The Gold Coast

47

Back in OC Jim can’t shake a feeling of uneasiness. It’s as if somewhere the program and the magnetic field keeping him on his particular track have been disarranged, fallen into some awful loop that keeps repeating over and over.

And in fact he falls into the habit of tracking about for several hours each day, all his free time spent in a big circle pattern on the freeways, Newport to Riverside to San Gabriel to San Diego to Santa Ana to Trabuco to Garden Grove to Newport, and so on. While he stares out the window looking down at his hometown. Around and around the freeways he goes, stuck in a loop program that resembles a debugging search pattern caught by a bug itself. Software going bad.

Once he stops to cruise through South Coast Plaza.

Twelve department stores: Bullock’s, Penney, Saks, Sears, KlothesAG, J. Magnin’s, I. Magnin’s, Ward’s, Palazzo, Robinson’s, Buffum’s, Neiman-Marcus.

Three hundred smaller shops, restaurants, video theaters, game parlors, galleries…

A poem is a laundry list.

You wear your culture all over you.

Chrome, and thick pile carpets.

Mirrors everywhere, replicating the displays to infinity.

Is that an eye I see in there?

Escalators, elevators, half-floors of glass, fountains.

Lots of plants. Most are real, from the tropics. Hothouse blooms.

Spectrum bends, rack after rack after (mirrored) rack.

Entering Bullock’s, Magnin’s, Saks: thirteen counters of perfume each.

Perfume! Earrings, scarves, necklaces, nylons, stationery, chrome columns, blouse racks, sportswear, shoes—

You complete the list (every day).

Jim walks through this place untracked, his uneasiness bouncing back from every mirror, every glossy leaf and fabric. The memory of his night in Egypt is overlaid on his sight like the head’s-up display of a fighter pilot’s helmet. IR images in a faint green wash: of beggars in Cairo, too poor even to live in the jammed miserable tenements around them. How many people could live in a structure like SCP? The luxury surrounding him, he thinks, is a deliberate, bald-faced denial of the reality of the world. A group hallucination shared by everyone in America.

Jim wanders this maze, past the sleepwalkers and the security police, until he has to sit down. Disoriented, dizzy, he might even be sick. Some mall kids hanging out by the video rental window stare at him curiously, suspecting an OD. They’re right about that, Jim thinks dully. I have ODed on South Coast Plaza. The kids stand there hoping for some theatrics. Jim disappoints them by getting up and walking out under his own power. His damaged autopilot gets him through the maze of escalators and entry levels to the parking lot, to his car.

He calls Arthur. “Please, Arthur, give me some work. Is anything ready to go?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact there is. Can you do it tonight?”

“Yes.” And Jim feels immense relief that he can act on this feeling of revulsion.

That night he joins Arthur enthusiastically as they stay up all night to arrange a successful strike against Airspace Technology Corporation, which makes parts for the orbiting nuclear reactors that provide the old space-based chemical lasers with their power. Off to the rendezvous at Lewis and Greentree, in the little warehouse parking lot; the same men load the boxes into Arthur’s car; and they’re off to San Juan Hot Springs Industrial Park. Despite security precautions that include fence-top heat-seeking missiles, the strike succeeds; in Airspace Tech’s main production plant, all that was composite has fallen apart.…

But the next morning, back in his ap, exhausted to emptiness, Jim has to admit that the operation hasn’t changed all that much for him. He’s still sitting in his little ap under the freeway looking around. Nothing in it soothes him. He’s heard his music too often. He’s read all the books. The orange crate labels mock him. He’s looked at the maps till he knows them by heart, he’s seen all the videos, he’s scanned every program in the history of the world. His home is a trap, the complex and massively articulated trap of his self. He has to escape; he looks around the dusty disorderly room, with its treasured shaft of nine A.M. sunlight, and wonders how he ever stood it.

The phone rings. It’s Hana. “How are you?” she says.

“Okay! Hey, I’m glad you called! You want to come down to my place for dinner tonight?”

“Sure.”

And the flood of relief that fills him has other components in it he can’t tag so readily; it’s the kind of pleasure he gets when Tash or Abe give him a call to arrange something, the sense that one of his good friends reciprocates his regard, and will actually take the trouble to initiate a get-together, something that is usually left for Jim to do.

So he goes out and buys spaghetti and the materials for the sauce and a salad. A bottle of Chianti. Back home for some hapless, hopeless attempts to clean the place, or at least order it a little.

Hana shows up around seven.

“I’m really glad you called,” Jim says, stirring the spaghetti sauce vigorously.

