NightSun

by Dan Vining

“Of course we do,” Cali said, releasing Ava, smiling a radiant smile. “Catch up.” She threaded her arm through Ava’s and walked her toward the house. “Come meet my friends,” she said. “You’re barefoot. That is so perfect.”

  And so they walked arm in arm through the perfect orange grove. It was bogus. Not a single piece of fruit was on the ground, not even any fallen leaves. Ahead, the house waited for them. Under the tallest of the archways, the dark wooden front doors stood open. The same doors had been closed a minute ago, when Ava had first seen the house.

  Cali leaned over and kissed Ava on the cheek as they went in.

  “Is…DL here?” Ava said.

  “Do you know about DL?” Cali said. “That is so cool.”

  The cavernous great room was appointed with Deco furniture and accessories, stained glass lampshades on Mission end tables next to club chairs and rolled-arm sofas, rugs over the red tile. Warm light, softened by proximity to the ocean, angled in from one of the high round windows. It still felt like a waiting room in a train station on Sunday morning. And everyone had already boarded. Perhaps that was the intention.

  Around the room on the Navajo white walls were outsize posters: Eraserhead. The Elephant Man. Blue Velvet. Wild at Heart. Twin Peaks. Mulholland Drive. And hung up over the mantle and the mouth of the fireplace was the artwork for Be.Here.Now. Behind the three-word imperative was an image of David Lynch, staring right at you, more than a little Big Brotherish.

  “So what’s he like? David,” Ava said. “Is he here?”

  Cali wasn’t hearing anything Ava said. She too was looking around at the high-ceilinged room and all it held, as if she had never seen it before either.

  At the other end of the great room was a large painting, the centerpiece of the room, even more than the Be.Here.Now. art. Ava gave up on getting anything out of Cali right now that made any sense and walked toward it.

  It was the lighthouse from the print in Cali’s apartment in the Marina, the red lighthouse on the rocky point in daylight with the ragged California coastline behind it—the spikes of Big Sur in the distance—all of it under a cloudless blue sky. And with the cones of black light—antilight?—shining from the lens.

  The brass plaque on the bottom rail of the frame read: Dark Lighthouse.

  Then Cali was standing at Ava’s side again, looking up at the painting, too. “That’s David’s company. Do you ever see Esther or Doreen?” Cali said. Before Ava could respond—or even process the question—Cali looked around and said, “Where is everybody? Sleepyheads. You have to meet all the girls. We’re all in this together. We’re the California Girls!”

  Ava wished she had some duct tape so she could wrap up Cali, throw her over her shoulder and get her the hell out of there. But then a girl in another white bikini walked in from somewhere, yawning and stretching fetchingly and rubbing her eyes.

  “Hey,” the new girl said, from across the huge room.

  “Syndy, this is my friend Margo,” Cali said, turning, indicating Ava. “Margo was the first person I met when I went to New York for a year when I was seventeen and trying to be a model. We had this apartment, oh my gosh, that was so small you had to go outside to change your mind.”

  The new girl held out her hand to shake.

  “Ava,” Ava said.

  “Hi, Ava,” Syndy said. “I love that name. How do you spell it?”

  “A—V—A?”

  “I love names that have the same letter at the beginning and the end. Names like…” But she couldn’t think of another one in the moment.

  “Palindromes.”

  “What?”

  “Like…wow,” Ava said.

  “Really…” Syndy said, nodding, agreeing.

  “Mom. Dad. Eve. Eye. Gag. Bob. Pop. Boob.”

  “Huh?”

  Cali watched Ava and Syndy talking. What they were saying didn’t matter. Not really. This is a subplot, Cali was thinking. No, an aside. She wondered how it could be that Margo hadn’t changed at all since New York. Then she remembered the thing that was crucial always to remember: I am in control of this. She thought, I created Margo. I picked the purple dress because that was what I remembered. Cali looked in the direction of the arched hallway at one end of the great room, the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Where was everyone? When she looked—was it because she looked?—two more California girls came out, rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. All of the girls were younger than Cali. Cali smiled at the sight of her friends. But where was David?

