Golden States

  “Now what about that shower?” Warren said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can think about it. There’s no rush.”

  “Okay.”

  Warren took the glass from him and filled it once again. David said, “I like that, um, umbrella in the other room,” just to make conversation.

  “Umbrella... oh, that.” Warren gave him the filled glass. “That’s just a stupid thing. I’ve been saving up for a real lamp.”

  “Oh.” David drank his water. He should probably have picked something other than the umbrella to comment on, something Warren was prouder of. It was always hard to know.

  “Have you been thinking about that shower?” Warren asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And what have you decided?”

  “Well, I’d like to take one.” He was anxious not to make any more mistakes. He noticed how Warren’s chin had a raised white scar on it. He touched his own scar, up at his hairline.

  “On down the hall.” Warren pointed the way with a big-knuckled finger.

  David took his pack, which he’d set on the floor, and walked down the dark hallway. Warren’s voice, behind him, said. “That door there,” and he turned through a half-open door into the bathroom and switched on the light.

  “Plenty of clean towels,” Warren said. “Shampoo, you name it. It’s all completely self-explanatory, basic bathroom. Enjoy yourself.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it.” He went out and closed the door.

  The bathroom was white, like the kitchen. David stood in the middle of it for a while, looking it over. Above the sink, a pair of sleek white hands, woman’s hands, stuck out from the wall. One hand held two toothbrushes between its curled fingers, the other held soap in its cupped palm. There might have been a woman on the other side of the wall, sticking her hands through, except that both were left hands. David drank some more water from the sink, then looked at himself in the mirror. His eyes were red and it was only by seeing them in the mirror that he realized they burned. He blinked. They stayed red. He was supposed to take a shower. He settled his pack on the lid of the toilet seat and watched himself take his clothes off.

  When he was naked he stood in front of the mirror for a minute or two. He was so skinny. He twisted around and looked at the bumps of his spine. Then he leaned over closer to the mirror, stretched his lips back off his teeth with his fingertips and, with his thumbs, pushed his nose up to see if he could detect his skull. He could. It was a bad idea. He turned on the water in the shower, which was actually a bathtub with a clear plastic curtain strung around it on a chrome rod. The tub had white lion’s feet, clutching white balls. As he waited for the water to heat up he saw that a second dark curly hair had started growing out of his chest, right next to where the first one was.

  Two of them now. He wondered why the second one had to come in right beside the first. He imagined himself grown up, with hair only on one side of his body. Then he wondered why it had happened here. Or when had it happened? How could he not notice a black hair growing on his own body? How could it suddenly just be there, a full-grown hair at least a quarter-inch long? The water beat against the shower curtain, and steam started fogging the plastic. Too hot. He turned the cold on harder and got in.

  Water pounded against his thighs. Still too hot. He turned the cold faucet, and as he bent to do it water sprayed over his face. He hoped the shower would make him less stoned. Once he got the temperature right, he stood with the needles of water striking him on his face and chest, concentrating on what he would do next. He’d get out of the shower, get dressed, find Janet. He couldn’t be stoned when he knocked on her door. What if Rob answered? He would have no idea what to say. Why did he let himself get stoned? He’d never expected it to have this kind of disorganizing effect.

  Time passed, and he wondered how long he had been in the shower. It might have been a long time. He turned the water off. He did not seem to be any less stoned. If anything, he was more stoned. The two hairs lay pressed down on either side of his right nipple. The nipple was small and pink, made ridiculous by the dark doggish hairs. He thought no one would ever marry him.

  The mirror was too foggy for him to see anything but his own shape, a pink haziness topped by a brown blur. He wiped a clear arc with his hand and saw his eyes. Still red. He wondered what time it could be. He dried himself with a white towel and started putting his clothes on, after puzzling over whether to start with his shirt or his jeans. Jeans first.

  When he was dressed he took his pack and went back out into the hall. Warren had turned the hall light on. Warren was in the bedroom, smoking another joint.

