The Poison Sky (4 page)

“I don't think it's the impossible dream.”

D
RIVING
back to Chris Johnson's place in West Hollywood, he passed three young women, all with long blond hair and Nazi uniforms with the big black boots. They goosestepped along La Cienega in front of an outlet store. Suddenly they about-faced and headed back south, as if afraid of getting too close to the Jewish district up along Fairfax. There was probably no way on earth of figuring out what that was about, he thought.

Chris Johnson was looking pretty glum when he opened the door. “You look like your parole officer just dropped by,” Jack Liffey said.

The young man didn't even give a snappy reply, just beckoned Jack Liffey in morosely and led him to the computer where he'd been researching the Theodelphian Elect and tapped the screen. Red text was slowly flashing:
MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS THIS IS THE ONLY WARNING YOU WILL BE GIVEN YOU ARE NOW OFF-LINE.

He handed Jack Liffey an inch-thick bundle of paper. “I got this down before they struck. I underestimated these guys, and that's for sure for sure. I'm not even sure what clued them in to my nosing around, but I'm lucky I keep that computer physically separate from my other stuff. That machine is hosed, dude. I was running every kind of antivirus software known to man and they cut through it all like butter. Your generation just gazumped mine. Maybe you old guys are meaner than we thought.”

“I thought you routed the call through some department store.”

“I did a lot more than that, dude, and it's like none of my protection was even
awake.
They just waltzed into my computer and squashed it like a bug. That message you see is the
only
remaining parcel of nonrandom data on my hard disk. They trashed it all in the time it took to blink, and that's not even physically possible. It takes time to write over a six-gig hard disk. Don't ask me how they did it. These guys are bad news, okay? Watch your back.”

Jack Liffey thought of the men watching his office, but how could the Theodelphians have got onto him so quickly?

“Sorry.”

Chris Johnson shook his head. “Don't be. I always told you I was the best. Man, sooner or later somebody always walks up and shoots Wild Bill Hickok in the head while he's holding aces and eights and I think we just witnessed the new fast gun.”

“You want to get even?”

He laughed ruefully and held up the flats of his hands. “Talk to me later. I'm shell-shocked right now. Man, I
did
think I was the best.”

• • •

W
HILE
he was waiting for evening to drive up and see Faye Mardesich, he parked near the Theodelphian Elect headquarters on the unfashionable end of Melrose near Western. It was unmistakable—a whole-block agglomeration of what had been storefronts and three-story apartments lashed together by a coat of festive yellow paint over everything. He could see into a courtyard in the center of the block that was accessed through a triumphal entrance arch where a building had been demolished. Inside was an artificial lagoon and a pagoda. The place looked like a big toy city made of Legos.

He watched the bustle of coming and going past a marquee that said:
“MY EYES ARE BEHOLDEN TO THE PROUD DELIGHTS LIFE IS OFFERING.” —K.A.
They were mostly young and most wore bright yellow short-sleeve tunics. He wondered if the yellow meant they had been elected or just nominated. The corner building on Melrose had a big well-lit Edward Hopper glass window, and a sign said it was the Reception Center, though nobody seemed to be going in there. Most of the traffic went under the arch past a guard shack. The kids going in seemed to be showing a card or badge, but the lion's share of the foot traffic was out, as if it was quitting time from the day's heavy metaphysical climb on the Big Ladder.

He looked over the papers Chris Johnson had given him, lots of tiny text and a mystico-muddle of graphs and drawings.
Region of the Second Permanent Retinal Image,
he read. He wondered if the leaders believed in their own cosmic mumbo jumbo or if it was all a big scam. But what he really needed to know was whether they kept new recruits squirreled away inside the Melrose complex, or if they were spirited off somewhere else, safe from the deprogrammers, some isolated ashram where the spirit coaches could dig their thumbs into all your emotional bruises.

He watched the kids for a bit because something seemed odd about them. They didn't migrate in groups like ordinary workmates or schoolmates, not even in twos or threes. Each one seemed to be utterly alone, and they went their separate ways at once, turning in different directions or spacing themselves out as they drifted away in these curiously emotionless gaits, not so much zombie-dead as simply preoccupied and uncomfortable. It was as if they'd been dropped there yesterday from Kansas and they were still unsure of what to do with themselves. Still, for all the oddity of the place, it didn't seem to represent the kind of cult that fried your computer and sent thugs to watch your office.

