The Road Narrows As You Go (12 page)

She said those words to him, What happens if I kiss you?

He said, Here in the arcade?

Yeah for sure here or anywhere. As soon as possible. Like our lives depend on it.

Okay, he said and kissed her. He tasted of seasalt, like a caramel you'd dropped in the ocean. Can we go back to your place? he asked. Quickly she processed this: she wasn't a virgin but she'd never brought a boy back to her apartment before. That would break a lot of her mom's house rules.

Isn't there somewhere else? My mother sleeps on the living room hide-a-bed. Screw it, let's go to my place. I don't care. I can lock my door. She'll have to break it down.

The lights were off in the apartment and her mother wasn't home, but in the morning when the two of them awoke they discovered she had done the laundry, cleaned all their clothes, and Jonjay's were folded neatly and laid out at the door, including socks and underwear. Cheap coffee was percolating aromatically and the first round of toast just popped out of the toaster with a cheap jolt. She whispered to Jonjay her mother never made breakfast—this was her embarrassing display of benevolence to prove Mom was
cool
with the presence of a naked boy in Wendy's bed and finding their clothes all over the apartment as if the two teenagers had exploded. The moment she left the bedroom to say good morning to her mother, Jonjay opened the window and climbed out. (She was mistaken about more than his age, she would someday learn.)

When they discovered Jonjay was gone her mother leaned out the third-floor window and looked down into the alleyway, laughed and said, You remind me so much of myself sometimes it hurts.

That was the sort of thing her mother said to make Wendy cringe. She didn't want to resemble her mother or be close to her mother, she wanted to run away. But how does one leave behind something that's within?
How to go and say goodbye, as if to life itself? Leaving brought her closer to her unknown self, that American aspect, her father. Now her mother could see she was stewing and wanted to show Wendy something she'd found in that boy's pocket when she put his pants through the laundry last night. It was a chequebook. Look at the number. The last amount credited was for over a million dollars.

So what if he's rich? Wendy said and staggered back in shock though doing as best she could to make it look natural. Her mother didn't always have money for rent at the end of the month. Wendy put the chequebook in her pocket. You shouldn't snoop through other people's stuff, Mom.

Alls I'm saying is, that's men for you. Her mother shot her a look, stood up from the kitchen table, and went to light a cigarette off the stove. Sometimes it hurts, she said.

Her mother was dead wrong. Jonjay didn't vanish from her life after one night like Ronald Reagan did with her mother. He was still loafing around in town. He wanted to see her, otherwise why would he go back to Horizone? She wasn't so catatonic with passion that she forgot to ask him about the chequebook. So you're a millionaire? she asked point-blank. He blushed and chewed his lip, asked her if she had the chequebook and if so could he have it back? Can you keep a huge secret? he asked her and she said that she could. I'm not that rich, he said.

It didn't matter to Wendy either way. What mattered was him. Once more he spent the night in Wendy's bed and her mother had to deal with it. His ideas about sex were novel but not gimmicky. His gestures were fun, brave, he smelled better than a forest, and he could flatter and spoil her. When he left town the next day Wendy grieved as though he had died. It never occurred to her she could go with him and it never figured into his plans to invite her. His next stop was not home to No Manors but to Japan to sell the coastal matsutakes he'd picked on the island. And to climb Osorezan. In her bed he'd described his plans. There was a mountain in Japan called Fear that was supposed to hide the entrance to
the afterlife. On that mountain he was going to pick and eat the legendary skull mushroom, a hallucinatory fungus only found there. And so with thoughts of Fear Mountain clutched to her breast, the following day Wendy stole the money she knew her mother kept hidden in a Hungry Hungry Hippos game box in the closet, left a note with a doodle that said she was leaving the city, leaving the island the city was on, leaving the country, and she'd call from America next chance she got.

11

Just how old are you anyway? she asked Jonjay that afternoon before Frank arrived for his tour of Bernal Heights park and its community of lost pets.

Retirement age, he said and smiled with a childlike mendacity. His feet were kicked up in front of a television showing clips of hostage negotiations. This is terribly suspenseful TV, he said by the way. It's just an airplane on tarmac, and it's a repeat, but I'm hooked. Masked men waving Kalashnikovs once a day. The hijacking is a Cold War in miniature where the less that happens the better.