  “How do you feel?” he called to David. “Like a new man?”

  The bedroom opened off the end of the hallway, just past the bathroom door. The light had been off before, but David had assumed it was a bedroom. Warren leaned back on the double bed, which was covered with a black spread. The walls here were painted gray, like the living-room ceiling. Warrenextended the joint in David’s direction, his brows raised questioningly.

  “No thank you,” David said. “I think I’d better go now.”

  “I’ll drive you,” Warren said. “Just let me jump in the shower first. I reek of the post office.” He took another hit of the joint.

  “Okay,” David said.

  “Come in here a minute. I want to show you something.”

  “What?” David asked.

  “A six-foot anaconda that hasn’t eaten in a week. Just come here, for God’s sake. Are you always so jumpy?”

  “No.” David stood on the threshold, and his belly rose on a wave of feeling. Warren hit once more on the joint. Sinews shifted under the skin of his forearm; the swell of his bicep slipped lazily up under his shirtsleeve. He was stronger than David had thought. Watching Warren’s arm, David walked into the room.

  “Are you interested in whales and dolphins and things like that?” Warren said. “Sharks, octopi, moray eels?”

  David considered the question, searching for a trick. “Well, I guess so,” he said.

  “Good. I happen to have a big fat book right here for you to entertain yourself with while I’m in the shower. Come here and have a look.” He bent over and pulled a book the size of a welcome mat from the bedside table. He grunted at the weight. “Come here, look, look,” he said, fanning the air with the hand that held the joint.

  David came closer, into the circle of marijuana smoke. On the cover of the book was a picture of a shark swimming straight at the camera, jagged mouth agape, one round eye staring up, showing a crescent moon of white. The title of the book was Underwater World, written in yellow letters below the shark.

  “This is a fascinating book, and well worth a few minutes of your attention,” Warren said. He propped it on his lap andopened it to a picture of a bright-orange starfish prying open a clam. Then he flipped to a school of tiger-striped fish, thousands of them, swimming through bottomless blue water. “Do you think this could keep you entertained for a little while?” he said.

  “Yes.” David ventured closer until his knees bumped up against the bed; he jumped back as if he’d been shocked, then moved forward again. Warren smiled. David smiled back.

  “Come, come,” Warren said. He patted the mattress next to where he was sitting, then put the book down there and got up, the joint still smoldering between two fingers. He got off on the opposite side of the bed. “Make yourself comfortable,” he said. “I’ll be back in two shakes. Do you like music?”

  He was always asking questions you couldn’t say no to. “Yes,” David said.

  “Good. I can accommodate your every wish.” A tape player sat on a low table on the far side of the bed. Warren picked up a cassette, held it close to his eyes and squinted. “Mozart,” he said. “The Magic Flute. How do you feel about Mozart?”

  “Fine,” David said. He thought he had heard Mozart once. Warren picked up a pair of headphones, two blue foam disks connected b
y a white plastic arc.

  “I have an arrangement with my neighbor,” he said. “I promise to keep the noise down, and he promises not to burglarize my apartment. Come here, come here. Put these on.”

  He held them at arm’s length, halfway across the bed. David put his pack down and knelt on the bed to reach them. A gray cord ran from one blue disk to the tape player. David held them, weighing them in his hands, and Warren pantomimed putting headphones on his own ears. David put them on his ears. Warren spoke, and he took them off again.

  “—at the fish,” Warren was saying, “and listen to Mozart, and I’ll be right back. Okay?”

  “Okay.” David sat down on the bed, with his shoes hangingover the side. He put the headphones back on. Warren pantomimed taking off his shoes, and he did it. His shoes dropped heavily, noiselessly, to the floor.

  Warren put the tape in. The headphones came to humming life. There was a thin squeak, then a silence. Then music.

  He watched Warren leave the room to a rising swell of violins. The music was like a thread being pulled through his ears. The violins grew louder, rounded a sort of curve, and got softer again. His head filled so completely with music that he saw the room as if he wasn’t in it, as if it was a display behind glass.

