The Gold Coast

64

No sooner has Jim returned to his ap, which, to tell the truth, looks just as dreary and lifeless as before, than there’s a sharp knock at the door. He opens it.

“Abe! What are you doing here?”

Abe smiles lopsidedly.

Stupid question. Abe’s eyes have a drawn, tired, defiant look, and Jim understands: he’s here for the company. For help. Jim can hardly believe it. Abe’s never come to Jim’s place before, except once or twice to pick him up. Given their homes it makes sense to go up Saddleback and hang out there, on the roof of OC, if hanging out is what they’re going to do.

“I’m here to get wasted,” Abe says harshly, and laughs.

“What, Sandy’s not home?”

“That’s right.” Again the abrupt laugh. But then Abe’s direct gaze catches Jim’s eye, admitting that there’s more to it than that. Abe steps in, looks around. Jim sees it through Abe’s eyes.

“Let’s go outside,” he says, “and sit on the curb. I’m sick of this place.”

Seated on the curb, next to the fire hydrant at the corner, feet crossed in the gutter, they can look up at the freeway overhead and see the roofs of the cars in the fast lane, see the fans of light from the headlights, sweeping by. Two men sitting on a curb.

Abe pulls out one of Sandy’s monster spliffs and lights it. They pass it back and forth, expelling great clouds of smoke into the empty street. A passing car tracks through the cloud and scatters it. “Quit passing so quickly,” Abe says at one point. “Take two hits, then pass it. Don’t you even know how to smoke a joint?”

“No.”

They sit silently. Nothing to say? Not exactly. Jim supposes that his value in times like these is his willingness to start conversations, to talk about things that matter.

“So,” he says, coughing on a deep hit. “You were the paramedics called to Lillian’s crash, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“You and Xavier?”

“Yeah.”

Long pause.

“How’s he doing?”

A shrug. “I don’t know. Same as ever. Falling apart, hanging on. I guess it’s a permanent condition for X.”

“Sounds tough.”

Abe purses his mouth. “Impossible. I can’t do it, anyway.”

He starts fidgeting in typical Abe fashion, finally getting up to squat on his hams, balancing over his feet with armpits on knees, in the aboriginal crouch that is a favorite with him, because then even sitting takes nervous energy. “Have I changed much this last year, that you can tell?”

“Everyone changes.”

Abe gives him a sidelong glance, laughs sharply. “Even you?”

“Maybe,” Jim says, thinking of the last month. “Maybe, at last.”

Abe accepts that. “Yeah. Well, I’m wondering. I mean, I’ve been getting like X, all this last year. I’m wondering if I can keep going. You know…”

His voice tightens, he’s looking down in the gutter now. “X told me that once when he was losing it bad he couldn’t stand any of the crashes with kids in them. Because once he looked in this backseat and found a body and said to himself, What the hell is this black kid doing with these white folks, and he turned it over and it had one of his kids’ faces. And he sort of fainted on his feet, and when he came to it was some white kid he’d never seen.”

“My God.”

“I know. You can see why X worries me. But—but”—Abe is still resolutely looking in the gutter—“when I saw it was Lillian, I stepped away and all of a sudden remembered X’s story and I thought I had gone crazy, that it wasn’t her and I had hallucinated it. And then when I was sure it was Lillian, I mean really sure… I was almost glad!”

“I understand.”

“No you don’t!”

Abe jumps up, paces back and forth in front of Jim, out in the street. He hands Jim the forgotten spliff: “You don’t understand! You think you do because you read so fucking much, but you never really do any of it so you don’t really know!”

Jim looks at Abe calmly. “That’s probably true.”

Abe grimaces, shakes his head a few times. “Ah, no. That’s bullshit. Everyone knows, as long as they’re not sleepwalkers. But shit. I would rather have had Lillian Keilbacher dead than have gone crazy for even one minute!”

“Just at that moment, you mean. It’s a natural reaction, you were shocked out of your mind. You can think anything at times like that.”

