"Yeah," said Art. "But I get the feeling they're not.''
Price nodded as though Art had confirmed some suspicion. He seemed mildly pleased. “Stick around, and you'll find out. You seem pretty smart."
"No, I think I've got to go home.'' Right now, Art missed the solitude of his home very much.
"C'mon, one beer won't kill you. Who knows? You might get laid." He laughed.
Art recalled the first time he had watched a football game, utterly unaware of the rules. The motions and objectives had all seemed baffling then, too. Now he felt a jolt of competitive macho; he wanted to return Price's hard serves in a fashion that said he was not a child, that he could be a worthy contender, even an opponent.
"Dina says you were screwing Suzanne. She's all upset because she thinks you don't want her."
It was good enough to interrupt Price's stride. "Dina said that? Wow." He shook his head in the manner of someone who expects bad news, but is prepared for it. "I'm surprised that chick was able to get her head out of her own ass long enough to consider the world outside the envelope of her ego. She wants to fuck me?"
"That's the general impression."
"Hm. I don't think I will. I already know how it would go."
"She's upset because of you and Suzanne. She said."
"Nah, I didn't do Suzanne either. She's nice-like a Wally Wood cartoon come to life-but I don't need the grief. Some of these women crave the attention victims get; they think their lives are more interesting if they come to you in peril, so you can rescue them. But it's all a setup, because you then must become the new peril from which they'll require someone else to rescue them, in order to continuously demonstrate their idea of worth, which is based on some imaginary profile of a person so attractive or interesting that they are constantly victimized."
"Somebody seems to have shaved their head in your upstairs bathroom. There's hair all over the floor.''
"Is it black?" Price nodded. "That'd be Malcolm. He wants to write meaningful novels that only get reviewed in the free papers. He's constantly worried he's not had enough, punk rawk enough, edge enough. He's probably out in the cabana getting his ear pierced with a hot ice pick, right now. Wonder where he got the razor?"
The main open space downstairs branched off in two directions from the turret, forming an area which, in an architectural show-and-tell, would be called the hot space. Together Art and Price descended back into this warren of morphing activity, part green room, part Bedlam. Art noticed there were no clocks, and the TV screens in the circular pit of the turret were obviously broadcasting prerecorded material. Price surveyed what he had wrought with the air of a minor god choosing his next mortal folly. "So, Dina's nursing a secret lust for me?" he said again, as though the idea was unexpected, yet obliquely pleasing.
"Like I said."
Michelle spotted them and snaked past bodies without upsetting any drinks. "We've got a couple more MIAs, not in the cabana. I think they went outside."
Price looked toward the picture windows, bowing now and again with the force of the wind and rain. "Solomon?"
"Not Solomon, he came in. Unless a few just went home."
"Nonsense, it's too early to go home, right, Art?"
"I should be," Art said. "Soon, anyway."
"You should cruise the cabana," said Price. "Find out where your limits are, maybe redefine a couple."
Art stopped Price from moving into the fray by placing his hand on one arm. "Price, you've got to understand about Suzanne. I don't know why she threw that fit upstairs. It surprised me. Earlier, she was the way you saw her when we came in. Now… I just don't know what's going on.''
"Like she acted in a completely unpredictable way?"
"Very unpredictable."
"Might have something to do with the fact she's been babysitting her ex-boyfriend upstairs-a guy whom she despises and fears. I'm sure she told you."
Art was honestly perplexed. "Why?"
"Because she tells everybody the Bryan story."
"No, I mean why go back to him?"
"Who knows? Revenge, maybe." Price's kung fu skill at deflecting queries was undeniable.
"C’mon, allow me to drag you away, sweetheart," said Michelle, taking Art's hand.
As soon as Price disengaged, Michelle had him. Her sway was persuasive, but he stuck to his plan of sane escape. "Drag me back toward the kitchen, because I've really got to go home and feed my dog."
"The cabana doesn't strike me as your scene," she said. "Unless you'd enjoy having your asshole widened by a domme with wildly mismatched skin illustrations covering more than eighty percent of her body."