My editor thinks I'm twenty-five, but I turned
eighteen
this year, Wendy said and sat down beside him and stared at the TV screen. Am I in trouble? What's going on?

Men from Iran loaded with guns took the passengers on that plane hostage, Jonjay explained, and I'm not
that
old looking, am I? You wouldn't actually in a court of law mistake me for a senior citizen, would you? It's that White Mountain sunburn, gave me a lizard tan. I'm twenty-eight yesterday.

Happy birthday. As a present, take me here, now, do it. Plunge, splash,
come. Here's my plan, she said without batting an eyelash and took an erasable blue pencil out of her tray and began to rough out the basic composition of each of the four frames in a weekday
Strays
. As she spoke, she drew. Tell me what you think: I'll show Frank up the hill and around the bend and find him a rabid cat and a mangy dog or two. Walk around the dump site and see him to his vehicle. Good night, no kisses. If he expects to go up my skirt I'm going to tell him that's out of the question. From now on, it's business, that's all.

Good idea. Sex is for dummies, said Jonjay, slapping his beltloops. What if you got the nastiest herpes ever from sex?

Twyla said Wendy shouldn't repress her emotions, that would be too demon-friendly. That's why a sensible woman is easily possessed by evil, because she so promptly represses the bad shit. Fuck Frank
again
, Twyla advised.

Rachael Wertmüller was skeptical of Wendy's willpower. Who are you resisting
for
? she wanted to know. Surely not yourself. Spouse? A woman you've never met?

No, for my own sanity. He can go ahead and picture me on a bed of silk for all I care. I don't want him to see my
Rockford Files
pillowcases. I'm all for the separation of businessmen and pleasure. What if he's told his wife he's gone out of town or some bullshit story because he expects to spend the night—the weekend? I don't know why I'm so scared about him coming over, but I really wish I could call this off. This was a mistake from the start. I don't like it when people have extra expectations they aren't being honest about. Secrets are bad. But if I cancel, my editor will decapitate me.

We told Wendy not to cancel. To cancel would be overthinking a good thing. She needed the business Frank promised to drum up and this was ostensibly a friendly business meeting, nothing more. If he crossed a line she could demand he retreat out of respect. If he didn't accept then we'd kill him, clearly.

A phony, Jonjay said. I remember him. Got me kicked out of Stanford. Problem is, everyone in that lab is there for one reason, pure math. Math for math's sake. It's a very clean system. There's professors and students and it's all academic, nothing ideological in the room to spoil the atmosphere of pure math. A guy like Frank spoils the atmosphere. Pure math becomes ulterior-motive math. When you know there's a stooge in the room with ulterior motives it changes the outcome of an experiment, every scientist knows that and does everything they can to avoid that. He tainted labs. Everyone felt it. Then they pointed at me. I was even worse. I tainted everything. I was auditing. I was the impurity they'd failed to notice. The impurity they were too blind to see. They hated me. So the graduates got up a petition to have me removed.

You know what he sort of told me, that he stole your formula so he could get rich off stocks and bonds.

He stole my model? Is that what he told you? Well, he did, then. Jonjay stood up from the couch and paced the living room and absently picked up the clutter on the floor. As he spoke he found gaps to wedge these toys and novels into shelves, toss a watercolour set across the room onto the longtable. His free-throw rate at the wastebin was unrivalled. He talked at a steady clip, a bit faster than usual and with a lot more sarcasm, spitting out his words. If he's using that model then he went to the labs looking to pinch something and use it for profit. Those eggheads were right all along. He didn't want people, he wanted code. But you can't steal
my
formula, said Jonjay and walked the other direction, then back again. I didn't invent this equation and I can't own it, I just discovered it exists. I hit on a model for the ages. I don't own anything. He has no idea what I use that for.

What sort of formula is it? Wendy asked.

It's more of a model, Jonjay said. When you get obsessed down to the integer with how much of life is pinballs knocking around in the universe's unending game of total randomness, there's only one ground
zero for chaos theory. Not MIT, but right here in the Bay, the Stanford scene. I got fascinated with nature's architecture somehow formed up in this boiling chaos. Like conch shells, and fiddleheads, you know Fibonacci spirals, those repeated sequences in nature and so on. That blooms big in my mind. The fact there's a million squillion years of randomness flickering under those perfect forms nature designs, human life, any matter and all existence, pretty amazing.

