``You're in a decided minority,'' Landry said. `Ìt shocked what few friends I had left, shocked them plenty. Linda's relatives thought I had all the emotion of a warthog. I didn't have the energy to explain that I was trying to save myself.
Frog them, as Peoria would say. I grabbed my book the way a drowning man would grab a life-ring. I grabbed you, Clyde. My case of the shingles was still bad, and that slowed me down--to some extent it kept me out, or I might have gotten here sooner--but it didn't stop me. I started getting a little better-physically, at least--right around the time I finished the book. But when I had finished, I fell into what I suppose must have been my own state of depression. I went through the edited script in a kind of daze. I felt such a feeling of regret . . . of loss . . .'' He looked directly at me and said, ``Does any of this make any sense to you?'‘
`Ìt makes sense,'' I said. And it did. In a crazy sort of way.
``There were lots of pills left in the house,'' he said. ``Linda and I were like the Demmicks in a lot of ways, Clyde--we really did believe in living better chemically, and a couple of times I came very close to taking a couple of double handfuls. The way the thought always came to me wasn't in terms of suicide, but in terms of wanting to catch up to Linda and Danny. To catch up while there was still time.'‘
I nodded. It was what I'd thought about Ardis McGill when, three days after we'd said toodle-oo to each other in Blondie's, I'd found her in that stuffy attic room with a small blue hole in the center of her forehead. Except it had been Sam Landry who had really killed her, and who had accomplished the deed with a kind of flexible bullet to the brain.
Of course it had been. In my world Sam Landry, this tired-looking man in the hobo's pants, was responsible for everything. The idea should have seemed crazy, and it did . . . but it was getting saner all the time.
I found I had just energy enough to swivel my chair and look out my window. What I saw somehow did not surprise me in the least: Sunset Boulevard and all that surrounded it had frozen solid. Cars, buses, pedestrians, all stopped dead in their tracks. It was a Kodak snapshot world out there, and why not? Its creator could not be bothered with animating much of it, at least for the time being; he was still caught in the whirlpool of his own pain and grief. Hell, I was lucky to still be breathing myself.
``So what happened?' I asked. ``How did you get here, Sam? Can I call you that? Do you mind?’
``No, I don't mind. I can't give you a very good answer, though, because I don't exactly know. All I know for sure is that every time I thought of the pills, I thought of you. What I thought specifically was, `Clyde Umney would never do this, and he'd sneer at anyone who did. He'd call it the coward's way out.' '‘
I considered that, found it fair enough, and nodded. For someone staring some horrible ailment in the face--Vernon's cancer, or the misbegotten nightmare that had killed this man's son--I might make an exception, but take the pipe just because you were depressed? That was for pansies.
``Then I thought, `But that's Clyde Umney, and Clyde is make-believe . . . just a figment of your imagination.' That idea wouldn't live, though. It's the dumbbells of the world--politicians and lawyers, for the most part--who sneer at imagination, and think a thing isn't real unless they can smoke it or stroke it or feel it or fuck it. They think that way because they have no imagination themselves, and they have no idea of its power. I knew better. Hell, I ought to--my imagination has been buying my food and paying the mortgage for the last ten years or so.
`Àt the same time, I knew I couldn't go on living in what I used to think of as `the real world,' by which I suppose we all mean `the only world.' That's when I started to realize there was only one place left where I could go and feel welcome, and only one person I could be when I got there. The place was here--Los Angeles, in 1930-something. And the person was you.'‘
I heard that faint whirring sound coming from inside his gadget again, but I didn't turn around.
Partly because I was afraid to.
And partly because I no longer knew if I could.
VI. Umney's Last Case.
On the street seven stories below, a man was frozen with his head half-turned to look at the woman on the corner, who was climbing up the step of the eight-fifty bus headed downtown. She had exposed a momentary length of beautiful leg, and this was what the man was looking at. A little farther down the street a boy was holding out his battered old baseball glove to catch the ball frozen in mid-air just above his head. And, floating six feet above the street like a ghost called up by a third-rate swami at a carnival seance, was one of the newspapers from Peoria Smith's overturned table.
Incredibly, I could see the two photographs on it from up here: Hitler above the fold, the recently deceased Cuban bandleader below it.
Landry's voice seemed to come from a long way off.
`Àt first I thought that meant I'd be spending the rest of my life in some nut-ward, thinking I was you, but that was all right, because it would only be my physical self locked up in the funny-farm, do you see? And then, gradually, I began to realize that it could be a lot more than that . . . that maybe there might be a way I could actually . . . well . . . slip all the way in. And do you know what the key was?’
``Yes,'' I said, not looking around. That whir came again as something in his gadget revolved, and suddenly the newspaper frozen in mid-air flapped off down the frozen Boulevard. A moment or two later an old DeSoto rolled jerkily through the intersection of Sunset and Fernando. It struck the boy wearing the baseball glove, and both he and the DeSoto sedan disappeared. Not the ball, though. It fell into the street, rolled halfway to the gutter, then froze solid again.
``You do?' He sounded surprised.
``Yeah. Peoria was the key.'‘
``That's right.'' He laughed, then cleared his throat--nervous sounds, both of them.
`Ì keep forgetting that you're me.'‘
It was a luxury I didn't have.
`Ì was fooling around with a new book, and not getting anywhere. I'd tried Chapter One six different ways to Sunday before realizing a really interesting thing: Peoria Smith didn't like you.'‘
That made me swing around in a hurry. ``The hell you say!'‘
`Ì didn't think you'd believe it, but it's the truth, and I'd somehow known it all along. I don't want to convene the lit class again, Clyde, but I'll tell you one thing about my trade--writing stories in the first person is a funny, tricky business. It's as if everything the writer knows comes from his main character, like a series of letters or dispatches from some far-off battle zone. It's very rare for the writer to have a secret, but in this case I did. It was as if your little part of Sunset Boulevard were the Garden of Eden--'‘
`Ì never heard it called that before,'' I remarked.
``--and there was a snake in it, one I saw and you didn't. A snake named Peoria Smith.'‘
Outside, the frozen world that he'd called my Garden of Eden continued to darken, although the sky was cloudless. The Red Door, a nightclub reputedly owned by Lucky Luciano, disappeared. For a moment there was just a hole where it had been, and then a new building filled it--a restaurant called Petit Déjeuner with a window full of ferns. I glanced up the street and saw that other changes were going on--new buildings were replacing old ones with silent, spooky speed.
They meant I was running out of time; I knew this. Unfortunately, I knew something else, as well--there was probably not going to be any nick in this bundle of time. When God walks into your office and tells you He's decided he likes your life better than His own, what the hell are your options?
`Ì junked all the various drafts of the novel I'd started two months after my wife's death,'' Landry said. `Ìt was easy--poor crippled things that they were. And then I started a new one. I called it .