Panorama City (20 page)

 

I went into Maria's storefront, I went into her psychic adviser shop, I pushed through the bead curtain into the waiting room. Empty and quiet. Usually she was there right away, or I could hear her talking with another client and I would wait my turn. I listened for her voice, I heard nothing. I sat on the couch and waited, there was a magazine about boats. I flipped through it and looked at pictures of yachts. I wondered, when I was finished with the magazine and still had not seen Maria, I wondered whether she had heard my psychic appeal to her several nights before, whether she had heard it but had not responded, whether she was avoiding me. But then I heard something, it sounded like someone had knocked over a glass, an empty glass. It clanged but did not break, then rolled across the floor. I walked through a second bead curtain into the room where Maria did her readings, with the round table, and the crystal ball, and the chandelier that had cast strange patterns of light on her face. Empty. Then more sounds, something else knocked over, furniture, from farther back, there was a solid door, I had never been through it. Something told me to go in, whatever was going on didn't sound right. I thought Maria might be in trouble, I was in the part of my heart that belonged to her, I acted without thinking. I nudged open the door, I must admit I thought of myself as coming to her rescue, I thought about how grateful she would be that I'd interceded.

 

If there's one thing I can't recommend, it's thinking of yourself in an outside way when the situation requires you only to be yourself. I poked my head into the room, ready to save the day, and I found an empty business office, or a business office I thought was empty. I looked down and saw, on the floor, Maria, blocked partially, or mainly I should say, by broad shoulders, short arms, a fleshy neck, and a head that even from behind looked like a pineapple. Maria's eyes were closed, and her mind must have been somewhere else, because, being psychic, she should have known I was standing there, even nonpsychics know when someone is looking at them, but she was distracted, her mind was elsewhere, I lingered there only long enough to verify, only long enough to understand what was happening, which was obvious at first glance, which was that they were doing what men and women do, only long enough to verify and certify that what was happening was happening mutually, I mean, that it wasn't a violation, that she wasn't being attacked. I lingered only to make sure, to be sure she didn't need to be rescued. I might have lingered there a moment longer than necessary, I wanted Maria to open her eyes, I wanted her to see me standing there and stop everything, but she did not, she was lost in pleasure.

 

I did not go back to the Bible group. I went to the Laundromat. I watched clothes tumble around inside a dryer. Words echoed in my head, something Scott Valdez had said, the first time I met Maria, when Maria had asked me for a jump start, Scott had said, his words, The battle between good and evil played itself out everywhere, and our mini-mall was no exception. I watched a skinny man pull out items from a rolling wire laundry basket and fold them on a high counter. Maria and Scott, Scott and Maria, it made no sense, they hated each other, I had seen it, I had heard it, seething hatred. Maria had heaped scorn on the Lighthouse Fellowship, which was Scott's organization, which was Scott's mission in life, his calling, and Scott had even more viciously and publicly attacked everything that went on behind Maria's bead curtains. Yet my eyes had not deceived me, as they say. I couldn't watch the skinny man calmly folding his clothes anymore, I turned my eyes to the dryer again, it better suited my thinking, which was tumbling in circles, or which tumbled a half circle before free-falling through space.

 

Eventually, Aunt Liz pulled up at the Lighthouse Fellowship and went inside to look for me. I stepped out of the Laundromat and sat on the hood of her car. She emerged from the Lighthouse looking panicked, she thought I'd run off again. I told her I'd been waiting outside and that she must have missed me. Scott Valdez came out then, he came out of the Lighthouse, he had come through the back, he came out and told Aunt Liz that he knew I hadn't wandered off, he told her that I was a real asset to the Lighthouse, he told her I always kept the Bible group on their toes. I looked into his eyes, his too-close-together eyes, and I saw only sincerity, and I knew then that Scott, too, was a double agent of sorts, a better double agent than I could ever be. Scott gave me a big grin, his cheeks looked flushed, he patted my upper arm. There was no fear in his eyes, not the slightest trace, I knew that he had not seen me, that he and Maria had had no idea I'd seen them. I knew, too, because I've always studied people, since elementary school I've studied people, I knew that this wasn't the first time for Scott and Maria, this had been going on a long while, what I had witnessed in the office was not the exception but the rule. Which meant that the jumper-cable incident had had nothing to do with a battle between good and evil. It had been a lovers' quarrel.