"It's not that," said Art as they interleaved partygoers. "People can scar or burn or pierce or ink themselves however they want. It's just that it's become assimilated; tattoos are now what van art was to the seventies." He liked making Michelle laugh.
"God, I'd disagree, except I've seen some really stupid ones. You sure you want to take off?" She was gauging what to offer as an incentive for him to linger.
"I can't ignore the storm," he said. "But tell me something, Michelle. This whole party is a bipolar mood swing personified as a crowd. It seems like a big round of musical chairs. People scurry around a selection of different personalities and flop down on whichever one they can grab, and it all changes again at a moment's notice."
"Musical chairs is an elimination game."
"The odd man would be whoever freaks out in the bathroom next."
"I see the point, but this isn't that."
"No, the real point is that Price seems to know this, like he's responsible for it, somehow. He talked about getting people together here like some sort of social experiment, a big Skinner box full of volatile ingredients, a petri dish for emotional stress testing."
She regarded his thumbnail with frank admiration. "That's Price. Just celebrating somebody's birthday with a cake would be a drag."
"But, Michelle… if it's on purpose, doesn't it all seem a bit cruel?"
She lowered her eyes. "Sometimes yes, I suppose."
"Michelle, have you seen Tobias anywhere?" It was Shinya, the Asian woman Art had originally met in the kitchen. "I was scanning the room for that big blue shirt he was wearing, and''-she held up the shirt-"I found it on the couch, but he wasn't in it."
"You check upstairs?" Michelle said.
Shinya shook her head. "He had this kind of mad fit, you know, like when you suddenly just have to get out of a room? He said if he took off his glasses, he could see how ugly everybody was and it was starting to bug him." Shinya was fidgeting. Her hands did not know where to land; they got pocketed and withdrawn, moved to compulsively twirl strands of hair, then toyed with her broad belt, yanking out the leather tongue, then slotting it back. She might have actually been trembling.
"Hang on," said Michelle. She press-ganged a partygoer from just outside the kitchen arch, a tall woman in a pencil skirt and vintage forties lingerie, whose face read as male, pancaked in too much makeup, as though in preparation for a silent-movie shoot. "Chantelle, darling, go ask Kyle and Elpidia if they've got a twenty on Tobias, and see if you can spot him yourself. He might have pulled a costume change on us."
While Michelle was occupied with Chantelle, Shinya moved very close to Art and took both of his hands in hers, furtively glancing back to ensure her hostess would not overhear.
"You've got the right idea," she said in a low voice, to Art. Whispering was impossible here. "Get out. Before you get hurt." Then she quickly kissed his gathered hands, and retreated.
"Okay, doll," Michelle said to Shinya as she returned. "Our girl Chantelle is on it, and if she doesn't turn him up, you and I will do a search of the closets and storage areas."
Shinya nodded, her obsidian gaze welling with tears she regarded with surprise, as though she had no idea why she was running off at the eyes.
Art collected his slickers, his bomber jacket, and the coat he had loaned Suzanne from the peg near the door. Michelle stoppe
d him before he could get rainproofed.
"You have to promise me you'll come back, or I'll come looking for you," she said, turning his head with one hand and kissing his cheek. "Don't panic. I'm not attracted to you in that way, at least not yet. More of a kindred spirit thing. We have a lot in common. You and me together could overlord this entire party."
"What would Price say?"
"Price won't mind. Promise me."
Art didn't want another semantic battle. He wanted to get out into the storm, which was at least something he thought he could deal with. He settled for: "I'll see you again.''
Michelle vanished back into her party, and Art made it through the door. The storm on the outside had grown ten times worse than the one on the inside. Or was it the other way around? He could not decide.
***
The dash clock in the Jeep read 7 P.M. Price's house, and the menagerie it contained, seemed to collapse time; Art might have sworn he'd only been there an hour or so. Among the vehicles parked outside, the wind was threatening to tear the ragtop off a Caddy convertible and the newer, smaller cars were visibly rocking with each gust. A yacht-size black Buick Riviera held its ground, determined as a squatting cockroach.
