“What do you think?” I asked her. We'd already more or less settled it, but nothing seemed to be settled about Lo.
She shook her head. “I don't know. I didn't know then and I don't know now. He was tired, that's for sure.”
“I'm tired, too.” I yawned again. “That doesn't mean I just flew in from Hong Kong.”
“Who just flew in from Hong Kong?” Hammond asked.
“Circadian rhythms persist for a long time, even where there's no sunlight,” Orlando contributed, more to thwart Hammond, I thought, than for any other reason. “People living in deep caves for months still function in twenty-four hour cycles. Astronauts in space, same thing.”
“Orlando is interested in time,” Sonia said, a bit wearily.
“Who isn't?” Orlando demanded.
“Can we have a show of hands?” Hammond asked.
“Time is everything,” Orlando said, warming to his subject, “and we don't know doodly about it. We haven't got words for it, even; we recycle the words we use about space. 'The near future' and 'the distant past.' Like I just said, 'a long time.' Time isn't like space in any way, but we use the same words. Space goes on in all directions. If time moves at all, it moves in only one direction.”
“Time moves in only one direction?” Orlando had jogged Eleanor's metaphysical funnybone.
“Maybe it doesn't move at all,” he said, looking mysterious. “But if it does, it moves in only one direction.”
“Says who?” Eleanor asked.
“Says atomic decay, for one thing.” Orlando sounded positive.
“I thought time was cyclic,” I said.
“You would,” Orlando said coolly. “Stone age.”
“Most of the people in the world believe in cyclic time,” Eleanor volunteered.
“Most of the world,” Orlando said dismissively, “believes in reincarnation, too. That doesn't make it anything except a remnant of a primitive worldview.”
“Yow,” Hammond said. “Listen to the boy. Am I the only one who's hungry?”
“You don't believe in reincarnation?” Eleanor was on the fence about it.
“I'd say the mix is a bit rich in former Egyptian princesses,” Orlando said. “There couldn't have been that many Egyptian princesses. How come nobody was a dung-beetle farmer, that's what I'd like to know.”
“Dung sounds great,” Hammond announced, “but I'm having steak.”
“You had steak yesterday, Al.” I thought for a moment. “Was it yesterday?”
“Time is a cycle. What about you, Sonia?”
“Surf and turf,” Sonia said. “And something white and dry.”
“I want to eat something with a head,” Eleanor said. “I'm feeling fifties. Maybe a steak, like Al's. How can you be so sure about reincarnation?”
“Because it's cyclic. Cyclic time doesn't happen in nature.” Orlando closed his menu. “I'd like pork chops.”
“It doesn't happen in nature, huh? Tell me about the year,” Sonia said.
“A perfect example.”
“For whose side?” Eleanor put an oar in.
“Prime rib,” I said. I hadn't even realized a waiter was present until I felt him behind me. He was as tall and thin and melancholy as Ichabod Crane, and he had a small hole in the elbow of his red jacket.
“Anything for starters?” he asked mournfully.
“Salad all around,” Hammond said, assuming command. “Bring all the dressings you got.”
“For my side, of course,” Orlando said. “Every year is absolutely different.”
“And wine?” the waiter asked.
“A jug of each color,” Hammond said impatiently. “Can't you see we're debating the nature of the universe?”
“Let me know if you figure it out,” the waiter said, turning away.
“Spring, summer, fall, winter,” Sonia said, counting each off on a finger. “You remember a year when they came in a different order?”
“And garlic bread,” Hammond called after the waiter.
“Oh, sure,” Orlando said. “And day and night, high tide-slash-low tide, waking-slash-sleeping, the phases of the moon, the apparent motions of the planets and stars, the solstices, circadian rhythms—I mean, give me a break. Local phenomena, card tricks. So the planet circles a star. So it rotates. Mercury doesn't. On Mercury, it's the same day all year. A Mercurian's circadian rhythms would last forever. So what? We have a day every twenty-four hours, but it's never the same day.”
“I told you he was bright.” Sonia didn't sound entirely happy about it.
“And why do you care about this so much?” I asked.