TAPE
8,
SIDES A & B;
TAPE
9,
SIDE A

As these things usually are, Paul Renfro's words. Look at the Trojan War. I wasn't interested in the Trojan War, I wanted to know why and how Scott and Maria had ended up together. On that point, Paul had no answer other than to say love is blind, truly blind, not blindfolded, when you're dealing with love you don't get a choice, even when you think you do, there's no blindfold to remove, you just have to accept it. Scott and Maria could seethe all they wanted, they could talk about good and evil until they lost their voices, but they were in the grip of future generations asserting a right to exist, Paul's words. We were in the ceiling, I had gotten in the habit of climbing up there after Aunt Liz had taken her sleeping pills and gone to sleep professionally, to let the balm of sincere friendship do its work. Night after night, Paul and I discussed every subject imaginable. If I had been wiser I would have recorded our discussions, they would have proven more valuable to you than this thin slice of my experience. Every other thing out of Paul's mouth was something I did not understand, my head filled with his words. The only thing we didn't talk about was what he'd scrawled on the notes hanging from the walls and joists, he would say only that he'd finally had the time and space to successfully reabsorb all of the thoughts and ideas he'd written on all of those scraps and sheets of paper, he'd for the first time in years managed to turn himself into a duplicate of his former self, so that he could push forward, through the development of several basic questions, push forward his thinking. He described his thinking as a large rock, the size of a small mountain, that had to be kept rolling, that if it came to a stop might never roll again, due to the differences between the coefficients of static friction and kinetic friction, Paul's words, which I remember but still do not fully understand, as opposed to most other people's thinking, presuming they thought at all, presuming they hadn't given over their thinking responsibilities to so-called common sense, which was, other people's thinking was, more like a tumbleweed, meaning it was not as dense as his thinking, and therefore not as difficult to move forward, but also much more sensitive to the whimsy of shifting winds.

 

He said to me, this was a few days into his stay in the ceiling, he said that the one thing he needed that the ceiling hadn't given him, the one last obstacle to his thinking, was freedom of movement, everything else was ideal, but his blood wasn't circulating freely, it might have been exacerbated, Paul's word, by the fast-food place food, which thickened his blood, or the warm air, the warm dry air of Panorama
City, but freedom of movement, or the lack thereof, had become an obstacle, the last in a long line of obstacles. I asked him if he needed to come down, if he needed to walk around the block, I had taken walks around Aunt Liz's block many times, it had been most salutary, though I probably didn't use that word, Paul probably taught me that word while I was telling him about the walks, I offered to help Paul down from the ceiling to let him roam the streets of Panorama City at night. I explained to him that at certain hours the streets were completely empty, we could imagine we had Panorama City all to ourselves, thinkers only. But for Paul coming down from the ceiling was out of the question, even in the middle of the night he couldn't risk interacting with the terrestrial-minded masses. His thinking, his cloud, had become like a soap bubble, contact with coarser elements would destroy it. How, then, to achieve movement? We devised the solution together, I can't deny that I was part of the thinking process that lay behind the ingenious but ultimately doomed solution, doomed but also not doomed, resulting as it would in your eventual arrival, I can't trace all of the unintended consequences here, it's not my job to do so, I can only tell you what we did and what came after. There was a network of crawl spaces and openings up there, Paul had explored them on his first day, I mentioned that he'd found a way to observe the front door. Near my room, not far from my room, above the area we would later realize was the kitchen, the roof above peaked in a continuous line toward the living room. The living room had high ceilings but the kitchen did not, meaning that there was an area above the kitchen where the roof was peaked but the ceiling was low, it wasn't a big area, it covered maybe half the floor plan of the kitchen, but providing he stayed on the beams it was big enough to allow Paul Renfro to pace back and forth while developing his thinking, it was big enough to allow the kind of unfettered movement Paul was in desperate need of. The space was unlit, but some light crept in from three separate sources, which were a dim glow from Paul's Christmas lights, shafts of daylight coming through a ventilation grate, and, occasionally, if I left them on, overspill from the ceiling-mounted kitchen lights. The only problem, which was a problem we solved together, was figuring out how Paul could do his pacing without making too much noise. What happened, what ended up happening, was that I went down into my dresser and pulled out four pairs of socks, these socks were too big for Paul's feet, we had to stuff them with newspaper so they would fit, we stuffed the socks and put Paul's feet into them, and then put three more pairs of socks over that, and it was like, his words, it was like walking on air, he didn't make a sound.

