Abe pulls out one of Sandy’s monster spliffs and lights it. They pass it back and forth, expelling great clouds of smoke into the empty street. A passing car tracks through the cloud and scatters it. “Quit passing so quickly,” Abe says at one point. “Take two hits, then pass it. Don’t you even know how to smoke a joint?”
“No.”
They sit silently. Nothing to say? Not exactly. Jim supposes that his value in times like these is his willingness to start conversations, to talk about things that matter.
“So,” he says, coughing on a deep hit. “You were the paramedics called to Lillian’s crash, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“You and Xavier?”
“Yeah.”
Long pause.
“How’s he doing?”
A shrug. “I don’t know. Same as ever. Falling apart, hanging on. I guess it’s a permanent condition for X.”
“Sounds tough.”
Abe purses his mouth. “Impossible. I can’t do it, anyway.”
He starts fidgeting in typical Abe fashion, finally getting up to squat on his hams, balancing over his feet with armpits on knees, in the aboriginal crouch that is a favorite with him, because then even sitting takes nervous energy. “Have I changed much this last year, that you can tell?”
“Everyone changes.”
Abe gives him a sidelong glance, laughs sharply. “Even you?”
“Maybe,” Jim says, thinking of the last month. “Maybe, at last.”
Abe accepts that. “Yeah. Well, I’m wondering. I mean, I’ve been getting like X, all this last year. I’m wondering if I can keep going. You know…”
His voice tightens, he’s looking down in the gutter now. “X told me that once when he was losing it bad he couldn’t stand any of the crashes with kids in them. Because once he looked in this backseat and found a body and said to himself, What the hell is this black kid doing with these white folks, and he turned it over and it had one of his kids’ faces. And he sort of fainted on his feet, and when he came to it was some white kid he’d never seen.”
“My God.”
“I know. You can see why X worries me. But—but”—Abe is still resolutely looking in the gutter—“when I saw it was Lillian, I stepped away and all of a sudden remembered X’s story and I thought I had gone crazy, that it wasn’t her and I had hallucinated it. And then when I was sure it was Lillian, I mean really sure … I was almost glad!”
“I understand.”
“No you don’t!”
Abe jumps up, paces back and forth in front of Jim, out in the street. He hands Jim the forgotten spliff: “You don’t understand! You think you do because you read so fucking much, but you never really do any of it so you don’t really know!”
Jim looks at Abe calmly. “That’s probably true.”
Abe grimaces, shakes his head a few times. “Ah, no. That’s bullshit. Everyone knows, as long as they’re not sleepwalkers. But shit. I would rather have had Lillian Keilbacher dead than have gone crazy for even one minute!”
“Just at that moment, you mean. It’s a natural reaction, you were shocked out of your mind. You can think anything at times like that.”
“Uhn.” Abe isn’t satisfied by that. But he sits down on the curb again, takes the spliff.
“Most people would have just freaked on the spot.”
Abe shakes his head, taking a hit. “Not so.”
“Well, not many would try to go tell the family like you did.”
“Uhn.”
They smoke a while in silence.
Jim takes a deep breath; he’s used to the Bernards’ Saddleback house becoming a brooding, Byronic place, overhanging the world; but it appears Abe can confer the atmosphere wherever he goes, if his immense nervous energy is spinning him in the right way, in the right mode … so that Jim’s streetcorner curb under its sodium vapor light now swirls with heraldic significance, it looks like an Edward Hopper painting, the bungalow aps lined out side by side, the minilawns, empty sidewalks, fire hydrant, orange glare of light, giant pylons and the great strip of freeway banding the white-orange sky—all external signs of a dark, deep moodiness.
Abe holds the spliff between thumb and forefinger, speaks to it softly. “It’s getting so that anytime I can hear that sound”—glancing up briefly at the freeway—“or, or anytime I see a stream of headlights flowing red white, I hear the snips ripping through the metal. I hear the cutting hidden in the rest of the sound, sometimes I even hear some poor torn-up bastard moaning—just in the freeway sounds!”
