Inherent Vice (29 page)

the front door
was nearly invisible, more of a big access panel that fit snugly into the curving fa
ç
ade. In the lobby beneath a tasteful sign
in sans-serif face reading
golden fang enterprises, inc.
\
corporate hq
and behind a nameplate of her own that said
“
Xandra, hi!
”
sat an Asian receptionist wearing a black vinyl jumpsuit and a distant expression, who asked him in a semi-Brit accent whether he was sure he had the right place.

“
This is the address they told me at the Club Asiatique in San Pedro? Just here to pick up a package for the management?
”

Xandra reached for a telephone, punched a button, murmured into it,
listened, gave Doc another doubtful once-over, stood, and led him across
the reception area to a brushed-metallic door. It took only a step or two for him to dig that she
’
d logged more dojo hours in the year previous than he
’
d spent in front of the tube in his whole life—not the sort of
young lady whose displeasure you
’
d go looking to provoke.

“
Second office on the left. Dr. Blatnoyd will see you in a moment.
”

Doc found the office and looked around for something to check out his hair in but saw only a small yellow-framed feng shui mirror by the door. The face looking back did not seem to be his own.
“
This is not promising,
”
he muttered. Behind a titanium desk, the window revealed
a stretch of lower Sunset—taquer
í
as, low-rent hotels, pawn shops. There
were beanbag chairs and a range of magazines—
Foreign Affairs, Sinse
milla Tips, Modern Psychopath, Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists
—that gave
Doc no handle on the clientele here. He started paging through
2000 Hairdos
and was just getting into
“
That Five-Point Scissor Cut—What
Your Stylist Isn
’
t Telling You,
”
when Dr. Blatnoyd came in wearing a suit
in a deep, nearly ultraviolet shade of velvet, with very wide jacket lapels
and bell-bottom trousers and accented with a raspberry-colored bow tie and display handkerchief. He seated himself behind the desk, reached for a weighty loose-leaf manual of some kind and began consulting it,
squinting over at Doc from time to time. Finally,
“
So
...
you have some
ID, I imagine.
”

Doc went looking through his wallet till he found a business card from a Chinese head shop on North Spring Street he thought would do the trick.

“
I can
’
t read this, it
’
s in some ... Oriental... what is this, Chinese?
”

“
Well, I figured that you,
being
Chinese—
”

“
What? what are you talking about?
”

“‘
The ... the Golden Fang ...
’
?
”

“
It
’
s a syndicate, most of us happen to be dentists, we set it up years ago for tax purposes, all legit— Wait,
”
peering at Doc you
’
d have to say
diagnostically,
“
where
’
d you tell Xandra you were from again?
”

“
Uh...
”

“
Why, you
’
re another one of those hippie dopefiends, aren
’
t you. My
goodness. Here for a little
perking up,
I
’
ll bet—
”
In a jiffy he was out with
a tall cylinder of brown glass sealed elaborately with globs of some bright
red plastic—
“
Dig it! just in from Darmstadt, lab quality, maybe I
’
ll even
have some with you.
..
”
And before Doc knew it the hectic D.D.S. had a quantity of fluffy white cocaine crystals all chopped up into snortable format and arranged in lines on a nearby copy of
Guns &Ammo.

Doc shrugged in apology.
“
I try not to do dope I can
’
t pay for,
‘
s what it is.
”

“
Whoo!
”
Dr. Blatnoyd had a soda straw and was busy snorting away.
“
No worries, it
’
s on the house, as the TV antenna man alw
ays sez…
Hmm, missed a little..
.
”
He took it on his finger and rubbed it enthu
siastically into his gums.

Doc did half a line in either nostril, just to be sociable, but somehow could not shake the impression that all was not as innocent here as it
looked. He had been in a dentist
’
s office or two, and there was a distinc
tive smell and a set of vibes that were as absent here as room echoes,
which he
’
d also been wondering about. Like something else was going
on—something...
not groovy.

There was a quiet but no-nonsense knock at the door, and Xandra the
receptionist looked in. She had unzipped the top of the jumpsuit, and
Doc could now make out this exquisite pair of no-bra tits, their nipples
noticeably erect.

“
Oh, Doctor,
”
she breathed, half singing it.

“
Yes, Xandra,
”
replied Dr. Blatnoyd, moist-nosed and beaming.

Xandra nodded and slid away back on out the door again, smiling
over her shoulder.
“
And don
’
t forget to
bring that bottle
”

“
Be right back,
”
Blatnoyd assured Doc, speeding out after her, eyes frenziedly focused on where her ass had just been, his echoless footsteps
soon vanishing into unknown regions of the Golden Fang Building.

