He walked out of the bus terminal and headed for the row of taxis at the curb. Tucking his canvas bag under his arm. he opened the first one’s door and slid into the front seat beside the driver. “That all you got?” said the driver, glancing at the bag.
“Yeah, I’ll hold it.” Through the canvas Ralph could feel the stiff manila folders he had stolen from the Thronsen Home. He gave the driver his parents’ address, and they pulled out into the downtown traffic.
“What happened there?” asked Ralph. One of the towering office buildings had what looked to be a giant hole chewed out of one corner, with warped girders protruding into the air. He twisted around to stare at it as they went past. Trucks and bulldozers were clearing away a small mountain of rubble that blocked one of the streets at the foot of the building.
“One of those damn Ximento crazies,” said the driver, scowling. “Wired himself up like a bomb and set himself off in the men’s room on the thirtieth floor.”
“Really?” Ralph felt a familiar unease at not knowing what everyone else seemed to know. He’d once considered subscribing to Time. “What for?”
“Who knows? Maybe the guy had something against pay toilets. Hah.”
The uncomfortable feeling went away as it always did when he realized nobody else seemed to know anything either. Anyway, he thought, I know more than they do. Just enough to be scared.
Several minutes later, he was standing on the sidewalk in front of his parents’ house. The taxi’s engine faded away, the noise swallowed by the residential street’s relative peace. The neighborhood had deteriorated a little since he was a kid—a couple of the houses were abandoned, with broken windows and spray-painted graffiti—but, in general, had resisted the complete decay that radiated from other parts of the city. He lifted his canvas bag and headed up the little path that bisected the front lawn.
The front door was unlocked. Ralph stuck his head into the house and listened for a moment. He could detect the faint, barely audible hum of a television set in one of the rooms. Closing the door softly behind himself, he peeked in the living room—empty, except for furniture—then went down the hallway and looked in the den. His parents were there, both silently watching the television. “Hello,” called Ralph from the doorway of the room.
Mrs. Metric turned her head toward him. The garish colors from the pre-embargo Japanese portable glinted from the oval lenses of her glasses.
“Ralph,” she said, showing no surprise or any other emotion. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m on vacation.” He crossed in front of them and sat down in an armchair at right angles to both them and the television.
“That’s nice.” She and Ralph’s father continued to watch the screen.
Some type of game show was on.
“Yeah.” Ralph shifted in the overstuffed chair, feeling somehow uncomfortable. “I just thought I’d spend some time looking up some people.”
“Oh?” She didn’t look at him. “Who?”
“Uh, just people I . . . used to know.”
Several seconds passed, filled with the faint hysterical squealings from some woman on the television.
“Would it be all right,” said Ralph, “if I borrowed one of the cars? The Ford?”
“Oh, sure.” His mother waved vaguely at the doorway. “The keys are hanging on the bulletin board in the kitchen.”
“Thanks.”
“There’s still some of your clothes in your old room.” She seemed to be talking to the television. “Doesn’t look like you brought very much with you.” Somehow she had noticed his small canvas bag.
“Okay.” The sound from the television grew even shriller. Ralph pushed against the arms of the chair, feeling the uneasiness growing in his limbs.
“Uh, anything new?” he said, almost desperately. “Hear from Linda recently?” That was his sister.
“She’s fine. George got stationed at El Toro, so he sees her and the baby every weekend. He’s radio-controlling a Soldier Joe right now.”
“That’s the big three-ton model,” said Ralph’s father. His voice rumbled up from some depth in his chest. “With the plasma howitzer.”
“He says he’s seen quite a lot of Brazil on his view screen.” Mrs. Metric nodded for emphasis. “Even piranha fish in the Amazon River.”
“How about that.” Ralph stood up. “Well, I’m going to be on my way. Maybe I’ll stop back by tonight.”
“That’s fine. We’ll be right here. We’re not going to go anywhere.”
He crossed the room, picked up his bag from where he had left it in the doorway, then looked back at his parents. The source of the uneasiness he felt became apparent to him. The expression on their faces as they sat absorbed in the television—absence of expression, really, on the border of the inanimate—was the same as he had always seen on the watchers back at the base. And sometimes in his own mirror. A shudder moved across his shoulders and arms. He turned away and headed down the hallway.
In his old bedroom he found a fresh shirt hanging in the closet and, tucked away on a shelf, a shallow rectangular box he had forgotten all about. He knelt beside the open closet and lifted the cardboard lid, revealing a sheaf of paper. On the topmost sheet was his own name, neatly typed beneath the manuscript’s title. He lifted out the thin bundle and flicked through the pages of crisp black typing and the slightly blurred carbon copies.
It was supposed to have been a science fiction novel. He had already started on it and was about a quarter of the way through when he had taken the night job at the Juvenile Hall south of L.A. Then his life had bogged down and he had wound up with Operation Dreamwatch out in the desert.
He put the lid back on the box. Science fiction, he thought, shaking his head. What’s the point of writing it when you find yourself living it? He stood up, laid the carton back on the shelf in the closet, and stripped off his shirt.
When he had finished buttoning the fresh shirt, he picked up the canvas bag and laid it on the bed. He zipped it open and took out the two battered manila folders. The booking slips, made whenever the kids had been arrested, had the addresses of their parents on them. He located the most recent slip in each folder and jotted down the addresses on a piece of scrap paper. Folded into a square, the paper lay in his shirt pocket against his heart as he left the room.
His parents were watching the same game show, or maybe a different one, as he stepped into the kitchen and took the ring of keys from the board next to the bright yellow wall telephone. He pulled the front door shut behind himself without them hearing.
With a hamburger in one hand and vanilla milkshake balanced precariously on the seat next to him, Ralph maneuvered the Ford through the Harbor Freeway traffic. There was a certain elemental pleasure to the car’s motion in and out of the lanes—what he supposed he would feel if he had ever learned to dance. He braked for a bus wheezing through its gears ahead of him, whipped the Ford into a small gap in the next lane, cleared the corner of the bus by inches and caught his milkshake as it started to fall over. Pleased with himself, he pulled on the plastic straw, drowning the last of the hamburger’s dry gray meat.
The sight of L.A.’s harsh sun on the bending vistas of asphalt and concrete was so familiar and comfortable that it compressed and decreased his fear. A smooth-edged ball in his gut, the fear was now heavy, but at least bearable for the time being.