I thought maybe you went to art school, said Wendy.

Pure math is ahead of pure art around here. Not many cities can say that. There's a lot going on in math right now, big stuff. Those physics classes I considered my art school. Like, just wrap your mind around the idea that reality itself is a random zap. I learned there are universes that
aren't real
. So I wanted to figure out for the sake of my life what can change what's random. I was like, maybe my amazement does, probably panic does. Maybe there's a mathematical model that measures fear or courage as it affects random processes. If the universe is a game of Ping-Pong, I wanted to model the whaps we make with the paddles.

Pong theory, said Wendy.

God, I love Pong. Playing Pong changed my life. When I fuck up Pong, or when I nail Pong, I want to measure precisely why, I want to create a data field to model my emotional reaction. That bouldercrashing frantic mistake-riddled emotional trip-ups that video games tap into and feed off of, for sure. I love that. My model is for deeply associative, emotional, triggerhappy free-floating human volatility. I tightened my math a hair here, a hair there to get the actions to align. A mathematical model is my kind of art. I start up from a sketch and get the lines tighter and tighter as I ink in the details, and then it's an experiment with shadows and fine lines until I think I have it. Life in all its manifold illogical conjecture, quantified.

Yikes.

Nature's data. I wanted to input natural events into my formula, and
check out what I got—the meaning of life. But if you crunch the data, someone like Frank might think he's seeing the results for a stock market crash
in advance
. But he isn't, that's his imagination.

That's what Frank thinks, that he stole a crystal ball. He's my editor's idea of a whale of a client, so listen. I don't want to go broke before I get to be rich, so maybe you should tell him when he comes over that the formula he stole doesn't work the way he thinks it does. Plus I'd like to see if that news made his wig pop off.

He can do what he wants with it, said Jonjay. I'm not going to stop him. I didn't show anyone the formula. I kept it to myself. I never told him how it works. Like you said, he stole it.

Frank owns some of your pictures, too, did you know that? You should pay Justine Witlaw a visit and collect your half, said Wendy.

I make what I make to make it
, he said and snorted with indifference It was clear from his expression that money and possessions repulsed him on the same basic level as rotting vegetables, but at the same time entrepreneurialism was, if anything, his art form. Because of this pompous disrespect he had for economic wellbeing, if it weren't for Justine Witlaw being savvy enough to steal up every scrap of art she saw Jonjay made, his oeuvre might be lost forever.

Compare that attitude to when around seven that evening Frank arrived for his special tour of Bernal Hill—from the moment he stepped up to the manor door he took on this persona of a thumbsucking shy teen suitor, and his bouquet and bottle of red wine tied with a pink ribbon distracted from the brick-sized Motorola cellphone hanging from his hip. He confessed right away how excited he was to see her again as if it wasn't obvious. She took the bottle and flowers and tossed them to Mark, asked if he'd like to see the manor first.

Sure, he said and stepped gingerly through the entrance of what appeared at first glance to be a slob's house, a disorganized mess of things no sane adult kept around. The range floored him if not the
functionality. The longtable shall remain the centre of the legend of No Manors but guests, especially ones from other, tamer milieus, never forget seeing the dozens of pedal bicycles that hung from the ceiling in the main hall entrance, the clever solution Hick thought of to deal with all the unclaimed bikes left behind after some of the more outlandish parties in the heyday. For these bikes tipped the iceberg of hoard in No Manors. Rather than go out much, it had been Hick's preference to suck as much of the world as possible into his orbit. Hick and Wendy's favourite outings were for art supplies, to record stores, flea markets, and pawn shops. We got the impression Frank was glad to meet her assistants, if only to reassure himself that Wendy didn't live alone in this dump. No, there was Patrick in front of a video game, and Rachael over a sewing machine prepping a costume for her next live performance as Aluminum Uvula. Twyla and Mark acted on duty at the lightboxes tracing images from old
Strays
for future panels. So that was us. There might have been others. Biz or someone else from upstairs down to use the Xerox machine or a camera.