“Easy for you to say. Try it sometime.”
They had arrived at a beach pad with salmon walls and an aqua roof, with a dwarf palm growing out of the sand in front decorated all over with empty beer cans, among which Doc couldn’t help noticing a number of ex-Burgies. “Actually,” Doc remembered, “I’ve got this coupon, buy a case, get one free, expires midnight tonight, maybe I better—”
“Hey, it’s your ex–old lady, man, I’m just along for the finder’s fee.”
They were greeted by a person with a shaved head, wearing wire-rim sunglasses and a green and magenta kimono with some kind of bird motif on it. He was a dedicated old-school longboarder recently back from Oahu, having somehow known in advance about the epic surf that hit the north shore of that island back in December.
“Man, did you miss a big story,” he greeted Doc.
“You too, man.”
“I’m talkin about sets of fifty-foot waves that wouldn’t quit.”
“‘Fifty,’ huh. I’m talkin about Charlie Manson gettin popped.”
They looked at each other.
“On the face of it,” Vehi Fairfield said finally, “two separate worlds, each unaware of the other. But they always connect someplace.”
“Manson and the Surge of ’69,” said Doc.
“I’d be very surprised if they weren’t connected,” Vehi said.
“That’s because you think everything is connected,” Sortilège said.
“‘Think’?” He turned back to Doc, beaming. “You’re here about your ex–old lady.”
“What?”
“You got my message. You just don’t know you did.”
“Oh. Sure, Woo-Woo Telephone and Telegraph, I keep forgetting.”
“Not a very spiritual person,” Vehi remarked.
“His attitude needs some work,” Sortilège said, “but for the level he’s on, he’s okay.”
“Here, take some of this.” Vehi held out a piece of blotter with something written on it in Chinese. Maybe Japanese.
“Oboy, now what, more through-the-wall sci-fi, right? groovy, can’t wait.”
“Not this,” said Vehi, “this is designed expressly for you.”
“Sure. Like a T-shirt.” Doc popped it in his mouth. “Wait. Expressly for me, what’s that mean?”
But after putting onto his stereo, at top volume, Tiny Tim singing “The Ice Caps Are Melting,” from his recent album, which had been somehow fiendishly programmed to repeat indefinitely, Vehi had either left the area or become invisible.
At least it wasn’t quite as cosmic as the last trip this acid enthusiast had acted as travel agent for. When it began exactly wasn’t too clear, but at some point, via some simple, normal transition, Doc found himself in the vividly lit ruin of an ancient city that was, and also wasn’t, everyday Greater L.A.—stretching on for miles, house after house, room after room, every room inhabited. At first he thought he recognized the people he ran into, though he couldn’t always put names to them. Everybody living at the beach, for example, Doc and all his neighbors, were and were not refugees from the disaster which had submerged Lemuria thousands of years ago. Seeking areas of land they believed to be safe, they had settled on the coast of California.
Somehow unavoidably the war in Indochina figured in. The U.S., being located between the two oceans into which Atlantis and Lemuria had disappeared, was the middle term in their ancient rivalry, remaining trapped in that position up to the present day, imagining itself to be fighting in Southeast Asia out of free will but in fact repeating a karmic loop as old as the geography of those oceans, with Nixon a descendant of Atlantis just as Ho Chi Minh was of Lemuria, because for tens of thousands of years all wars in Indochina had really been proxy wars, going back, back to the previous world, before the U.S., or French Indochina, before the Catholic Church, before the Buddha, before written history, to the moment when three Lemurian holy men landed on those shores, fleeing the terrible inundation which had taken their homeland, bringing with them the stone pillar they had rescued from their temple in Lemuria and would set up as the foundation of their new life and the heart of their exile. It would become known as the sacred stone of Mu, and over the centuries to follow, as invading armies came and went, the stone would be taken away each time for safekeeping to a secret location, to be put up someplace different when the troubles were over. Ever since France began colonizing Indochina, on through the present occupation by the U.S., the sacred stone had remained invisible, withdrawn into its own space. . . .
