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  Bewigged and sporting Karen’s clothes, Susan was feeling good as she walked out the unlocked patio door, onto a back lane, where she heaved a plastic bag of her week’s garbage into a stranger’s trash can. She tried to think of a place to go. She chose Indiana.

  Chapter Three

  In the hospital John woke up long enough to hear the doctor tell a nurse that his lungs were plugged up with “about five cans of cream-of-mushroom soup,” followed by, “Christ, he looks awful. I’ve eaten steaks healthier than this guy. He’s down to what, sixteen T cells? He looks familiar. Movie guy?”

  “Johnson. He did Bel Air PI.”

  “No way. What else?”

  “Bel Air PI 2.”

  “Oh yeah—that was one of the few sequels better than the original.”

  “Yeah, sure, but did you see The Wild Land?”

  “Nope. Never heard of it.”

  “Join the club. Didn’t even go to video. I think it went, like, straight to Malaysia.”

  “Wait—didn’t this guy do The Other Side of Hate?”

  “Guilty. It went straight to in-flight. They might as well have shipped the dailies directly up to the Boeing factory.”

  “He deserves Holy Retribution for that one. I flew across the country about eight times one year and that movie was like a curse on my life. It haunted me no matter what flight or which direction I was flying in.”

  “At least it paid for Fun Boy’s toy box. Check the rope burns on the wrists and ankles.”

  The doctor and nurse inspected his body like it was a skimpy Christmas tree. “Well, like I say, whatever floats your boat. Time to Hoover out the lungs again. And monitor his CNS for the wobblies. This guy’s pill soup. Christ, whatta mess. He’s like the undead Sno-Kone that is Walt Disney.”

  The nurse turned on a suction tube, but turned it off when John made a noise. “Didnaw go vee-oh.”

  “He’s saying something. What’s he saying?”

  “Didnaw go vee-oh.”

  “It sounds like mush. Listen harder . . .”

  “I think he’s saying, ‘It didn’t go straight to video.’ ”

  “What didn’t?”

  “Wile Lann.”

  “The Wild Land.”

  “Yoo azzhoe.”

  “Well, Doctor, I think he just called you a prince.”

  That it was something bacterial, and not, say, an overdose of five different prescription drugs mixed with cognac and two Slimfast strawberry shakes that nearly killed him was a fact not lost on him, regardless of what his medical team thought.

  The night he died was to have been a typical Thursday evening: out of the house around 11 P.M., party with a friend of Ivan’s who was coming in from New York, some guy with a hot play for sale—maybe take him up to Melody’s for a quick hug or two. But John woke up around midafternoon feeling achy and nauseous, his thinking foggy, and he mistook this to be a bad reaction to the previous evening’s methamphetamine, Serax and bondage. After all, a leather hood had chafed his Adam’s apple. He seemed to recall a rope he pulled too hard. There was a sore at the base of his penis—ouch—was the skin surface broken? And the Vasarely ashtray as-expensive-as-a-new-small-car had been cleaved into three valueless chunks.

  Kay finished cleaning the kitchen and Saran-wrapped his lunch around sunset. He heard her car exit the driveway. A pulse of seasickness surged, and his breathing grew limp. He dragged his torso to the shower stall to vomit, afterward grabbing and chewing a stray Serax tablet lying beneath the sink’s kick. He stripped while leaning crumpled against the slate tiles, then ignited the hot water faucet and felt what little food he’d had that day—seaweed, basmati rice, grapefruit, algae drink and six Kit Kats. Rinsing off his skin, he blacked out.

  When he came to, the water dowsing him was nearly cold and the sky outside had gone fully dark. He turned off the faucet. He was shivering and realized he was merely sick—sick! He hadn’t been sick in decades, but his heart leapt with the knowledge that it wasn’t drugs or excessive living that had his jaws chattering like a tree full of birds. He reached for the wall phone beside the toilet to slap the speakerphone button with his palm, triggering a dial tone that sliced the silence like a razor.

  Who to call? He had to think quickly because he felt numbers leaving him. Kay would be back home in Inglewood now, well into her second bottle of Chablis. Melody was over in Rancho Mirage organizing a fantasy weekend for bankers. Ivan was in Davos, Switzerland, nookying with investors. His mother? No way was he going to let her see him like this. His assistant, Jennifer, had quit yesterday when she found the nannycam that Lopez, his security man, had installed in the bathroom’s plug-in deodorizer. (“John, I can’t believe you’d sink to accusing me of stealing your coke.” “But Jennifer, you were stealing my coke.” “Even still, how could you harbor such ugly thoughts about me in your head?”) Bridge burned.

