“Only when I’m in the water. Or sometimes in a dark, closed-up place. I get them then, too.”
Redken moaned again, probing afresh from a new angle. “And you’ve been taking it easy?”
“Yeah.”
“No superhuman efforts out there in the waves?”
“No. I’m just scared shitless, Doc.”
Redken retracted his light with an air of finality, clicking it off and sliding it into a coat pocket. Frye shifted on the table, tissue clinging noisily to his legs. Redken brought a set of X rays from a folder, then a collection of gray, unfocused photos of some kind.
“These, of course, are the X rays from two months ago, when the injury took place. They show now what they showed then — no damage to the inner ear bones.” Redken consulted the murky film. “And the CAT-scan done two months ago shows the ruptured tympanum. I’m still surprised that the surfboard didn’t break bone. Now, the scan we did last week shows no fluid build-up at all, no indications of labyrinthitis or Ménière’s syndrome.” The doctor fixed Frye with an oddly pat stare. “In other words, Chuck, you’re healed. A recovered patient of nature’s own slow therapy.”
Frye watched his feet crossing and uncrossing below him. The truth was that he had been hoping for mildly tragic news to justify his dread of the water, not some toast to mother nature’s skill as a doctor. This, he thought, is a whole new ballgame. “Then how come I get the spells?”
“Fear. Worry. It could be that you anticipate them, thereby bringing them on.”
“I was hoping for something nasty but curable.”
“Well, you’ve been struck by a hard object about the face and head. That cut is curable. What happened?”
“Slipped in the shower.”
Redken eyed him with professional resignation, sensing limits. “Water seems your nemesis these days, Charles. Tell me, are you quite afraid of the ocean?”
“I’m afraid of not coming up. You haven’t lived until you’ve swum to the bottom of the Pacific to get a breath of air.”
Redken leaned against a cabinet, nodding. “Describe these feelings of confusion again for me.”
“I take off, I get a ride, I get wiped out. Or sometimes it’s just TOADS.”
“Excuse me?”
“Take-Off-And-Die-Syndrome.”
Redken made a note. “And?”
“Sometimes I’m at the surface where I’m supposed to be, and sometimes I get all mixed up. So I swim for the top. I can tell it’s there and I can see the sunlight. Then I’m running out of air and ready to hit the surface but I’m at the bottom instead. I swim up, but go down. Sometimes I’m watching myself go through it. Or I’m watching someone who looks a lot like me. Like me, but longer hair. Sometimes I’m just dreaming and I wake up standing there looking down at the bed.”
“Interesting, Chuck. It sounds like a new disease. A combination of vertigo and claustrophobia.”
“Can you name it after me?”
Redken tossed the folder to the cabinet and crossed his arms. “Chuck, you have been living with a great deal of anxiety about this. You didn’t know you were all right. My advice is to go easy, to get your confidence back one wave at a time. Come in next week and we’ll talk again. And for heaven’s sake, don’t go out in the hurricane surf that’s coming. That’s enough to shake up anybody.”
Frye pondered the irony of not knowing he was all right. “Can do, Doc.” He slid off the table and stood.
Redken clicked his pen shut and slid it into his pocket. “Chuck, tell me something. Have you been thinking of Debbie recently? More than... usual?”
Frye nodded.
“Her birthday is this month?”
He nodded again.
“There was nothing you could have done,” he said quietly.
“I know.” There was. Something.
Redken sighed. “Let go, Chuck.”
“I try.”
Redken forced a nod. “It’s tragic about Bennett’s wife. Any... positive developments at all?”
“They’ve got a suspect but can’t find him.”
“I suppose that’s a start. Your entire family has my support.” Redken hesitated, pursed his lips, and shook his head. “I miss your boxing articles. You’re one of the few writers who refused to portray prizefighters as idiots.”
“Write my ex-publisher. Ronald Billingham. Tell him if I don’t get my job back you’re going to die of depression. From a leading doctor in Laguna, it could mean a lot.”
Redken checked his watch. “Are you going to the big MIA rally at Main Beach today?”
“Hadn’t thought about it.”
“You should. You should donate a little money, too, if you can spare it. Yesterday at the Laguna Chapter meeting, Lucia Parsons implied she has proof that some MIAs are alive. She stopped short of saying what exactly it is, but said she would show solid evidence by Thursday of this week. That woman is powerful/and practical too. She gets people to believe. That’s a gift, in times as cynical as ours.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Frye counted out sixty-eight dollars for the receptionist, who said she could bill him. He said next month he’d probably be broke. She took the cash with offended dignity, gingerly as a specimen, and placed it in a drawer.
He stepped outside and into the languid morning optics of summertime Laguna. Dunce was waiting where Frye had left him. Downtown, things seemed muted, slightly airborne. As Frye walked down Forest Avenue, shoppers floated by on a radiant sidewalk, mouthing silences, dazed by the harsh economics of looking for bargains in a town where none exist, burying their woes in two-dollar ice-cream cones, dreaming of air conditioners, Bloody Marys, naps. The traffic had already slowed to a crawl, and the tourists weaved slowly between the overheating cars as if protected by force fields. A mother stopped her stroller in front of an idling Mercedes and adjusted her baby’s bonnet. Her husband waited in another dimension, ice cream melting down his wrists, gazing to the Pacific with some unfocused longing. Paying customers, Frye thought, endure them. He dumped the envelopes in a mail box.
A fresh batch of MIA Committee posters had sprung up around town — on the trees, the storefronts, the lamp posts. Frye could see the crowd starting to gather on Main Beach.
Organize, he thought. Organize all this, just like a newspaper piece. The inverted pyramid. Who, what, where, when, how, and why?
Eddie leaves early.
Li gets kidnapped.
One gunman has muddy shoes and bracelets on his wrists — gifts of Stanley Smith.
They get away in a blue Celica, Eddie’s car.
They vanish in Saigon Plaza with people everywhere.
I get a tape with DeCord paying off Nguyen Hy.
DeCord shows up with Minh.
Minh finds Li’s bloody, muddy clothes in Eddie’s garage. Or says he did.
The tape of DeCord and Nguyen gets taken by Eddie’s rivals, the Dark Men. They total my place. More muddy shoes, in the middle of August.
The whats and the whens. But not enough whos, or hows... and no whys.
And who knew I had that tape, besides Bennett?
Maybe I can find out — tonight.
He headed down Coast Highway, bought a Times, then took a deep breath before ducking into the Mega-Shop to see Bill Antioch. There was a sense of duty here, because Bill had been his partner for eight years in the only venture at which Frye had been even mildly successful.
It smells the same, he thought — rubber wetsuits; new cotton shirts; leather MegaSandals; fresh resin on new boards; the sweet, sexy smell of MegaWax, concocted with essence of coconut and an expensive dash of musk.