+ Your wife
+ Your wife, gave the chair to her. Not the time to think those thoughts, however. Richard closed his eyes and leaned back, the chair expanding under him footrest up back tilted arms inclining, friendly.
+ Why he did it. Madame de Roche thinks not crazy; a natural. Why then. Brilliance getting Emanuel down they say they say. Deep depravity coming up sicking up foulness like a dog. Bubble of evil in still waters noxious gases. Poem in that. Nothing worth bothering with. If not depraved not crazy then rational. Thinking all the time; planning. Form of expression. Expression of true brilliance stretching beyond human morality limitations. Did it for his art to see what he would make himself into. Kill himself as well as them; sure as hell he has no life to return to. Murderer murders twice. Kills two for each victim. No. Kills himself only once; murder once and it’s enough you’re done for deep therapy enforced maybe not even you left when you come out. Wanted to go through that maybe; kill be caught be prosecuted and therapied deep therapy…Come back new Goldsmith. See if poet survives that. Like scientist a personal experiment.
Richard tightened his eyelids until his nose wrinkled.
+ I am a simple man with simple wants. I want to be left alone. I want to forget.
But forgetting was not possible. He had half an impulse to open all the nets and LitVids on his slate and immerse himself in the propagated facts but he resisted. The simple knowledge was enough; multiple murders, likely by the man Richard admired most in the world.
“Somebody’s coming,” the manager rasped. People walked by and the manager was never sure whether to express concern or not.
The door chimes century old corroded brass antiques bumbled and belled against each other. Richard imagined them shaking off dust; they were seldom disturbed. He collapsed the chair and strode hunched to the door to peer through the verdigris stained peephole.
Female, black hair, long gray and orange shift, clutching a woven reed handbag. Nadine Preston. “Hi to you,” she said, bending to eyeball the peephole. “I thought you might be feeling down.”
Richard opened the door. “Come in,” he said voice mortician deep and resigned. He coughed and shook his head to clear the somber tone. “Please come in.” He had always come to her, not the other way around, to control his exposure to her bad times. He wondered whether he should feel touched by her concern.
“Are you down?” she asked brightly.
“A little,” he confessed.
“Then you need company.”
“Actually, I do, I guess,” he said.
“Such enthusiasm. Have you eaten?”
He shook his head.
She opened her handbag and brought out a suckwrapped package of forever meat. “I can do wonders with this,” she said. “Have any potatoes?”
“Dried,” he said.
“We’ll have shepherd’s pie.”
“Thank you for coming over,” he said.
“I’m not always good for you,” Nadine said demurely looking down at the carpet. “But I know when you need somebody and you shouldn’t sleep alone tonight.”
The shepherd’s pie tasted decently of salt and garlic and potatoes which reminded him of Nadine, a salt and garlic woman. As they ate she talked about the shade vid industry as she had known it and as she still came in touch with it. His mind was nudged away from the problem of the day until a gap formed between him and recent memory and he listened to her, so tired that he saw the pale ghosts of hallucinations. Blue raincoated figure in the corner of his eye.
“They did this scene with music,” Nadine said, talking about some vid production ten years past. “The director needed to show that now the musician a cellist was really playing much better than before, and the scorer said but we have soundtrack that’s already the best we can get. He plays the cello and it’s the best cellist in the world playing behind him but there was no contrast. The director says then ‘Get a fruity cellist.’ Just that. Fruity. When the best isn’t good enough you go a step beyond, into the frankly bad. Isn’t that marvelous?” She smiled broadly, hand frozen in a demonstrative wave and he chuckled politely nodding yes that’s the way of it. Richard could not help being polite and kind to her when she was in this mood, and it was a good story.
He ate and contemplated contrast. His mind went back to Goldsmith like a chained dog circling an iron spike. What to do when you’re the best and you need contrast or else all is gray.
+ Relief through grand melodrama. Was that it.
The blue figure was smiling; he knew that without seeing it clearly. His daughter. He could not avoid trying to look at the figure directly. It vanished every time.
1100-11000-11111111111
(The Examiner, having finished his work on the guilty of ten worlds, suddenly finds on his desk the folders of curriculum vitae for a number of terrestrial greats. He sighs and looks them over one by one. This great human being, by inventing such and such, has destroyed a hundred million; this other, by philosophizing, has misled billions. They are in his charge now, and he is growing increasingly weary.)
Examiner: “Please, my Father, enough! I have judged the guilty. Why must I judge the best and brightest?” (No answer.) (The Examiner drops the folders on the desk, perhaps resigned.)
Examiner: (Murmurs) “The least you could do is give me a computer.”
12
At six hundred, Mary Choy’s home manager woke her up with a persistent chiming. She ascended from a dream of swimming in the surf off Newport Beach with her mother and sister. “Jesus. What is it?”
“Supervising Inspector D Reeve.”
“What time? Morning?”
“Six hundred, Mary.”
“Put him on. No vid.” She sat up in bed, lifted her arms over her head and stretched to force blood into her brain. Shook herself vigorously. Threw one leg over the side of the bed. She had been searching the jags until two hundred with no results; none of Goldsmith’s acquaintances had seen sliver of the man.
“My apologies, Inspector Choy.” Reeve himself seemed exhausted, face dark olive on the incoming vid, eyes hooded.
“Good morning, sir.”
“You were involved with the Khamsang Phung Selector kidnapping early this year, were you not?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I have a message in my desk memory that you wanted to be called if we tracked any suspects involved in that case.”
She stood and shook out her hands, fully awake now. “Yes, sir.”
“We have a Selector jiltz in a comb. One of the Phung suspects could be there. Do you want to be involved? I can put you on a backup team at the site.”
No hesitation. “Definitely, sir. I’d like to be there.”
Reeve gave her the location. Mary dressed quickly, grateful her transform chemistry could let her coast for many hours without sleep.
Twenty three minutes after leaving her apartment, she stood on the north facing balcony of Canoga Tower, dark slim fingers lightly touching the polished brass railing, overlooking LA from a height of four hundred meters. On instructions from the local CEC, the Comb Environs Commander, she had ascended two thirds of the tower. A tightpacked curtain of air whispered a few inches from her face as she leaned forward, keeping out the cool early morning breezes. To her right dawn smeared gray and watery across the foggy horizon.