The Gold Coast

44

They land in Stockholm after a two-hour flight over the North Pole—just enough time to catch the in-flight movie Star Virgin. Once in the city they quickly decide that the Great Stagemaster in the Sky has shifted San Diego east and north to give them a surprise. Everyone speaks English, even. They eat at a McDonald’s to confirm the impression and hold a conference in Sandy and Angela’s hotel room to decide what to do next. Jim is for going north to the Arctic Circle and above, but no one else has much enthusiasm for the idea. “You can get reindeer steaks at Trader Joe’s,” Sandy tells him, “and snow on Mount Baldy. Midnight sun in the tanning parlor. No, I want to see someplace different.”

“Well shoot,” Humphrey says, “why don’t we just go visit the Disneyland near Paris? That’s bound to be different! We can walk around and note all the differences between it and the original Disneyland.”

“The real Disneyland.”

“The true Disneyland.”

“The one and only and forevermore always the best Disneyland!”

Sandy nods. “Not a bad idea. But I’ve got a better one. We’ll fly to Moscow.”

“Moscow?”

“That’s right. Get behind that Iron Curtain and see how the Russkies really live. It’s bound to be different.”

“It would be a challenge to the businessman,” Humphrey says dreamily. “I’d have to do some shopping first.”

Jim is in favor of the idea, he wants to see this Great Adversary that America has worked so hard to create and support. Angela is up for it.

So they go to Moscow. Well, sure. It reminds Humphrey of Toronto, his childhood home. Streets are clean. A lot of well-dressed people are out walking. Little untracked gas-engine cars roar about on the streets, which the travelers find delightfully quaint and noisy. At their hotel, recommended by the Intourist Bureau at the airport, they ask where they can rent a car and are told they cannot. “We’ll see about that,” Humphrey declares darkly. His eyes gleam crazily. “Time for some private sector enterprise.” He has smuggled a number of videocassettes in, and as soon as they’ve unpacked in their rooms he stuffs several in his jacket and goes out to flag a taxi. Half an hour later he is back, pockets crammed with rubles. “No problem. Asked my driver if he knew anyone interested, and of course he was. The cab drivers are the big black market dealers here. The bellboy wants some too.”

He looks affronted as Jim and Sandy and Angela laugh themselves silly. “Well, it’s not so funny. We’ve got a serious problem here, in that they won’t let you exchange rubles for real money. So this is like Monopoly money, you know?”

Sandy’s eyes light up. “So while we’re playing the game we might as well move to Boardwalk, is that it?”

“Well, yeah, I guess so.” This is against Humphrey’s grain entirely, but he can’t figure out why he should object.

“What’s the most expensive hotel in town?” Sandy asks.

They end up just behind Red Square in an immense old hotel called the Rijeka, and take up a suite on the top floor. Their window view of Red Square, filtered though it is, is impressive. “What a set, eh?” Sandy orders champagne and caviar from room service, and when it arrives Humphrey goes to work on the hotel employees, who speak excellent English. It’s actually a disadvantage for the employees in this case, as it allows Humphrey to work them over more completely. When they leave the gang is many rubles richer, and Humphrey marches about the room ecstatically quoting long extempore passages from Acres of Diamonds in between attacks on the caviar, waving fistfuls of rubles in each hand.

They leave the hotel and go touristing, all ready to explore Red Square and say hello to Lenin and infiltrate the Kremlin and buy out GUM and do all the other great American-in-Moscow activities. In GUM they stand in a basement sale with hundreds of Russian women, and shout to each other across the crowds; they’re a head and more taller than any of the locals there. Funny. The clothes on sale are remarkably gauche and Angela falls in love with several outfits. Back outside Humphrey flags a taxi and they sing “America the Beautiful” over Sandy’s McCarthyite rap, “Better dead—than red, yeah better dead—than red.”

They instruct their stoical driver to take them into the residential areas of the city, where great applexes are grouped around green parks. Up on a hill they figure they’re in Party territory, everything’s upscale as always in the hill districts of a city. And in fact they reach one cul-de-sac with a view over much of Moscow, and stare about them amazed. Sandy sputters: “Why it’s—it’s—it’s condomundo! It’s just like—just like—” and they all pitch in:

“Orange County!”