He’s squishing the spliff flat, and suddenly he hands it back to Jim.
“And following taillights is like blood over exposed bone, red on white, you know the headlights, so bright coming at you … I mean I really see that.”
His voice is going away, Jim can barely hear his words. “The way the cars crumple and shear, and the blood—there’s a lot of it in a body. And their faces always look so—like Lillian’s face, it was so…” He’s shaking now, his whole body is racked with shaking, his face is contorted in the mask that faces go to when crying is stopped short no matter the cost to the muscles. Abruptly he stands again.
As if on a string Jim stands too. Tentatively he puts a hand to his friend’s shoulder. “It’s your work, Abe. It’s hard work, but it’s good work, I mean we need it. It’s what you want to do—”
“It’s not what I want to do! I don’t want to do it anymore! Man, haven’t you been listening?” He jerks away from Jim, turns and paces around him like a predatory animal. “Pay attention, will you?” he almost shouts. “I’m going crazy out there, I tell you, I can’t even do my job anymore!”
“Yes you can—”
“I cannot! How do you know? Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do out there—so fucking glib—” He reaches up and takes a wild swing at Jim’s upraised hand, hits it away, swings again and backhands Jim on the chest, for an instant he looks like he’s going to beat Jim up, and appalled Jim holds his arms up across his chest to take the blows—
Abe stops himself, shudders, twists away, takes off rapidly down the street; turns, wavers indecisively, plops down on the curb and leans over the gutter, face between his knees, buried in his hands. And there he rocks back and forth, back and forth.
Jim, frightened, his throat crimped tight at the sudden exposure to so much pain, stands there helplessly. He doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t have any idea what Abe might want him to do.
After a long while he walks down the street, and sits down next to Abe, whose rocking gets slower and slower as his shaking subsides. They both just sit there.
The forgotten roach, black with oil, is still pressed between Jim’s thumb and forefinger; he pulls a lighter from his shirt pocket, torches the roach’s ashy end, sucks on it till it blooms smoke. He takes a hit so big that he can’t contain it, and coughs hard. Abe has his elbows on his knees now, and he’s staring silently out at the street. His face is all streaked. Jim offers him the roach. He takes it, puffs on it, passes it back, all without a word. A final paroxysm shudders through his flesh, and then he’s still.
After a while he looks at Jim with a wry grimace. “See what I mean?”
Jim nods. He’s at a loss for words. Without premeditation he says, “Yeah, man. You’re fucking nuts.”
Abe laughs shortly. Sniffs.
They finish the roach in silence. They sit on the curb and watch the traffic hum by overhead.
Abe sighs. “I never thought it would get this hard.”
65
Abe leaves. Shaken to the core, Jim finds himself prowling his ap restlessly. Nothing in it offers the slightest consolation. What a day it’s been.…
The longer he stays in the ap, the more intense becomes his helpless, miserable nervousness. He can’t think what to do. What time is it, anyway? Three A.M. The dead hour. Nothing to do, no one to turn to—the friends he might have looked to for help are looking to him, and he isn’t up to it.
There isn’t a c
hance of sleeping. The malignancy of thought, vision and memory, all drugged, speeded up, spiked by fear, makes sleep out of the question. The day keeps recurring in his mental theater in a scramble of images, each worse than the last, the sum making him sick with a synergistic toxicity. He recalls Hana’s face, as she saw him and Virginia stagger out of the Hungry Crab together. No great scowl of anguish or despair, no nothing that melodramatic; just a quick snap of shock, of surprise, and then an instantly averted gaze, a disengagement, a refusal to look at him. Goddamn it!
He gives up on any attempt to get hold of himself, and calls Hana’s number, without a thought in his head as to what he’s going to say. At the sound of the ring he panics, his pulse shoots up, he’d hang up if he weren’t sure that Hana would know it was him waking her and then failing to hold together the nerve to speak to her, and with that prospect before him he holds on, through ring after ring.…
Nobody home.
66
Nobody home.
How did it happen?
