Is everything all right? Is there a problem?
Flynn begins to withdraw his hand and she shakes her head, both her lips pulled into her mouth. He makes a head gesture to the microphone and she nods rapidly, then unclenches her teeth and leans forward.
Not at all. Do you have a question?
I’m a first-time caller, Ronnie. First-time caller, but a longtime admirer.
[Pause] Thank you. And your question?
Flynn moves his hand to her thigh and leaves it there, motionless.
Well, it’s more a comment than a question. A warning,’ you might say.
A warning?
Yes, that’s right. I know your show is very popular among the Wireless crowd.
At the mention of the bar, Flynn straightens up slightly and turns his head to stare at the flashing lights of the board.
And I’ve got a feeling those O’Zebedee Brothers might be fans of yours also. And I feel a need to be open here, to inform the whole miserable cult of bastards of my intentions.
There’s a minute of dead air as Ronnie catches her breath and stares down at Flynn. Then,
Ronnie, you there? Hello?
I’m afraid, sir, you’ve called the wrong show. We’re here to discuss human sexuality. That’s our topic here. I think maybe you want Ray Todd’s—
They know who I’m talking to. They’ve been warned. The joke is over, okay? They’re screwed. I’m in town and I won’t be leaving till the job is done. They know what I mean.
I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong show, caller. I’m going to have to cut you off now—
I am in town, you little bastards. I know who you are—
She reaches out and kills the line.
We’ll be right back after these messages.
She jams home a cart, and an announcement for a bluegrass festival starts up.
“Why did you stop?” she says, head back, looking up at the ceiling.
“You were losing it. You couldn’t speak.”
“You shouldn’t have stopped,” she says.
He doesn’t know what to do. He feels foolish and inept. He starts to say, “I could still—”
But she cuts him off, smiles down at him, and removes his hand.
“I don’t think so,” she says.
She swivels until her back is to the board and then starts to get dressed.
“I don’t get it,” he says.
She tucks the last of her blouse into her skirt and says, “Relax. Food’s here.”
And he turns to see the doors of the glass elevator closing behind Wayne. The engineer starts to walk slowly toward the studio. He’s got a brown paper bag in his arms. It’s gone wet and dark near the bottom.
Ronnie stands up and runs her hands through her hair. She gives Flynn a soft punch to the shoulder.
“Better luck next time,” she says. “God, I hope he brought some curried beef.”
28
Speer cuts the engine of the Ford and slouches a bit in his seat, but it’s no longer possible to fall into the comfort of a standard surveillance posture. So he tries to ignore his twitching muscles and the rhythmic ache that pulses through his temples. He tries to concentrate instead on the landscape.
The Goulden Ave whores are smoking dusted joints, trading stories about the kink of the week and generally hanging out, waiting, squeezed into their Lycra and spandex, maybe mildly hoping for that one mythical all-night john who’ll pop for a room in the Penumbra and a bottle of Johnnie Walker. There are probably thirty to forty of them spread down the two blocks of Goulden between Granada and Grassman, but there’s one core group, a semilegendary clique of hustlers that congregate around the entrance of the Hotel Penumbra. They’re sometimes called “the best and the brightest” by the bachelor-party yuppies who cruise in from the suburbs.
Just a year ago, the Penumbra was an improbable but absolutely gorgeous piece of work, a hundred-year-old, five-story arc that served as preposterous crib for Cortez, onetime neighborhood mayor for the Latinos. Cortez dumped an enormous percentage of his income into mutating the hotel into a surreal vision that spliced elements of spooky High Gothic with splashes of Euro-industrial. It never should have worked, but Cortez willed it into being and shined a barrage of klieg lights on it so the city had to look.
Then Cortez disappeared. And the vision that took ten years to refine toward perfection took only twelve brutal months to decay into a darkened hulk of looted rooms, graffitied walls, and burned-out floors. No one knows for sure who owns the Penumbra today, though it’s possible the city has been saddled with it. But in the absence of a resident landlord, a pimp named Bedoya has taken to renting out the uncharred rooms by the hour.
Speer grips the steering wheel, sweating, habitually moistening his lips and gums, wondering if the dozen women loitering in front of Cortez’s desecrated monument realize the fierceness of this devolution, if they understand it as a simple and beautiful example of eternal laws, not the humanist babble about survival and extinction, but the most ancient stories, tales concerned with the expulsion of the unworthy, vignettes about vile, unfit creatures being cast downward.
He takes his notebook from the passenger seat, opens it, rereads the last few lines of rigid print, then picks up his pen and continues writing.
(Goulden Avenue)
My life continues, Margie. I’m involved in the meat of one of my most annoying investigations. You would say I found them all annoying and that I loved the annoyance. (Maybe in the same way that I used to love the static, what you thought to be blank noise, undefined, incapable of being interpreted.) I don’t disagree with you out of hand. I’m just not sure “love” is the correct word in this instance. Rather, I would say that I am compelled to view “annoyance” as an opponent of complacency. Complacency can be equated with weakness. And weakness will always lead to disorder, confusion, an irreversible breakdown of progress and history.
In this vein, I’d like to attempt to explain my attention to seemingly meaningless static. Though I am still making progress in Dr. Helm’s book (though, to be honest with you, I am having trouble accepting his contention that it is the repression of a “female sensibility,” trapped, hidden, and degraded in every male, that is the cause for everything from harsh words to Cambodian genocide …), I took a look, yesterday, into another tome from the self-help library you had abandoned in our home. I happened to scavenge Dr. Rothstein’s Death Takes No Holiday before moving to my current residence. The doctor goes in for the popular notion that casts Anger as one rung on the inevitable ladder up to an acceptance of Death as a natural (and constantly imminent) state.
Possibly, this is where we differed the most, Margie. I continue to see my anger as an assault on death, an affront to its peasant (communistic) power. And even if I’m forced to admit that, at some point, my defeat (and Death’s victory) is certain, I still have the comfort of the knowledge that I did not bow down to a foe I cannot respect.
A pain begins behind his left eye. He rubs a hand over his face, takes some deep breaths, then slides the notebook and pen under his seat and looks down Goulden Ave. He fixes on a dark-skinned girl, maybe seventeen. He watches her bend down to the window of a slowing low-rider and begin a full-bodied negotiation, a form of barter where suggestion is everything. And the ease of her movements and gestures, the lascivious way she runs her hand along the side of her own breast, tells him yes, these women may be the best and the brightest, but they haven’t got a clue that there’s a ton of granite metaphor easily within their grasp, waiting to be noticed and understood. Cortez’s barren empire of signs flanking their backsides might as well be Notre Dame or Chartres.