Soon, he thought.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
“The little fishes of the sea,
They sent an answer hack to me.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
THE sun was under the skirts of the dark clouds now, showing briefly on the western edge of the world before disappearing below the silhouetted hills of Pacific Palisades. Pete Sullivan was sitting by the leaded-glass window of Kendall’s Sport Time Bar, and the long, horizontal rays of sunlight glowed red in the depths of the Guinness stout in the glass on the polished table.
He was waiting for his order of appetizers—fried mozzarella with marinara sauce, and Buffalo chicken wings with celery and blue-cheese dressing—but he had got the stout in the meantime because a teacher at City College had once told him that Guinness contained all the nutrients required to sustain human life. It was thick and brown and rich, though, and he planned to switch to Coors Light as soon as he had emptied this glass and thus fulfilled his health duties. And this bar somehow didn’t have any smoking area at all, so his next cigarette would have to wait until he got back into the van. A healthful evening all around.
Television sets were hung at several places in the darkness under the ceiling beams, but each one seemed to be tuned to a different channel, and the ones with the sound turned up loud weren’t the ones closest to Sullivan. On the nearest screen he watched presidential candidate Bill Clinton moving his lips, while what he heard was whining electrical machinery and mechanical thumping from a farther speaker. Sullivan looked away.
His hands were still sticky from having washed them with Gojo hand-cleaning jelly at the tiny sink in the van. This morning, after driving around to pick up supplies, he had found an unfenced dirt lot east of Alameda, among the windowless plastic-works and foundries by the train tracks and the cement-walled Los Angeles River, and he had done some work on the poor old van.
The sun had still been glaring out of a clear October sky, and he had taken off his shirt and scapular and popped a beer from a fresh twelve-pack before opening the van’s back doors and dragging out his tools.
The tire pressures were low, so he hooked up a little electric air pump to the battery with his jumper cables, and crouched beside each tire in turn, puffing a cigarette and sipping the chilly beer, and watched to make sure the cable clamps didn’t touch each other as the pump wobbled and vibrated on the adobe dirt. Then he crawled under the van and dumped the oil, conscientiously draining the old black stuff into the kind of sealable plastic container that could be taken to an oil-recycling center, though unless someone was watching he intended to leave the container right there in the middle of the field. A new oil filter, new spark plugs, and six quarts of Valvoline 20-50-weight oil finished the job.
L.A. air in the tires, he thought, and fresh oil in the engine. Nothing with any memories of fleeing Arizona—of driving to Houdini’s wrecked old place—of fearfully crossing borders. And he remembered the old notion that after some number of years every cell in a human body had been replaced, every atom, so that the body is just a wave form moving through time, incorporating just for a little while the stuff of each day; only the wave itself, and none of the transient physical bits, makes the whole trip. Even a scar would be no more significant than a wobble still visible in an ocean wave long after the wave had passed the obstruction that caused it, while the water molecules that had actually sustained the impact were left comfortably far behind.
A.O.P., Sullivan thought now as he sipped his cloying Guinness. Accelerate Outta Problems. He had always been uneasy watching people dig in—the newlyweds committing themselves to a mortgage and a roof and plumbing, the brave entrepreneur leasing a building and getting boxes and boxes of letterhead printed up. Sullivan had owned the van for five years now, but he had owned other vehicles before that, and he would own others after the van met whatever its eventual terminal problem would turn out to be; the very books on the shelf over the top bunk were a wave form—paperbacks that were bought new, became bent and ruptured and yellowed, and eventually served as ragged whiskbrooms that went out with the trash they swept up, to be replaced by new paperbacks.
Sullivan had once read some Greek philosopher quoted to the effect that no man can step into the same river twice, because it’s never again the same river, and he’s never again the same man.
Thank God for that, Sullivan thought now as he beckoned to the waitress. On the nearest television screen, in front of some shabby house draped in yellow police-line tape, a concerned-looking newsman was frowning into the camera and opening and closing his mouth, seeming, because another set was turned up loud on a different channel, to be barking like a dog while someone kept saying, “Speak!”
Sullivan looked back down at the table. It was better with just the sound. Today he had set up his portable radio and cassette deck on the van floor, and on the noon news he had heard that some giant prehistoric fish had washed up on the shore at Venice Beach, and that lobsters had crawled out of the ocean and terrified people on the shore.
So there had been a timely at Venice. That was immensely reassuring. DeLarava’s motive in going there had been just for a news story, and nothing to do with… anything else.
You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer, you wont dissolve.
He cut off the intrusive remembered sentence before he could distinguish the voice that had (long ago) spoken it. Better to dissolve, he thought.
“And could I switch to a Coors Light now,” he said aloud, for the waitress had brought the two steaming plates to his table, and lukewarm stout wasn’t at all the thing for washing down garlic and Tabasco and blue cheese. “In fact,” he added, “could I have two of them.”
One of them to drink in memory of the surely dissolved ghost of Sukie, he thought.
Now that his head was ringing slightly with alcohol, he was comfortably sure that the wave form that had been his sister was safely dispersed and flattened out, and not carrying on past the death of the body that had maintained it. DeLarava only went to Venice today because her job happened to take her there, he told himself, and all the ghosts are laid.
Let it all dissolve. Scarf this hasty late lunch or early dinner, call Steve and go over to his house for a few more beers, and then just get out of L.A. All the old dirty shit is cleaned out of the van’s works, and you’ve surely cleared all the old guilts and uncertainties out of your soul just by coming back here and looking around at the outgrown home town.
Veni, vidi, exii, he thought, quoting another motto of Sukie’s. I came, I saw, I left.
The sound vibrating out of the nearest speaker was some kind of mulitudinous roar like a crowded stadium, but on the nearest screen he could now see a beach, breezy basketball courts, a crowd of people in swimming suits standing and craning their necks…a brightly sunlit scene, not live.
Jarringly, it was Venice Beach—but obviously this was just a recap of the prehistoric fish story. Perhaps this film clip was deLarava’s work. Sullivan’s two beers arrived then, and with one of the chilly glasses clamped in his palm he was able to keep on looking up at the TV screen.
And a deep slug of cold beer helped him hang on to his mood of serenity. I can look at films of Venice Beach now, he thought steadily. All the old ghosts are laid.