  “There are my girls,” David Lynch said, coming in from another room.

  Cali ran toward him. All the girls encircled him, pushing in to give him some sugar.

  Except, of course, Ava.

  Lynch had noticed her but didn’t seem suspicious at seeing her there, a stranger, an outsider. He looked at her, then looked away. He acted like what he was: the master of the house. The way the multiple Calis were acting, dancing around him, Ava wondered how long he’d been away. Then she remembered that they were all just girls and were easily excited.

  David Lynch. Here was another Dallas Raines, a man of a somewhat advanced age who didn’t look it. Eraserhead—Lynch’s first film—had come out in…what? The late 1970s? When the director was just out of film school? Ava was never much on math—her father’s profession aside—so she gave up halfway through trying to figure out how old Lynch was. Eighty? He looked fifty, with the same angular face he’d always had, a face topped off by a shock of tall hair you couldn’t stop looking at. The hair was white now, which made the whole effect even more striking.

  “Who wants some dessert?” Lynch said loudly, though it wasn’t noon yet and no one had eaten. He was speaking figuratively…

  Because then Vivid walked in. There was a good deal of squealing. Vivid had waited in the wings in the dining room to make her entrance. She was a blonde again. Her lipstick was properly smeared. A tribute to herself? She wore a little black dress and—could it be?—the gold open-toed heels the Shoemaker had made. Behind Vivid was a moderately handsome and very well-groomed man in a sports coat and khakis who looked familiar to Ava. John Tern! The politician on the poster in Cali’s apartment. Mr. Empathy! Behind Tern was the gunsel who drove the Bentley. The gunsel was carrying a bunch of luggage, struggling with it so much he apparently didn’t notice Ava standing across the room.

  Vivid went directly to Cali and kissed her on the mouth; then Vivid waved at Ava as if they were best friends, too. Cali watched Vivid as if she were wondering which part of this was real.

  “Same here,” Ava said, reading Cali’s mind.

  www

  The California Girls—there were five of them, including Cali—changed into identical butterfly dresses. They were all still barefoot and as cute as five buttons. Ava wondered whose idea the costume change was. Theirs? A cue from Lynch? An order from T-Bone, the gunsel? Mental telepathy? They were all sitting on the floor with their tanned legs drawn up underneath them, in a circle around Tern, who seemed to be delighting them with a story that appeared to have a lot of moving parts, requiring gestures and changes of voice.

  Vivid had slipped away for a nap. Followed by Lynch.

  Ava was still standing apart from the others, under the painting of the weird lighthouse. The gunsel brought her another margarita, as nice as could be. She now knew from the snatch in her parking garage that his name was T-Bone, not that Cali was the best authority on people’s names.

  “Why, thank you…T-Bone,” she said, handing him her empty glass.

  “No salt,” he said. He shrugged his trademark shrug.

  “So are you like…his butler?”

  “No!” he said. But then he got over his indignation. “The cook went back to Mexico. Retired. Rich. We’re short-handed.”

  “Did you drive the Bentley up here?”

  “It’s out back, on a flatcar. On the tra
in.”

  “He has a train? I didn’t hear a train.”

  “Electric,” T-Bone said.

  “So who was the big guy in my garage with the big gun?”

  He looked surprised that she was asking. “Ask your what-you-call-it…client.”

  “Beck? I don’t buy it. Why would Beck hire him? For what?”

  “To back you up, I guess,” T-Bone said. “Or do what you couldn’t do. Or wouldn’t do. Direct action. Muscle. He’s from out of town. Way out of town. We’ve been watching him. Or maybe he was watching us.”

  “He was pretty scary, all right,” Ava said. “I guess that was the idea. By the way, Action-Man is an idiot.”

  “Yeah,” the other said.

  They both looked over as Lynch came down the hallway from the living quarters into the great room again. He’d apparently changed into a fresh outfit. It was hard to tell because he always wore the same thing: a black suit with a white shirt open at the neck, no tie. Black-and-white, like an old movie. He stood over the circle of girls and Tern, appearing to enjoy Tern’s charisma.