Tiny Tim was still singing the same number. Moving through the three-dimensional city labyrinth, Doc noticed after a while that the lower levels seemed a little damp. By the time the water was ankle-deep, he began to get the idea. This entire vast structure was sinking. He went up steps to higher and higher levels, but the water level kept rising. Beginning to panic, and cursing Vehi for setting him up once again, he felt more than saw the Lemurian spirit guide Kamukea as a shadow of deep clarity. . . . We must leave now, said the voice in his mind.
They were flying together, close to the tops of the waves of the Pacific. There was dark weather at the horizon. Ahead of them a white blur began to sharpen and grow, and slowly it resolved into the sails of a topmasted schooner, running along full-spread before a fresh breeze. Doc recognized the Golden Fang. Preserved, Kamukea silently corrected him. This was no dream ship—every sail and piece of rigging was doing its work, and Doc could hear the snap of canvas and the creak of timbers. He angled in toward the port quarter of the schooner, and there was Shasta Fay, brought here, it seemed, under some kind of duress, out on deck, alone, gazing back at the way she’d come, the home she’d left. . . . Doc tried calling her name but of course words out here were only words.
She’ll be all right, Kamukea assured him. You don’t have to worry. That is another thing you must learn, for what you must learn is what I am showing you.
“I’m not sure what that means, man.” Even Doc could feel now how mercilessly, despite the wind and the sails of the moment so clean and direct, this honest old fishing vessel had come to be inhabited—possessed—by an ancient and evil energy. How would Shasta be safe in that?
I have brought you this far, but now you must return through your own efforts. The Lemurian was gone, and Doc was left at his negligible altitude above the Pacific to find his way out of a vortex of corroded history, to evade somehow a future that seemed dark whichever way he turned. . . .
“It’s okay, Doc.” Sortilège had been calling his name now for a while. They were outside on the beach, it was nighttime, Vehi wasn’t there. The ocean lay close by, dark and invisible except for luminescence where the surf broke stately as the bass line to some great uncontainable rock ’n’ roll classic. From somewhere back in the alleys of Gordita Beach came gusts of dopers’ merriment.
“Well—”
“Don’t say it,” warned Sortilège. “Don’t say, ‘Let me tell you about my trip.’”
“Makes no sense. Like, we were out in this—”
“I can either press your lips gently closed with my finger or—” She made a fist and positioned it near his face.
“If your guru Vehi did not just set me up . . .”
After about a minute, she said, “What?”
“Huh? What was I talkin about?”
EIGHT
THE BANK DEPOSIT FORM SLOANE WOLFMANN HAD GIVEN DOC was from Arbolada Savings and Loan in Ojai. This, according to Aunt Reet, was one of many S&Ls Mickey held a controlling interest in.
“And their customers, how would you describe them?”
“Mostly individual homeowners, what we in the profession refer to as ‘suckers,’” replied Aunt Reet.
“And the loans—anything out of the ordinary?”
“Ranchers, local contractors, maybe some Rosicrucians and Theosoph
ists now and then—oh and of course there’s Chryskylodon, who’ve been doing a heap of building and landscaping and tacky but expensive interior design lately.”
As if his head was a 3-D gong just struck by a small hammer, Doc recalled the blurry foreign word in the photo of Sloane he’d seen at her house. “How do you spell that, and what is it?”
“Got one of their brochures someplace on this desk, down around the Precambrian layer as I recall . . . aha! Here: ‘Located in the scenic Ojai Valley, Chryskylodon Institute, from an ancient Indian word meaning “serenity,” provides silence, harmony with the Earth, and unconditional compassion for those emotionally at risk owing to the unprecedented stressfulness of life in the sixties and seventies.’”
“Sure sounds like a high-rent loony bin, don’t it.”
“The pictures don’t tell you much, everything’s been shot with grease on the lens, like some girlie magazine. There’s a phone number here.” Doc copied it, and she added, “Call your mother, by the way.”
“Oh, shit. Something happen?”
“You didn’t call for a week and a half, is what happened.”
“Work.”
“Well, the latest is, is they think you’re a dope dealer now. The impression I get, I should say.”
