Trust Me (15 page)

CHAPTER 32

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Jeff showered and picked through the few clothes he had unpacked from the suitcase.
It was strange having his pants and shirts hanging in a closet as if he had always lived here. He put on jeans and a dark-blue shirt, slipped on his sandals, and went out to the living room.

It was an old house, probably built in the thirties, with small, boxy rooms, but it was bright and uncluttered. The living room had two walls entirely lined with books, and some bright prints against the other two white walls. He liked the feel of the house and felt secure in the back room that Ron had told him he could use.

“Let’s go.” Ron had his keys in his hand, ready to leave. A step ahead of him even though Ron had washed the dishes, showered, and made some phone calls. They walked out into the early evening. Santa Ana winds blew through the canyon. The air was dry and hot. He had always loved these conditions—perfect surfing weather when the winds blew the spray off the tops of the swells and held them up so that a surfer could move across the face of a wave for impossibly long distances.

“So where are we headed?” He buckled into the seat of the Rover.

“Good little meeting out in West LA.” Ron wheeled out of the driveway and on to the lane that led to Beachwood Canyon.

“What kind of meeting?” He couldn’t see going to one of those things Kathy had taken him to. What if she showed up?

“AA, Jeff. We’re going to an AA meeting.” Ron looked over at him as if he were talking to a dense child.

“If you go to AA, why do you go to those SOL meetings?”

“Curiosity. There’s a lot of good information there. The trouble is, they package it up and sell it to you, then they tell you that you won’t really ‘get it’ unless you go recruit other people to come in and buy so that then they can go out and recruit. But the information is good. Most of it, anyway.”

They drove in silence for a while. Eventually, they turned onto Highway 10, heading toward the setting sun.

Jeff pulled down the visor to block out the brightness.

“You know, I don’t know why you’re doing all this, but thanks for giving me a place to stay and everything.”

“No problem. Wash your own dishes. Maybe do a few errands.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Neighbor’s got a dog I feed when he’s on tour. Musician. You could do that.”

“I can’t believe how messed up everything got. And how fast.” He caught his reflection in a mirror on the visor. The sun had given him some color—he looked pretty good. Not like a guy that just got out of county.

Ron said, “Look how bad things could have gotten.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, given what you were doing . . .”

Jeff cut in, “What do you know about what I was doing?”

Ron explained about Joe Greiner and his call from the Narco Squad.

“You mean they wanted to use my sister’s death to set me up?” He was incredulous. “Marilyn didn’t take drugs.”

“Maybe not,” Ron said, “but they found something in her when she died.”

“What—Marilyn? That’s crazy. What was it?”

Ron told him about the Halcion, and what it was for.

“So they were after me anyway. Unbelievable.” He shook his head. “You know what?”

“What?” Ron glanced over.

“You’re right. It could have been worse. Much worse.” He was silent for a moment and then said, “I still don’t get it. How did my name come up in the first place? I mean between you and your cop friend—hey, Joe Greiner, that’s the guy that left a card on my door!”

Ron turned onto the San Diego Freeway, heading north, and got off at Santa Monica Boulevard before answering.

“Remember I told you I wrote about your sister?”

Jeff nodded. “Yeah, so?”

“I thought there was something strange about what happened, so I did a little research. Joe helped me.”

“What did you come up with?”

“I came up with seven similar cases. Apparent suicides. Young. Attractive. Your name just came up out of the blue.”

“Seven. Jesus.” He looked out the window. Ron had turned on Westwood Boulevard and they were heading back south.

“I don’t know about the others, but I’ve got this feeling that what happened to my sister has something to do with that SOL group.”

“Yeah,” Ron nodded. “So do I”

He stopped at a light in the right turn lane. A small crowd stood around the entrance to a church on the corner. Someone noticed Ron’s car and waved. Ron drove along the residential block until he found a spot to park. “Try to put all that aside for now,” he said as they stepped out of the Rover.

CHAPTER 33

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A freak rain spattered the coast on Wednesday morning—spin-off from a tropical storm battering central Baja.
A cool, damp wind blew in gusts from the south, but by midday the sky was clear again, the August heat reasserted itself and the air was sweltering.

The Museum of Natural History is an imposing stone edifice, locked in place between the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Coliseum. The three institutions share a space on the map at the uppermost portion of that part of LA known as South Central, deep in the heart of the city.

Holly was unfamiliar with this part of town. The drive down Exposition Boulevard got stranger and stranger to her; as she headed east, the small but respectable middle-class homes gave way to a grimmer atmosphere, the ironwork on the doors and windows of the houses betraying a sense of siege on the part of the inhabitants.

It was with a feeling of relief that she turned onto Menlo and pulled into the museum parking area. The few cars in the lot were mainly vans and SUVs—family vehicles nestled in this downtown oasis. She followed a young mother pushing a stroller with a round-faced baby in the front seat and a pixie-like boy with curly red hair in the back. The heat, after her air-conditioned ride, was oppressive. She wondered why Art had been so enthusiastic about meeting here.

