He reached his arms out and eased her down into the lake. They held onto their dissolving life raft. “Get your clothes all heavy and goppy,” he said. “We’re going to take a deep breath and dive down to the very bottom. We’re going to see a couple of tubes and we’re going to swim right through them, until we get to the other side. We’ll have to hold our breath until we count up to sixty nice and slow in our minds and when we get there, we’ll be fine. Are you ready?”
“The same tube or different tubes?” Her voice was tremulous.
“What do you mean?”
“Do we both go in the same tube or different tubes?”
“You pick.”
“Same.”
“That’s just what we’ll do. Are you ready?”
She nodded, yes.
They breathed, they held hands, they jack-knifed their bodies, and they dove down. Stein counted his fingers off in front of her face as they descended. One, two, three, four. They reached the bottom at ten. The water was less viscous but darker down here. He could sense only the dark shapes of the open pipes. He pointed at the openings in front of them, to the tube on the left. She swam toward it, her hair pasted to her neck like a mermaid. She lost heart for a moment. Stein pushed her by the heels and propelled her in. And he followed.
Stein thought of the seals he used to watch frolicking in the pool in Central Park Zoo, where Stein Senior had taken him on occasional weekends. One cub was Stein’s favorite. He was rambunctious, with whiskers only on one side of his mouth. Maybe the other side had been bitten off or never grew in, but it gave him an air of amused contemplation, as though he were thinking what prank he could pull next. He loved to waddle up along the hot rocks and get behind anyone who was snoozing in the sun, snuffle his snout down in good leverage, and shove his victim rolling fins-over-flippers into the cold water. Elder seals barked at him and tried to discipline him but he was incorrigible, and whenever they got too close, he’d dive into the water himself and become pure exuberant motion. That was how Stein tried to envision himself now, that every moving part of his body was an act of propulsion.
He kept mentally counting. At forty-two his lungs began to implode. He could see, he thought, a lightening at the end of the tunnel. Forty-four. Forty-five. He reached forty-eight knowing it was over for him. He saw himself at the zoo. Where Stein senior had died. At age forty-eight. He visualized Angie standing there with him watching his father die. He knew that couldn’t be possible. She wasn’t born yet when his father died. He dreamed that he tried to yell to her to swim on without him. But the power in his brain shut down. The screen went black.
He never felt himself being grabbed by the hair and pulled through the last few feet of the pipe and lifted out onto the casement alongside the purification tank. He was unaware of the EMT giving him CPR or of the expulsion of liquid from his lungs. He was aware of Lila taking his hand and helping him up to sitting position, and when she saw that he was all right, she nodded to Angie, who was able look at Lila but not at her father until she knew.
Lila helped Stein to standing. His feet squished in his shoes. He could still barely breathe and the world was pixilating through the membrane of placental soap that still surrounded him. “I don’t mean to trivialize what you’ve been through,” Lila said, “but your hair looks absolutely lustrous.”
TWENTY
Stein was not an ardent observer of Nature but it always amazed him when the same kind of tree burst into blossom simultaneously all over the city. In late winter it was the heady mock orange blossoms. In spring the purple jacaranda flowers carpeted the streets. And all through the year, a bunch of other stuff whose names he didn’t know. He wondered how they all got the signal. What was the trigger? He was reminded of this phenomenon now as he drove across the city and saw one after another after another of newly exposed billboards for Espe New Millennium Shampoo.
Each was ingeniously comprised of a three-dimensional reproduction of the bottle, which in itself was a generation of Nicholette Bradley’s sumptuous body. As though she had been regenerated. Become a milkweed, seeds of her new life spread by the wind after death and desiccation. Being surrounded by all these pictures of Nicholette made it harder for Stein to let go of her. He didn’t want forgiveness. There was too damn much forgiveness in the world. Emotional pedestrian crossings. If we learn anything at all in this life it is through enduring the consequences of our worst mistakes. The moment Stein had stopped believing that one man could make a difference, Nicholette had died. He resolved never to forget what Shmooie the Buddhist always said, that we had to keep doing the best we could all the time, even if no one was watching.
What also pissed him off was that he had been yoinked once again-swallowing the whole story about Alex being the new Espe model when obviously she was not-and never catching even a whiff of the lie. At least he had been right (after how many wrong guesses?) about David Hart and Michael Esposito being the killers, so that was something. He had just come back from the homecoming of Goodpasture’s orchids, which had taken place at the edge of the Los Padres National Forest (which in Los Angeles resembles a forest as much as the Gobi Desert resembles a ski resort). The weed had been flown commercially from Amsterdam to Ottawa, Fed Ex’d to St. Croix, yachted to Santa Barbara, taken by HAZ-MAT truck down to L.A. and now, concealed amongst ten freshly cut California Spruces that were loaded onto the open flatbed of a lumber truck which would carry them up north, carefully swaddled in burlap so as not to disturb the cones of gorgeous green sin-semilla that hung from the branches like festive ornaments.
Stein watched the proceedings but had little to say to Goodpasture or Schwimmer, nor they to him. There was muted joy in the triumph. More and more, the fight was exhausting just to get back to even. Stein found it depressing that they were still considered outlaws for aiding people at the end of their lives. Maybe next year when Al Gore was elected president and we put all the Clinton blowjob stuff behind us, the country would get back on track and Stein would feel a part of something again.
Paul Vane was being discharged today from Cedars Sinai, the gunshot wound, as he had accurately self-diagnosed, a mere glancing blow to the heart. He was sitting primly on his hospital bed as Stein entered the room. It was filled with flower arrangements, beautiful, unusual, thoughtfully constructed poems of flowers. In his bright yellow shirt and brown silk pants, Vane looked very much the pistil of the flower. His weight barely made an impression on the hospital mattress. He looked his age. He looked beyond his age. He looked fossilized. He pretended not to have been looking at the newspaper strewn across his bed carrying the sordid tale of his two former lovers.
Stein put his arm around Vane’s shoulder. “You just bet the wrong horses.”
“Story of my life.”
“You only bet the wrong horses. They are the wrong horse.”
“Sometimes it doesn’t feel any different.”
A pudgy bespectacled man shaped like a bowl of mashed potatoes came into the room. He was wearing white, which even Stein could see was an unfortunate fashion choice. He had brought Vane a candy bar and Stein was glad to see the staff was caring and personable. “They didn’t have Twix so I got you Almond Joy. I hope that’s close enough.”
“My two heroes,” Vane announced. He introduced Stein to the man Stein first thought was an orderly but who was not an orderly at all, but the photographer Ray Ramos.
“You did the shots of Alex for the Espe box,” Stein said, recognizing the name as soon as Vane spoke it
Ramos smiled, while he went about the efficient scouting of all the hidden crevasses in Paul’s room where items might accidentally be left behind.
“What was that all about?” Stein persisted.