  He picked up the book and settled it on his lap. There were the thousands of tiger-striped fish and, on the next page, a moray eel peering out of a black hole in a crusty brown rock, with intelligent yellow eyes and a grinning lizard mouth. David shuddered. The eel wasn’t so bad, but there might be anything on the next page. He turned the page and found, with disappointment, nothing but a school of tuna flashing silver through a shaft of turquoise sunlight.

  Music rose and fell in his head. Voices now, singing in a foreign language. As he turned the pages he wondered if Mozart had been thinking of fish. There were pictures of sharks and one of an octopus and several of a seal eating a penguin, a sequence in which the seal flipped the penguin off an iceberg like a peanut off a spoon. David hurried past it, then went back and looked again. It seemed to him that the music and the pictures made perfect sense together; they were like a movie. He began to see connections between the pictures themselves, as if they were all episodes in a single story. Here a blue angel-fish hovered like a gas flame; here a penguin stood (he went back to the iceberg sequence one more time), hopeless in black and white, just before the seal flicked it headfirst into its jaws. Each picture caused the next with a logic that lay just beneath David’s intelligence. Though he could not say whatthe next picture would be, the moment he turned the page it was always the perfect follow-up.

  Warren appeared beside him on the bed. David didn’t see or hear him come back from the shower. He felt a weight on the mattress and looked up into Warren’s face. Warren had on a pair of jeans but no shirt. A medallion of white-blond hairs curled on his small, surprisingly muscular chest. He went with the music.

  David smiled at him and he smiled back. Warren had bright, questioning eyes and a long nose. His face was so big. He had a thin, smiling mouth with dots of white whisker stubble above and below. David watched Warren’s mouth until Warren’s face came closer and kissed him on the lips. A woman sang a single high note. A sluggish bubble rose lazily from David’s belly and filled his head. He looked straight into the pale blue disks of Warren’s eyes. The woman’s high note ended. David pulled his face away and jumped to his feet. The headphones stretched to the end of their cord and fell crookedly off his ears onto the bed. The silence was shocking.

  Warren sat on the bed, smiling. David wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand and looked at his palm. It was wet. He wiped his mouth with his other hand.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked Warren.

  “Because you wanted me to,” Warren said in a satisfied voice.

  “No I didn’t.” He wiped his mouth again, this time with the back of his hand.

  “I think you did.”

  David’s eyes filled so suddenly with tears that they were running down his face before he realized he had started crying at all. “No I didn’t,” he said. He could feel the thickness in his voice.

  “What’s the matter?” Warren said. “You don’t like kissing?”

  ‘Wo. ”

  “Well honey, then what are you doing in—Wait a minute. You’re not, are you?”

  “Not what?” David said. Warren floated in front of him, a pink blur through the tears. He wiped his nose with his finger.

  “How old are you really?” Warren said.

  “I don’t know. Twelve.”

  Warren whistled. “Twelve. I thought you were just underdeveloped.”

  “I’m not,” David said, uncertain of what he was denying.

  “Come on, stop crying,” Warren said. “There’s no harm done, kisses wipe off. Put your shoes on and I’ll drive you to Bush Street.”

  “No.” David could tell from Warren’s silence that he had said it at the right volume.

  “All right,” Warren said softly. “Do you want some money?”

  “No,” David said again. His eyes cleared a little. He picked up his shoes and put them on, hopping first on one foot and then on the other. Warren got up off the bed.

  “When you’re a little older, this won’t seem so bad,” he said. “I have a feeling it may come to seem very usual. Please don’t cry.”

  “I’m not crying,” David said, and just that suddenly he wasn’t. The tears dried up. He lifted his pack and walked out of the room, with Warren following.

  “Look, it’s starting to rain,” Warren said when they got to the living room. David looked at the window and saw silver slashes of rain against the glass. The tears had left a ragged heaviness in his throat.

