Inherent Vice (60 page)

“Oh, we’ll see.”
Groovy.

“
We’re
also going to Hawaii next weekend.”

Doc remembered his dream. “You takin a boat?”

“Flying over on Kahuna Airlines. Coy got tickets someplace.”

“Try not to check too many bags.”

“He just came in. Here, talk to him. We love you.”

There were sounds, annoying after a while, of prolonged kissing, and Coy finally said,
“I’m
officially off of everybody’s payroll, man.
Burke Stodger called in person to tell me. Did you get to the concert last
night?”

“No, and my cousin Scott’s gonna be so pissed off. I just forgot. Heard
you really kicked ass.”

“I got some long solos on ‘Steamer Lane’ and ‘Hair Ball’ and the Dick
Dale salute.”

“And I guess your daughter had fun.”

“Man, she’s ...” And he just went silent. Doc listened to him breath
ing for a while. “You know what the Indians say. You saved my life, now
you’ve got to—”

“Yeah, yeah, some hippie made that up.” These people, man. Don’t know nothin. “You saved your life, Coy. Now you get to live it.” He hung up.

WHEN IT BECAME TRAGICALLY OBVIOUS TOO LATE IN THE FOURTH
quarter that the Lakers would lose Game 7 of the finals to the Knicks, Doc began thinking about who he’d bet on it with, and how much, and then the ten thousand dollars, and then everybody else he owed money to, which he now remembered included Fritz, so he popped off the tube and, deciding to take his disappointment out on the road, got in the
Dart and headed up to Santa Monica. By the time he arrived at Gotcha!, there were still one or two lights on inside. He went around the back and
tapped at the door. After a while it opened an inch, and a kid with very short hair peered out. Had to be Sparky.

Which it was. “Fritz said you’d be by sometime. Come on in.” The computer room was hopping. All the tape reels were spinning back and forth, and there were now twice as many computer screens as
Doc remembered, all lit up, plus at least a dozen TV sets on, each tuned
to a different channel. A sound system that must have been looted from a movie theater was playing “Help Me, Rhonda,” and the beat-up old percolator in the corner had been replaced with some gigantic Italian coffee machine covered with pipes and valve handles and gauges and enough chrome that you could drive it slowly along any boulevard in East L.A. and fit right in. Sparky went to a keyboard and typed in some series of commands in a peculiar code
Doc tried to read but couldn’t,
and the coffee machine started to—well not breathe, exactly, but begin to route steam and hot water around in a purposeful way.

“Where’s Fritz got to?”

“Down in the desert someplace, chasing deadbeats. As usual.”

Doc took a joint out of his shirt pocket. “Mind if I, uh
...
”

“Sure,” just this side of sociable.

“You don’t smoke?”

Sparky shrugged. “Its harder for me to work. Or maybe I’m just one of those people shouldn’t be goin in for drugs.”

“Fritz said after he’d been on the network for a while it felt like doing
psychedelics.”

“He also thinks the ARPAnet has taken his soul.”

Doc thought about this. “Has it?”

Sparky frowned off into the distance. “The system has no use for souls. Not how it works at all. Even this thing about going into other
people’s lives? it isn’t like some Eastern trip of absorbing into a collective
consciousness. It’s only finding stuff out that somebody else didn’t think you were going to. And it’s moving so fast, like the more we know, the
more we know, you can almost see it change one day to the next. Why I
try to work late. Not so much of a shock next morning.”

“Wow. Guess I better learn something about this or I’ll be obsolete.”

“It’s all pretty clunky,” waving around the room. “Down here in real
life, compared to what you see in spy movies and TV, we’re still nowhere
near that speed or capacity, even the infrared and night vision they’re using in Vietnam is still a long way from X-Ray Specs, but it all moves exponentially, and someday everybody’s gonna wake up to find they’re
under surveillance they can’t escape. Skips won’t be able to skip no more,
maybe by then there’ll be no place to skip to.”

The coffee machine burst into a loud synthesized vocal of “Volare.”

“Fritz programmed that in. I might have gone more for ‘Java Jive.’”

“Little before your time.”

“It’s all data. Ones and zeros. All recoverable. Eternally present.”
Groovy.

The coffee wasn’t bad considering
it’s
robotic origins. Sparky tried to show Doc a little code. “Oh hey,” Doc remembered then, “this network of yours, does it include hospitals? Like if somebody went in an emergency room, could you find out their status?”

“Depends where.”

“Vegas?”

“Maybe something by way of the University of Utah, let me look.”
There was a flurry of plastic percussion and green space-alien glyphs on
the screen, and after a while Sparky said, “Got Sunrise here, and Desert Springs.”

“She’d either be under Beaverton or Fortnight. Pretty recent, I think.”

