I was touched by the length of his speech, because it meant that he was deeply worried about me.
“So,” I said, “you’re calling me an asshole.”
“Not yet. Depends on what you do about this.”
“So I’m an asshole waiting to happen.”
“Let’s just say that your asshole potential is off the Richter.”
I shook my head. “Well, from where I sit, this doesn’t look like a thirty-footer.”
“Maybe a forty.”
“It looks like a twenty max.”
He rolled his eyes up into his head, as if to say that the only place he was going to see any common sense was inside his own skull. “From what Angela said, this all goes back to some project at Fort Wyvern.”
“She went upstairs to get something she wanted to show me—some sort of proof, I guess, something her husband must have squirreled away. Whatever it was, it was destroyed in the fire.”
“Fort Wyvern. The Army. The military.”
“So?”
“We’re talking about the government here,” Bobby said. “Bro, the government isn’t even a thirty-footer. It’s a hundred. It’s a tsunami.”
“This is America.”
“It used to be.”
“I have a duty here.”
“What duty?”
“A moral duty.”
Beetling his brow, pinching the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, as though listening to me had given him a headache, he said, “I guess if you turn on the evening news and hear there’s a comet going to destroy the earth, you pull on your tights and cape and fly into outer space to deflect that sucker toward the other end of the galaxy.”
“Unless the cape is at the dry cleaner.”
“Asshole.”
“Asshole.”
20
“Look here,” Bobby said. “Data coming down right now. This is from a British government weather satellite. Process it, and you can measure the height of any wave, anywhere in the world, to within a few centimeters.”
He had not turned on any lights in his office. The oversize video displays at the various computer workstations provided enough illumination for him and more than enough for me. Colorful bar graphs, maps, enhanced satellite photos, and flow charts of dynamic weather situations moved on the screens.
I have not embraced the computer age and never will. With UV-proof sunglasses, I can’t easily read what’s on a video display, and I can’t risk spending hours in front of even a filtered screen with all those UV rays pumping out at me. They are low-level emissions to you, but considering cumulative damage, a few hours at a computer would be a lightstorm to me. I do my writing by hand in legal tablets: the occasional article, the best-selling book that resulted in the long Time magazine article about me and XP.
This computer-packed room is the heart of Surfcast, Bobby’s surf-forecasting service, which provides daily predictions by fax to subscribers all over the world, maintains a Web site, and has a 900 number for surf information. Four employees work out of offices in Moonlight Bay, networked with this room, but Bobby himself does the final data analysis and surf predictions.
Along the shores of the world’s oceans, approximately six million surfers regularly ride the waves, and about five and a half million of these are content with waves that have faces—measured from trough to crest—of six or eight feet. Ocean swells hide their power below the surface, extending down as much as one thousand feet, and they are not waves until they shoal up and break to the shore; consequently, there was no way, until the late 1980s, to predict with any reliability even where and when six-foot humpers could be found. Surf junkies could spend days at the beach, waiting through surf that was mushy or soft or even flat, while a few hundred miles up or down the coast, plunging breakers were macking to shore, corduroy to the horizon. A significant percentage of those five and a half million boardheads would rather pay Bobby a few bucks to learn where the action will or won’t be than rely strictly on the goodwill of Kahuna, the god of all surf.
A few bucks. The 900 number alone draws eight hundred thousand calls each year, at two dollars a pop. Ironically, Bobby the slacker and surf rebel has probably become the wealthiest person in Moonlight Bay—although no one realizes this and although he gives away most of it.
“Here,” he said, dropping into a chair in front of one of the computers. “Before you rush off to save the world and get your brains blown out, think about this.” As Orson cocked his head to watch the screen, Bobby hammered the keyboard, calling up new data.
Most of the remaining half million of those six million surfers sit out waves above, say, fifteen feet, and probably fewer than ten thousand can ride twenty-footers, but although these more awesomely skilled and ballsy types are fewer in number, a higher percentage of them want Bobby’s forecasts. They live and die for the ride; to miss a session of epic monsters, especially in their neighborhood, would be nothing less than Shakespearean tragedy with sand.
“Sunday,” Bobby said, still tapping the keyboard.
“This Sunday?”
“Two nights from now, you’ll want to be here. Rather than be dead, I mean.”
“Big surf coming?”
“It’s gonna be sacred.”
Perhaps three hundred or four hundred surfers on the planet have the experience, talent, and cojones to mount waves above twenty feet, and a handful of them pay Bobby well to track truly giant surf, even though it is treacherous and likely to kill them. A few of these maniacs are wealthy men who will fly anywhere in the world to challenge storm waves, thirty- and even forty-foot behemoths, into which they are frequently towed by a helper on a Jet Ski, because catching such huge monoliths in the usual fashion is difficult and often impossible. Worldwide, you can find well-formed, ride-worthy waves thirty feet and higher no more than thirty days a year, and often they come to shore in exotic places. Using maps, satellite photos, and weather data from numerous sources, Bobby can provide two- or three-day warnings, and his predictions are so trustworthy that these most demanding of all clients have never complained.
