Panorama City (24 page)

 

Detective Woodward and another officer went up into the crawl space and shot photographs for their files, then they took
everything that belonged to Paul, all of his papers, all of his ideas, his cardboard briefcase, everything, they took it all away, they wouldn't say what was going to happen to it, they said it was evidence, some of it would be used as evidence, the rest would go into storage somewhere. Aunt Liz couldn't understand why I was so concerned about the illegible scrawlings of a criminal madman, her words, perhaps I should consider instead the fate of the woman who had tried to help me in every way, or consider how much danger I had put her in, how much danger we'd all been in while this creature, this termite, was living under our roof, unbeknownst to her. Which is only one tiny fraction of the extended discussion Aunt Liz and I had at the kitchen table, under the hole in the ceiling, for most of the night and resuming first thing in the morning. As you can imagine, I did not say much, most of the speech came from Aunt Liz's mouth, most of what she said she had already said a few times before, she kept repeating things, she kept saying that she remained in a state of disbelief as to what had happened, and that she was going to have to come to a decision, but every time she began to get close to that decision she retreated, it was clear to me what the decision was, she wanted me to leave, but despite her depending on professionals for everything, despite her adherence to common sense nonsense, despite whatever flaws I might be able to list here, she wanted me to leave but she couldn't say so, every time her giant circles of speech led her back to that inescapable decision point she pulled back, so to speak, she was my protector, she couldn't kick me out.

 

It was only the next morning, after we'd eaten something, or she'd had coffee, I had oatmeal, it was only with the break of dawn that she stumbled upon a new track, a new piece of speech that wouldn't again lead her to the decision point, something she'd never tried with me, she set down her coffee and looked me straight on, and she said to me, or she asked me, for the first time, What do you want? I said, I want to go home.

 

The words came out without me even thinking them. Then I told Aunt Liz that I wanted to respect my father's wishes, her brother's wishes, your grandfather's wishes, I wanted to bury him where he belonged, which was next to Ajax and Atlas, which was not in some cemetery next to Kutchinskis and Browns. She took a sip of her coffee, she took a long sip, she looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup, she was assessing, she was considering what I'd said. She put down her coffee cup then, and nodded, and said, her words, That sounds reasonable. She would get me as far as the bus, she said, she would buy my bus ticket back to Madera, of course I could always call her if I needed anything, but for right now she couldn't go with me, she had too much notarizing to do, she had people in need of verification and certification, she needed also to recuperate, she listed many reasons why she couldn't come with me, I didn't need any, I hadn't expected her to come with me, I could take care of myself, I told her so. After which a change came over Aunt Liz, she seemed greatly relieved, she had been trying to force herself to kick me out, she had been battling internally between needing to be rid of me and wanting still to control my every move and thought, and together we had found a third way.

 

She reminisced about my first day in Panorama City, she talked about the look on my face coming off the bus, and the suit I'd been wearing, and she talked about my first day on the job at the fast-food place, and so on, I had been so promising. Her reminiscing took on a darker tone, there was a dark magnet in Aunt Liz's head, it took her speech and led her where she didn't want to go, she reminisced and then she asked did I know, could I help her figure out where and how and why she'd failed. I told her of course that she had done no such thing. I told her she'd been very hospitable during my stay in Panorama City, I told her that my only regret was that she and Paul Renfro couldn't see eye to eye, it would have made things more pleasant, but east is east, as your grandfather used to say. And besides, I had done what I came to do, or I had stopped doing what I came to do, I had seen the error of my premises. I thought I had come to Panorama City to become a man of the world, while in fact I had come to Panorama City to become a provincial type, thinking that was what it meant to be a man of the world. Had I succeeded, had I never been disabused, as they say, of that notion, I would have indeed become a provincial type, I would be telling you right now that I had become a man of the world, and I would hold up my golf clubs to prove it. Instead, I came to understand that a man of the world is not something you can just kick up your feet and be, a man of the world, a true man of the world, is something you are always becoming. It is a question, not an answer. So I did not mind leaving Panorama City, because although I hadn't achieved my goal I had exposed it, or it had been exposed to me, as a false goal, which is far more valuable than achieving it could ever be, and I had come to understand that I could be a man of the world, or I could keep becoming a man of the world, anywhere, which included Madera, and besides I was eager to find Carmen again, my mind kept turning back to the flowers she brought me when your grandfather died.