“Well, it’s been a while.” She’s sitting at the kitchen table, staring past him at the floor, throwing her sentences out casually. Attack of shyness, it seems. Her black hair as tangled as ever.

“I—I think I’m losing it, somehow,” Jim says, surprising them both. “This trip, it just reinforced everything I was feeling before!” And it all spills out of him in a rush, Hana glancing up now and then as he rattles on about Cairo and Crete and California. He mixes his account of them so that it must be impossible for her to figure out which place he’s talking about, but she doesn’t interrupt until a desperate edge tears his voice. Then she stands, briefly, puts a hand to his arm. This is so unlike her that Jim is struck dumb.

“I know what you mean,” she says. “But look. Your dinner’s almost ready, and you shouldn’t eat when you’re upset.”

“I’d starve if I didn’t.”

But he pours the spaghetti into the colander with a wry grin, feeling a bit more relaxed already. There’s something new floating in the steam between them, and he likes it. As they sit down to eat he goes and puts on one of his amalgamations of classical music, and they eat.

“What’s the music?” Hana asks after a while.

“I’ve taken all the slow movements from Beethoven’s five late string quartets, and also the slow movement from the Hammerklavier Sonata as the centerpiece. It has a very serene effect—”

“Wait a minute. You mean all these movements come from different quartets?”

“Yeah, but they’re unified by a similar style and—”

She is laughing fit to burst. “What a terrible idea! Ha, ha, ha, ha!… Why did you do that?”

“Well.” Jim thinks. “I found when I put on the late quartets I was usually doing it to hear the slow movements. It’s for a mood I have that I like to, I don’t know. Soundtrack, or reinforce, or transform into something higher.”

“You’ve got to be kidding, Jim! You know perfectly well Beethoven would cringe at the very idea.” She laughs at him. “Each quartet is a whole experience, right? You’re cutting out all the other parts of them! Come on. Go put on one of them complete. Choose the one you like best.”

“Well, that’s not so easy,” Jim says as he goes to the old CD console. “It’s odd. Sullivan says in his book on Beethoven that opus 131 is by far the greatest of them, with its seven movements and the spacy opener and so on.”

“Why should that matter to you?”

“What Sullivan says? Well, I don’t know… I guess I get a lot of my ideas out of books. And Sullivan’s is one of the best biographies in the world.”

“And so you accepted his judgment.”

“That’s right. At first, anyway. But finally I admitted to myself that I prefer opus 132. Beethoven wrote it after recovering from a serious illness, and the slow movement is a thanksgiving.”

“Okay, but let’s hear the whole thing.”

Jim sticks in the CD of the LaSalle Quartet performance, and they listen to it as they finish dinner. “How you could pass on this part?” Hana says during the final movement.

“I don’t know.”

After dinner she wanders his ap and looks at things. She inspects the framed orange crate labels with her nose about an inch from their surfaces. “These are really nice.” In his bedroom she stops and laughs. “These maps! They’re great! Where did you get them?”

Jim explains, happy to talk about them. Hana admires the Thomas Brothers’ solution to the four-color map problem. Then she notices the video cameras in the corners where walls meet ceiling; she wrinkles her nose, shudders. Back into the living room, where she goes over the bookcase volume by volume, and they talk about the books, and all manner of things.

She notices the computer on Jim’s battered old sixth-grade desk, and the piles of printout beside it. “So is this the poetry, then? Do I get to read some?”

“Oh no, no,” Jim says, rushing to the desk as if to hide the stuff. “I mean, not yet, anyway. I haven’t got any of it in final form, and, well, you know.…”

Hana frowns, shrugs.

They sit on the bamboo-and-vinyl couch and talk about other matters. Then suddenly she’s standing and looking at the floor. “Time to go, I have to work tomorrow.” And she’s off. Jim walks her to her car.

Back in his ap he looks around, sighs. There at the desk, all those feeble half-poems lying there, broken-backed and abandoned.… He compares his work habits to Hana’s and he is ashamed of his laziness, his lack of discipline, his amateurishness. Waiting for inspiration—such nonsense. It really is stupid. He doesn’t even like to think about his poetry anymore. He’s an activist in the resistance, it’s time for praxis now rather than words, and he only writes when he has the time, the inclination. It’s different for him now.

But he doesn’t really believe that. He knows it’s laziness. And Hana—how is he ever going to show her any of his work? It just isn’t good enough; he doesn’t want her put off by his lack of talent. He’s ashamed of it. He identifies the feeling and that makes him feel even worse. Isn’t this his work, his real work?