The odds were always against everything.
~ ~ ~
MONDAY CAME. I HAD a few days off.
Miriam went to a business lunch and I killed time at the studio visiting Dan. I’d completed the outline revisions and turned them in — HBO would probably take a week or so to give a thumbs-up. Hopefully they’d be cool with whatever work I did and would let me start writing the pilot; I was getting itchy. It was all a little easier if you tried not to have expectations. Anyway, I had other worries: Clea and Thad. Being on the lot brought me nearer to my oldest friend and the mystery of her absence. I felt like a dad waiting around during an Amber Alert — utterly helpless.
I strolled to the editing bay to see Nick Sultan. Normally, he’d have already finished; in TV, it wasn’t typical for directors to stick around to supervise an edit. They were hired hands and they knew it. But in this case, Nick was committed and determined. Because of “complications,” the producers had given him more leeway than usual. The room was dark. The first thing I saw on the Avid was Ensign Rattweil, engaged in final combat on the Fellcrum Outback. The action kept digitally rewinding and repeating itself, images broken into millions of shardy, dust mote — sized squares. The dual was incredibly well done — you’d never know a look-alike had been employed. When I asked the editor how they’d managed, he smiled and said, “Movie magic.”
Just then, Nick appeared in the doorway holding a container of Chinese chicken salad from the commissary.
“Did you hear?” he said.
“What?”
“Oh Christ.” He steered me to the hall and whispered, “They just found the bodies.”
~ ~ ~
HE WAS BURIED IN THE Vineyard with Jack and Jeremy, as his mother had wished.
Sudden death expunged her rancor; at last, Thad was brought into protective arms. It came to mind this was the closest he’d been to his brother in the forty-odd years since that time beside the gently rocking Sea Horse where they parted. Miriam said the configuration of monuments in the family plot put him farthest from Jack, which gave a small measure of comfort. She said there was a wake, with far less turnout than the one I’d attended, and Morgana had behaved much the same as at her husband’s — brave and wittily stoic, boisterously bereft.
We scattered Clea’s ashes at sea. There was to be no headstone or grave marking, by her request. TV tabloids and magazines made much of the lurid deaths, mostly on account of the illustrious parents. In the end, the light (“Even the light”) — the white dwarves that were their children — could not escape the gravity of those legendary black holes.
My own mother took great care of me in the days that followed.
She got some of her old energy back and threw a lovely memorial. It was as if Gita knew that with this death — Clea’s — I had finally graduated, and we now shared consecrated alma maters. (Heartbroken wolves cloaked in sheepskin.) The celebration took place on the beach, where I once fantasized they would exchange vows. Everyone linked hands and cried — friends from AA, the gang from Starwatch. Dad walked me to the wet sand and said that my eulogy was “the finest thing” he’d ever heard. With tears in his eyes, he begged forgiveness for all fatherly transgressions. He was a little drunk but his sentiments were in earnest. I did forgive him, from the bottommost bottom of my heart. I forgave just about everyone for everything, including myself.
Gita was right. School was out — forever.
~ ~ ~
I DECIDED TO GO TO Vegas to retrace their steps. (Later, I wondered if my motivation was born less from a sense of “closure” than the subconscious decision to tell this story.) No matter, I still needed to say good-bye; it felt just too miserable to let the memory of her last, plaintive phone message stand. Like some action hero, I craved pursuit — to chase the dispersed stardust of my first love.
To my surprise, when I told Miriam of the plan she actually wanted to come along. We’d always joked about going to see Celine Dion. Now, she said, was our chance.
I rented an obnoxious silver Porsche, and we headed out on the highway, looking for adventure (and whatever came our way). It wasn’t quite summer — the weather was tolerably warm. We used the Mirage as our headquarters; while Meerkat lay by the pool I got in touch with a detective who’d worked the case, and was naturally a mega-Starwatch buff. He provided me with a rough itinerary of Thad and Clea’s meanderings in the days before their deaths.
We didn’t get around to seeing Celine, though I did wind up at sundry downtown casinos offering $3.89 all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets. The detective said that once Mr. Michelet arrived, he managed to get his hands on a shitload of cash, wired from a bank in Fort Lauderdale. He blew through two hundred grand at blackjack (the irony of the name of the game wasn’t lost on me) at the Palms. According to phone records, Thad and Clea were in constant touch before she left L.A. When she joined him, they pissed away another $75,000 (most of her savings, no doubt) at a divey gaming parlor off the Strip and by then were in for an additional fifty “large.” I met with the owner, who was a fairly decent guy. His kids were huge fans of The Jetsons and when the hotelier saw the tough straits Thad was in, he offered to help. His son was being bar mitzvahed that weekend and the guy was ready to knock off $20,000 from the debt if the actor made an appearance at the party to sign autographs. They shook hands over it — but “Bonnie and Clyde,” he smirked, were no-shows.
Miriam and I hit the Wheel of Fortune slots and took in a raggedy-ass rock-’n’-roll lounge revue. In the spirit of “What Happens Here, Stays Here,” I sampled the Viagra I’d been carrying around in my wallet the last few months; it seemed the appropriate thing to do. The pill worked OK but I didn’t get much sleep, and not for the reason you might think. When I finally passed out, I had recurrent dreams of snorting coke. In the morning, Meerkat and I had a stupid argument — it was definitely time to decamp.
Death Valley would be the next and last stop. Miriam didn’t think she had it in her to go. I wasn’t sure I did either.
I dropped her at the airport around 2:00 P.M. She tenderly kissed me, not envying the ordeal ahead. I hate to be noir about it, but somewhere inside that good-bye was the thought we might be done with each other for good. We embraced long and hard, the subtext being that we’d shared forbidden fruits. We knew our friendship would survive regardless of what the future held. It was kind of a cinematic moment, part Casablanca, part Planet of the Apes (just before Heston rounds the corner to howl at Lady Liberty) — because neither of us could shake the feeling that some awesome, half-buried truth was waiting for me in the desert.
~ ~ ~
THIS TIME, THE APPROACH WAS from the east — though all roads led to the Bun Boy Motel. Around the time I passed Pahrump, that first trip flashed back in all its carefree glory. It was like a teen memory: I heard the girls’ voices and lusty giggles — I could practically smell them. Inseparable from Clea’s image was Thad’s, a grizzled, fine-witted contradiction, bellowing and gracious, born to be wild.