“There.” Bobby pointed to a wave profile on the computer. Orson took a closer look at the screen as Bobby said, “Moonlight Bay, point-break surf. It’s going to be classic Sunday afternoon, evening, all the way until Monday dawn—fully pumping mackers.”
I blinked at the video display. “Am I seeing twelve-footers?”
“Ten to twelve feet, with a possibility of some sets as high as fourteen. They’re hitting Hawaii soon…then us.”
“That’ll be live.”
“Entirely live. Coming off a big, slow-moving storm north of Tahiti. There’s going to be an offshore wind, too, so these monsters are going to give you more dry, insanely hollow barrels than you’ve seen in your dreams.”
“Cool.”
He swiveled in his chair to look up at me. “So what do you want to ride—the Sunday-night surf rolling out of Tahiti or the tsunami pipeline of death rolling out of Wyvern?”
“Both.”
“Kamikaze,” he said scornfully.
“Duck,” I called him, with a smile—which is the same as saying buoy, meaning one who sits in the lineup and never has the guts to take a wave.
Orson turned his head from one of us to the other, back and forth, as if watching a tennis match.
“Geek,” Bobby said.
“Decoy,” I said, which is the same as saying duck.
“Asshole,” he said, which has identical definitions in surfer lingo and standard English.
“I take it you’re not with me on this.”
Getting up from the chair, he said, “You can’t go to the cops. You can’t go to the FBI. They’re all paid by the other side. What can you possibly hope to learn about some way-secret project at Wyvern?”
“I’ve already uncovered a little.”
“Yeah, and the next thing you learn is the thing that’ll get you killed. Listen, Chris, you aren’t Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. At best, yo
u’re Nancy Drew.”
“Nancy Drew had an unreal rate of case closure,” I reminded him. “She nailed one hundred percent of the bastards she went after. I’d be honored to be considered the equal of a kick-ass crime fighter like Ms. Nancy Drew.”
“Kamikaze.”
“Duck.”
“Geek.”
“Decoy.”
Laughing softly, shaking his head, scratching his beard stubble, Bobby said, “You make me sick.”
“Likewise.”
The telephone rang, and Bobby answered it. “Hey, gorgeous, I totally get off on the new format—all Chris Isaak, all the time. Play ‘Dancin’’ for me, okay?” He passed the handset to me. “It’s for you, Nancy.”
I like Sasha’s disc-jockey voice. It’s only subtly different from her real-world voice, marginally deeper and softer and silkier, but the effect is profound. When I hear Sasha the deejay, I want to curl up in bed with her. I want to curl up in bed with her anyway, as often as possible, but when she’s using her radio voice, I want to curl up in bed with her urgently. The voice comes over her from the moment she enters the studio, and it’s with her even when she is off-mike, until she leaves work.
“This tune ends in about a minute, I’ve got to do some patter between cuts,” she told me, “so I’ll be quick. Somebody came around here at the station a little while ago, trying to get in touch with you. Says it’s life or death.”
“Who?”
“I can’t use the name on the phone. Promised I wouldn’t. When I said you were probably at Bobby’s…this person didn’t want to call you there or come there to see you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why exactly. But…this person was really nervous, Chris. ‘I have been one acquainted with the night.’ Do you know who I mean?”
I have been one acquainted with the night.
It was a line from a poem by Robert Frost.
My dad had instilled in me his passion for poetry. I had infected Sasha.
“Yes,” I said. “I think I know who you mean.”
“Wants to see you as soon as possible. Says it’s life or death. What’s going on, Chris?”
“Big surf coming in Sunday afternoon,” I said.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know. Tell you the rest later.”
“Big surf. Can I handle it?”
“Twelve-footers.”
“I think I’ll just Gidget-out and beach party.”
“Love your voice,” I said.
“Smooth as the bay.”
She hung up, and so did I.
Although he had only heard my half of the conversation, Bobby relied on his uncanny intuition to figure out the tone and intent of Sasha’s call. “What’re you walking into?”
“Just Nancy stuff,” I said. “You wouldn’t be interested.”
As Bobby and I led a still-uneasy Orson onto the front porch, the radio in the kitchen began to swing with “Dancin’” by Chris Isaak.
“Sasha is an awesome woman,” Bobby said.
“Unreal,” I agreed.
“You can’t be with her if you’re dead. She’s not that kinky.”
“Point taken.”
“You have your sunglasses?”
I patted my shirt pocket. “Yeah.”
“Did you use some of my sunscreen?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Geek.”
I said, “I’ve been thinking….”
“It’s about time you started.”
“I’ve been working on the new book.”