“It just pisses me off. Our brains are the most complicated things in the universe, and we don't use them. We understand time intuitively in ways we don't even consider.” He picked up the salt shaker and threw it at me.
It was a pretty quick snap. I caught the shaker left-handed, and salt poured over my forearm. “Great,” I said. “And I've been trying to cut down.”
“You just performed dozens of complicated calculations about time and space,” Orlando said. “You estimated the thing's velocity and trajectory, and you timed it to the split second. Your brain told your arm where to go and then interpreted the information from the nerves in your hand to let you know that you'd caught it, and then you made a joke. Not much of a joke, of course, but you were busy. You can do all that literally without thinking about it, but you and lots of other people persist in thinking that time is like a ... a clothes dryer or something, just going around and around in easy, predictable, stupid little patterns.”
"I could have done without the 'of course,' " I said as the waiter put two carafes of wine on the table and gestured for a black-coated acolyte to set the green salads. He watched critically, dismissed the acolyte, bent forward from the waist in military fashion, placed Sonia's more exactly in the center of her place mat, and retreated, a puffy little blister of white shirtsleeve protruding through the hole in his jacket.
“Watch him go,” Orlando said. “What do you see?”
“What do you mean, what do I see? I see the waiter heading for the bar.”
“What you see,” Orlando corrected me, “is a man with his back to you, moving his legs and getting smaller. You know what it is because you're time-binding—you think of the waiter as a more or less permanent object in space and time, and you put together the different pictures you see every moment to conclude he's leaving. Otherwise you might think he's one man getting smaller and smaller, or a succession of men, each smaller than the other. Same thing when you listen to music: You hear a succession of pitches over a period of time and you put them together into a melody. Listen to something moving in the dark, and you know it's the same thing although you can't see it. It's called time-binding. Even birds can do it. Migrating starlings take off when their clocks tell them to, and stop when they get there, the same place every year. And they use, birds use, time-binding. Starlings can fix on a permanent object, like the rising sun, and use it as a reference point for takeoff every morning, even though they haven't seen it for twenty-four hours. Obscure the sun and show them its reflection, and they'll take off in the wrong—”
“Here's a man getting bigger,” Hammond interrupted, grating pepper over his salad and offering the mill to Sonia.
The maître d' leaned in and addressed Eleanor. “Miss Chan?”
“Good guess,” Eleanor said.
“You have a phone call.”
“Where are we,” Hammond asked heaven, “the Polo Lounge?”
“I left the number on my answering machine.” Eleanor smoothed a hand over my shoulder, but not before I'd asked her to give my regards to Burt. She grabbed a lock of my hair and yanked it as she followed the maitre d’.
“Burt, huh?” Hammond grunted, shoveling a bale of romaine lettuce into his mouth. “Talk about permanent objects.”
“The reptilian brain, on the other hand,” Orlando continued as though no one had interrupted, “can't really time-bind.
Its prey has to be the right shape, the right size, and moving. Surround a frog with dead flies, and it'll starve to death.”
“And that's enough,” Sonia commanded. “No more flies, no more dung. We've been very patient.”
Orlando started to say something, then closed his mouth so sharply I could hear his teeth crack together. He prodded at his salad with a forefinger, the picture of a man looking for dead flies.
“Do you really think,” Sonia asked, softening, “that Eleanor might introduce him to someone?”
On cue, Eleanor beckoned to me from across the room. Even at that distance I could see that something was wrong.
“I'll ask her,” I said, getting up.
“Collar the waiter while you're up,” Hammond said. “No Russian dressing?”
“Getting smaller now,” I said as I left the table. Orlando fixed me with a poisonous look.
The Christmas tree twinkled hyperactively at me, silhouetting Eleanor in its prism of light. She grabbed my wrist and led me toward the phone, out of sight of the table. The receiver dangled by its coiled cord, and she picked it up and gave it a shake, as though there were someone unpleasant inside it.
“I don't know whether to laugh or cry,” she said, hanging it up. “I wish I'd been born an orphan.”
“What is it?”
“It's Horace,” she said. “The jerk. He's left Pansy and the kids in Vegas and gone after Uncle Lo.”