Sparky typed some more and nodded. “Okay, Sunrise Hospital shows
a Trillium Fortnight, home address in L.A., admitted with a concussion, cuts, and bruises. ... In for observation and treatment two
...
three nights, released in the custody of her parents
...
looks like last Tuesday.”

“That’s her.” He looked over Sparky’s shoulder at the screen. “What do you know, that is her. Well. Thanks, man.”

“You all right?” Seeming impatient now to be back to work.

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know. You look a little weird, and most people your age call
me ‘kid.’”

“I’m headin over to Zucky’s, can I bring you somethin back?”

“Don’t really get hungry till after midnight, then I usually just call up
Pizza Man.”

“Okay. Tell Fritz I owe him money. And would you mind if I look in
here once in a while if I try not to be too much of a pain in the ass?”

“Sure. Help you set up your own system if you want. It’s the wave of
the future, ain’t it.”

“Tubular, dude.”

At Zucky’s, Doc sat at the counter and ordered coffee and a full-size
chocolate cream pie, and for a while went through the exercise of actually
cutting forty-five-degree slices and putting them on a plate and eating
them one by one with a fork, but finally he just picked up what was left with his hands and went ahead and finished it that way.

Magda came over to have a look. “Like some pie with that?”

“You’re workin nights now,” Doc observed.

“Always been more of a night person. Where’s that Fritz, I haven’t seen him for a while.”

“Out in the desert someplace, is what I heard.”

“Looks like you’ve been copping some rays yourself.”

“I know this guy has a boat, we went out on it the other day?”

“Catch anything?”

“Drank beer mostly.”

“Sounds like my husband. They figured one time they’d go to Tahiti,
ended up at Terminal Island.”

Doc lit an after-dinner cigarette. “Long as they all got back safe.”

“Can’t remember. You have some whipped cream on your ear there.”

doc got on
the Santa Monica Freeway, and about the time he was making the transition to the San Diego southbound, the fog began
it’s
nightly roll inland. He pushed his hair off of his face, turned up the radio
volume, lit a Kool, sank back in a cruising slouch, and watched everything
slowly disappear, the trees and shrubbery along the median, the yellow
school-bus pool at Palms, the lights in the hills, the signs above the free
way that told you where you were, the planes descending to the airport.
The third dimension grew less and less reliable—a row of four taillights
ahead could either belong to two separate cars in adjoining lanes a safe distance away, or be a pair of double lights on the same vehicle, right up your nose, no way to tell. At first the fog blew in in separate sheets, but soon everything grew thick and uniform till all Doc could see were his headlight beams, like eyestalks of an extraterrestrial, aimed into the hushed whiteness ahead, and the lights on his dashboard, where the
speedometer was the only way to tell how fast he was going.

He crept along till he finally found another car to settle in behind.
After a while in his rearview mirror he saw somebody else fall in behind
him. He was in a convoy of unknown size, each car keeping the one
ahead in taillight range, like a caravan in a desert of perception, gathered
awhile for safety in getting across a patch of blindness. It was one of the few things he’d ever seen anybody in this town, except hippies, do for free.

Doc wondered how many people he knew had been caught out tonight
in this fog, and how many were indoors fogbound in front of the tube or in bed just falling asleep. Someday—he figured Sparky would confirm it—there’d be phones as standard equipment in every car, maybe even dashboard computers. People could exchange names and addresses and life stories and form alumni associations to gather once a year at some
bar off a different freeway exit each time, to remember the night they set
up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog.

He cut in the Vibrasonic. KQAS was playing Fapardokly’s triple-tongue highway classic “Super Market,” ordinarily ideal for driving through L.A.—though with traffic conditions tonight Doc might have to settle for every other beat—and then there were some Elephant’s Memory bootleg tapes, and the Spaniels’ cover of “Stranger in Love,” and “God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys, which Doc realized after a while he’d been singing along with. He looked at the gas gauge and saw there was still better than half a tank, plus fumes. He had a container of
coffee from Zucky’s and almost a full pack of smokes.

Now and then somebody signaled a right turn and cautiously left the
line to feel their way toward an exit ramp. The bigger exit signs overhead
were completely invisible, but sometimes it was possible to see one of the
smaller ones down at road level, right where the exit lane began to peel
away. So it always had to be one of those last-possible-minute decisions.

Doc figured if he missed the Gordita Beach exit he’d take the first
one whose sign he could read and work his way back on surface streets.
He knew that at Rosecrans the freeway began to dogleg east, and at
some point, Hawthorne Boulevard or Artesia, he’d lose the fog, unless it
was spreading tonight, and settled in regionwide. Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he’d have to just keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego, and across
a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican,
who was Anglo, who was anybody. Then again, he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over on
the shoulder, and wait. For whatever would happen. For a forgotten joint
to materialize in his pocket. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him. For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride. For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.

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End
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