Foliage had taken wing from the hills and debris scooted across the road like tumbleweeds, in the narrow brilliance of the high beams and the Jeep's bonus rack of halogen floods in shock-mounted titanium. Sheets of water unfolded themselves across the driving surface as Art engaged the four-wheel drive and managed a steady thirty-per, leery of booby traps, alert for a washout. He wanted to hole up in his sanctuary, fix a hamburger, and empty his head of the cacophony of the party. He had not partaken of any of the edibles at Price's; he now admitted to himself it was because he backhandedly feared the food was drugged. Half the people he'd encountered had seemed dangerously high. Paradoxically, a part of him wanted to go home and plug down Dixie Double Hexes until he lapsed into sleep, but he promised himself he'd be good tonight.
He wanted to know the hidden linkages that would bring the whole story into light. Price was adept at talking around the truth, and Michelle was his creature, so anything they revealed indicated a concurrent action list of facts in partial shadow. They seemed to be ringmastering the whole circus; they knew why Suzanne's personality had fishtailed on him, but Art was not permitted to know because he was an outsider.
Forget it, he told himself. Cut your losses, don't try to figure it out, and just drive. Leave it behind and it becomes the past. It's not like you had any make on Suzanne's personality-whatever it was, for real.
He thought of his own isolation, his self-imposed exile from the vertiginous soap opera represented in microcosm by Price's party. For every upside to dealing with people, there was a downside; for every benefit, an emotional bill to be paid. Somehow Price had seized the more jagged emotions of each of his guests and propelled them to the fore; he unburied fears and needs and denuded them, right on the surface, where they were unshielded enough to strike sparks against all the other fears and needs distilled from every other partygoer. Price could be a sadistic child in a room full of windup robots, setting them all in motion, heedless of how they collided or fell over. What remained hidden to Art was the benefit derived by Price himself, a guy who acted like he always had an angle hardwired to an agenda… unless it was to simply humiliate and embarrass everyone enough to give him some kind of future leverage.
Michelle seemed to know what was going on, too, but her only reaction, apparently, was bemusement at the demolition derby. She was luminescently attractive; another kind of armor. Art could not deny that his glands surged whenever she touched him or made eye contact, and she was pointedly aware of this, and the best defense he could muster was a passing-fair stone face. If you permitted yourself to be seduced by the song of the Sirens, you crashed your longboat on the reef-that was the entire purpose of the transfixing tune. Venus flytraps looked like flowers. Mosquitoes anesthetized their puncture points so you didn't know your blood had been sucked until they were gone. Legend said cobras mesmerized their prey. After the seduction, Art wondered, what sort of feeding took place?
Suzanne remained an enigma. Art felt the need to see her one more time, to talk with the version of her that had engaged him from a safe distance, before the roller-coaster free-for-all that had transpired in the bedroom. Pulling against this was the voice in his head that advised him to just let it go. It was what it was, and the story had ended. The End. Next page.
Dina disturbed him. He felt a conflicting desire to reach out to her, to engage her seeming manic depression, because past her perimeter of Bouncing Betty mines and razor wire there was a human being in considerable pain. He felt like a kid who had been warned not to touch something hot. The burn might teach him something he desperately needed to learn and know, the shape of which might only be clear after he'd taken the risk. Or it might merely scald and scar him, proving that reaching out was foolish.
All of them, the hosts and partygoers, were from a world Art had forsaken and did not miss. He could bail and leave them to their damnation and self-destruction. He owed the world nothing, and the world did not care about his grief. It wasn't living, but it was a life.
What happened next, happened fast.
First impression: A zebra sprang across the Jeep's path just as something shattered the right front windscreen.
It was too late to brake, but Art stomped the pedal in pure reflex, his entire body contracting as though electroshocked. The Jeep brodied off the rainswept road, tires hydroplaning, then vaulted a wet dune as though kicked in the ass. Sandgrass divided like hair ripped by a comb. The Jeep was airborne for a quarter of a second. It crunched down hard on its right front fender and tipped over, mostly because the front wheels were turned. It made a heavy woodblock impression as it settled into the sand on its passenger side.