9 - Hill Street Ooze
My room in the TraveLodge on Hill Street was mercifully lacking in Christmas cheer. No dying tree, no cards lining the mantel. For that matter, no mantel. I'd checked the window for a glimpse of festivity and found myself looking at a concrete wall two feet away. After my first night on the street, I'd found the dour little room a relief from the faux-Oriental facades of Chinatown, sparkling with lights and ringing with scratchily amplified carols, as though a missionary had seized control of a small Asian country and decreed a cure for his homesickness.
Tossed over the sagging princess-sized bed a stained lemon-yellow spread struggled for chromatic dominance with a carpet the color of decayed teeth, an irregularly mottled brown over which you could have changed the oil in a car without leaving a noticeable stain. I'd dropped my keys on it the second evening I was there and spent ten minutes on my hands and knees trying to find them by touch. They didn't move or jingle, so I didn't get a chance to practice my time-binding.
This was my fourth evening, which made it Sunday night. One week since I'd stared at Lo over the red candle.
One wall framed a door and a mirror, below which were a narrow Formica counter and a curved plastic chair. The chair and counter had seceded from the color wars and assumed a sort of spit-gray neutrality. The decor was completed by a simulated wood dresser shoved up against the wall with the pictureless window in it. Above the dresser a bent nail supported an impossibly vivid laser-generated photo of two kittens in a basket. That was it, except for two more doors, one leading to the tiny closet and the other to a bathroom where the grouting was in serious need of attention.
Sitting becalmed on the lemony pouf of the bed, I tried to convince myself that I knew what I was doing. I knew I was putting on my Reeboks because my feet would hurt later if I didn't, but long-term goals were conspicuous by their absence. I didn't really think I would turn a corner and bump into Horace, or that my two murderous Vietnamese kids would wave cheerfully at me from across a room. But the kids had come from Chinatown and Uncle Lo had been assaulted in Chinatown—or so he'd told Mrs. Summerson. Or so Mrs. Summerson had said he'd told her. Still, Eleanor had been sure that Horace was in Chinatown, and more than anything in the world right then, I needed to find Horace. I needed to find him for Eleanor and Pansy, and I needed to find him for me. So I'd sentenced myself to wandering aimlessly around Chinatown morning and night, working my way through Horace's known haunts, and enduring the TraveLodge so I could get an early start.
After three nights of merciless Cantonese meals—lop sop, Eleanor called it, dismal imitation Chinese food the restaurant help would never eat themselves—and after wearing down the tread on my Reeboks tracking kids who, on closer inspection, looked like visitors from the Valley, I'd come to one firm conclusion. I'd concluded that I'd eat at McDonald's.
Only in a city as horizontal as Los Angeles would Hill Street be called Hill Street. Most of it is as level as a billiard table, four lanes of flat black asphalt distinguished from a million other L. A. streets only by the two-story, Chinese-cheesy architecture that crowds it on either side, replacements for the original buildings, slapped together in 1938 by the ephemeral architects of Paramount Pictures as a gift to the Anglo city's fantasy life. The development had been so romantically and persuasively inauthentic that scenes from The Good Earth had been shot there before the whole mishegas burned to the ground. The canned-Cantonese frippery that replaced it was no less unauthentic but much less glamorous, sets for a movie starring Victor Mature, with someone like Veronica Lake playing the Chinese girl he loves, all shorthand Asian Mystery and inscrutable proverbs, pidgin English, horsehair wigs, and rubber eyelids. The wigs were in plentiful evidence, re-Orienting the Western mannequins modeling Chinese robes in the shop windows. The eyelids, the ones on the street, that is, seemed to be real.
Of course, not all of them these days belonged to Chinese. Hill Street, its two parallel streets, and the web of cross streets, alleys, and walkways that connected them were relics of what had at least been a real Chinese neighborhood all those years ago. Now the Asian presence in Los Angeles was more complex, a confused stew of people with nothing in common but tonal languages. The Chinese and Japanese had been joined by the refugees from wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Add the ambitious economic opportunists from Korea and Indonesia and Thailand to the mix, and you had the diverse population that the Anglo newspapers lumped together as “the Asian community.”