 

I was often in a half-waking state when Aunt Liz banged on my door to ask me to breakfast, I was often existing with one ear in the real world and one in the dream world, which was what led me to picture, or hallucinate, or dream one morning that your grandfather George was typing again, which meant alive, he was alive again, I thought. I heard the sounds of typing, I heard your grandfather typing his Letter to the Editor, it was the sound of home. Then I remembered that he'd died, I remembered what an indignity it was that he'd been buried next to someone called Kutchinski and someone called Brown, miles from his hunting dogs Ajax and Atlas. I climbed the ladder of awareness, I mean I awoke completely, and I recognized the dream for what it was. But the typing continued. I thought first of Paul, I thought at first that Paul had found a typewriter, I thought that he'd found a typewriter and had followed an idea so deeply that he'd forgotten to fear exposure. Then the sound changed, it didn't sound so exactly like typing, and I realized it was coming from outside, from the walnut tree outside, a tree situated well away from the house. I opened my window to see what the source was, and I saw what I'd never seen before, or never noticed before, at the top of several branches, a group of tiny birds making typewriter noises at each other. Hummingbirds, chirping. I ran to get my binoculars but by the time I'd returned to the window they were gone.

 

By the time you're able to see me, Juan-George, I'll be gone. It's unthinkable, but it's so.

 

When I walked into work that morning I saw for the first time my Employee of the Month photograph on the wall. It was shocking to see my face up there, on display. I've already talked about what it looked like, I've already told you how I wasn't present in the image, despite the image being an image of me, I've covered that, but at that moment, at the moment of me first seeing that picture up on the wall I experienced shock at the evidence before my eyes, at the evidence that I'd been turned into, as Paul had warned I'd be, that I'd been turned into a shadow of myself. When Roger brought my own copy to me, in a manila envelope, the copy that you'll find among my things, I told him I wasn't feeling well, I told him I was going to have to go home, I told him I was going to have to take a sick day. He looked me up and down, he winked, he pointed at the Employee of the Month photograph up on the wall, and he said that I'd earned it, what the fuck, just this once.

 

I didn't go home. I ended up at the Lighthouse Fellowship, or at Maria's, I should say, I didn't want to enter the Lighthouse Fellowship. I walked through the first bead curtain and sat down to wait for Maria, I didn't know what I was going to say, I didn't know what was going to come next. She pushed her way through the second bead curtain a moment later, I could see immediately what I had seen in Scott Valdez's eyes, she had no idea I'd seen what I'd seen. As far as Maria was concerned nothing had changed. She flashed the same smile she'd always flashed, she touched my arm the way she always touched it when she led me to the table where she did her readings. We sat across
the table from each other and she held my hands the way she always held them at the start of a session. You see, Juan-George, for her these gestures had not changed, their meaning had not changed. Yet for me each one was a blow. She did not love me back. It's nature's way, the exception is being loved back, if everyone who loved was loved back, nature would move sideways for a while, then collapse, Paul's words. Maria asked me if there was anything specific I wanted to ask her about, did I have any pressing issues, she sensed that I was troubled, the details were hazy, her words, there was a lot of interference between the earthly plane and the higher planes, she said, because of sunspots, it had been on television. She looked to the envelope on the table, I had set it there when I came in. There is something, she said, of great importance in that envelope. She asked me if I had opened it already, I said that I had. She asked me to tell her how I felt about what was in there. I told her I didn't know how I felt, I knew only that I was supposed to feel proud but didn't. She asked me to open the envelope for her and show her what was inside. She said that she knew what was inside, of course, but she needed more specifics, the sunspots and solar flares had been interfering with her abilities. I handed her the picture. She looked at it for a moment and then held it to her forehead. She described how helpful the image was in cutting through the celestial activity and accessing the higher planes. She said that my father was proud of me, but not for what was in the picture, he was proud of me for something that hadn't yet happened, for something I hadn't yet done but would do soon, they know no time in the higher planes, her words.