TAPE
9,
SIDE B;
TAPE
10,
SIDE A

I departed from the North Hollywood station, everything looked the same as it had forty days earlier. Aunt Liz wished me luck, she hugged me, she told me to call if I needed anything, I thanked her again for her hospitality, I promised updates, I hoped she would visit sometime. I would miss her cooking, I said, which wasn't all I would miss, but I knew how proud she had been to feed me, to feed someone who she called a growing boy, even though I had stopped growing years before. I pulled my leather suitcase out of the Tempo's trunk, the bus driver grabbed it and threw it into the cargo hold, he didn't care how the bags were stacked, he didn't examine my ticket at all, it seemed like he'd rather be elsewhere, though once we got on the road he was excellent, his driving style was fluid and precise. I sat alone in the front row and watched the city get thinner and thinner until we started up through the Grapevine, then some wires bobbed up and down and I fell asleep.

 

The bus rattled and I awoke in the middle of the Central Valley, golden grasses and farmland on both sides, cars and
trucks and buses lined up in two orderly rows to the horizon. I pulled my compact binoculars from your grandfather's old shaving kit, but even through those powerful lenses I couldn't make out why our side of the freeway was clogged. I had expected, Juan-George, or hoped, or somehow felt without thinking that after falling asleep near the Grapevine I would awaken in Madera, but it wasn't meant to be. We lurched forward and stopped, lurched and stopped. The wires on the side of the road kept no rhythm to doze off to. I scanned the shoulder for items of interest but the landscape seemed more suited to being sped past rather than examined in detail. This of course had nothing to do with what was actually on the side of the road but what was in my head, Juan-George, which was Paul Renfro. His papers everywhere, the Christmas lights, his suit inside out. Pouring ketchup packets into his mouth and wolfing down the french fries I'd brought him. The cardboard briefcase, the pushpins, the stuffed socks. I tried to focus on the freeway shoulder, I tried to turn my thoughts to what lay directly in front of my eyes, but sometimes when something is in front of you, even if it's coming right at you, your head, what's in your head, would rather be somewhere else entirely, and my head, for whatever reason, wanted to be hundreds of miles away, surrounded by beams and insulation, in the cranium of Aunt Liz's house. Then the traffic thinned in a strange way, the gaps between cars grew without there seeming to be fewer cars. My attention turned to the road ahead, I wanted to see what had kept us lurching and stopping for almost an hour, but there was nothing. We just lurched one last time, then stopped, then accelerated smoothly to freeway speed. I asked the driver what had happened, maybe I had missed something. He shrugged and said, Random. At which point my mind returned to Paul Renfro, I wished Paul was sitting next to me, making a mess of his papers, Paul would have given the driver a piece of his mind, as they say. The word
random
is a white flag of surrender, Paul's philosophy, for use only by the cowardly and the defeated. To call any phenomenon random is to declare your own ignorance, is to declare pride in your own ignorance, Paul's words, by predicting, falsely, the fruitlessness of further inquiry. But on the other hand, my philosophy, the driver was good at his job, he drove the bus smoothly and precisely, exactly because he was not interested in the fruits of further inquiry. His ignorance, as Paul would have called it, was in fact a tool. We can't all swallow the whole world, Juan-George, some of us need white flags. Even Paul knew this. I remember the police leading him away, Paul going past me in handcuffs, wincing every time his ankle hit the floor. I was still arguing that he was an invited guest in Aunt Liz's ceiling, that he'd been welcome, that they couldn't arrest him. Paul said that I needn't advocate on his behalf anymore, that I was wasting my breath on those people, the police, that small minds could not be changed. He said there was a high probability we wouldn't see each other again, and he wanted to take the moment, before these barbarians dragged him away, to thank me for acting heroically and nobly in aid of a fellow thinker, in service of the struggle to save mankind from its own stupidity. It wasn't fair, I said, it wasn't right what they were doing to him. Paul looked at me with that newly hatched alligator smile of his and said, Oppen, my friend, listen, it's the way of the world, he who laughs last must first endure the laughter of others. Then they took him away.

