The Gold Coast

7

On the way up to Sandy’s they run into Arthur Bastanchury, who is returning to the party’s end carrying a big over-the-shoulder bag. Jim is uncomfortable, here he’s just gone to bed with Arthur’s ex-ally and who knows what’s still going on between them, really. But both Virginia and Arthur are cool, and after they go inside and sit in the video room and chat for a while about what’s on the screens, Jim relaxes too. We’re in the postmodern world, he reminds himself, alliances are no more than that: every person is a sovereign entity, free to do what they want. No reason to feel any unease.

Sandy and Angela, Tashi and Erica come out of the jacuzzi room wrapped in big thick white towels, steaming faintly. They go on into the kitchen to rustle up a late-night snack. Arthur puts his bag on the floor and opens it, begins to arrange things inside. “So are you coming with me?” he shouts into the kitchen.

“Not tonight,” Sandy calls back in. “I’m beat.” No word from the others. Arthur makes a face. “Ginny?”

Virginia shakes her head. “’Fraid not, Art. I told you before, I think it’s a waste of time.”

Arthur looks disgusted with her, and abruptly she gets up and walks into the kitchen, where their friends are laughing over something Sandy has done or said. Ruefully Arthur shakes his head: he’s going to have to go it alone again, the expression says.

“What’s a waste of time?” Jim asks.

Arthur pins him with a challenging stare. “Trying to make a difference in this world. Virginia thinks that trying to make a difference is a waste of time. I suppose you think the same. You all do. A lot of talk about how bad things are, how we have to change things—but when it comes to a question of action, it turns out to be nothing but talk.”

“Don’t be so sure!”

“No?” Arthur’s tone is careless, his grin sardonic; he looks down to arrange the papers in his bag. Offended, Jim rises to it.

“No! Why don’t you tell me what you have in mind?”

“I’ve got some posters in here. I’m going to do an information blitz in the mall. Here—” He pulls one out, hands it up to Jim without looking at him.

From one angle it’s a holo of a wave at the Pipeline, a perfect tube about to eat some ecstatic goofy-footed surfer. Shift the poster just a bit, though, and it becomes a holo of a dead American soldier, perhaps taken in Indonesia. The legs are gone. Under this apparition bold letters proclaim:

Jim rubs his chin. Arthur laughs at him. “So?” he taunts. “Want to come with me and put these up?”

“Sure,” Jim says, just to shut off that contemptuous look. “Why not?”

“It could land you in jail, that’s why not.”

“Freedom of speech, right?”

“They have ways around that. Littering. Defacement. These things have to be lased off, they have molecular-ceramics bonds on the back.”

“Hmph. Well, so what? Are you planning to get caught?”

Arthur laughs. “No.” He stares at Jim, a curious look in his eye. Despite the events of the night—Jim’s ping-pong victory, his jump in bed with Arthur’s ex-ally… or perhaps because of them, somehow… Arthur seems to have some curious kind of moral high ground, from which he speaks down to Jim. Jim doesn’t understand this; he only feels it.

“Come on, then.” Arthur’s up and off to the door. Jim follows him out and just has time to register the scowl on Virginia’s face, there in the kitchen. Oops.

“Let’s start at the north end and work our way back here,” says Arthur as they descend to the ground floor of the mall. They get on the empty people mover and track through the complex to South Coast Village, buried under the northward expansion of the mall proper. “Good enough. Let’s keep it fast, say twenty minutes total. But casual. Watch out for the mall police.”

They start down the wide concourse of the mall. Escalators in mirrors branch off to a score of other floors, some real, some not. “Put the posters up then rub this rod over them. That activates the bond.”

Jim puts one small poster up, on the window of a Pizza City. This one’s a holo of a naked girl standing in knee-deep tropical surf; the shift of angle and it’s another blood-soaked fallen soldier, with the words “THE DEFENSE DEPT. RUNS THIS COUNTRY—RESIST” underneath. “Whoah. This might spoil a few dinners.”

By now it’s nearly four A.M., although it’s impossible to tell inside the mall, which is as timeless as a casino. The big department stores are closed, but everywhere else the windows and mirrors and tile walls gleam with a jumpy neon insistence:

Lights! Camera! Action!

Long central atrium, five stories tall.

Plastic trees, colored light fountains. Reflected

Images. Game parlors, snack bars, video bars: all open, all pulsing.

Hey, guess what! I’m hungry.

The South Coast carousel is spinning. All its animals have riders.

Glazed eye. Clashing music spheres. Blinks.

Gangs in the restroom niches, in closed shop entries.

Into an expresso bar. Hanging out.

Shopping.

On Main Street.

You live here.

Jim and Arthur slap their posters on walls, windows, doors. “The mortuary is really hopping tonight,” Arthur says.

Jim laughs. He hates malls himself, though he spends as much time in them as anyone. “So why do you poster a place like this? Isn’t it a waste of molecular ceramics?”

“Mostly, sure. But the draft has gotten teeth since the Gingrich Act was reenacted, and a lot of people in here are bait. They don’t know it because they don’t read newsheets. In fact when you get right down to it they don’t know a fucking thing.”

