The Gold Coast

27

Tracking back north Jim dozes. He’s sitting in the middle seat, leaning against the right window. Arthur is beside him, Abe and Tash behind him in the backseat. Jim finds it difficult to joke around with Arthur; easier to doze. The act of falling asleep often brings hypnagogic visions to him, and the sensation of falling down a black cliff jerks him awake. “Whoah!” Arthur and Raymond, on the cliffside platform. Snatches of a conversation. Warm body in the ocean’s chill. It’s been a strange night.

Out the window is the single stretch of southern California’s coast left undeveloped: the center of U.S. Marine Camp Joseph H. Pendleton. Dark hills, a narrow coastal plain cut by dry ravines, covered with dark brush. Grass gray in the moonlight. Something about it is so quiet, so empty, so pure.… My God, he thinks. The land. A pang of loss pierces him: this land that they live on, under its caking of concrete and steel and light—it was a beautiful place, once. And now there’s no way back.

For a moment, as they track up the coast and out of the untouched hills, into the weird cancerous megastructures of the desalination plant and the sewage plant and the nuclear facility, Jim dreams of a cataclysm that could bring this overlit America to ruin, and leave behind only the land, the land, the land… and perhaps—perhaps—a few survivors, left to settle the hard new forests of a cold wet new world, in tiny Hannibal Missouris that they would inhabit like foxes, like deer, like real human beings.…

They track on into the condomundo hills of San Clemente, and the absurdity of his vision, combined with its impossibility, and its cruelty, and its poignant appeal, drive Jim ever deeper into depression. There is no way back; because there is no way back. History is a one-way street. It’s only forward, into catastrophe, or the track-and-mall inferno, or… or nothing. Nothing Jim can imagine, anyway. But no matter what, there is no going back.

Humphrey gets them up the empty freeway to Sandy’s place, and they all get out to go to their own cars. Humphrey says, “Listen, the odometer shows about a hundred and forty miles, divide it among the six of us and it’ll be really cheap—”

“Really cheap,” say Tashi and Abe together.

“Yeah, so let me just figure it out here and we can even up before you guys forget.”

“Figure it out and bill me,” Sandy says, walking off toward the elevator. Even Sandy seems a little weary. “We will recompense you fully.” Arthur’s off without a word. Tashi and Abe are emptying their pockets and giving Humphrey their change, “Sure that covers wear on the brake pads, Humph?” “Don’t forget oil, Bogie, that big hog of yours just sucks the oil.” “No lie.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Humphrey says seriously, collecting their coins. “I took all that into my calculations.” He drives off without a blink at Tash and Abe’s gibing, perfectly unaware of it. Jim laughs to see it. The guy is so perfectly unselfconscious! And of his chief characteristic!

As he walks to his car Jim marvels over it. And tracking home he wonders if everyone is, perhaps, unaware of the principle aspect of their personality, which looms too large for them to see. Yeah, it’s probably true. And if so, then what part of his own character doesn’t he see? What aspect of him do Tash and Abe giggle over, behind his back or even right in front of him, because he doesn’t even realize it’s there to be made fun of?

It comes to him in a flash: he’s got no sense of humor at all!

Hmm. Is that right? Well, it certainly is true that he has about the same amount of wit as a refrigerator. His carbrain would be quicker with repartee, if it only had a speaker. Yes, it’s true. Jim has never really thought of it this way before, but many’s the time when he’s recalled a funny conversation, Abe and Sandy and Tash jamming on one comic riff or another, and a great line to throw into the hilarious sequence will come to him!—only a week or so too late. A bit slow in that department, you could say.

Of course his friends are perfectly aware of this; now Jim sees it clearly. They’ll get on a jag and everyone’ll be laughing hard and Sandy will get that gleam in his eye and demand swiftly of Jim, “What do you say about that, Jimbo?” and Jim will conquer his giggling and puff and wheeze and blow out all his mental circuits trying to think of just one of the kind of witticisms that are flying out of his friends as natural as thoughts, and finally he’ll say something like, “Well… yeah!” and his three friends will collapse, howling like banshees. Leaving Jim grinning foolishly, only dimly aware that in a gang of wits a dorker can be more valuable than another quick tongue.

What joy it would be to convulse the crowd with an ad-libbed one-liner, tossed into a long sequence of them! But it’s not something Jim, Mr. Slow, has ever managed. He’s just a convulsee, a one-man audience, the great laugher; when they get Jim going they can drive him right to the floor with laughing, he gasps and chuckles and screams and beats the floor, stomach muscles cramping, Sandy and Tash and Abe standing over him giggling, extemporizing one comic theme or another, Sandy saying “Should we kill him right now? Should we asphyxiate him right here on the spot?”

Sigh. It’s been a long night. Partying can be damned hard work. And rather disturbing as well.

Mr. Dull walks in the door of his little ap just before dawn. In the gray light it looks messy, stupid. Books in the city built tomorrow. Sigh. Go to sleep.