  “So, was he helping Vivid with her nap?” Ava said.

  “He’s not going to let you take her,” the gunsel said. “I know him.”

  “I just want to talk to her. Once the drugs wear off.”

  “She’s not high. DL is against drugs. He won’t allow them.” With that he walked off toward the kitchen with her empty glass. “I’m making tacos,” he said. Or at least that’s what Ava thought she heard him say.

  She dove into her fresh drink. She remembered that she’d read somewhere that David Lynch had his own brand of tequila. In Lynch’s case, that didn’t mean that he’d bought a south-of-the-border distillery. It meant he cooked off his own split agave hearts, extracted the juice, fermented it, distilled it, aged it for seven years, and then bottled the end product. And he’d designed the label. He did, however, let Texas field hands tend to the spiky agave plants, which took seven years to grow to maturity. Which meant, Ava guessed—taking another sip—that the master of the house had unnatural patience. When Lynch looked over at her, Ava raised her glass. In recognition of his patience, if nothing else.

  Cali saw the two of them looking at each other. She blinked, as if trying to change things.

  www

  “Unfulfilled desire is life’s bedrock experience,” David Lynch said, now standing behind Ava. She almost jumped out of her skin. She was at a window with a third drink, looking up the brown hill at Xanadu. Casa Oxymoron.

  She turned. Lynch was shoeless, wearing white socks. “You snuck up on me,” she said.

  “That’s what the Buddists say,” he said.

  “You snuck up on me?”

  “They call it dukkha. Unfulfilled desire, also translated: unsatisfactoriness.”

  “I hear that,” Ava said. She started to take another sip of her margarita, thought better of it, put it down on a table. Two or three days from now she’d have to drive again. Or at least find her car.

  “Wouldn’t you like to join us?” Lynch said.

  “How do you mean that? Amble over there with the other gals or…drink the Kool-Aid?”

  It was clear that Lynch didn’t feel like arguing with Ava. Or proselytizing. And it was easy to see that he hardly ever did anything he didn’t feel like doing. “She wants to be here,” he said. “She needs to be here.”

  “You mean Cali?”

  “Do you know that she chose that name herself? Cali SoBrite.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Be on your way,” he said, without anger, turning. He turned back and pointed at her. “Be on your way.”

  The last thing Ava saw on her way out—on her way out—was the gang, now including Vivid again in a black wig on the floor in a circle in the great room, kneeling around Lynch who seemed to be explaining something intently. The way Lynch talked to them—pointing at each of them in turn as he recited his lines—made the scene seem ceremonial. And when he bent over and touched each of them on the ear and they closed their eyes, nodding, it made Ava’s skin crawl.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Earwig,” Edward Chang said.

  “Eww…” Ava said. She was driving back down from Xanadu toward Cambria, had the Hudson on auto-drive because she was so flummoxed. And still half drunk, though the DL tequila was dissipating. “You mean that thing that crawls in your ear while you’re sleeping and burrows in and eats your brain?”

  “They don’t call it that, they just call it… I don’t even remember. The Daisy or The Dongle or The Dreambug. They like words that start with D or L. Everybody else calls it an earwig. You stick it in your ear and it digs in and goes into your bloodstream.”

  “Literally?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever happened to Myst? Or SimCity?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “It loads and you’re off and running. Only most people just sit in a chair and think they’re running.”

  “What did you call it?”

  “Isolational Imaginable Immersion. I I I. The basic node-hub has been around ten years but for Be.Here.Now., the techs at Dark Lighthouse and the master himself kicked its ass and dunked the user all the way. DL personally came up with the robo-earwig to administer it. There’s the genius.”

  “Maybe. How long does it last?”

  “That’s where the Stackers come in—outside hackers. We found a way to modify it. The stock earwig parks at the base of the brain and goes to work. But then, at the appointed hour—Game Over—it kills itself, breaks apart, flushes out of your system. It’s gone in three hours and thirty-three minutes.”

  “The Mark of the Beast divided by two,” Ava said. “Coincidence?”

  “What?”

