“And following taillights is like blood over exposed bone, red on white, you know the headlights, so bright coming at you… I mean I really see that.”
His voice is going away, Jim can barely hear his words. “The way the cars crumple and shear, and the blood—there’s a lot of it in a body. And their faces always look so—like Lillian’s face, it was so…” He’s shaking now, his whole body is racked with shaking, his face is contorted in the mask that faces go to when crying is stopped short no matter the cost to the muscles. Abruptly he stands again.
As if on a string Jim stands too. Tentatively he puts a hand to his friend’s shoulder. “It’s your work, Abe. It’s hard work, but it’s good work, I mean we need it. It’s what you want to do—”
“It’s not what I want to do! I don’t want to do it anymore! Man, haven’t you been listening?” He jerks away from Jim, turns and paces around him like a predatory animal. “Pay attention, will you?” he almost shouts. “I’m going crazy out there, I tell you, I can’t even do my job anymore!”
“Yes you can—”
“I cannot! How do you know? Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do out there—so fucking glib—” He reaches up and takes a wild swing at Jim’s upraised hand, hits it away, swings again and backhands Jim on the chest, for an instant he looks like he’s going to beat Jim up, and appalled Jim holds his arms up across his chest to take the blows—
Abe stops himself, shudders, twists away, takes off rapidly down the street; turns, wavers indecisively, plops down on the curb and leans over the gutter, face between his knees, buried in his hands. And there he rocks back and forth, back and forth.
Jim, frightened, his throat crimped tight at the sudden exposure to so much pain, stands there helplessly. He doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t have any idea what Abe might want him to do.
After a long while he walks down the street, and sits down next to Abe, whose rocking gets slower and slower as his shaking subsides. They both just sit there.
The forgotten roach, black with oil, is still pressed between Jim’s thumb and forefinger; he pulls a lighter from his shirt pocket, torches the roach’s ashy end, sucks on it till it blooms smoke. He takes a hit so big that he can’t contain it, and coughs hard. Abe has his elbows on his knees now, and he’s staring silently out at the street. His face is all streaked. Jim offers him the roach. He takes it, puffs on it, passes it back, all without a word. A final paroxysm shudders through his flesh, and then he’s still.
After a while he looks at Jim with a wry grimace. “See what I mean?”
Jim nods. He’s at a loss for words. Without premeditation he says, “Yeah, man. You’re fucking nuts.”
Abe laughs shortly. Sniffs.
They finish the roach in silence. They sit on the curb and watch the traffic hum by overhead.
Abe sighs. “I never thought it would get this hard.”
65
Abe leaves. Shaken to the core, Jim finds himself prowling his ap restlessly. Nothing in it offers the slightest consolation. What a day it’s been.…
The longer he stays in the ap, the more intense becomes his helpless, miserable nervousness. He can’t think what to do. What time is it, anyway? Three A.M. The dead hour. Nothing to do, no one to turn to—the friends he might have looked to for help are looking to him, and he isn’t up to it.
There isn’t a chance of sleeping. The malignancy of thought, vision and memory, all drugged, speeded up, spiked by fear, makes sleep out of the question. The day keeps recurring in his mental theater in a scramble of images, each worse than the last, the sum making him sick with a synergistic toxicity. He recalls Hana’s face, as she saw him and Virginia stagger out of the Hungry Crab together. No great scowl of anguish or despair, no nothing that melodramatic; just a quick snap of shock, of surprise, and then an instantly averted gaze, a disengagement, a refusal to look at him. Goddamn it!
He gives up on any attempt to get hold of himself, and calls Hana’s number, without a thought in his head as to what he’s going to say. At the sound of the ring he panics, his pulse shoots up, he’d hang up if he weren’t sure that Hana would know it was him waking her and then failing to hold together the nerve to speak to her, and with that prospect before him he holds on, through ring after ring.…
Nobody home.
66
Nobody home.
How did it happen?
At first it was a result of the tracts, the freeways, the cars. If you lived in a new suburb, then you had to drive to do your shopping. How much easier to park in one place, and do all your shopping in one location!
So the malls began. At first they were just shopping centers. A big asphalt parking lot, surrounded on two or three sides by stores; there were scores of them, as in most of the rest of America.
Then they became complexes of parking lots mixed with islands of stores, as in Fashion Square, the oldest shopping center in the county. They were popular. They did great at Christmastime. In effect they became the functional equivalent of villages, places where you could walk to everything you needed—villages tucked like islands into the multilayered texture of autopia. Once you parked at a shopping center, you could return to a life on foot. And at that idea the body, the brainstem, said Yeah.
South Coast Plaza was one of the first to go beyond this idea, to complete the square of stores and roof it, putting the parking lot on the outside. Call it a mall. An air-conditioned island village—except, of course, that all the villagers were visitors.
When South Coast Plaza opened in 1967 it was a giant success, and the Segerstrom family, heirs to the lima bean king C. J. Segerstrom, kept building on their land until they had the mall of malls, the equivalent of several fifty-story buildings spread out over a thousand acres, all of it enclosed. A sort of spaceship village grounded on the border between Santa Ana and Costa Mesa.
They made a lot of money.
Other malls sprang up, like daughter mushrooms in a ring around SCP. They all grew, enclosing more space, allowing more consumers to spend their time indoors. Westminster Mall, Huntington Center, Fashion Island, the Orange Mall, Buena Park Center, the City, Anaheim Plaza, Brea Mall, Laguna Hills Mall, Orange Fair Center, Cerritos Center, Honer Plaza, La Habra Fashion Square, Tustin Mall, Mission Viejo Fair, Trabuco Marketplace, the Mission Mall, Canyon Center, all were in place and flourishing by the end of the century, growing by accretion, taking up the surrounding neighborhoods, adding stores, restaurants, banks, gyms, boutiques, hairdressers, aps, condos. Yes, you could live in a mall if you wanted to. A lot of people did.
By 2020 their number had doubled again, and many square miles of Orange County were roofed and air-conditioned. When the Cleveland National Forest was developed there was room for a big one; Silverado Mall rivaled SCP for floorspace, and in 2027 it became the biggest mall of all—a sign that the back country had arrived at last.
The malls merged perfectly with the new elevated freeway system, and midcounty it was often possible to take an offramp directly into a parking garage, from which one could take an escalator through the maze of a mall’s outer perimeter, and return to your ap, or go to dinner, or continue your shopping, without ever coming within thirty feet of the buried ground. Everything you needed to do, you could do in a mall.
You could live your life indoors.
And none of that, of course, ever went away.
67
Dennis gets a call from Washington, D.C. “Dennis? It’s Louis Goldman. I wanted to tell you about the latest developments in the Stormbee case. It’s looking very hopeful, I think.”