“Right, well, seeing Gilroy’s the one with the life, operations manager for whatever, grandkids and acreage and so forth, stands to reason, don’t it, I should be the one with the narcs breathin down my neck.”
“Preaching to the choir, Doc, I wanted out of that place before I could talk. They’d catch me pedaling a mile a minute on my li’l pink trike heading out through the beet fields, and drag me back screaming. Nothing you can tell me about the San Joaquin, kid. Then again, Elmina says she misses your voice.”
“I’ll call her.”
“She also agrees with me you should look at that two-acre piece out in Pacoima.”
“Not me, man.”
“Still on the market, Doc. And like we say in the business, get a lot while you’re young.”
Leo Sportello and Elmina Breeze had met up in 1934 at the World’s Largest Outdoor Rummy Game, held annually in Ripon. Leo, reaching for one of her discards, said something like, “Now, you’re sure you don’t want that,” and as Elmina told it, the minute she looked up from her cards and into his eyes, she was sure as salvation about what she did want. She was still living at home then, student-teaching, and Leo had a good job at one of the wineries, known for a fortified product marketed up and down the coast as Midnight Special. Every time Leo so much as put his head in the door, Elmina’s father would go into a W. C. Fields routine—“Ah? the wino’s frien-n-n-d . . . ye-e-esss . . .” Leo began to make a point of bringing some over whenever he came to pick up Elmina for a date, and before long his future father-in-law was buying the stuff by the case, using Leo’s company discount. The first wine Doc ever drank was Midnight Special, part of Grandpa Breeze’s concept of baby-sitting.
DOC WAS HOME watching division semifinals between the 76ers and Milwaukee, mainly for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whom Doc had admired since he was Lew Alcindor, when right in the middle of a fast break he became aware of a voice down in the street calling his name. For a minute he flashed that it was Aunt Reet, secretly resolved to sell his place out from under him, showing it at this inappropriate hour to some flatland couple especially selected for their pain-in-the-ass qualities. By the time he got to the window to have a look, he dug how he’d been fooled by a similarity of voices, and it was actually his mother Elmina in the street, somehow in deep discussion with Downstairs Eddie. She looked up, saw Doc, and started waving cheerfully.
“Larry! Larry!” Behind her was a double-parked 1969 Oldsmobile, and Doc could dimly make out his father Leo leaning out the window, an inexpensive cigar clamped in his teeth pulsing bright to dim and back again. Doc was now imagining himself at the rail of a long-ago ocean liner sailing out of San Pedro, ideally for Hawaii but Santa Monica would do, and he waved back. “Ma! Dad! Come on up!” He went running around opening windows and cranking up the electric fan, though the odor of marijuana smoke, having long found its way into the rug, the couch, the velvet painting, was years too late to even worry about.
“Where do I park this?” Leo hollered up.
Good question. The kindest thing anybody’d ever called the parking in Gordita Beach was nonlinear. The regulations changed unpredictably from one block, often one space, to the next, having been devised secretly by fiendish anarchists to infuriate drivers into one day forming a mob and attacking the offices of town government. “Be right down,” said Doc.
“Will you look at that hair,” Elmina greeted him.
“Soon as I can get to a mirror, Ma,” by which time she was in his arms, not all that put out at being hugged and kissed in public by a longhaired hippie freak. “Hi, Dad.” Doc slid into the front seat. “There’s probably something down on Beachfront Drive, just hope we don’t have to go halfway to Redondo to find it.”
Meantime, Downstairs Eddie was going, “Wow, so this is your folks, far out,” and so forth.
“You boys go park,” said Elmina, “I’ll just hang out with Larry’s neighbor here.”
“Door’s open upstairs,” Doc quickly reviewing what he knew of Eddie’s rap sheet, including the hearsay, “just don’t get in any kitchens with this guy, you should be all right.”
“That was back in ’67,” Eddie protested. “All those charges got dropped.”
“My,” said Elmina.
Of course no more than five minutes later, having lucked into a spot just down the hill good at least till midnight, Doc and Leo returned to find Eddie and Elmina in the kitchen, and Eddie just about to open the last box of brownie mix.
