Bullets of Rain (3 page)

    Lorelle had always read books voraciously; Art did not try to keep up with her and excused himself as selective. Derek could pace her, talking obscure classics and current bestsellers, always with both of them swapping recommendations. Then he could digress onto the mean worth of the work of artists Art had never heard of or remembered, without missing a breath. He loved finding conversational links, and Art appreciated his way of thinking around corners. Derek entertained a succession of youngish girlfriends, mostly brown-over-brown fitness fanatics, and Art rarely bothered to try telling them apart, depending on Derek to clue him in if it was important. He lingered over one such partner-Art recalled her name as Erica-and the two of them had blazed off to Hawaii in search of volcanoes. That was it. Until today, two years later, or was it three?

    The card was not from Hawaii. It had been postmarked in San Francisco. Art propped it on his desk-not his drafting table, but the wraparound workstation where the computer monitor dominated a third of the space. He wondered if Derek had any idea how to find him, then smiled to himself again.

    "Hey," he said in English to Blitz. "Remember Uncle Derek? From when you were still a puppy?'' Blitz cocked his head, trying to figure out if the question had anything to do with anything edible. Art hit a key command to let the computer slide to sleep mode. The monitor made a strange little
boink
sound that always caused Blitz to bark, exactly once. Art was perpetually amused by this, and never chided him.

    The house clicked and popped from a sudden strong gust of wind. Art knew all the sounds of the house intimately. Sometimes he dreamed Lorelle was walking through their front door-now refaced in stainless steel, another task yet undone while she was alive.

    She returns from some errand and he hears the locks crank, and the jangle of keys. Cvery person's keybunch has a sound as characteristic as a fingerprint. He hears the thud of her leather shoulder bag on the glass-topped entryway table. She calls into the house to determine whether it's empty, and he hears her voice ring. The acoustics are different because the house is a wreck and most oh the seaward windows are boarded up with plywood, prior to reinstallation. They can't keep the plaster dust out oh the kitchen and are forever stepping on stray screws or nails or sharp curls o/j cut metal. Most of the furniture is sheeted in plastic, or not yet bought. Plans and the detritus oft reconstruction are everywhere. Art hears Lorelle call his name into this wasteland, this work in progress…

    … then he always bolted awake, panic about burglars popping a quick sweat on his skin, the silence broken only by his own breathing. He could always smell the emotions he dragged back from the dream state and they always embarrassed him. There was nobody to be embarrassed before, until Blitz intruded with his own menu of needs. Dogs are tolerant and forgiving. No matter how you screw up, they look at you with an expression that says they still love you.

    It had always been difficult or impossible for Art to get back to sleep after these Lorelle interludes, which did not actually classify as dreams. Every tiny noise sprang him back to queasy wakefulness, and as a result he suffered a misdistribution of REM sleep similar to that experienced by alcoholics.

    Art was what is known in idiomatic parlance as a "morning bear." It was generally not a good idea to speak to him or otherwise distract him, or list demands, until about two hours after he'd opened his eyes, had coffee, gotten oriented to the day. He often thought of the rattler he and Derek had seen in the desert-its aggressive patterning, its never-blinking slit-eyed gaze, the warnings inherent in the devilish design of its weaponlike head. No molestarme. Don't mess with me. Art often fancied that the snake was coiled inside his own chest, its blunt length separating his lungs, its ballistic skull resting atop his heart, absorbing body heat. Once it warmed up, it could pursue its own meditations, and safely be ignored. Lorelle, a talker, had never fully comprehended Art's need for quiet upon waking and his disinclination toward breakfast chitchat, but she accommodated it, accepting the trait as Art's wall against distraction. She usually rose before he did and left him fresh coffee on the nightstand, retreating to putter. She maintained an intriguing work habit, which was to install herself before her own computer immediately upon waking, before caffeine and the real world could fully kick in. In this half-asleep, half-awake Zen state, she said, things flowed around the logic roadblocks in her brain, directly to her fingers, and her keyboard, making her good for a thousand words, minimum, before she had to think about getting dressed for real or what obligations the day mandated. She had been halfway into the bones of a novel when she died.

