Into the bedroom. First the video system, he can bring those cameras down and smash them to pieces. And the maps! He leaps up, catches the upper edge of one of the big Thomas Brothers maps, rips it down. It tears with a long, dry sound. The other maps come down as well, he ends up sitting in a pile of ripped map sections, tearing them into ever-smaller fragments, blinded by tears.
Suddenly he hears a car pull up and stop on the street out front. Right in front of his ap. Police? Arthur and his friends? Panic surges into Jim’s mindless rage again, and he wiggles out the little bedroom window, across the yard filled with dumpsters. It occurs to him that Arthur and his friends might want to trash his ap in revenge for his betrayal, and at the thought he doubles over laughing. Won’t they get a surprise? Meanwhile he continues through the applex, staggering, giggling madly, bent over the hard knot of his stomach.…
No problem losing pursuit in such a warren. The boxes we live in! he thinks. The boxes! Okay, he’s out on Prospect, they’ll never find him. Police cars are cruising, heading down toward Tustin and the scene of his attacks. Busy night, hey Officer? Jim feels an urge to run out into the street and shout “I did it! I did it!” He actually finds his feet on the track when fear jumps him and he hauls ass back into the dark between streetlights, shivering uncontrollably. Are those people on foot, back there? That’s not normal, he has to run again. Can’t go back for his car, no public transport, can’t reach anywhere on foot. He laughs hard, tries hitchhiking. Turn right down Hewes. He gives up hitchhiking, no one ever picks up hitchhikers, and besides where is he going? He jogs down Hewes to 17th, gasping. Over into Tustin, onto Newport, then Redhill. A couple of times he stops to pick up good stones, and then throws them through the windows of real estate offices that he passes. He almost tries a bank but remembers all the alarms. By now he must have tripped off a score of lesser alarms, are the computers tracking his course this very moment, predicting the moves that he is helplessly jerking through?
People passing in cars stare at him: pedestrians are suspicious. He needs a car. Cut off from his car he is immobilized, helpless. Where can he go? Can he really be here, doing this? Is he really in this situation? He seizes an abandoned hubcap, frisbees it into the window of a Jack-in-the-Box. A beautiful flight, although the window only cracks. But it’s like hitting a beehive; employees and customers pour out and in a second are after him. He takes off running into the applex behind him, threads his way silently through it. He stumbles over a bicycle, picks it up with every intention of stealing it and pedaling off, gives up and drops it when he sees the Mickey Mouse face, staring at him from between the handlebars.
Back on Redhill, farther south, he sees a bus. Incredible! He jumps on it, pays, and off they go. Only one other passenger, an old woman.
He stays on all the way to Fashion Island, trying vainly to catch proper hold of his breathing. The more time he has to think, the angrier he gets at himself. So that I’ll go out and do something even stupider! he thinks. Which will make me angrier, which will make me do something even more stupid!… Hopping out at Fashion Island he goes immediately to a Japanese plastic bonsai garden with some real, and truly fine, rocks in it. Rocks like shot puts. After pulling some of the plastic trees apart he picks up these rocks, and has one big one in each hand as he approaches the Bullock’s and I. Magnin’s. Huge display windows, showing off rooms that could house a hundred poor people for five hundred years. All there to display rack after chrome rack of rainbow-colored clothes. He takes aim and is about to let fly with both of them at once, when there is a grunt of surprise from behind him, and he is grabbed up and lifted into the air.
He struggles like a berserker, swings the rocks back viciously, where they clack together and fall out of his hands; he kicks, wriggles, hisses—
“Hey, Jim, lay off! Relax!”
It’s Tashi.
75
Jim relaxes. In fact, when Tashi lets him down and lets go of him, he almost falls. When he recovers from the little blackout he tries to pick up one of the rocks and heave it at the I. Magnin’s, but Tashi stops him. Tash takes the two rocks, underhands them back into the shredded garden. “For Christ’s sake, Jim! What in the world is wrong?”
Jim sits down and starts to shake. Tash crouches beside him. He can’t seem to breathe right anymore. He’s hurt something inside, every breath spikes pain through him. “I—I—” He can’t talk.
Tash puts a hand on his shoulder. “Just relax. It’s okay now.”
“It’s not! It’s not!” The hysteria floods back.… “It’s not!”
“Okay, okay. Relax. Are you in trouble?”
Jim nods.
“Okay. Let’s go up to my place, then, and get you out of sight. Come on.” He helps him up.
They walk uphill, along the lit sidewalks through the dark of Newport Heights, and reach Tashi’s tower. A police car hums by, and Jim cowers. Tash shakes his head: “What in the hell has happened?”
Up on Tashi’s roof Jim manages to stutter out part of the story.
“Your breathing is all fucked up,” Tash observes. “Here, lid some of this.” He gets him to lid some California Mello. Then Tash stands in front of his big tent and thinks it over.
“Well,” he says, “I was planning on taking a farewell trip anyway. And it sounds like you should get out of town for a while. Here, just sit down, Jim. Sit down! Now, I’m going to stuff another sleeping bag, and get you a pack packed. We’ll have to buy more food in Lone Pine in the morning. You just sit there.”
Jim sits there. It’s possible he couldn’t do anything else.
An hour later Tash has them packed. He puts one compact backpack over Jim’s shoulders, picks up another for himself, and they’re off. They descend to Tashi’s little car, get onto the freeway.
Jim, in the passenger seat, stares at the lightflood of red/white, white/red. Autopia courses by. Slowly, millimeter by millimeter, his stomach begins to unknot. His breathing gets better. Somewhere north of L.A. he jerks convulsively, shudders.
“My God, you won’t believe what I did tonight.”
“No lie.”
Jim tries to tell it. Over and over Tashi exclaims “Why? But why?”
And over and over Jim says, “I don’t know! I don’t know.”
When he finishes they are on an empty dark road, up on the high desert northeast of L.A. Jim, shivering lightly, jerking upright from time to time, falls into a restless sleep.
76
(And meanwhile, out at sea, a small boat is drifting onshore, rising and falling on a small swell, coming ever closer to the short bluff at Reef Point. Then as it nears the reefs searchlights burst into being, their glare blinds everyone around, the black water sparkles, the heavy boom of a shot blasts the air, reverberates—
A warning shot only. But the two men obey the voice hammering over the loudspeakers, they stand hands overhead, eyes terrified, looking like the figures in the Goya sketch of insurgents executed by soldiers under a tree—)
77
When Jim wakes they are tracking through the Alabama Hills in the Owens Valley. The oldest rocks in North America look strange in this hour before dawn, rounded boulders piled on each other in weird, impossible formations. Beyond them the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada rises like a black wall under the indigo sky. Tashi sits in the driver’s seat listening to Japanese space music, a flute wandering over Oriental harp twanging; he looks awake, but lost in some inner realm.