“Finally got your lazy ass in gear.”
“It’s about friendship.”
“Am I in it?”
“Amazingly, yes.”
“You’re not using my real name, are you?”
“I’m calling you Igor. The thing is…I’m afraid readers might not relate to what I have to say, because you and I—all my friends—we live such different lives.”
Stopping at the head of the porch steps, regarding me with his patented look of scorn, Bobby said, “I thought you had to be smart to write books.”
“It’s not a federal law.”
“Obviously not. Even the literary equivalent of a gyrospaz ought to know that every last one of us leads a different life.”
“Yeah? Maria Cortez leads a different life?”
Maria is Manuel Ramirez’s younger sister, twenty-eight like Bobby and me. She is a beautician, and her husband works as a car mechanic. They have two children, one cat, and a small tract house with a big mortgage.
Bobby said, “She doesn’t live her life in the beauty shop, doing someone’s hair—or in her house, vacuuming the carpet. She lives her life between her ears. There’s a world inside her skull, and probably way stranger and more bitchin’ than you or I, with our shallow brain pans, can imagine. Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside—some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me—we aren’t so special, bro.”
I was briefly speechless. Then I fingered the sleeve of his parrot-and-palm-frond shirt and said, “I didn’t realize you were such a philosopher.”
He shrugged. “That little gem of wisdom? Hell, that was just something I got in a fortune cookie.”
“Must’ve been a big honker of a cookie.”
“Hey, it was a huge monolith, dude,” he said, giving me a sly smile.
The great wall of moonlit fog loomed half a mile from the shore, no closer or farther away than it had been earlier. The night air was as still as that in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital.
As we descended the porch steps, no one shot at us. No one issued that loonlike cry, either.
They were still out there, however, hiding in the dunes or below the crest of the slope that fell to the beach. I could feel their attention like the dangerous energy pending release in the coils of a motionless, strike-poised rattlesnake.
Although Bobby had left his shotgun inside, he was vigilant. Surveying the night as he accompanied me to my bike, he began to reveal more interest in my story than he had admitted earlier: “This monkey Angela mentioned…”
“What about it?”
“What was it like?”
“Monkeylike.”
“Like a chimpanzee, an orangutan, or what?”
Gripping the handlebars of my bicycle and turning it around to walk it through the soft sand, I said, “It was a rhesus monkey. Didn’t I say?”
“How big?”
“She said two feet high, maybe twenty-five pounds.”
Gazing across the dunes, he said, “I’ve seen a couple myself.”
Surprised, leaning the bike against the porch railing again, I said, “Rhesus monkeys? Out here?”
“Some kind of monkeys, about that size.”
There is, of course, no species of monkey native to California. The only primates in its woods and fields are human beings.
Bobby said, “Caught one looking in a window at me one night. Went outside, and it was gone.”
“When was this?”
“Maybe three months ago.”
Orson moved between us, as if for comfort.
I said, “You’ve seen them since?”
“Six or seven times. Always at night. They’re secretive. But they’re also bolder lately. They travel in a troop.”
“Troop?”
“Wolves travel in a pack. Horses in a herd. With monkeys, it’s called a troop.”
“You’ve been doing research. How come you haven’t told me about this?”
He was silent, watching the dunes.
I was watching them, too. “Is that what’s out there now?”
“Maybe.”
“How many in this troop?”
“Don’t know. Maybe six or eight. Just a guess.”
“You bought a shotgun. You think they’re d
angerous?”
“Maybe.”
“Have you reported them to anyone? Like animal control?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Instead of answering me, he hesitated and then said, “Pia’s driving me nuts.”
Pia Klick. Out there in Waimea for a month or two, going on three years.
I didn’t understand how Pia related to Bobby’s failure to report the monkeys to animal-control officers, but I sensed that he would make the connection for me.
“She says she’s discovered that she’s the reincarnation of Kaha Huna,” Bobby said.
Kaha Huna is the mythical Hawaiian goddess of surfing, who was never actually incarnate in the first place and, therefore, incapable of being re.
Considering that Pia was not a kamaaina, a native of Hawaii, but a haole who had been born in Oskaloosa, Kansas, and raised there until she left home at seventeen, she seemed an unlikely candidate to be a mythological uber wahine.
I said, “She lacks some credentials.”
“She’s dead-solid serious about this.”
“Well, she’s way pretty enough to be Kaha Huna. Or any other goddess, for that matter.”
Standing beside Bobby, I couldn’t see his eyes too well, but his face was bleak. I had never seen him bleak before. I hadn’t even realized that bleakness was an option for him.
Bobby said, “She’s trying to decide whether being Kaha Huna requires her to be celibate.”
“Ouch.”
“She thinks she probably shouldn’t ever live with an ordinary dude, meaning a mortal man. Somehow that would be a blasphemous rejection of her fate.”