“Ah-ah-ah,” Doc wagging his finger.
There were beers and half a bag of Cheetos, and Surfside Slick’s deli up the hill was open till midnight for whatever they’d be running out of.
Elmina wasted no time in bringing up the subject of Shasta Fay, whom she’d met once and taken to right away. “I always hoped . . . Oh, you know . . .”
“Leave the kid be,” muttered Leo.
Doc was aware of Downstairs Eddie, who’d once upon a time had to listen to it all through his ceiling, throwing him a look.
“She had her career,” Elmina continued. “It’s hard, but sometimes you have to let a girl go where her dreams are calling her. There did use to be Hepworths over by Manteca, you know, and a couple of them moved down here during the war to work in the defense plants. She could be related.”
“If I see her, I’ll ask,” Doc said.
There were footfalls up the back steps and Scott Oof came in by way of the kitchen. “Hi Uncle Leo, Aunt Elmina, Mom said you’d be driving down.”
“We missed you at supper,” Elmina said.
“Had to go see about a gig. You’ll be here for a while, right?”
Leo and Elmina were staying up on Sepulveda at the Skyhook Lodge, which did a lot of airport business and was populated day and night with the insomniac, the stranded and deserted, not to mention an occasional certified zombie. “Wandering all up and down the halls,” said Elmina, “men in business suits, women in evening gowns, people in their underwear or sometimes nothing at all, toddlers staggering around looking for their parents, drunks, drug addicts, police, ambulance technicians, so many room-service carts they get into traffic jams, who needs to get in the car and go anyplace, the whole city of Los Angeles is right there five minutes from the airport.”
“How’s the television?” Downstairs Eddie wanted to know.
“The film libraries on some of these channels,” Elmina said, “I swear. There was one on last night, I couldn’t sleep. After I saw it, I was afraid to sleep. Have you seen Black Narcissus, 1947?”
Eddie, who was enrolled in the graduate film program at SC, let out a scream of
recognition. He’d been working on his doctoral dissertation, “Deadpan to Demonic—Subtextual Uses of Eyeliner in the Cinema,” and had just in fact arrived at the moment in Black Narcissus where Kathleen Byron, as a demented nun, shows up in civilian gear, including eye makeup good for a year’s worth of nightmares.
“Well, I hope you’ll be including some men,” Elmina said. “All those German silents, Conrad Veidt in Caligari, Klein-Rogge in Metropolis—”
“—complicated of course by the demands of orthochromatic film stock—”
Oboy. Doc went out to search through the kitchen, having dimly recalled an unopened case of beer that might be there. Soon Leo put his head in.
“I know it has to be someplace,” Doc puzzled out loud.
“Maybe you can tell me if this is normal,” Leo said. “We got a weird phone call at the motel last night, somebody on the other end starts screaming, at first I figure it’s Chinese, I can’t understand a word. Finally I can just make out, ‘We know where you are. Watch your ass.’ And they hang up.”
Doc was having those rectal throbs. “What name are you guys checked in under?”
“Our usual one.” But Leo was blushing.
“Dad, it could be important.”
“Okay, but try to understand, it’s this habit your mother and I have sort of fallen into, of staying at different motels up and down old 99 on weekends, under fake names? We pretend we’re married to other people and having an illicit rendezvous. And I won’t try to kid you, it’s a lot of fun. Like those hippies say, whatever turns you on, right?”
“So the front desk doesn’t really have you down as any kind of Sportello.”
Leo gave him one of those hesitant smiles that fathers use to deflect the disapproval of sons. “I like to use Frank Chambers. You know, from The Postman Always Rings Twice? Your mother uses Cora Smith if anybody asks, but for Chrissake don’t tell her I told you that.”
“So it was a wrong number.” Doc saw the case of beer, out in front of his face all this time. He put some cans in the freezer, hoping he’d remember he’d done this and that nothing would explode like it usually did. “Well Dad, I’m really shocked at you two.” He embraced Leo and held it for almost long enough to be embarrassing.
Inherent Vice Page 12
