There were calls from Hollywood too, producers making promises, naming sums, gabbling over the line like auctioneers — and that was what this was, an auction, make no mistake about it — but none of them ever followed through and he never received a letter from a single one of them let alone a contract or, god forbid, a check. But he didn’t want a check, didn’t want to be inflated any more than he already had been — who in his right mind would ever want to see a movie made out of his life, anyway? The camera pans down the street to focus on a frame house in need of paint in the sleepy lumber town of Fort Bragg, California, and there he is, ten years old and emerging from the front door to do something dramatic like walk to school, and here’s his mother calling to him like June Lockhart in Lassie, then we shift to the high school years, the junker car, the prom, Vietnam, college and Carolee, the birth of their son, student teaching, the rise up the rocky slope to the great and shining plateau of school principal, and all of it circling round the cruise ship and the blighted dirty jungle and one climactic moment to justify it all, this American life. Who would they get to play him — Sean Connery? Tommy Lee Jones? Travolta? Absurdity on top of absurdity.
As it turned out, he did agree to one TV appearance, gratis, with a station out of San Francisco, which sent one of their newswomen and two support people to the house and filmed him sitting in the rocker on the front porch with the blue pennant of the ocean flapping in the distance. When it aired that night on the six o’clock news, he saw himself loom up on the screen like something out of one of the Japanese horror flicks he’d loved as a boy—Rodan, maybe, or Godzilla—his eyes blunted, his face scaled and gray and his big fists clenched on the arms of the chair as if he was afraid of falling out of it. Were you scared? the TV woman asked him and he said he was too angry to be scared, his voice like the leaky hiss of an air hose. It all happened so quickly, she prompted. Yeah, he rasped, looking into the camera with his face absolutely frozen, something like that. And you just reacted? Yeah, he said, I just reacted.
By the second week, things had died down to the point of extinction as far as the press was concerned, but he couldn’t go anywhere without somebody giving him a thumbs-up or calling out to him, people he didn’t even know. It was as if he belonged to them now, the whole community, as if he’d graduated from being a retiree and homeowner to another level altogether. And that might have given him some satisfaction — it did — but somehow all he could see was Adam’s face, twisted in a sneer. Big hero. Yeah. Sure. That about summed it up. What was he going to do, run for mayor?
And yet still, at odd moments and always while Carolee was out or occupied elsewhere, he couldn’t resist googling his name to see what would come up. Most of the articles repeated the same information (and misinformation, one adding ten years to his age and another spelling his name variously as Sternson and Stevenson), but every once in a while he would find something new, a detail revealed, a tidbit that put everything in a fresh light as if the incident were reconstructing itself for him like a jigsaw puzzle. He was at it one fog-obliterated afternoon, surfing away, the world reduced to the dimensions of the screen in front of him, when he came across an article he’d somehow managed to overlook (or maybe it had just been posted, who knew? — the internet worked in mysterious ways). This was a fuller account of the AP story that had appeared just about everywhere, and as he scanned it, his eyes jumped to the one detail the other reports had left out as if it had no significance at alclass="underline" the name of the dead man. To this point, he’d been anonymous — the thug, the mugger, the thief — and now he had a name: Warner Ayala. And more: here was his biography, compacted in two lines of print. He was twenty-four years old. A resident of Jamaica Town. He’d built up a long rap sheet of minor crimes from the age of twelve on and he was a suspect in a string of attacks on tourists and local residents alike. Or had been. Warner Ayala. And here was his movie, here was his life.
“Warner,” he repeated to himself, saying it aloud like an incantation, “Warner,” and all at once he was thinking of the parents, the siblings, cousins, grandparents, a father like himself who was mourning his dead son even now. It was as if someone had crept up and struck him a blow from behind, all of it rushing back in that instant, the sun, the mud lot, the fierce unrelenting intimacy of his body entangled with this other one, and he felt so filled with self-loathing and despair it was all he could do to lift his finger to the off button and make the whole thing disappear.
It was three-thirty in the afternoon. The fog sat in the windows. It was very quiet. The blank screen gave him back a ghost image of himself, of his ravaged face and unfocused eyes, the presence still there, still awake and alert and corrosive, even as he pushed himself up from the desk and the world came back to him in all its color and immediacy. Paneled walls. The den. The framed photo of Adam, eleven years old and holding a stringer of half-grown trout aloft with a smile uncomplicated by anything beyond the joy of the moment. Another picture there, of him and Carolee, squinting into the camera against a fierce tropical sun and no older than Adam was now. And another, of his mother, dead twenty years and more, a ghost herself. Next thing he knew he was in the kitchen, washing down a Xanax with a cold beer, and then he went into the living room and started a fire, as much for the cheer as the warmth of it. He felt hopeless. Felt like shit. The pill wasn’t working or the beer or the fire either.
For a long while he just sat there, moving only to stir the coals, the clock on the mantel ticking louder and louder and the fire hissing and the four walls closing him in until some sort of curtain seemed to lift inside him, dark to light, and gradually he began to come out of it. Here he was, still ambulatory, with his mind intact, or mostly so, sitting before a fire in the shingled ocean-view cottage they’d traded up to get — and get at a steal, jumping on it when the recession hit and the values plunged. Even better: he’d finally managed to escape Fort Bragg, winding up here in the religiously quaint little tourist village of Mendocino, population 1,008, where you could get fresh-baked bread every morning and afternoon and the world’s best coffee anytime you wanted. Enough, already — he wasn’t one to feel sorry for himself. What was done was done. Move forward. Shake some pleasure out of life. He got to his feet, groggy from the beer and the pill, but inspired suddenly: he was going to call Carolee and tell her to come home, right away, because he was taking her out to dinner — at the Bistro, the place she liked best.
Her phone rang but she didn’t answer and it went to voicemail. “Call me!” he shouted into the receiver and then rang the number again. She was down in Calpurnia, helping out at the animal preserve there where she liked to volunteer two days a week, but it was getting late — past five now — and they would have fed the animals already, wouldn’t they? Or shoveled up the shit or whatever they did? Maybe she was in the car, maybe that was it. He was trying to picture that, his wife, driving, the fog strangling the headlights, her gray serious eyes fixed on the road, which was slick and wet and deserted, when she picked up.
“Hi, Sten,” her voice breathed in his ear, “what’s up?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m just getting in the car.”
“Good. Great. Because I’m taking you out to dinner at that place you like.”