“Uhn.” Abe isn’t satisfied by that. But he sits down on the curb again, takes the spliff.

“Most people would have just freaked on the spot.”

Abe shakes his head, taking a hit. “Not so.”

“Well, not many would try to go tell the family like you did.”

“Uhn.”

They smoke a while in silence.

Jim takes a deep breath; he’s used to the Bernards’ Saddleback house becoming a brooding, Byronic place, overhanging the world; but it appears Abe can confer the atmosphere wherever he goes, if his immense nervous energy is spinning him in the right way, in the right mode… so that Jim’s streetcorner curb under its sodium vapor light now swirls with heraldic significance, it looks like an Edward Hopper painting, the bungalow aps lined out side by side, the minilawns, empty sidewalks, fire hydrant, orange glare of light, giant pylons and the great strip of freeway banding the white-orange sky—all external signs of a dark, deep moodiness.

Abe holds the spliff between thumb and forefinger, speaks to it softly. “It’s getting so that anytime I can hear that sound”—glancing up briefly at the freeway—“or, or anytime I see a stream of headlights flowing red white, I hear the snips ripping through the metal. I hear the cutting hidden in the rest of the sound, sometimes I even hear some poor torn-up bastard moaning—just in the freeway sounds!”

He’s squishing the spliff flat, and suddenly he hands it back to Jim.

“And following taillights is like blood over exposed bone, red on white, you know the headlights, so bright coming at you… I mean I really see that.”

His voice is going away, Jim can barely hear his words. “The way the cars crumple and shear, and the blood—there’s a lot of it in a body. And their faces always look so—like Lillian’s face, it was so…” He’s shaking now, his whole body is racked with shaking, his face is contorted in the mask that faces go to when crying is stopped short no matter the cost to the muscles. Abruptly he stands again.

As if on a string Jim stands too. Tentatively he puts a hand to his friend’s shoulder. “It’s your work, Abe. It’s hard work, but it’s good work, I mean we need it. It’s what you want to do—”

“It’s not what I want to do! I don’t want to do it anymore! Man, haven’t you been listening?” He jerks away from Jim, turns and paces around him like a predatory animal. “Pay attention, will you?” he almost shouts. “I’m going crazy out there, I tell you, I can’t even do my job anymore!”

“Yes you can—”

“I cannot! How do you know? Don’t tell me what I can or can’t do out there—so fucking glib—” He reaches up and takes a wild swing at Jim’s upraised hand, hits it away, swings again and backhands Jim on the chest, for an instant he looks like he’s going to beat Jim up, and appalled Jim holds his arms up across his chest to take the blows—

Abe stops himself, shudders, twists away, takes off rapidly down the street; turns, wavers indecisively, plops down on the curb and leans over the gutter, face between his knees, buried in his hands. And there he rocks back and forth, back and forth.

Jim, frightened, his throat crimped tight at the sudden exposure to so much pain, stands there helplessly. He doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t have any idea what Abe might want him to do.

After a long while he walks down the street, and sits down next to Abe, whose rocking gets slower and slower as his shaking subsides. They both just sit there.

The forgotten roach, black with oil, is still pressed between Jim’s thumb and forefinger; he pulls a lighter from his shirt pocket, torches the roach’s ashy end, sucks on it till it blooms smoke. He takes a hit so big that he can’t contain it, and coughs hard. Abe has his elbows on his knees now, and he’s staring silently out at the street. His face is all streaked. Jim offers him the roach. He takes it, puffs on it, passes it back, all without a word. A final paroxysm shudders through his flesh, and then he’s still.

After a while he looks at Jim with a wry grimace. “See what I mean?”

Jim nods. He’s at a loss for words. Without premeditation he says, “Yeah, man. You’re fucking nuts.”

Abe laughs shortly. Sniffs.

They finish the roach in silence. They sit on the curb and watch the traffic hum by overhead.

Abe sighs. “I never thought it would get this hard.”