 

I was the only passenger getting off in Madera. The driver yanked my bag from the cargo area and dumped it at my feet, then hopped aboard again without a word. I stood on the tree-lined sidewalk, looking down at my leather suitcase on the bricks. The air stank of almonds roasting and grapes fermenting. Through the Dial-a-Ride office's window I could see the same woman I'd seen there when I'd left for Panorama City, sitting in the same position, eating soup while talking on the phone, as if no time had passed at all, as if time had never passed and never would. Then someone called my name. Oppen, not Mayor. Oppen. Above the row of cars parked nose to curb I saw a person, or I should say I saw a person's hair and sunglasses, the hair sticking up all over the place, it was Officer Mary. She came out from between the cars, waving, and gave me a warm hug, her badge hanging from her shirt like she had magnets in her shoes. She told me that Aunt Liz had called her, and that as long as I was back in town, her words, the least she could do was give me a ride home from the bus depot. Madera hadn't been the same without me, she said. What a coincidence, I said, I hadn't been the same without Madera. We got into Mary's police car, I put my bag in the backseat, Madera-style. Leaving for Panorama City had felt like getting on a rocketship to fly to another planet. Coming back to Madera felt more like realizing I'd never left the planet in the first place.

 

When we pulled up to the house I noticed two things right away. One, there were no longer any tracks cutting across the yard where the mini-excavator and flatbed truck had come through. Nature had reclaimed them. And two, the mailbox, which I had expected to find stuffed, was empty, which was a relief. A momentary relief, I should say. In fact I had gotten massive amounts, all held at the post office, thanks to Wilfredo, and all later sorted through with the invaluable help of Officer Mary. There is a world of paperwork, Juan-George, an alternate universe, Paul Renfro might have called it, where nothing can be done without the right documents, where every human moment is assigned a piece of paper, paper that exists only so that what is evident to everyone involved can become clear to someone who is not. Without Officer Mary's help I would have been lost there forever.

 

Is it that dust has a way of getting into a house and no way of getting out, or is it that having no people around for a while allows the dust already in the air to settle? A question I cannot answer, Juan-George. Other than the accumulation of dust on everything, the house hadn't changed since I'd walked out the door some forty days earlier. Oh, and the bread, I'd forgotten some bread, it was a fuzzy black ball. I brought my things upstairs, I'm not sure why, but the first thing I did was bring my bag upstairs to my room and put it on the floor. My sheets were messy, I hadn't made my bed before leaving. I sat on the bed a moment, I thought about breathing my own air, but I didn't want to leave Mary alone downstairs wondering. I gathered my strength and stood and walked out of my room again, I had done it so many times, getting out of bed and heading downstairs, it was like every muscle in my body remembered those motions and those views, they'd made a deep trench in my thinking, and my head was slipping into the trench, so that I had this strange feeling, this notion, or suspicion, I don't know what to call it, I mean, I knew it wasn't true, I knew it wasn't fact, but another part of me felt sure I was waking from the dream that had been Panorama City.

 

Downstairs, I told Mary what I'd always told everyone, which was that I could take care of myself. She wrote down her phone number, said that I should call if I needed anything. Groceries, post office, whatever. I told her I was fine, that I would be fine. She walked over to the phone in the kitchen and picked it up, listening for a moment. You'll need help, she said, getting this reconnected. She flipped a light switch up and down. Nothing happened. And this, she said. I got a flashlight from your grandfather's old toolbox and fetched some matches and candles. Officer Mary left, reluctantly, after offering to stay the night. I took a shower, a cold shower, there was no hot water, and put on the nicest clothes I had in my closet, a white button-up shirt and some plain tan pants. From my window I could see the horizon splitting the sun, clouds turning orange and red, shadows everywhere. I went out to the garage and found my favorite bicycle, the blue-flake three-speed with leather bags. I wiped it down with wet rags, put air in the tires, sprayed WD-40 on the chain. There was something I had to do.