“Are you going to go to film school?” Dennis said. They all looked at Michael, who was cautiously pressing the tines of the fork into a baby carrot. He glanced up at the adults looking expectantly at him. There was an awkward pause.
“There’s this place in New Mexico.”
“A film school?” Jack said skeptically.
Michael grasped his fork tightly and stared at his fist.
“It’s this valley. And this guy put these stainless-steel rods, four hundred of them, equidistant, precise, in a field out in this valley.” Michael gave up on the fork and started to smile but still didn’t look up. Jack sort of laughed uneasily.
“So the delineated space, this grid, is exactly a mile long and a kilometer wide. Four hundred rods out there to attract lightning. Just for its own sake. That’s the idea, anyway.” Michael stopped smiling. “And it’s there, right now, this very moment, these hundreds of precisely aligned, perfectly spaced lightning rods in a field in a valley about two hundred miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico.” There was a pause as everyone nodded at Michael and then went back to eating. Jack asked if anyone wanted more wine, and conversation resumed in a different direction and Mina continued to watch Michael, waiting for him to say something to her or glance her way.
He wore a look of extreme concentration. He gamely grasped the fork once again, lifting it with a mechanical deliberateness, then closed his mouth on it, following with a labored and protracted swallow. Slowly the fork went down again to the plate, and then the long way back to his mouth. Eating hadbecome too conscious for him to accomplish, although he seemed determined to continue. She again tried to catch his eye. Later we will both laugh about this, right? He continued to eat even more slowly. He finally dropped the fork and stood up. He excused himself and left the room. Not a glance or a wink or an eye roll in her direction. No one seemed to give much notice to his abrupt exit. They accepted it as standard moody teenaged behavior. They shrugged and commented faintly about Michael “doing his own thing” and “letting him work it out.”
Mina heard the revving of his Alfa Romeo. Michael peeled out of the driveway, leaving her with the pod people, all alone.
Hours later, he woke her with a tap on the arm. She had fallen asleep still in her clothes, on top of the bedspread, lights on. Michael was sitting on her bed.
“Jesus, are you OK?” she said.
“No, I’m Michael,” he said, giggling.
“You’re, you’re like so fucking crazy, Michael.”
He looked a little wild-eyed but recovered; in fact, he glowed with an aloof, distracted sort of amusement.
“I thought you were like splayed across Sunset Boulevard.”
“Like, like, like yeah?” he said, giggling some more.
“What?” Mina asked, rubbing her eyes.
“Am I, like, crazy? No, I’m, like, OK, a nearly perfect facsimile of OK but not actually OK. ButlikeOK.”
“Stop it.” “
Likestop it, or really stop it?”
“Fuck, Michael.”
“I’ve been thinking, Mina, that a person could speak only using the wordslike, yeah, yah,and perhapsas ifand communicate purely by inflection and gesture. You know, like,” and he nodded and then he shrugged.
“Stop it.”
“It’s Zen language, minimal, pure, all reduced to context and intonation. Hyperbolic emphasis. All complications of meaning reduced to these porous words, as meaningful or as meaningless as you choose. Erasing language, pure inflection. Pure speech. So nonspecific it encompasses everything, sort of, like, profound, you know? We could call it “like” speaking.”
“Are you OK?”
“Like, yeah.” Michael raised the inflection on the last part ofyeahas if to say, That is obvious.Soobvious.
“I screwed up, Mina,” Ashlee said. She was twenty-two and astoundingly tan.
“What do you mean?” Mina flicked on the reservation computer.
“I mean I entered the wrong information for Mrs. Bradley last night.”
“Is that a real tan? Or is that one of those self-bronzers?”
“I entered someone else’s information, and it was supposed to be no fish, but we used a fish stock, and she’s allergic to—”
“Mrs. Bradley? You mean Dale Bradley’s second wife? You don’t mean that Mrs. Bradley, do you?”
“She called. She had to go to the hospital. Mr. Bradley wants to talk to you. He’s in the lounge downstairs. The Room.”
Mina smiled grimly and looked at the video monitor of the lounge. Mr. Bradley.
“It’s a real tan. I mean, I got it at a tanning salon.”
“Ashlee, tell him I’m not here. Or, wait. No, here’s what you do. You go downstairs to Mr. Bradley. You tell him you screwed up and you start to cry. Maybe you even lean on him a little because you are so upset. You tell him you screwed upand you beg him not to tell me because I’ll fire you and you really, really need this job. Think, I don’t know, think of Sharon Tate inValley of the Dolls—beautiful and helpless.”
Ashlee nodded.
“And Ashlee — use your tan. That’s very bold, a real tan. Very bold.”
“But Mina?”
“What?”
Ashlee looked very upset.
“What?”
“I don’t know who Sharon Tate is.”
Mina smiled. “That’s perfect, Ashlee. Perfect, spot-on. Now go down there.”
The phone buzzed.
“It’s me.”
“Hi.” Mina watched Ashlee on the video monitor. She looked great. Extremely tan.
“Mina.”
“I can’t come over this afternoon.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I think I’m going crazy.”
“Tomorrow. Sunday.”
“Uh, Christ, I can’t. I have to meet with Lorene — not possible.”
“Are you wearing a skirt? Or are you wearing pants?”
“No.”
“Just tell me and I’ll let you go. Are you alone?”
“I’m watching Ashlee kiss a customer on the video monitor. Ashlee with twoe’s and noy,Max.”
There was a long Max silence.
“Max?”
More silence. Mina sighed. “How about tomorrow noon?”
“Yep.”
Mr. Bradley had his arm around Ashlee. His hand moved to her tiny waist. Her body was shaking with sobs. Max hung up the phone and Mina waited for the dial tone. Max wasn’t able to disconnect and she listened to the repeated clicks as he pressed the cradle button again and again to hang up. At last, she heard the dial tone.
Lorene sat at her kitchen table, still in her kimono at noon. She kept staring at the mail she had from yesterday. A white envelope with no return address and familiar handwriting was tucked among bills and magazines. It was Michael’s handwriting. Inside was a card with a picture of the Chrysler Building. It read: Left the hospital and am going to visit Mom in New York. Be there until end September. I’ll be in touch. I’m sorry it’s been so long. I hope you are all right.
She did some calculations strung together by weather systems, riots, disasters, and shoe styles. It was three years since he’d contacted her. Nothing since the one time she saw him in the hospital. Theonetime he had reluctantly agreed to let her visit him.
She had found him surrounded by papers — tacked to the wall, in stacks on the floor. He had been busy compiling lists, it seemed. For unknown purposes.
Lorene wore a pale peach crepe de chine day dress that had been altered with strips of peek-a-boo peach lace inserted at bias-cut angles. Underneath she wore a deep auburn silk sheath slip, and under the slip, nothing at all, save some very sheer flesh-colored stockings that stopped midthigh. The stockings were held in place by embroidered garters, tiny peachflowers on beige, the elastic kind of garter that just circled each thigh around the top band of the stocking. It was all, she realized as she entered the room, far too precious, far too much. She cringed in the doorway — a mistake. Couldn’t she have just been simple and sober for once? He sat on a single tightly and grayly made-up institutional bed, looking thin and tender in a fresh white T-shirt and drawstring pants. He had the air of incarceration. He was engrossed in the papers he held, and it took him a full minute to notice her standing in the doorway. He stared at her, took her in, and she wished with all her heart she had worn underwear.