They passed through a gate into an open area with a fountain. A long truck, the size of a large moving van, sat parked in front of the entrance, deep green with dinosaurs and sharks painted in brilliant colors. She went up the stone steps and found Art in the courtyard at the top, straddling a large bronze tortoise in the shade of the building.

He rose, grinning, and came forward to greet her.

“Perfect. It’s lovely inside, you’ll see.” He took her hand and began to lead her to the glass doors of the museum, then stopped and turned toward her again.

“How are you, my dear?” He looked directly into her eyes, his tanned face serious now, the piercing blue eyes unblinking. He wore the cream-colored suit in which she had first seen him. His hand was cool to the touch.

“I’m fine.”

She started to look away, but he held her gaze and said, “Really?”

“I don’t know” she said. “I’ve been feeling tired a lot. Coffee just seems to make me feel anxious.” Then she told him about the dreams, and the false waking that was still a dream and how something seemed to be floating at the periphery of her attention, something crucial but elusive.

Art pulled her gently toward him and touched her briefly on the forehead with his lips. She could smell his cologne, the scent attractive but subtle. His shirt was brilliant white against a yellow silk tie. She turned her head and rested it against Art’s shoulder; a brief tremor ran through her but was replaced by a sense of comfort.

Art patted her back and then kneaded the muscles at her spine with his fingertips. “You’ve launched into a process of discovery. The subconscious mind is stirring—it doesn’t like to be prodded, and now it’s making waves in your conscious life.”

She disengaged from Art and stepped back. They entered the museum and Art showed an attendant what must have been a member’s pass, because they were allowed to proceed without paying.

“So it’s normal to feel what I’m feeling?”

“Absolutely. Growth is an awkward thing, and pain is the touchstone of growth. There are no free rides.”

“What if I just decided to stop?” she asked.

“Well, that would be like stirring up a hornet’s nest and then trying to throw a blanket over it. The hornets get enraged and try to get out so they can do some damage. No, Holly, we must walk steadfastly toward the light.” He took her hand again and they walked into the rotunda.

A series of beautiful photographs from China was on display. She marveled at the delicacy and power of each: the pattern of cracking ice in a winter pond, a red bird in a leafless tree against a gray sky, women and children carrying sheaves of wheat along a country path. Her heels clicked against the marble floor and echoed against the high-domed ceiling; the air was delightfully cool. Except for a handful of other visitors, the museum was pleasantly unpopulated.

Art led her into the dinosaur exhibit.

“Look at this,” he told her, pointing to a plaque in front of a fearsome recreation of a pre-historic carnivore.

The sign read: Tarbosaurus - late Cretaceous - 90 million years.

“Unbelievable,” she said. “Ninety million years ago.”

“Yes. It puts our human problems in perspective, doesn’t it?”

They entered another room, half of which was dominated by the reassembled skeleton of a
Brontosaurus
. Next, they entered a new chamber; a plaque proclaimed the emergence of early mammals.

“Look at this!” She pointed to a macabre gathering of skeletons, two of which stood about thirty-six inches tall, the other about half that. “It’s a family of horses. Thirty million years old.”

“Yes. The dinosaurs seem to have disappeared quite suddenly, and then the warm-blooded mammals gained a foothold. Come . . .” He guided her by the elbow toward the next room. “This tells the whole story.”

A series of panels, covering three walls, made up a single enormous mural. Holly contemplated the first panel, which described the Big Bang and the early expansion of the universe.

“Now we’re fourteen billion years back. So what do they think there was before this big bang. I mean, if everything was condensed into a single point, where was the point?”

Art nodded his head and clapped his hands together.

“Exactly. The point couldn’t be in space because all the space was in the point. Fantastic, isn’t it?”

The next panel described the cooling and condensing of gases into stars and the eventual formation of galaxies.

Following the progression clockwise, they watched the panorama unfold as the earth was born, cooled, and became covered with water. They walked on to see single-celled life develop, then multiply into more complex combinations and shapes, eventually becoming fish, leaving the water, and transmuting into crawling things. In another thirty steps they had passed through the great eras: Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and into the Cenozoic. She stopped when they reached the panel that showed apes on the left side, dragging their knuckles across the plains. In the center of the panel an almost-human ape stood erect, while increasingly human figures marched toward the next panel; cavemen, gathered around a fire, wielding tools.

“You know,” Art said, “there are those who say that this is all a fabrication, a lie inspired by the devil himself to lure man into a false sense of self-sufficiency.”

She noticed that, beneath the panels, there was a timeline showing the duration of epochs. The caveman panel to the end of the sequence—the next panel, depicting early civilization giving rise to modern man, the atom bomb, and space exploration—represented a small sliver of the entire timeline.