A bedraggled Latino family wheeling an infant in a shopping cart and trailing several other children made a slow procession past the complex. The father would work at day labor by loitering in front of the Home-Depot, Jack Liffey conjectured, and the mother would clean motel rooms. The cheerless family passed a dozen yellow kids without so much as a glance to or from, alternate realities inhabiting the same city without touching. Jack Liffey found he wanted to get out of the car and shout in one of the kids' faces, wake them up, introduce them to the migrant family, tell them a joke, make them read a book.

In his lap he read:

Level
2,
Stage 5: Here the ego and the future Universal All-Soul come into conflict over the ego's wish to become fully present in its own life, but held back by the fear of lonely perception. Key: Door of true synapse speed. Wall structure: The Dark brick. Archetype: Dash runner. Physical body: All the animal traits of the region of soul-light. Modality: aural-oral repetition. Higher desires: Presence and dense touch. Lower desires: Breath. Elect guide: Socrates. Work goal: To take the first steps from the desire world to the Being World. Work tapes: Fulton Bell Lectures no. 321-329.

He read it a second time, but it didn't help much. He was haunted by the dull eyes of the kids, and he wondered if Theodelphia was onto anything at all—even idiots and con men caught on scraps of ideas. He knew from his own life, almost four years now of a kind of spiritual migrancy since his marriage and his old job had blown up in his face, that everyone lived in a kind of relationship to the catastrophe that could sweep over you at any moment, and all you could do about it was know where you stood facing the catastrophe, minute to minute, and if you tried to deny it and look away, it could swallow you up in such a paroxysm of grief and horror that nothing living would ever touch you again. So you pushed on with your life and did the best you could day to day, and in a poor light it passed for strength.

A boy was coming along the sidewalk toward the car and Jack Liffey rolled the window down. The boy was hardly twenty and his yellow tunic was permanently food-stained, as if it was the only one he had. A bad case of acne had left him scarred and shy. He glanced furtively at Jack Liffey watching him as he approached the old car.

“Don't drink the Kool-Aid,” Jack Liffey said earnestly, and the boy glanced away and sped up half a step.

T
HIS
time he drove into the Valley over Laurel Canyon. He thought he'd miss the worst of the commute traffic but a flatbed had apparently collided with a green Camaro convertible on one of the tighter curves and dumped three pianos onto the road. The drivers were shouting at each other over a shattered upright that was propping up a baby grand. Other cars had to eke past on the shoulders and a woman with long red hair was leaning far out of the mashed convertible and pounding away on the keyboard of the baby grand.

• • •

“J
IMMY'S
a California boy,” she said, indicating the shelves built into the walls for sports equipment, a shorty surfboard, a bright blue snowboard, balls of various types, and an odd racket that he guessed was for something like lacrosse. He'd thought only rich kids at prep schools played lacrosse. For some reason, Faye Mardesich was wearing a baseball cap backward and when she had led him down the hall he read it:
WHAT PART OF “BALL-BUSTING BITCH!” DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

The boy had the back room, on the far side of the house from his parents and away, too, from his dad's postmodern sanctum. They'd passed the father's den on the way and he'd glanced in at the piles and piles of books on the floor, each book dangling a limp tongue of a bookmark. As they'd contemplated the father's study, Faye Mardesich had remembered she was carrying a beer bottle for each of them, and she'd thrust one into his hand, but he'd managed to lose it along the way. It was too much trouble to explain that he didn't drink.

There was a CD player on a shelf of the boy's room and the usual CDs with the usual dark and riddling titles like Factory of Funk and Shrieking Death Angels. Jack Liffey's eye caught on one disc by a group called the Hot Bleeding Assholes. A lot had changed since his day and the Shirelles and Bell-Notes. His eye also caught on a black fielder's mitt, and he wondered when they'd started dying them black and why. It smelled right, though, that same oily animal aroma.

“He's not brainless, but he and his friends are afraid of being seen to know things, if you know what I mean.” She held up a Game Boy player with something like contempt. “If I could only harness the hours he sat at the dinner table playing this beeping thing.”