“The sleepwalkers.”

“Yeah.” Arthur gestures at a group lidded almost beyond the point of walking. “Sleepwalkers, exactly. How do you reach people like that? I published a newsheet for a while.”

“I know. I liked it.”

“Yeah, but you read. You’re in a tiny minority. Especially in OC. So I decided to move into media where I can reach more people. We make videos that do really well, because they’re sex comedies for the most part. The newsheet equipment has been converted to poster work.”

“I’ve seen the ones on Indonesia that Sandy has in his study. They’re beautiful.”

Arthur waves a hand, annoyed. “That’s irrelevant. You culture-vultures are all alike. It’s all aesthetics for you. I don’t suppose you really believe in anything at all. It’s just whatever attracts the eye.”

Without replying Jim goes into the McDonald’s, puts up a poster over the menu. On the one hand he feels a little put upon, it’s a bit unfair to attack him while he’s right here risking jail to put up these stupid posters, isn’t it? At the same time, there’s a part of him that feels Arthur is probably right. It’s true, isn’t it? Jim has despised the ruling forces in America for as long as he has been aware of them; but he’s never done anything about it, except complain. His efforts have all gone to creating an aesthetic life, one concentrating on the past. King of the culturevultures. Yes, Arthur has a certain point.

When they rendezvous outside Jack-in-the-Box, where Arthur has been at work, Jim says, “So why do you do all this, Arthur?”

“Well just look at it!” Arthur bursts out. “Look at these sleepwalkers, zombieing around in some kind of L-5 toybox.… I mean, this is our country! This is it, from sea to shining sea, some kind of brain mortuary! While the rest of the world is a real mortuary. The world is falling apart and we devote ourselves to making weapons so we can take more of it over!”

“I know.”

“That’s right, you know! So why do you ask?”

“Well, I guess I meant, do you really think this kind of thing”—swinging his poster bag—“will make any difference?”

Arthur shrugs, grimaces. “How do I know? I feel like I have to do something. Maybe it just helps me. But you have to do something. I mean, what the hell do you do? You type a word-cruncher for a real estate office, you teach technoprose to technocrats. Isn’t that right?”

Almost against his will, Jim nods. It’s true.

“You don’t give a shit about your jobs. So you drift along being ace culturevulture and wondering what it’s all about.” The grimace intensifies. “Don’t you believe in anything?”

“Yeah!” Feeble show of defiance. Actually, he’s always thought he should be more political. It would be more consistent with his hatred for the wars being waged, for the weapons being made (his father’s work, yes!)—for the way things are.

“I’ve heard you talk about the way OC used to be,” Arthur says. They spot a mall cop and stand watching the keno results appear in the Las Vegas window, green numbers embedded in glass. When the cop has passed Arthur covers the numbers with another dead soldier. “Some of what you say is important. The attempts to make collective existences out here, Anaheim, Fountain Valley, Lancaster—it’s important to remember those, even if they did fail. But most of that citrus utopia bit is bullshit. It was always agribiz in California, the Spanish land grants were grabbed up in parcels so big that it was a perfect location for corporate agriculture, it was practically the start of it. Those groves you lament were picked by migrant laborers who worked like dogs, and lived like it was the worst part of the Middle Ages.”

“I never denied it,” Jim protests. “I know all about that.”

“So what’s with this nostalgia?” Arthur demands. “Aren’t you just wishing you could have been one of the privileged landowners, back in the good old days? Shit, you sound like some White Russian in Paris!”

“No, no,” Jim says weakly. They plaster restroom doors and walls with posters, approach the May Company at the south end of the mall. “There were some serious attempts to make cooperative agricultural communities, here. A lot of them had to do with the orange groves. We have to remember them, or, or their efforts were wasted!”

“Their efforts were wasted.” Arthur slaps up a poster. “We’d better get out of here, the cops are bound to have seen some of these by now.” He pokes Jim in the arm with a hard finger. “Their efforts were wasted because no one followed up on them. Even this kind of thing is trivial, it’s preaching to the deaf, making faces at the blind. What’s needed is something more active, some kind of real resistance. Do you understand?”

“Well, yeah. I do.” Although actually Jim isn’t too clear on what Arthur means. But he is convinced that Arthur is right, whatever he means. Jim’s an agreeable guy, his friends convince him of things all the time. And Arthur’s arguments have a particular force for him, because they express what Jim has always felt he should believe. He knows better than anyone that there is something vital missing from his life, he wants some kind of larger purpose. And he would love to fight back against the mass culture he finds himself in; he knows it wasn’t always like this.

“So you mean you are doing something more active?” he asks.

Arthur glances at him mysteriously. “That’s right. Me and the people I work with.”

“So what the hell!” Jim cries, irritated at Arthur’s dismissals, his secretive righteousness. “I want to resist, but what can I do? I mean, I might be interested in helping you, but how can I tell when all you’re doing is spouting off! What do you do?”

Arthur gives him the eye, looks at him hard and long. “We sabotage weapons manufacturers.”