At first it was a result of the tracts, the freeways, the cars. If you lived in a new suburb, then you had to drive to do your shopping. How much easier to park in one place, and do all your shopping in one location!
So the malls began. At first they were just shopping centers. A big asphalt parking lot, surrounded on two or three sides by stores; there were scores of them, as in most of the rest of America.
Then they became complexes of parking lots mixed with islands of stores, as in Fashion Square, the oldest shopping center in the county. They were popular. They did great at Christmastime. In effect they became the functional equivalent of villages, places where you could walk to everything you needed—villages tucked like islands into the multilayered texture of autopia. Once you parked at a shopping center, you could return to a life on foot. And at that idea the body, the brainstem, said Yeah.
South Coast Plaza was one of the first to go beyond this idea, to complete the square of stores and roof it, putting the parking lot on the outside. Call it a mall. An air-conditioned island village—except, of course, that all the villagers were visitors.
When South Coast Plaza opened in 1967 it was a giant success, and the Segerstrom family, heirs to the lima bean king C. J. Segerstrom, kept building on their land until they had the mall of malls, the equivalent of several fifty-story buildings spread out over a thousand acres, all of it enclosed. A sort of spaceship village grounded on the border between Santa Ana and Costa Mesa.
They made a lot of money.
Other malls sprang up, like daughter mushrooms in a ring around SCP. They all grew, enclosing more space, allowing more consumers to spend their time indoors. Westminster Mall, Huntington Center, Fashion Island, the Orange Mall, Buena Park Center, the City, Anaheim Plaza, Brea Mall, Laguna Hills Mall, Orange Fair Center, Cerritos Center, Honer Plaza, La Habra Fashion Square, Tustin Mall, Mission Viejo Fair, Trabuco Marketplace, the Mission Mall, Canyon Center, all were in place and flourishing by the end of the century, growing by accretion, taking up the surrounding neighborhoods, adding stores, restaurants, banks, gyms, boutiques, hairdressers, aps, condos. Yes, you could live in a mall if you wanted to. A lot of people did.
By 2020 their number had doubled again, and many square miles of Orange County were roofed and air-conditioned. When the Cleveland National Forest was developed there was room for a big one; Silverado Mall rivaled SCP for floorspace, and in 2027 it became the biggest mall of all—a sign that the back country had arrived at last.
The malls merged perfectly with the new elevated freeway system, and midcounty it was often possible to take an offramp directly into a parking garage, from which one could take an escalator through the maze of a mall’s outer perimeter, and return to your ap, or go to dinner, or continue your shopping, without ever coming within thirty feet of the buried ground. Everything you needed to do, you could do in a mall.
You could live your life indoors.
And none of that, of course, ever went away.
67
Dennis gets a call from Washington, D.C. “Dennis? It’s Louis Goldman. I wanted to tell you about the latest developments in the Stormbee case. It’s looking very hopeful, I think.”
“Yeah?”
“We’ve been pursuing several avenues here, and a couple are really moving for us. We’ve been in contact with Elisha Francisco, the aide to Senator George Forrester. Forrester is head of the Senate Budget Committee, and he’s on the Armed Services Committee, and he’s been in a kind of a feud with the Air Force for about four years. So his office is always receptive to ammunition for this feud, and when I gave Francisco the facts of our case he jumped on the matter instantly.”
“And what can they do?” McPherson asks cautiously.
“They can do a lot! Essentially the GAO, the Congress’s watchdog, was steamrolled in our case, and Congress is touchy about being ignored like that. Senator Forrester has already asked the Procurements Branch of the Office of Technology Assessment for an independent report on the matter. That should be really interesting, because the OTA is as far out of the pressure points as you can be in this town. Procurements Branch at OTA has the reputation of being the most impartial assessment group that you can bring to bear on the military. Anyone in Congress can ask them for a report, and no one else has any leverage on them at all, so they pride themselves on giving a completely unbiased spread of the pros and cons, on anything. Nerve gas, biological warfare, persuasion technology, you name it, they’ll give you a report on it that sticks to technological efficiency and only that.”