    Art would wonder forever how that story was supposed to end.

    When you live with another person for a significant length of time, your body sensors become attuned to the sounds of your partner, elsewhere in the house. Art missed waking to the smell of fresh-ground brew and hearing the fluting sound of his wife's half tunes. Lorelle sang to herself, and hummed a lot, never complete songs. Hence, Art now kept his stereo hot, and the big-screen TV on most of the time, just to experience voices or a presence other than himself that could aid in defining spaces and the acoustic weight of rooms in which he was the sole occupant. He preferred cinema channels with no commercials and no "original series"-just movies-but Blitz actually seemed to pay attention to the nature channels, especially the ones that featured graphic veterinary surgery and looked, at a glance, like shows about the warp and woof of torture. Art was also held victim to a bizarre fascination for the History Channel, or as he called it, the Hitler Channel, since every other program seemed to focus on World War II. ''That logo, that little H in the box? It stands for Hitler." That never failed to crack Lorelle up. It was part of their secret language. The Hitler Channel was about the past; you could see it was the past because of the black-and-white footage, the film scratches, the view through a time-keyhole refreshingly free of digital perfection.

    Art fired up all systems and settled for CNN, to see if anything in the world had really changed. Nothing had. He got more coffee, bisected a bagel, and continued doodling.

    Before the semicircle of black leather sofas grouped around the electronic fireplace of the TV screen was a low glass table the size of a child's inflatable swimming pool. Art perched his athletic shoes on it. Once a week he rigorously cleaned and dusted all the surfaces in the house. You had to anyway, with a dog in residence. Shortly after Lorelle had died, he'd disengaged their housekeeper, Mrs. Ives, a top-heavy, gray-bunned Welsh lady with a gait like a pouter pigeon.

    He'd discovered that he could fill time with basic maintenance.

    Keeping track of seven principal rooms with two and half baths could become a job instead of a chore. Every time he vacuumed rugs or polished countertops, he thought that no matter how thoroughly he cleaned, there would always be pieces of Lorelle in the house-microscopic motes of shed skin cells, fading scents on still-hanging clothes, a baseboard scuff where she'd once kicked a door shut in anger. Last week he'd found one of her auburn hairs behind an antique armoire, and he'd slid slowly down the wall to a sitting position, legs out like a kid in a sandbox, and wept for twenty minutes.

    The memory, even dulled by time, could flood back that quickly, blindside him that unexpectedly, and cut past all his calculated defense mechanisms, draining hope from his heart and disturbing the rattlesnake, who held fast within his chest, coiled around Art's emotions, its slanted, evil-looking mouth seeming to grin.

    The corridor to the south wing, bedroom and library, was crowded with framed photographs that also haunted him. Wedding shots, excursions, parties, adventures on foreign soil. Pictures of both her late parents still hung there. Lorelle had been born a month before Neil Armstrong had stepped onto the surface of the moon. Her mom and dad had been college students trying to fathom the Summer of Love. They had died within a year of each other, in 1992. Dad had acquired ALS-amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more popularly known as Lou Gehrig's disease-and had hung on long enough to see his daughter marry; it was almost as though he could let go once Lorelle had found Art. Mom went totally unexpectedly, after a bus jumped a yellow light verging on red and broadsided her Acura. She arrived at the hospital comatose and never woke up. Lorelle and Art had been there for all of it, the deathwatch, the sorrow, the funeral, and the discomfiting silence and emotional flatline that polluted their next few months.

