But the worst thing his parents had ever done to him they did on the day he was born—they named him after one of these Mahatmas, a dead guy who had to go and have the name Koot Hoomie. Growing up named Koot Hoomie Parganas, with the inevitable nickname Kootie, had been…well, he had seen a lot of fat kids or stuttering kids get teased mercilessly in school, but he always wished he could trade places with them if in exchange he could have a name like Steve or Jim or Bill.
He lifted the Dante in both hands to a height of about four inches, and let it fall. Clunk! But it still didn’t break.
He believed his parents worshipped the thing. Sometimes after he had gone off to bed and was supposedly asleep, he had sneaked back and peeked into the living room and seen them bowing in front of it and mumbling, and at certain times of the year—Christmas, for example, and Halloween, which was only about a week away—his mother would knit little hats and collars for Dante. She always had to make them new; too, couldn’t use last year’s, though she saved all of them.
And his parents always insisted to Kootie—nervously, he thought—that the previous owner of the house had coincidentally been named Don Tay (or sometimes Om Tay) and that’s why the drunks or crazy people who called on the phone sometimes at night seemed to be asking to talk to the statue.
TERMIMATOR 2. “Peewee’s Playhouse.” Mario Brothers and Tetris on the Nintendo. Big acs and the occasional furtive Marlboro. College, eventually, and maybe even just fnishing high school. Astronomy. Friends. All that, on the one hand.
Rajma, khatte chhole, masoor dal, moong dal, chana dal, which were all just different kinds of cooked beans. On the other hand. Along with Mahatmas, and start some kind of new theosophical order (instead of go to college), and don’t have a girlfriend.
As if he ever could.
You think it’s bad that Melvin touched you and gave you his cooties? We’ve got a Kootie in our class.
HIS JAW was clenched so tight that his teeth ached, and tears were being squeezed out of his closed eyes, but he lifted the Dante over his head with both hands—paused—and then smashed it down onto the hearth.
With a muffled crack it broke into a hundred powdery white pieces, some tumbling away onto the tan carpet.
He opened his eyes, and for several seconds while his heart pounded and he didn’t breathe, he just stared down at the scattered floury rubble. At last he let himself exhale, and he slowly stretched out his hand.
At first glance the mess seemed to consist entirely of angular lumps of plaster; but when he tremblingly brushed through the litter, he found a brick-shaped piece, about the size of two decks of cards glued together front-to-back. He picked it up—it was heavy, and its surface gave a little when he squeezed it, cracking the clinging plaster and exhaling a puff of fine white dust.
He glanced over his shoulder at the front door, and tried to imagine what his parents would do if they were to walk in right now, and see this. They might very well, he thought, go completely insane.
Hastily he started tugging at the stiffly flexible stuff that encased the object; when he got a corner unfolded and was able to see the inner surface of the covering he realized that it was some sort of patterned silk handkerchief, stiffened by the plaster.
Once he’d got the corner loose, it was easy—in two seconds he had peeled the white-crusted cloth away, and was holding up a little glass brick. The surfaces of it were rippled but gleamingly smooth, and its translucent depths were as cloudy as smoky quartz.
He held it up to the light from the window—
And the air seemed to vibrate, as if a huge gong had been struck in the sky and was ringing, and shaking the earth, with some subsonic note too profoundly low to be sensed by living ears.
ALL DAY the hot Santa Ana winds had been combing the dry grasses down the slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains, moving west like an airy tide across the miles-separated semi-desert towns of Fontana and Upland, over the San Jose Hills and into the Los Angeles basin, where they swept the smog blanket out to sea and let the inhabitants see the peaks of Mount Wilson and Mount Baldy, hallucinatorily clear against a startlingly blue sky.
Palm trees bowed and nodded over old residential streets and threw down dry fronds to bounce dustily off of parked cars; and red-brick roof tiles, loosened by the summer’s rains and sun, skittered free of ancient cement moorings, cartwheeled over rain gutters, and shattered on driveways that were, as often as not, two weathered lines of concrete with a strip of grass growing between. The steady background bump-and-hiss of the wind was punctuated by the hoarse shouts of crows trying to fly, upwind.
Downtown, in the streets around the East L.A. Interchange where the northbound 5 breaks apart into the Golden State and Santa Monica and Hollywood Freeways, the hot wind had all day long been shaking the big slow RTD buses on their shocks as they groaned along the sun-softened asphalt, and the usual reeks of diesel smoke and ozone and the faint strawberry-sweetness of garbage were today replaced with the incongruous spice of faraway sage and baked Mojave stone.
For just a moment now as the sun was setting, redly silhouetting trees and oil tanks on the western hills around Santa Monica, a higher-than-usual number of cars swerved in their freeway lanes, or jumped downtown curbs to collide with light poles or newspaper stands, or rolled forward at stoplights to clank against the bumpers of the cars ahead; and many of the homeless people in East L.A. and Florence and Inglewood cowered behind their shopping carts and shouted about Jesus or the FBI or the Devil or unfathomable personal deities; and for a few moments up on Mulholland Drive all the westbound cars drifted right and then left and then right again, as if the drivers were all rocking to the same song on the radio.
IN AN alley behind a ramshackle apartment building down in Long Beach, a fat shirtless old man shivered suddenly and dropped the handle of the battered dolly he had been angling toward an open garage, and the refrigerator he’d been carting slammed to the pavement, pinning his foot; his gasping shouts and curses brought a heavyset young woman running, and after she’d helped him hike the refrigerator off of his foot, he demanded breathlessly that she run upstairs and draw a bath for him, a cold one.
AND ON Broadway the neon signs were coming on and darkening the sky—the names of the shops were often Japanese or Korean, though the rest of the lettering was generally in Spanish—and many of the people in the hurrying crowds below glanced uneasily at the starless heavens. On the sidewalk under the marquee of the old Million Dollar Theater a man in a ragged nylon jacket and baggy camouflage pants had clenched his teeth against a scream and was now leaning against one of the old ornate lampposts.
His left arm, which had been cold all day despite the hot air that was dewing his forehead with sweat, was warm now, and, of its own volition was pointing west. With his grubby right hand he pushed back the bill of his baseball cap, and he squinted in that direction, at the close wall of the theater, as if he might be able to see through it and for miles beyond the bricks of it, out past Hollywood, toward Beverly Hills, looking for—
—An abruptly arrived thing, a new and godalmighty smoke, a switched-on beacon somewhere out toward where the sun had just set.