“That’s great, Bob, I’m glad you feel that way about it. But there’s a certain problem with where we stashed the stuff. We just picked the nearest isolated spot on the coast, you know, and dumped them in a bunch of boulders. But then we noticed that the buildings for Laguna Space Research were on the top of the bluff above us. And they’ve just announced an increase in security around their facility, because of the recent sabotages. Including a watch against boats landing.”
“Ah ha. That is a problem. So… this company is a defense contractor, then?”
“Yeah.”
“I see.” Long pause. “Okay, well listen Sandy, we’ll have to figure something out to help you, then. I’ll get back to you on this, okay? Meanwhile just let it ride.”
Fine with Sandy. He’s free to concentrate on some heavy-duty dealing. He’s got quite a bit of ground to make up, and so for the next few days he goes into overdrive, working sixteen, sometimes eighteen hours each day, to the point where he has to put some serious effort into supply as well as sales. Angela, who sees the need, is doing overtime herself taking care of him and the ap and their meals and the nightly party, which has regained its momentum in the days since their return. The constant running around in traffic, keeping track of handshake deals, doing the bookkeeping in the head, all over a ground base of massive drug intake, is exhausting in the extreme. In fact he’s finding it hard to come home at night and really enjoy the party.
“Wow, burnout,” he says to Angela.
“Why don’t you take tomorrow night off. In the long run it’ll help you keep this pace.”
“Good idea.”
So the next night he comes home early, around eleven, and corrals Abe, Tashi, and Jim. “Hey you guys, let’s cruise.”
The others like the idea. They get in Sandy’s big car and track onto Newport Freeway north. Sandy programs a loop into the car: Newport Freeway north, Riverside west, Orange south, Garden Grove east, and then north on the Newport again: it’s upper level all the way in each of these directions, so that it’s like going for a little plane ride on autopia, with the great lightshow and all the other cars and their passengers for entertainment.
They started doing this together on the wrestling team, when they first got driver’s licenses. Starving and thirsty high school kids, trying to make weight, or celebrating the end of the weekly necessity to make weight by pigging out.… Tonight there’s a strongly nostalgic feeling about it; they’re cruising the freeways, a basic OC activity. How could they have lost the habit?
Sandy is driving, Abe’s in the front passenger seat, Jim is behind Abe, Tash behind Sandy. The first order of business is to deploy a few eyedroppers, in fact there’s a sort of synergistic capacity upgrade when these four get together like this, and they really drown their eyes, according to long-standing tradition.
“Nothing like coming down to the old club and settling in,” Jim says blissfully. “The lightshow is good tonight, isn’t it? Look there, you can see in the pattern of the streetlights, the original plattings for the first towns in the area. See the really tight squares of streetlights are the oldest towns, when the platting was into really small blocks. There’s Fullerton… there’s Anaheim, the oldest… pretty soon we’ll see Orange… and in between the pattern stretches way out, see? Longer blocks and twisty housing tracts.”
“Yeah, I see it!” Sandy says, surprised. “I never noticed that before, but it’s there.”
“Yep,” Jim says, proudly. He goes rattling on about real estate history, which his employer First American Title Insurance and Real Estate has all the records for; then about First American and Humphrey’s attempt to build his office building on the land of the dismembered Cleveland National Forest; then about a new computer system that the company has installed in the offices, very advanced, “I mean you really can talk to it, not just simple commands but really complicated stuff, it’s like the real beginning of the man-computer interface, and it’s really going to mean a lot for,” and then suddenly all three of his friends have turned to stare Jim in the face.
He comes to a halt and Sandy giggles. Abe, shaking his head, says in a pitying, exasperated voice: “Jim, no one gives a fuck about computers.”
“Ah. Yes. Well. You know.” And Jim starts to giggle himself. Must have been an eyedropper of Funny Bone, that last unmarked one.
Abe is pointing down at the Orange Mall. “Sandy, did you ever tell these guys about the time we were in the parking garage there?”
“No, don’t think I did,” Sandy says, grinning.
Abe turns to the two in the backseat. “We were leaving the mall and driving out of the big parking garage they have, you know, the thirty-story one, and we’re following the arrows down the ramps from floor to floor, and it’s not a simple spiral staircase situation at all, they’ve got it screwed up and you have to go to successive corners of each floor to get down, or something like that. So here we are following the arrows down, and Sandy’s eyes do their bug-out-of-his-head thing, you know?”
Tashi and Jim nod, imitating the look in tandem.
“Exactly.” Abe laughs. “And he says, ‘You know, Abraham, if it weren’t for these arrows…’ and I say uh-huh, yeah, what? And he says, ‘Stop the car! Wait a minute! Stop the car, I forgot something!’ So I sit there while he goes back in the mall, and then he comes running back out with two big cans of paint—one can white, one a gray the color of the garage floors. And two brushes. ‘We’ll start at the bottom,’ he says, ‘and no one will ever escape.’”
“Ahhh, hahaha.”
“The labyrinth without the thread,” Jim says.
“You aren’t kidding! I mean, think about it! So we drive around and at every arrow Sandy jumps out and quick paints over the old one and puts a new one down, pointing in a new direction—not necessarily the opposite direction, just a new one. And finally we reach the top floor. Already we can hear the honking and the cursing and all from the floors below. And then Sandy turns to me with this puzzled expression, and says, ‘Hey, Abe—how are we going to get out of here?’”
Sandy’s manic laugh dominates the rest.
They’re tracking south on the Orange Freeway, coming to the giant interchange with the Santa Ana and the Garden Grove freeways—another immense pretzel of concrete ribbons flying through the air, lightly buttressed on concrete pillars. Their change to the Garden Grove east will take them right through the middle of the knot. Great views over Santa Ana to the south, then Orange to the north; just names in the continuum of the lightshow, but given what Jim has said about the pattern of the streetlights, interesting to observe.
Tashi rises up like he’s achieved enlightenment, and speaks the message from the cosmos: “There are only four streets in OC.”
“What?” cries Abe. “Look around you, man!”
“Platonic forms,” Jim says, understanding. “Ideal types.”
“Only four.” Tash nods. “First there’s the freeways.”
“Okay. I’ll grant you that.”
“Then there’s the commercial streets, big ones with parking lots flanking them and all the businesses behind the parking lots, or on them. Like Tustin Avenue, right down there.” He points north.
“Or Chapman.” “Or Bristol.” “Or Garbage Grove Boulevard.” “Or Beach.” “Or First.” “Or MacArthur.” “Or Westminster.” “Or Katella.” “Or Harbor.” “Or Brookhurst.”