Art's brain lurched like an egg in a dropped jar of vinegar as the world took a forty-five-degree tilt and his harness pushed the air out of his lungs. Touchdown punched him in the face, and his extremities blunted into remote, as though his hands and feet were sending signals from far away. His head banged the padded underside of the roll bar as all the loose junk inside the cab pelted him.
The engine revved wildly, a keening noise that strained upward; the sound of a prehistoric beast in pain. He tried to force his arm to stretch, to cut the ignition, and his right shoulder hollered. The headlamps carved a triangular spray of featureless sand and slanted needles of rain. The motor chugged and expired, leaving the hiss of falling water and the echoes of the last five seconds inside Art's swimming cognizance. Cold air pierced the cab. His legs seemed nailed into a pretzel configuration and the rest of him was strung aloft by the bondage of the driving harness like a parachutist hung up in an apple tree. Gravity insisted he go down. He undogged the latches and collapsed into a cramped astronaut crouch, feeling the door handle bruise his back, the gearshift jabbing his balls. Sharp things poked into his kidneys and he was able to draw two deep, raw breaths of air before he thought: A zebra?!
Maybe just someone in a patterned coat. Faux fur.
The Jeep gave a creak and cubes of shattered safety glass blizzarded down from the driver's-side window like crushed ice. Cold air lashed through the exposed cabin, bringing hostile raindrops. It was incentive enough. He wanted to lapse into unconsciousness, a blissful reprieve. Instead he keyed his own uncooperative, broken-robot body toward the task of climbing out of the upended Jeep, using his elbows for leverage.
Maybe just his imagination. Faux monster.
When he was upright, he pounded the glove box with his list, one, two, three times, before the goddamned door popped and jettisoned its contents-manuals, maps, old Life Savers, brown paper towels, flashlight. The rain slicker was still constricting his movements like a spiderweb. He hoped there wasn't any glass in his eyes.
Somebody was shouting in the distance. To Art it was all unintelligible rigmarole, like the voodoo bullshit assigned to black natives i
n serial thrillers, back when no one gave a damn about political correctitude. Art tried clumsily to dismount the Jeep and fell on his ass in the sand. Even as he contracted into a squat, the wind kept up its mission to knock him over again.
Flickering light was visible inside the Spilsbury house. Art realized he had gone off the road thirty yards shy of the driveway. Oddly, he felt very warm even though the wind and rain were frigid and unrelenting.
What to do first?
Somewhere inside the disorder of the Jeep was one of his guns- a Heckler G Koch USP compact, he remembered. A hammerless dock knockoff packing a ten-round, nine-millimeter mag. Normally it was stashed inside a fake Day Runner in the glove box. You could purchase these things out of any firearms periodical, and they usually featured a concealed, lockable back flap that concealed storage snugs "sized to your weapon" plus room for an extra clip. Why had he stashed a gun in the Jeep? Or had he misremembered this as well, which was why there was no gun to be found, and no attendant security to be had from tucking it against the small of his back (an "SOB carry," in gun argot).
The plastic flashlight was inadequate as a weapon. He blinked it several times in the direction from which he thought he had heard voices. No response, incomprehensible or otherwise.
Art flopped his hood into place and began to plod. It was time at last to check out the Spilsbury house, close up.
Art knew exactly nothing about his nearest so-called neighbors, the Spilsburys. Were there more than one? Wet sand sucked at his boots. There were small ponds everywhere, even this far from the beach. More than once, the storm tried to bowl him over.
The highway side of the two-story house was dark, but as Art rounded to the south he saw light flickering downstairs, dully orange and wavering. Firelight. If the wooden structure was burning, the interior would eat itself flagrantly until the doors and windows imploded and the blaze introduced itself to the abundance of rain. That would leave a gutted shell, unless the struts and supporting walls collapsed; then the pitched roof would cave in like a circus tent with the central pole removed. Bye-bye, vacation retreat.
Bullets of Rain Page 14