Grumbling loudly enough to draw stares, I angled across Hill and into a little pedestrian walkway between shops, on the way to my car and a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. I didn't make it.
My car, Alice, was in view, gleaming horsefly-blue under a street-lamp thirty yards away, when the girl screamed. She was tiny and Asian, and she burst from an alley twenty feet ahead of me and to the right, and then an arm snaked out and grabbed her down jacket at the neck and jerked her back in. I heard the squeeee as her rubber-soled tennis shoes left the pavement, and then another scream, higher and more urgent than the first.
Well, so it wasn't a time for reflection. I wrapped my fist around my car keys so that the points protruded between my knuckles, and sprinted after her. Fist-first, keys raking the air, I rounded the corner and dove headfirst into sucker heaven.
Something hard and heavy landed on the back of my neck, coming from the left, and the whisper it made as it parted the air gave me just enough warning to launch myself off the balls of my feet, subtracting my forward velocity from its momentum, and it struck my neck and folded my left ear forward and pasted it to my head like the flap on a glued envelope, pushing me forward and off my feet. I felt hot blood pour down my neck as I landed on my stomach, and the girl giggled.
Scuffle of shoes behind me. If the girl hadn't giggled I might have been dead then and there, but the giggle galvanized me and I rolled to the right, away from the shoes and into some wooden packing crates. They folded themselves noisily down over me, and whatever had hit me on the neck swooped down again and pounded them into confetti. The feet I'd heard were right next to me and had ankles attached to them, and I drove the points of the keys into the left ankle, trying for the little bones that you can separate but never quite put together again. One of the keys went all the way home.
The giggle was lost in a yowl, and the ankle I'd hit disappeared from view. I rolled farther under the scraps of wood and put both hands against the bottom of a crate and heaved a big piece of it in the direction of the vanishing ankle. Then I stood up, new blood heating my face and neck, and a fist hurtled toward my
eyes. Orlando's claims for the miracles of the mind notwithstanding, I failed to calculate the fist's trajectory and velocity properly, and it treated me briefly to a new and gaudily unattractive version of the star-spangled banner. Still, the mind had sufficient time and electricity to suggest that the proper course of action would be to fall down and play almost-dead, and the broken slats of the crate folded themselves cozily over me like a masochist's bed of splinters, and I ignored the shard that had put a second hole in my right ear and lay still. I smelled fish, an odor seeping up from the wood uninvited, like someone else's memory.
“Motherfucker,” panted a familiar voice.
“Is he dead?” That was the girl. She sounded winded.
“Not half,” said the kid I'd treated to the Torture of a Thousand Fingers. “But second half is easy.”
Hands grasped my Reeboks and groped their way up my ankles. The other kid, the one with the ruined ankle, was whimpering. Okay, one down, for the moment. I let Dumbo-Ears pull me out into the alley, grunting with the effort.
“He's fast,” said the girl.
“He's through,” said Dumbo-Ears.
“Fuck you,” said the corpse, and I brought my left leg up between the kid's thighs and hit him right on his personal share of the Vietnamese genetic destiny.
Dumbo-Ears said something that sounded like scummmpff and folded forward, landing conveniently, if heavily, on top of me. I threw him in the general direction of the girl and pulled myself to my knees, a lot more slowly than I would have liked. My hands were so far away that I seemed to be communicating with them by telephone.
He slammed into the girl. I listened with satisfaction as the two of them struck the pavement and then, with a Herculean effort, I got my feet under me. I looked up for a point of reference that might keep me from falling on my face, and focused on the barrel of a small revolver.
“You wouldn't dare,” I said.
The other kid, the good-looking one, cocked the gun with a click, a welcome sound. A revolver takes two clicks. Immediately after the first, I rolled to the right, thrusting my feet forward and tangling his damaged ankle between mine. He fell sideways, and the shot gouged concrete with a resonant spang that bounced back and forth between the walls of the alley like a berserk Ping-Pong ball. I found myself standing over him and raised one leg and sank it into the pit of his stomach.
The Man With No Time (Simeon Grist #5) (Simeon Grist Mysteries) Page 10