She took down a Van Nuys High School yearbook and thumbed through it while he poked at what passed for a desk. There was a laptop, but when he fired it up he couldn't find anything on it but games. A blue Post-it above the desk said
Marta Monday.
He put it in his pocket.

“Oh, man,” Faye Mardesich said mournfully into the yearbook. “So much is the same, it really takes me back. We thought our problems were so gigantic back then. How were we supposed to know we were happy?”

“Are you happy now?”

She laughed softly. “I know I won't fall off the edge of the world if some handsome boy ignores me. I know pain goes away. I know things that I can do to entertain myself. That's as close to happy as anybody needs to get.”

“Sounds okay to me,” he said absently. He poked at a pile of discarded letters, shoved anyhow into a drawer, and pocketed a folded sheet of paper that was separate and caught his eye for some reason.

“Wish I could take that frame of reference back with me and do high school all over again,” she said.

He pressed an ink stamp onto a scrap of paper. It was the number 88. The only thing he could think of was the metric caliber of a very fine antiaircraft cannon the Germans had made in World War II. He pocketed the 88, too.

“I know the boy I'd go after. That shy one, what was his name? Grant Ellis. He was always reading some book and staying off by himself. He seemed geeky to us then, but I'll bet he's a famous film director now, and he probably has a lot more interesting sex life than me, too.”

“Maybe he's the kid who went up on the roof and started shooting the neighborhood dogs,” Jack Liffey said. “Did Jimmy ever rebel or run away, cause you any trouble at all?”

She shook her head. “He was too
nice
ever to get mutinous. When Milo turned angry, Jimmy just got quiet and withdrawn around home.” She waved one strong-looking arm, as if to erase that thought out of the air. “I don't mean Milo was Uncle Scrooge or anything. It just happened a few times, things getting to him. He'd snap out at me or Jimmy. I know it's hard being a man and not being able to provide.”

No shit, he thought. Hard being anyone who couldn't take care of your loved ones. He noticed a book by the door and turned it over. It was Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique.
“Do you think he's reading this?”

“Oh, that's mine. I must have left it the last time I was poking around in here. I'm in one of those consciousness groups, better late than never.” There was a painful dependency in her tone that he noticed for the first time, under all that brusque assurance.

“Sure,” he agreed.

“Here's his picture.” She held the high-school annual flat and he leaned over to see a shock of hair like a question mark over the boy's forehead and a big grin, the kind of open smile that rarely made it past childhood. He was a handsome kid. She purposely pressed her shoulder against him, and he waited a moment before pulling away so he wouldn't seem skittish. A little flirtation he could always handle, but he began to wonder why he'd been hired and who had recommended him.

On the closet floor he found an old leg cast with a lot of names on it, a heap of sports shoes, and a box of old tape cassettes. He felt the shirt and pants pockets but found nothing.

“What's your next step?” she asked.

“I'll have to look it up in Chapter Three of
How to Be a Detective.
”

“I saw that movie. Really, I'd like to know.”

He shrugged. “Okay, you're paying. You're going to give me the names of some of his friends and classmates and I'm going to talk to them.”

“Sounds good. Let's get started.”

“Pardon me?”

“I'm coming along. Don't worry, I'll wait in the car if it'd cramp your style to have me listen while you're interviewing people.” She seemed to be filling the door, as if he'd have to throw her a body block to get out of the room.

“Uh-uh. It doesn't work that way.”

“Remember, I'm paying. Jack—can I call you Jack?”

“It's better than Veronica.”

“I've been asleep for twenty years. You know what I mean? I quit college to support Milo through grad school. I took a class or two while Jimmy was growing up, but it wasn't the way I figured my life would go. I wanted it
all,
I wanted to
do
it, not just hear about it. The first week Jimmy was gone, this thing was giving me a serious case of the bads, but then I just told myself I wasn't going to let it go until it blesses me. Jimmy's not in that much danger, not really. He's probably just shacked up with one of those poor girls the Theodelphians use to get their hooks into their converts. See, that's what you were keeping from me, isn't it? I know who those creeps are. I can
use
this thing to help Jimmy and me both. I can feel it, it's a kick start for my life, and I'm going along with you for the ride. I pay, I come along—that's the rules.” She set her fists on her hips and he found the determination made her strangely attractive in that way confidence always does.