“So we might see the report that the GAO should have made?”
“That’s right. And Forrester will hammer the Air Force with it, too, you can bet on that.”
“Can he get the Stormbee decision thrown out, then?”
“Well, not all by himself. There’s no mechanism for it, see. The best that could happen is that the Secretary of the Air Force would knuckle under to Congress’s prodding, but that isn’t too likely, no matter how much Forrester hammers them. However, if there were another appeal by LSR moving forward at the same time as this—if we appeal the decision to a higher court, and all this other stuff is breaking in Congress, then a new judge will almost certainly overturn Tobiason’s decision, and you’ll be back in business.”
“You think so?”
“I’m sure of it. So we’re sending a letter to you and to Argo/Blessman advising you to authorize us to initiate an appeal, but I wanted to tell you about it since you’re the liaison, so you can do what needs to be done at your end.”
“Yeah, sure. I’ll get right on it. So—so, you think we have a chance with this?”
“It’s better than that, Dennis. Senator Forrester is one of the most powerful people in Washington, and he’s a good man, as straight as they come. He doesn’t like what he’s heard about this, and he’s not one to forget. I think it’s our turn at last.”
“Great.”
McPherson writes a memo to Lemon immediately after the phone call, outlining what he has learned and suggesting immediate approval of the appeal.
As he writes down the facts, his hopes come flooding back. It seems to him, all of the sudden, that the system might really work after all. The network of checks and balances is almost suffocating in its intricacy—it is perhaps too intricate; but what that means in the end is that power is spread out everywhere, and no one part of the network can cheat another, without the balance of the whole being upset. When that happens the other parts of the network will step in, because their own power is threatened if any other part gains too much; they’ll fly in with a check like a hockey defenseman’s, and the balance will be restored. The Air Force tried to assert that it was above the system, outside the network; now the rest of the network is going to drag them back into it. It’s the American way, stumbling forward in its usual clumsy, inefficient style—maddening to watch, but ultimately fair.
So, feeling better about that, he spends the rest of the day workin
g on the Ball Lightning program. And here too he sees signs of some progress, signs that they might possibly reach the deadline with a workable system. The programmers have come to him chattering with excitement about a program that will successfully latch the beams from several lasers to a missile, in a phased array; this vastly increases the intensity of the beam, so that the shock pulse will work again. They also believe they can track the missiles past the boost phase, by extrapolating their courses very precisely. Combine that with the shorter dwell time offered by the phased array and … they might just be able to knock down the percentage specified by the Air Force. It could happen. Even though it may take them into the post–boost phase a bit.
Spurred by the possibility, McPherson wheedles, coaxes, and bullies Dan Houston into reactivating his brain and doing his share of the work; it will take a push effort by everyone to get the job done in time, a sort of phased array of effort. And Houston is a mess. He’s never mentioned to Dennis the evening at El Torito when Dennis had to help him down to his car; but now it’s clear to Dennis that that was not a particularly unusual evening. Dan is drinking heavily every day; he needs a haircut, sometimes he needs a shave, his clothes look slept in; really, he’s the stereotype of the man whose ally has left him, whose life is falling apart. Sometimes Dennis wants to snap at him, say, “Come off it, Dan, you’re living a video script!”
But then it occurs to him that Houston’s pain is real enough, and that this is the only way he knows how to express it, if he is consciously living the role. And if not, it’s just what happens when you don’t care anymore, when you’ve lost hope, when you’ve started drinking hard.
So McPherson takes him out to lunch, and listens to his whole sad story, which he is now willing to talk about openly—“The truth is, Mac, Dawn has moved up to her folks’.” “Oh, really?”—and Dennis gives him a pep talk, and talks to him in intense detail about what needs to be done by Houston and Houston’s part of the team, and he even refuses to allow Houston to order another pitcher of margaritas, though that only gets him a look of dull resentment. “Do it after work if you have to, Dan,” McPherson snaps, irritated with him. Stewart Lemon tactics? Well, whatever it takes; they don’t have much time left.