Going Native (41 page)

Will looked at the mirrors. They were all steamed up. "But I've had that car for years. There's sentimental value in those sprung seats and rusted chrome."

Tia smiled. "I know." She and Will had made love in its roomy interior like a couple of randy kids shortly after they met, in the deserted after-hours parking lot of the Gardens. "But I'm tired of it sitting out there in the garage, taking up space. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to park both cars inside?"

He thought for a moment, then abruptly turned to go. "We'll talk about it."

"I want that green monster out of my garage," she said.

"Daddy!" cried Todd from his sloppy tub of warm water. "I love you!"

Johnson went downstairs and out onto the beach. The surf seemed louder in the dark. A wind from out there in the salt night pressed softly, insistently against the contours of his face as if measuring him for a mask. It was pleasant to feel a force moving invisibly at him for a change and to know, more or less, the nature of its strength and the order of its interest in him. Each individual life seemed to serve merely as a culture for the incubation of mystery. And as the organism aged, the mysteries proliferated, whole colonies of them black as the spaces between the stars, and as numerous. The darkness that gobbled you up.

After a while he heard behind him the sound of approaching feet hissing through the sand, then felt the touch of Tia's hand upon his back.

"Beautiful," she asked, "isn't it?"

The moon, low and incandescent, had laid a shimmering bar of silver across the water, a highway of light.

Johnson stared up into its huge mottled eye. "Say cheese," he proclaimed. "It's like the aperture is wide open and it's about to snap our picture."

She leaned her head against his shoulder. "Such a romantic."

"There aren't many of us left."

There was a silence, then she said, "Why do you always act as though you're under surveillance? No one's watching you, Will. You're free to do as you please."

"Someone's always watching."

"Well, if that 'someone' is meant to refer to me, maybe we've got a problem."

He patted her hand. "No problem."

"Because most folks would regard my attentions as an aspect of love."

He made a contemptuous snorting noise. "Most folks."

"Please, Will, don't start."

"I never start. I only finish."

She waited until the turbulence of his words was carried off by the wind. Then she asked, "Is something wrong?"

"No."

"You haven't seemed like yourself lately."

"Really? Who have I seemed like?"

She didn't answer. She turned without a word and headed back up the beach toward the house.

He watched the twinkling lights of a freighter far out to sea moving so slowly they seemed to be not moving at all and he wondered what sort of ship it was and where it was from and where it would be tomorrow at this time and where he would be, too.

Back in his room he settled into bed with a bottle of Moosehead and his remote. He went channel-surfing. He was trying hard not to think, to remain clean by hosing himself off in the daily data stream. There were thoughts up in brain heaven anxious to be born; he could detect their clamor. There were shapes pressing at the elastic borders of this three-dimensional world; he could feel their pain. In the next moment, at any moment, anything you could possibly imagine could be rendered as fact.

He seemed at one point to wake up out of a shroud of befuddlement. All right, call it sleep. He shuffled to the bathroom. As he stood there splattering piss into the bowl, his vagrant eyes found themselves in the mirror over the sink and mind saw itself confronting a face it could not remember. Whose was this? Could it actually be his, the revealed vision of a self he'd burned down a life in sacrifice to, or just another pagan image? Where was the glass to show him that truth? He picked up a tube of Tia's lipstick -- there seemed to be one beside every mirror -- and he wrote upon his forehead in crude letters that read correctly in their reflection but backward on his skin the single word BOGUS.

He left his room and on bare feet padded silently down the carpeted hallway to Tia's door. His fingers, tuned to a professional thief's sensitivity, closed deftly around the brass knob of her door and soundlessly turned the cylinder in the plate like the numbered dial of a vault. He eased himself into the room and stopped, still as a mannequin in the cool blue light of the gaping moon. The dark air was alive with the presence of her, the heat and scent of a breathing animal. He did not move. Gradually, as his eyes adjusted, the image of her rose clearly into view. She was lying asleep in the bed he knew so well, her body at a forty-five-degree angle across the mattress, the pale shafts of her legs protruding like lengths of sculpted wood from beneath the covers, and in the theater of his mind he saw her eyes as dark unwinking stones set in an oval of colorless clay. He watched her for a long while. She did not move. The obscurity under the sheet. The awful toil of time and earth and the sinewy motion of the planets locked inside the design like coiled snakes.