Total collapse. They must return immediately to the hotel and order more champagne. OC has conquered the world. “James Utt would be proud,” Jim says solemnly.

As soon as they can spend all Humphrey’s rubles they’re gone. “We still haven’t seen anything different,” Sandy complains.

“The Pyramids,” Jim suggests. “See how it all began.”

They fly to Cairo. The airport is in a desert of pure sand, even the Mojave can’t compare to it. At the baggage collection they’re met by an enterprising “agent of Egyptian tourist police” who is happy to offer them all of his private tourist firm’s tours. He is smooth, but hasn’t reckoned on Humphrey, who takes note of the many rival agencies in a long string of booths next to the agent’s, and uses that fact to grind the man until he’s sweating. Sandy, Angela and Jim just keep standing up and sitting back down on Humphrey’s orders, depending on how the negotiations are going. In the end they have a free ride to a big hotel on the Nile offering half-price rooms, and transport to Giza for quarter-price tours and free tickets to the sound and light show here. The agent is punch-drunk by the time they leave, he looks like he’s been mugged.

Cairo turns out to be the same color as the desert. The buildings, the trees, the billboards, even the sky, all are the same dust color. The Nile Hilton, across the river, has been painted turquoise to combat the monochrome, but the turquoise has turned sand-colored as well. Only the old snake river itself achieves a certain dusty dark blue.

When they leave the funky old freeway and hit the streets they see that the city is terrifically densepacked. Most of the buildings are tenements. Every street is stopped up by cars and pedestrians; they can’t believe how many people are actually walking. Their hotel, old and dusty, is a welcome refuge. They chatter with excitement as they unpack and wait for the tour guide and driver to arrive and take them to Giza. Humphrey goes down to investigate currency exchange rates and comes back excited; there’s an official rate, a tourist rate, various black market rates, and some theft rates, designed to tempt greedy people into exposing lots of cash. With some manipulation of this market Humphrey figures he can generate hundreds of Egyptian pounds, and he is about to start with the hotel staff when their guide arrives. Off they go to the Pyramids of Giza.

The Pyramids are to the west, in a morass of hotels and shops. When they get out of their car they are inundated by street merchants and the guide can’t beat them away, especially with Humphrey asking about wholesale deals and the like. They dismiss their guide for saying “ThegreatandancientpyramidsofGiza” once too often, and walk up to the broad stone deck between pyramids one and two.

“Gee, they’re not all that big, are they?” says Humphrey. “Our office building is bigger.”

“You have to remember they were built by hand,” Jim objects, resisting a certain disappointment that he too feels.

Sandy sees a chance to kid him a bit and chimes in with Humphrey. “Man they’re nowhere near as big as South Coast Plaza. They’re not even as big as Irvine City Hall.”

“Kind of like the Matterhorn at Disneyland,” Humphrey says. “Only not as pretty.”

Jim is outraged. He gets even more distressed when he finds out no one is allowed to climb the Pyramids anymore. “I can’t believe it!”

“Unacceptable,” Sandy agrees. “Let’s try the backside.” They find guards on all sides of it, however. Jim is distraught. Their affronted guide retrieves them; it’s time for the sound and light show, apparently a major spectacle. Sunset arrives, and with it busloads of tourists to see the show.

Tonight’s show is in English, unfortunately. Between great sweeps of movie soundtrack romanticism a booming voice cracks out of twenty hidden speakers with a pomposity utterly unballasted by factual content. “THE PYRAMIDS… HAVE CONQUERED… TIME.” The laser lights playing across the Pyramids and the Sphinx use the latest in pop concert technology and aesthetics, including a star cathedral effect, some satellite beaming down thick cylinders of light, yellow, green, blue, red, bathing the whole area in a lased glow. Amazing display. “Never let them tell you there haven’t been useful spin-offs from the space defense technology,” Sandy growls.

