“Good. Just so you know, I asked Gina. She said I was free to do this. She wants both of us to be happy.”
Another piece of my heart chipped away. “That’s nice.”
“Life is long, Robbie.”
“Mostly.”
Stella moved back to Northern California early that summer. We talked a few times before she left. She gave me Garrett’s fishing gear, which included a split-cane fly rod that Garrett’s father had given him.
Her eye healed up nicely but I can’t vouch for the rest of her. Every word she said and every movement she made seemed to come from huge effort. It was like she was saying and doing things for the first time. You can’t get back what was taken away from Stella Asplundh. You can’t replace. You can only move on and make a life again. You can look back but not too long, and forward but not too far.
McKenzie talked to Stella much more than I did before Stella left San Diego. In McKenzie’s opinion Stella would be okay. Stella had strength, empathy, generosity, anger, and a deep well of loss and sadness.
“It’s more than a lot of people have inside,” said McKenzie.
After drinks at the Grant one evening, Erik Kaven offered me John Van Flyke’s old job as head of Ethics Authority Enforcement. Kaven said I’d have plenty of latitude to sniff out corruption and four investigators to help me go after it. I turned it down because I already had the job I’d always wanted to have. And who knew — maybe someday I’d be able to shoo off a mean dog and drag some little boy out of the bushes and give him a ride home in my car.
One night I got out the tape that Gina had made me, of my fall from the hotel. I set it on the VCR in the living room while I tried to straighten up the place a little, glancing at it as I came and went.
Late that night, after cleaning the house and going to McGinty’s for dinner and a glass of wine, I slipped the tape into the machine and hit play.
It was brief but very dramatic. The cameraman had shot the video from across the street, probably not far from where I’d been eating my lunch. But thanks to a powerful zoom lens, the old Las Palmas took up most of the screen. Flames lapped from the open windows while the smoke billowed into the sky.
I knew which window to watch. I could see Vic Malic crouched there, screaming down at the people on the street. His voice had something helpless in it, which is what fooled me into thinking I was going to help him rather than be attacked by him.
For a minute Vic vanished from the window and I knew that he had stood and come at me.
I pictured his drunk and insane face, smelled the gin fumes pouring from his mouth, felt the power of his wrestler’s grip on my body, saw the gasoline can in one corner, saw the small hotel room spinning around me once... twice...
And then I watched myself fly out. I had been dressed in chinos and a white shirt and a light-colored jacket that day, so I showed up well against the darker brick of the Las Palmas. I saw my early struggle for purchase in thin air, the craning of my neck, and my hands clawing at the sky. I saw that odd moment of stillness, followed by a woeful acceleration down. My arms and legs pumped furiously as the bricks sped up behind me. I looked like a many-legged insect. I folded open onto my back, leveling and looking up at the window from which I’d been thrown, and I saw on video what I’d seen in life: Vic Malic staring down at me with a surprised look on his face.
I recognized the point — it was between the third and second stories of the building — that I realized there was nothing I could do to slow or stop my fall, and I looked up into the sky and let go. I saw my body relax and I saw my back arch gracefully, though I don’t remember relaxation or grace when it was happening.
Right after that I must have blacked out.
I watched myself slam into the awning and chute through the bottom of it feetfirst and greatly slowed, like a mummy sliding from a conveyor belt, for the last ten feet of my journey. Even with my fall broken so effectively, I still hit the sidewalk with a tremendous whack that I don’t remember.
The crowd closed over me and a moment later Vic Malic spilled from the front door and joined them.
I rewound and watched the tape one more time. I’m not sure what I was expecting to discover.
I didn’t want to see my moment of surrender because I had come to be ashamed of it in light of being made a hero. But I could see exactly where I was in the sky when I realized the drastic truth of my predicament and let go. Religious people might tell me I found God. Nonreligious ones might say I found a “higher power.” Atheists might tell me I had just awakened to the great, pure aloneness we all share.
After watching the tape twice, I could see my fall in all of those ways. With time to reflect, things take on meaning. But at that moment I wasn’t thinking of meanings at all. I was just a hopeless man hoping for the best. A man so scared his brain finally shut down.
When I saw what he had gone through I wasn’t ashamed of him anymore.
McKenzie married Hollis Harris that June in Jackson, Wyoming. Harris flew in over two hundred friends and family members, put us all up in five of the very nicest hotels in that pretty little city.
McKenzie was indescribably beautiful in her lacy white dress, with her black hair back in an elegant swirl that somehow disappeared within itself. She had her makeup done by a professional and the results were extraordinarily impressive. I’d never known she had such stunning eyes.
Neither McKenzie nor Hollis came from wealthy families — in fact, they were both lower middle class — so there was a very pleasing eccentricity among the attendees. Everyone seemed giddily happy to be there. I saw some very odd and very old clothes. One of McKenzie’s older brothers had a prison tattoo on the back of his thick neck. Hollis’s best man had been his best friend since they met in kindergarten. He was an extremely thin, bespectacled stutterer who had a heck of a time with his toast and whose rented tuxedo pants suddenly slipped to his ankles while he was dancing with McKenzie. The crowd roared and a massive and intense red blush covered his face, but he was smiling.
McKenzie had told me some months earlier that Hollis’s parents had died in a car crash when he was ten, and while I watched him dance with his bride with the splendor of the Grand Tetons as a backdrop I wondered at the great loss that had helped propel him to great achievement. His son was smart and talkative and had just turned six. We had a nice discussion about Bionicles, a line of ingenious and popular toys, one of which he carried around with him during the long, loud reception. When it was my turn to dance with McKenzie I told her she looked very nice without a gun.
The only downside of the wedding was that I had been forced to confess Gina’s departure. I tried to put “positive spin” on it by saying that we’d both left the door open in case we wanted to go back. I fooled no one. People began looking at me a little differently, though since my fall from the Las Palmas people had always looked at me differently, so I was used to it.
I had no one to impress.
I knew it was time to start over again.
I flew home the next day, a Sunday, and that evening drove to the Belly Up in Solana Beach to hear Lillian, the synesthete, sing.
The house was nearly full, which is saying something, because the Belly Up brings in some very good, big-name entertainment. I was obviously not aware of Lillian Smith’s substantial local reputation. I got a seat up close, probably because I was alone.
When Lillian walked onstage I found myself clapping and cheering along with everyone else. She looked larger onstage than off, with the gleaming white guitar strapped over her shoulder, the shiny high black boots, and the same long wine-colored velvet coat she’d worn to the Synesthesia Society meeting back in March. The stage lights crisscrossed over her and bounced colors off her glossy black hair. She squinted out at the audience as she prepared for her first song and I think she recognized me, though the nice smile could have been for anyone in the room, really.