He stepped to the open closet, his hand moving among the sleek garments that hung there like the blade of a precision machine. The hand stopped to caress a dangling fold of skinlike texture and this he drew from its hanger and, without a backward look, left the room as quietly as he had come, closing the door softly behind him.

It was a black satin dress, a favorite of Tia's she had once worn, during her life with Si, to a grand old-time Hollywood party at Steven Spielberg's house. Back in his room Will stripped off his clothes and pulled on the dress. He stood before the mirror, studying himself like someone uncertain whether to make a purchase. He sat in a chair, he lay on the bed, he walked about the room. He didn't know what he was doing. He roamed the house, upstairs and down, even making a brief appearance en costume beside Todd's bed. It seemed crucial that he visit each room, debut his new persona before the assembled objects of each individual space, submit its unique aura to the history of the house. He was feeling so jacked, not sexually, but how he did when he couldn't find anything to watch on TV. Things moved in his body quick as darting fish, and he understood these things had not necessarily originated exclusively inside him, but had hatched elsewhere and slipped hungry and unseen through the prolific air.

Sometime in the early morning he returned downstairs, and beneath the shocking light of the kitchen he cut his finger while slicing a lemon for a vodka and tonic. The sight of his own blood infuriated him. This feeble flowering of the flesh. He let the tap water run chilly and smooth over the wound until it flowed sweet and clear. He sat at the kitchen table, nursing his drink, trying to avoid in the big picture window the matching reflection of himself sitting suspended in black space over the cries and explosions of the unchanging sea.

When he finished his drink, he went down the stairs and out to the garage and felt his way in total night around the polished contours of Tia's BMW over to his ruined car, the original vehicle, the one he had arrived in so long ago. He unzipped the dress, allowed it to fall whispering into a soft puddle at his feet, and, with barely a sound, opened the door on the driver's side and climbed in. Naked he sat, hands on the wheel of the Galaxie 500, staring through the windshield into the darkness ahead. He was at the controls of himself then, up on the bridge in the captain's chair. He reached under the seat for the reassuring touch of the Glock 19, and, yes, it was still there, the Old Baptizer, it had not abandoned him, he could see the gun's sorcerous shape through the nerves of his fingers. All the bonds of a life, the swelling clusters of knot upon impossible knot, severed instantly! in the blink of a trigger. The arena cleared, except for a disagreeable stain in the sand, and you could begin anew. Reborn in a bolt of lightning and a whiff of sulphur. The chambers of the heart, the conduits of thought scoured pure and wholesome as an innocent babe's.

But then everything got complicated again and you had to do it over and the intervals between doing kept getting smaller. All he wanted now was to come to a stop, but even here, in the dank confinement of this
garage,
the Galaxie was moving on beneath him. Beyond the windscreen the darkness that had appeared to be so inflexible, so monolithic, was moving, too, it teemed, it swarmed with minute specks of light, just as the fires of the day danced with specks of dark, and now it was all he could see, this nervous ballet between ground and being, the eternity of noise rushing trapped between channels. There was no self, there was no identity, there was no grand ship to conduct you harmlessly through the uncharted night. There was no you. There was only the Viewer, slumped forever in his sour seat, the bald shells of his eyes boiling in pictures, a biblical flood of them, all saturated tones and deep focus, not one life-size, and the hands applauding, always applauding, palms abraded to an open fretwork of gristle and bone, the ruined teeth fixed in a yellowy smile that will not diminish, that will not fade, he's happy, he's being entertained.

Scan Notes, v3.0:
Proofed carefully, italics and special characters intact.