    Doctors discovered Lorelle's tumor in March 2000, and by mid-April Art found himself back on the deathwatch chair. As time ran out, Lorelle's hospital stay seemed both excruciatingly protracted (in terms of her pain) and too fast, too soon for Art. Morose hindsight taught him that one either winds up dying, or watching someone else die. Do this long enough, and all too quickly your points of reference for the world are systematically erased. Events grow distant, celebrities die, your friends and family precede you, and suddenly nobody knows what you're talking about. That was when time itself had begun to blur for Art. The next thing he remembered was trying to answer questions from strangers as to how his wife should be buried. They never decided definitively what kind of cancer it was, exactly, and everyone apologized a lot. It did not require a medical education for Art to realize the doctors were out of their depth. Tumors morphed into new and frightening forms; that was enough information to forestall keener inquiry from strangers who didn't care anyway. People apologized. And the globe spun on.

    Most of the subsequent nine months-give or take-vanished into Art's recycling bin in the form of empty bottles, or up his reconstructed nose in the form of cocaine. It took another year to resurrect his career, and these days he stuck to occasional beer and wine. He let his hair grow out again and tied it back, not minding the gray threads that appeared and gradually got longer, seemingly because he was looking right at them.

    He had incorporated as Lattitude, Ltd., punning on his own name. Latimer plus attitude.
I don't know about "Art," but I know what I like.
His business cards were arrogantly stark-two geometric lines resembling open boundaries embossed in show-off metallic ink, the company name, and a row of reps and contact numbers, one of which was for Charlie Brill, an agent who had actually sold some of Art's designs as framed collectibles. Art always signed
Latt
in the appropriate box on the blueprints.

    Blitz mooched a bite of bagel that vanished down his gullet with no chewing whatsoever. CNN advised that the government was vaporlocked as usual and Wall Street was caterwauling over a single-percentage-point drop in something or other. Children were starving to death in India and 70 percent of the people in Africa, it appeared, were HIV positive. A hot-air balloonist had crashed and drowned somewhere between Art's home and Hawaii. In Los Angeles, the heat was on to make random weapon sweeps of private homes legal; Art thought of the Hitler Channel. San Franciscans were advised to button up for a big, wet storm over the weekend. Art's porch barometer was dropping steadily.

    The satellite dish feed offered five hundred channels of nothing. Art picked up the novel he had begun… what, weeks, months ago? Yesterday? He was only fifty pages in.

    Lorelle's bailiwick had been fiction, for which Art had little time among the temptations of research and tech journals. Occasionally he made a stab at reading for entertainment and was usually disappointed, feeling he had to process too much to gain not enough. Make-believe just did not grab him, although he presently made sorties into the novels Lorelle had left behind, as if preserving one of her favorite pastimes would help her endure in memory.

    His habit was to read at night, before dozing off, but he sensed oncoming defeat, and… sure enough. He lasted through a few more chapters of the overwrought bestseller about a made-up serial killer, and knew he would read no further. There; a decision had been made and it was still early in the day. Art found invented fiends far less interesting than genuine killers, although he could argue persuasively that Jack the Ripper was probably the most infamous "invented'' serial murderer in all history. Few candidates held a candle to H. H. Holmes, the guy who had constructed his " Murder Castle " in Chicago just in time to prey upon the throngs that came to experience the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Far fewer tomes had been written about Holmes than saucy Jack. Art had accumulated a respectable short shelf of true crime, and had done a great deal more reading since Lorelle's death.

    The telling of stories was fundamental to human nature, an expression of the anthropological need for the species to constantly arrange things into cogent groupings, which trait was supposedly its most salient distinction from the lower orders. Humankind organized thoughts, wants, needs, and dreams into a coding called language, expressed via spoken words, then put that conveniently opposable thumb to the task of ordering that language into graphic symbols. All human interaction was based on storytelling, one individual or group relating a story to another. You got together with your friends and swapped stories, or voiced opinion on topical events called news. Everybody decided what political or religious stories spoke to their condition, and new stories were fomented much in the manner of a spreading virus. Art, already a compulsive arranger, was aware that he had begun absorbing stories from pages and screens and displays as an alternate form of human contact. Not many actual humans were loitering around his life, at the moment, to listen while he told his own story, which he felt was cunningly one-note… right now, anyway.

    In the bathroom he spoke to himself again in the mirror. "Your ballroom days are over, baby."