora erected a smile. It was OK for the moment but would not stand much strain.
Sylvia said, ‘Actually, this month’s copy of Brown Genes never came.’
‘Ah,’ Isadora said, relieved by Sylvia’s friendly, confidential admission.
‘Which is odd. The subscription is not due to run out for months.’
‘Well,’ said Isadora, ‘if it ever shows up, you know where you can reach me.’ She handed over a card and stood up in one flowing motion. She told me again that I had charmed her and strolled out of the room.
I looked at the card in Sylvia’s hand. It was shiny with some kind of metallic foil. Both Isadora’s and Arno’s names were engraved on it, and under that it said, in large letters drawn like girders, HEAVY METAL. I stood up and said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Isadora turn you on?’
‘In a man
ner of speaking.’
My hearts racing each other, I walked from the room before Sylvia could make a clever comment on my sexuality.
I got lost only twice on my way back to the bedroom where the coats were piled on the bed. At the moment, two people were sprawled on top of the coats. The one on top with her legs spread looked like Isadora. The guy on the bottom, who was not fighting very hard to get free, may or may not have been Arno.
Ignoring them, I walked to the dressing table and flipped open the top copy of Brown Genes. In the dim, tasteful light I barely managed to read the tiny type on the first page. The main office of Brown Genes Magazine was in Huntington Beach.
I stood there pondering. The pair on the bed didn’t mind. They were busy crushing coats and making the springs sing. Suddenly, they stopped and looked up. I looked up too. Somewhere in the house, somebody had just screamed in terror.
Chapter 16
Crashing, Bashing, Smashing
I RAN in the direction of the sound and found a silent crowd at the front door looking out at the rock shelf. As I arrived, the loud music stopped in the middle of a word, leaving only the echo of powerful engines rumbling in the big cavern outside.
I glided through the crowd, trying not to get stepped on, and came to Puffy Tootsweet, who stood in the middle of the doorway frowning. She was not the bimbo she pretended to be. Standing in the doorway took a certain amount of grit. Rolling on to the rock shelf through a tunnel hidden behind a petrified curtain were the members of Gotterdammerung.
The gang pulled up smartly in a row in front of the house. They smiled and licked their lips and limbered up their leather-gloved hands. Without a word, they turned off their motorcycles and dismounted. Tankhauser swaggered towards the front door with his gang in tow. He would have walked in the front door, but Puffy did not get out of his way.
Tankhauser stood there casually. He didn’t even look at Puffy. I don’t think he’d had a bath since our meeting on the beach. He spoke to the ground. ‘We was hurt that we didn’t get invited, Puffy,’ he said.