  “Uh-huh.” He went to the door.

  “Wait,” Warren said. “You liked this parasol, didn’t you? Take it with you.”

  David hesitated, holding the doorknob. Warren jumped across the room and picked up the paper umbrella. When he lifted it the light behind was exposed, a glaring round bulb onthree black metal legs. The light in the room changed from pale gold to white.

  “Here,” he said, offering David the umbrella. After a moment, David accepted it. The handle was a stick of bamboo, wrapped at the bottom with thick green cord.

  “It won’t do in a typhoon,” Warren said. “But it’s better than nothing.”

  “Thank you,” David said. He looked up at the umbrella and saw the painted Japanese letters, backwards. Ordinarily he’d have asked what they said, in case it was something embarrassing that a Japanese person might laugh at.

  “You’re most welcome,” Warren said. “Have a safe trip.”

  “Okay.” David now had both hands full, and Warren opened the door for him.

  “If you feel like coming back when you’re older, you know where to find me. Drop in anytime.”

  “Uh-huh. Thank you. I mean ...” David got the umbrella out the door and stood in the hallway with it over his head. It cast a patch of golden light around him.

  Warren stood in the doorway with the door half closed. “Do you really like that umbrella?” he asked.

  David shrugged, and nodded.

  “See? Things aren’t so bad. Night.”

  “Good night.”

  Warren shut the door. The paper angel came up close, her perfect red lips pressed together, her eyes indistinguishable behind the dark glasses.

  He walked out into the street with the umbrella over his head. Rain thumped against it like gravel on a drum. David closed the umbrella and put it in his pack, so it wouldn’t get ruined. The rain fell on his head and shoulders as he walked down the hill. He watched his white tennis shoes on the glistening concrete. He thought about nothing. His mind was as empty as it had ever been.

  He came to the bottom of the hill, where the quiet street intersected a busy one. A group of people waited at a bus stop. He asked one of them, a woman in red overalls, how to get to Bush Street. She reeled off a series of buses. Bush Street was far away. David lost track af
ter the second bus but nodded comprehendingly as the woman spoke. When the woman was finished he thanked her and went to wait at the stop across the street, where she’d directed him. He held his pack tightly to his belly.

  The bus came in a few minutes, crackling with hard white light. David hung back and was the last one on. The driver wasa thin black man with a pocked face and a goat beard that came to a grizzled point. He held the wheel straight-armed, as if he were driving a plow.

  “How much is it?” David asked.

  “Sixty cent,” the man said without looking at him. He pulled a lever and the doors closed with a rubberized sigh.

  David dug sixty cents out of his pocket. It was nearly the last of his money. “Could you tell me how to get to Bush Street?” he asked.

  “Transfer at Van Ness,” the driver said. He tore a slip of paper off a pad, flicked it in David’s direction.

  “Thank you,” David said. He accepted the paper. As he started down the aisle the bus lurched forward. He nearly fell over into a Mexican woman’s lap, knocking her big brown knee with his pack. He said, “Excuse me.” It didn’t help. He struggled into an empty seat. He was wet from the rain. Everybody on the bus knew there was something wrong with him.

  When he got off at Van Ness, an old woman with her dress buttoned wrong walked up as if she’d been expecting him. She said, “Got a quarter?” in an impossibly deep, froggy voice. He gave her his last one because he didn’t think in time that it was possible not to.

  He stood at the corner of Van Ness, wet, waiting for his next bus. There were two other people. They were both women, both carrying umbrellas and big purses. The darkness was complete now. The utility tower at the top of Warren’s hill, studded with red lights, blinked to warn low-flying aircraft. Lights had come on in the windows of houses on the hill; one of the lights was Warren’s. He had wanted Warren to touch him. A part of him had known Warren would try to touch him when he first stepped into the car in Oakland. His clothes clung wetly to his body. For a moment he had no idea why he had come here, or what he would do next.