“Yes,” she replied. “I had a college roommate once, a born-again Christian, who counted the generations of the patriarchs and their ages, added them up, and told me that’s how old the universe was. We were theater arts majors together until she dropped out. She told me she had found a new calling.” She shook her head. “She wasn’t like that when I met her.”

They stared up at the final panel, with its depiction of machinery and science, its rocket launch and mushroom cloud.

“Did you know,” Art put his hand in the small of her back, “that in Texas there’s a place called the Creationist Museum?”

“Does it have dinosaurs?” She laughed.

“It has displays claiming to refute what they call the theories of secular humanism, Darwin in particular. The remarkable thing about it is that the curator and his director are both legitimate scientists. One worked as a geologist and the other was an astrophysicist. They too claimed that the earth was nine thousand years old and that the Biblical account of creation is the only accurate one.”

“What about the fossil record, sedimentation, geological strata, carbon-14 and all the rest?”

Art looked at her, his expression one of amused surprise.

“They taught you that in Theater Arts? I’m very impressed.”

“My first love was natural history. I can’t believe I’ve never come to this place—it’s so wonderful here.” She looked around the room. A summer-school class had filed in and now stood in a group in front of the Big Bang illustration. “So how do they explain away all that stuff?”

“No problem,” Art replied. His hand moved up her back and to her neck, which he massaged gently with his fingers. “They simply say that God, when he created the earth, created it complete with buried dinosaur bones.”

“No, really?”

“Yes, really. In fact, they welcome skepticism and challenges from visitors. I couldn’t resist.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I asked if they agreed with modern science about the speed of light, and they said yes. They also agreed when I asked them about the probable size of the universe, and the distance to certain known stars.”

“So?”

“So, I pointed out that if they agreed a particular star was more than ten thousand light-years distant, and that if the speed of light is constant, then in order for us to be able to see the star, the light that we’re seeing must have originated more than ten thousand years ago. Of course, that would be a thousand years before God created anything.”

“Hah. How did they get around that one?”

“Again, no problem. They said, ‘If God can create a world complete with living creatures and the bones of monsters that never lived, we have no problem with Him creating light in motion.’ In other words, he snapped the photons into existence as if they were en route, nine thousand light years from here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she exclaimed.

“Ah, but is it any more ridiculous than a single point, existing in no place because by definition no place exists outside it?”

She pondered the question and realized that both propositions were equally bizarre.

“It’s a good thing,” she said, “that choosing between the two isn’t a critical issue for daily living.”

She had meant to be sarcastic, but Art took her quite seriously.

“That’s just it, you see.” There was an intensity now in his manner. “If the Creationists are wrong, and the Big Bang picture”—he gestured at the entire panorama spread around them—“is correct, then where did Spirit come from? Is it just some aspect of psychology—something mundane that evolved out of animal intelligence? Some historical development arising by chance in a series of random mutations? A function of the ‘survival of the fittest’ process?”

She thought,
When he talks like this you don’t know what he’s after.
Art dropped his hand from her neck and stepped sideways to the previous panel, gesturing for her to join him.

“Or did it perhaps always exist—before the Big Bang, in another ‘place’ altogether—a community of spirits, waiting in the wings until the naked ape stood upright”—he pointed at the center illustration—“until his brain evolved to just the right point, and Spirit said, ‘It’s time,’ and volunteered to join us and make us human.”

She looked up at the stooped, apelike beings in the left-hand portion of the panel, with their vacant expressions, their brute dumbness as they plodded rightward toward their evolutionary destiny, and then the central figure, looking outward with awareness, a sense of its own presence. She could easily imagine that something had descended from another sphere and inhabited the creature, and that that, much more than the erect posture, was the essence of its humanity.

“So we’re really made up of two things, then,” she offered.

“Four,” Art corrected. “Earth, Water, Air, and Fire . . . Body, Heart, Mind, and Spirit. The trouble is, the first three conspire to shut Spirit out—they establish Ego in its place and relegate Spirit to a subterranean dungeon, where it waits to be awakened.”

She turned from the canny stare of the Cro-Magnon on the wall to face Art. “How,” she asked, “is it awakened?”

“Ah, now we get to the heart of the matter. When the true self, or the Soul, has finally had enough, when it sees the futility of the domination by Ego, it must make a conscious choice. It begins to listen to new sources of information, as you have done by coming to meetings and engaging with me. It accepts challenges to Ego, as you have done by opening yourself to guided imagery and facilitated awareness. You see, Holly,” and here Art reached and touched her gently with his fingers at her left temple, “you are already in the process of awakening Spirit. Now we must dig deeper, and truly examine what Ego has wrought and the powerlessness you feel. In this way it is exposed as the foolish tyrant that it really is and, as it loses its stranglehold on us, new power flows in. This is the essence of Saving Our Lives.” He leaned forward and again pressed his lips gently to her forehead.