  “Got it, Changster. It’s gone in three thirty-three. Now I believe you were about to toot your own horn.”

  “Some people—we Stackers are scattered across the globe in six different countries, including the Dominican Republic—are dedicated to freeing up globally any and all factory-encrypted code that—”

  “I’m almost to where I’m going, Chang. Leave out the agitprop.”

  “We hacked into the earwig, modified the base design. We give it away free. Or for a small donation.” He paused. Then he looked so so smug as he said, “Ours lasts up to ten days.”

  “You sit in a chair for ten days?”

  “You can still do your business, if you know what I mean, but mostly, yeah, you sit there for ten days and when you come back you’re really hungry.”

  “So it’s like reading a really good, really long book.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Chang said.

  “What does it feel like?”

  “Whatever you want to feel, wherever you want to go, whenever, with whoever you want along for the ride. Or whomever you want as your enemy. But that was yesterday’s game. It’s not a first-person shooter. It can be as complicated as you want to make it. You’re in control. Sorta.”

  “So it’s exactly the opposite of being here now.”

  “I guess, yeah,” Edward Chang said. “That’s sorta genius too, when you think about it.”

  Ava said goodbye just as Chang began to say something. Maybe, “Be careful.”

  She cruised along for a minute then said out loud, “I think it’s fair to say I tried.” She’d done everything she could, right? What now? She’d head for home, find out what Chrisssy had learned tailing Beck, find him, tell Beck the truth—“She’s gone, Babycakes, she doesn’t want you, she has her earwig…”—and then she would get on about her business.

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” Ava said. She hit the phone button.

  Penny appeared on the screen. “Hey, stranger,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “Where have you b
een?” Penny said.

  “On The Magical Mystery Tour. How many times has Beck called?” She was remembering what the gunsel had said about Beck hiring the big man in the big brown suit.

  “Zero. Goose egg. Cero. Nada. Null.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nein.”

  “He called nine times?”

  “No, he didn’t call once. Nein is German for no.”

  Ava thought a minute. Now Beck not calling annoyed her for some reason.

  “I think he’s moved on, Ava,” Penny said. “I’m wondering if you should, too.”

  Ava rang off, wondering if she should get a new answering service.

  After another mile or two, she put on her blinker and the Hudson took the turnoff for Moonstone Beach. The traffic was lighter than when she had blown through that morning. Now it was midafternoon. She looked over as they rolled past the first of the inns and motels on the strip.

  “Slow down,” she said to the car. “Where’s the fire?”

  The Hudson obeyed and slowed to a crawl, even let a car in. The Fog-Catcher, Cambria Pines Lodge, The Fireside Inn, The Sea Otter. Ava smiled at the names. She looked over at the water, how it broke over the rocks, swallowed them up. The tide was high. The surfers were out, surfing as if the rocks weren’t there. An open, beach-facing parking spot presented itself. Ava took it as a sign.

  “Park it,” she said.

  The Hudson pulled in and shut itself down, and Ava got out. She took in the scenery for a second, then crawled up onto the hood and sat with her back against the windshield, like she used to do with her dad when they would sneak out and go to the last drive-in movie in Los Angeles, in Burbank, to spite her mother. Maybe the sun would burn out the last of the tequila. Beck could wait.

  It was like a beach party movie. What caught Ava’s eye was a teenage boy, young—not more than twelve or thirteen—young enough that he still liked to surf with his dad. They were wearing wetsuits though real winter was a month or more away. Matching red wetsuits. The father sat on his board out beyond the break, rising and falling, watching his son, protective but in a way the boy wouldn’t notice. The father was on a longboard. The son was on a shortboard, a board shorter than he was tall. The kid danced all over his wave before coming off the top upside down and still spinning. The father just shook his head, laughing. It was possible that the father understood that the chances were his life would never be better than it was right then, but probably not. Ava watched the father and son, wishing she was either one of them. Or at least to be them right now, here and now. She’d even take being the mom, who sat on the beach with her knees drawn up to her, her arms around them, watching the show, apparently happy. Ava tried to remember if she’d ever seen her mother with a look like that on her face.