Doc went over and had a look at the manual on the desk. Titled
Golden Fang Procedures Handbook,
it was open to a chapter titled
“
Interpersonal Situations.
”
“
Section Eight—Hippies. Dealing with the Hippie is generally straightforward. His childlike nature will usually
respond positively to drugs, sex, and/or rock and roll, although in which
order these are to be deployed must depend on conditions specific to the
moment.
”

From the doorway came a loud, violent chirp. Doc looked up and
saw a smiling young woman, blond, Californian, presentable, wearing a striped minidress of many different
“
psychedelic
”
colors and waving at
him vigorously, causing enormous earrings, shaped like pagodas of some
kind, to swing back and forth and actually jingle.
“
Here for my Smile
Maintenance appointment with Dr. Rudy!
”

A blast from the past.
“
Hey! that
’
s at Japonica, ain
’
t it. Japonica Fen
way! Imagine meeting you here!
”

This was not a moment he
’
d been either dreading or hoping for, though now and then somebody would remind him of the ancient
American Indian belief that if you save somebody
’
s life, you are respon
sible for them from then on, forever, and he would wonder if any of
that applied to his history with Japonica. It had been his first paying
gig as a licensed private eye, and pay it did, for sure. The Fenways were heavy-duty South Bay money, living on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in a
gated enclave located
inside
the
already
gated high-rent community of
Rolling Hills.
“
How am I supposed to come see you,
”
Doc wondered
when Crocker Fenway, Japonica
’
s dad, called him at the office.

“
Guess it
’
ll have to be outside the gates and down in the flats,
”
said
Crocker,
“
like Lomita?
”

It was a pretty open-and-shut runaway-daughter case, hardly worth
daily scale, let alone the extravagant bonus Crocker insisted on paying
when Doc finally brought Japonica back, one lens missing from her
wire-rim shades and vomit in her hair, making the handoff in the same parking lot where he and Crocker had met originally. It wasn
’
t clear if
she
’
d ever clearly registered Doc then, or remembered him now.

“
So! Japonica! what
’ve
you been up to?
”

“
Oh, escaping, mostly? There
’
s this, like, place? that my parents keep
sending me to?
”

Which turned out to be Chryskylodon, the same nut plantation in
Ojai that Doc remembered his Aunt Reet mentioning and which Sloane
and Mickey had donated a wing to. Though Doc once may have res
cued Japonica from a life of dark and unspecified hippie horror, appar
ently restoration to the bosom of her family had been enough to really
drive her around the bend. Against the neutral surface of the wall oppo
site, Doc had a moment
’
s visual of an American Indian in full Indian
gear, perhaps one of those warriors who wipe out Henry Fonda
’
s regi
ment in
Fort Apache
(1948), approaching with a menacing frown.
“
Doc
responsible for crazy white chick now. What Doc planning to do about that? If anything.
”

“
Excuse me, short man with strange hair? Are you all right?
”
And on she went without waiting for an answer, twinkling like a room
ful of speed freaks hanging Christmas tinsel, about her different escapes.
It was beginning to give Doc a headache.

Owing to Governor Reagan
’
s shutdown of most of the state mental facilities, the private sector had been trying in
it’s
way to pick up some of the slack, soon in fact becoming a standard California child-rearing
resource. The Fenways had had Japonica in and out of Chryskylodon on
a sort of maintenance-contract basis, depending as always on how they
themselves were feeling day to day, for both led emotional lives of unusu
ally high density, and often incoherence.
“
Some days all I had to do was
play the wrong kind of music, and there
’
s my bags already packed, down
in the front hall waiting for the driver.
”

Soon Chryskylodon had found itself attracting a type of silent benefactor—middle-aged, male, though occasionally female, more focused than usual on the young and mentally disturbed. Freaky chicks and fun-loving dopers! Why do they call it the Love Generation? Come on up to Chryskylodon for a rockin weekend and find out! Absolute discretion guaranteed! Circa 1970,
“
adult
”
was no longer quite being
defined as in times previous. Among those who could afford to, a strenu
ous mass denial of the passage of time itself was under way. All across a city long devoted to illusory product, clairvoyant Japonica had seen
them, these travelers invisible to others, poised, gazing from smogswept
mesa-tops above the boulevards, acknowledging one another across miles and years, summit to summit, in the dusk, under an obscurely enforced silence. Wingfeathers trembled along their naked backs. They knew they could fly. A moment more, an eyeblink in eternity, and they would ascend
...

So, Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd, out on a first blind date with Japonica at the Sound Mind Caff, a secluded eatery with a patio in back and a menu designed by a resident three-star organi
c chef, was not only enchanted,
he was wondering if somebody hadn
’
t slipped some new psychedelic into his pomegranate martini. This girl was delightful! Being a little ESP-deficient, of course Rudy failed to appreciate that behind her wide sparkling gaze Japonica was not only thinking about but at this point
actually visiting
other worlds. The Japonica sitting with the older man in the funny velour suit was actually a Cybernetic Organism, or cyborg, programmed to eat and drink, converse and socialize, while Real Japon
ica tended to important business elsewhere, because she was the Kozmic Traveler, deep issues Out There awaited, galaxies wheeled, empires col
lapsed, karma would not be denied, and Real Japonica must always be present at some exact point in five-dimensional space, or chaos would resume
it’s
dominion.