The booming voice carries on, more fatuous by the second. Angela leans over Sandy to whisper heavily to them all, “I am the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz,” and with the vocal style of the narrator pegged they can’t restrain themselves, they get more hysterical at every sentence, and they’re attracting a lot of irritated looks from the reverent tourists seated around them. Well, to be obnoxious is un-Californian, so they sit up rigidly and nod their heads in approval at each new absurdity, only giggling in little pressure breakthroughs. But on the drive back they simply roll on the seats and howl. Their guide is mystified.

But that night—that night, after the others have retired—that night, Jim McPherson wanders down to the hotel bar. He feels unsettled, dissatisfied. They aren’t doing the Old World justice, he knows that. Going to see the Pyramids turned into bad pop video; that isn’t the way to do it.

The hotel bar is closed. The clerk recommends McDonald’s, then when she better understands Jim’s desires, the Cairo Sheraton, just a few blocks away. It’s simple to get there, she says, and Jim walks out into the dry, warm night air without a map.

There’s a desert wind blowing. Smell of dust, static cling. Neon scrawls of Arabic script flicker over green pools of light that spill out into the dark streets. A few pedestrians, hardly any cars. From one shop comes the pungent smell of roasting spiced lamb, from another the quarter-tone ululations of a radio singer. Men in caftans are out doing the night business. Hardly anyone glances at Jim, he feels curiously accepted, part of the scene. It’s peaceful in a way, the bustle is half-paced and relaxed. Men sit in open cafes over games that look a bit like dominos, smoking from giant hookahs whose bowls seem to contain chunks of glowing red charcoal. What are they smoking? Sandy would want to inquire, analyze a chunk for chemical clues; Humphrey would want to buy a bushel just in case. Jim just looks and passes on, feeling a ghost. The wailing music is eerie. Arab voices in the street are musical too, especially when relaxed like this. A cab driver plays the fanfare from “Finlandia” on his horn; all the cabbies here use that rhythm.

It occurs to Jim that he should have reached the Sheraton by now. It’s on the Nile and shouldn’t be that hard to find. But where, exactly, is the Nile? He turns toward it and walks on. Auto mechanics work on a car jacked up right in the street. Policemen stay in pairs, carry submachine guns. Jim seems to have gotten into a poorer neighborhood, somehow. Has he gotten his orientation off by ninety degrees, perhaps? He turns again.

The neighborhood gets poorer yet. Down one alley he can see the tower of the Sheraton, so he is no longer lost and all at once he pays real attention to what lies around him.

The street is flanked by four-story concrete tenements.

Doors are open to the night breeze.

Inside, oil lamps flicker over mattresses on the floor.

A stove.

Each family or clan has one room.

Ten faces in a doorway, eyes bright.

Other families sleep on the sidewalks outside.

Their clothing is sand-colored. A torn caftan hood.

You live here, too.

A man in a cardboard box lifts a little girl for Jim’s inspection.

Jim retreats. He thinks again, returns, hands the man a five-pound note. Five pounds. And he retreats. Off into the narrow alleys, he’s lost sight of the Sheraton and can’t recall where it was. Arms are extended out of piles of darkness, the cupped palms light in the gloom, the eyeballs part of the walls. It’s all palpably real, and he is there, he is right there in it. He picks up the pace, hurries past with his head held up, past the hands, all the hands.

He makes it to the Sheraton. But past the guards, in the big lobby, which could be the lobby of any luxury hotel anywhere, he experiences a shiver of revulsion. The opulence is dropped on the neighborhood like a spaceship on an anthill. “There are people out there,” he says to no one. With a shock he recalls the title of Fugard’s play: People Are Living Here. So that’s what he meant.…

He leaves, forces himself to return to the street of beggars. He forces himself to look at the people there. This, he thinks. This man, this woman, this infant. This is the world. This is the real world. He scuffs hard at the sidewalk, feels his breath go ragged. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling; he’s never felt it before. He just watches.

Faces in the open doors, people sitting on the floor. Looking back at him.

This moment seems never to end—this moment does not end—but has its existence afterward inside Jim, in a little pattern of neurons, synapses, axons. Strange how that works.

Next morning he says, “Let’s leave. I don’t like it here.”