  And then John couldn’t remember numbers, period, so he pushed the “Old Lady Button,” the one marked with the little red cross, and he croaked to the teenager manning the dispatch to “send me a goddamn ambulance,” which finally showed up what seemed like two REM cycles later, after he’d squirreled himself into a pair of track pants and scooped a Halloween sack of pills into their baggy pockets, which rattled out, one by one, as he inchwormed his way down the staircase to the front door just as the paramedics arrived, at which point he passed out again.

  Hours later, after the medical help had analyzed his career arc and removed the soup from his lungs, he lay in a cool, quiet room at Cedars-Sinai. Beside the bed there was a TV the size of a pack of Marlboros. He heard the sound of a laugh track, a few commercials, and then he used the sum of his strength to turn his head to watch. It was some piece-of-crap show from the early eighties. A bunch of has-beens.

  He was dizzy sick, feverish. He remembered being young in Kentucky with his mother when a freak tornado had hit. He had walked through a street across the town that had been flattened. A cow was lying beside a pickup truck with its hide sucked right off. A horse was stuck up inside the one standing tree, its leaves plucked off in the middle of summer. Thousands of perch flopped inside a swath of Russian thistle as though the earth had sprouted erupting, percolating sores.

  He suddenly felt sixteen years old again; his body was clean. He felt springy and he wanted to do somersaults off the high school’s trampette. He wanted to ski a glacier. He wanted to climb the glass windows of the First Interstate Bank Tower with suction cups. He felt like flying. And so he flew, up above the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Los Angeles, toward the sun, into the upper atmosphere where he rapped his knuckles on the Mir Space Station, and then he heard a woman’s voice and saw her face. It said to him, “No, John. Time to go back.”

  “Oh, you have got to be kidding.” John kept propelling himself toward the sun.

  “I don’t kid, John Johnson. It’s not a part of my job description.”

  John turned and saw Susan’s face and voice, so recently stolen from the TV. It was a lovely, TV-proportioned all-American face—the face of a child raised with tetracycline, baton twirling and kung fu lessons. “Like you run the studio or something?”

  “John, we’re not here to cut a deal for Canadian and Mexican distribution rights. We’re here to make you better.”

  “Better? I’ve never been better. Shit, I just rang the doorbell on the Mir Space Station.” He could feel himself falling back down to earth again, through the ionosphere and the troposphere and the creamy blue atmosphere. “Stop that!” he shouted. “And who are you—do I know you or something? Send me back up!”

  “Look at me, John.”

  “I’m looking. I’m looking.”

  “No you’re not. You’re looking for a way to get rid of me and fly back into space again.”

  “Okay, okay, you’re good. But do you blame me? I don’t want to go back down there to my crappy little life.”

  “Your life is crappy?”

  His body stopped where it was, his feet inside
the atmosphere, his head out in space, as though he were wading in the planet. “It’s not what I would have wanted, no.”

  “What would you have wanted, then?”

  “Like I keep that information at the top of my ‘To Do’ list, or something?”

  “What would be wrong with keeping that at the top of your ‘To Do’ list?”

  This gave John pause. “Nothing, I guess.” He looked east, toward the seaboard. “Hey, look at New York! You can see the lights! It’s night there now.” The view was indeed splendid.

  “Sure, John, the world is beautiful. But you were telling me what you would have wanted to do differently in your life.”

  “I dunno. Be one of those guys who buy short-sleeve golf shirts with olive checks at the pro shop—the ones who drive their kids to judo lessons and then to the pancake house afterward.”

  “You?”

  “Well, it’d be a start. I see these guys on the San Diego Freeway on Saturday afternoons. They’re married to soccer moms and they don’t have affairs.”

  “John, let’s be serious. Stop wasting my time.”

  “Okay, okay. Take a sip of water, fer Chrissake. Let me think.”

  “Oh Johnnnn,” the vision cooed, “I’m not a table full of suits from Disney.”

  “You know what?” John said. “I’d like to simply stop being me. I’d like to be somebody anonymous, without any luggage. I want a clean slate.”

  “So then go clean your slate. Enter your own private witness relocation program.”

  “It’s too complex. You can’t do it anymore. Too many computers and stuff.”

  “It’s not complex. It’s the opposite of complex. What could be simpler?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m not the issue here.”

  “I know you from somewhere. Sundance? Tristar?”

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Back to the hospital.”

  “Oh.”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  John went quiet as an empty room. And then he said, “I want to see you again.”

  “I don’t know, John.”

  “Please?” John’s body began zooming down to California at telescopic speed.

  “I have a call on another line, John.”

  Whamp!

  He felt as though he’d fallen onto concrete.

  Two days later, he was lying on his hospital bed, wide awake, and his confidant-madam, Melody, was sitting across his dark private room watching Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman on the TV screen.

  “You’re awake! Hello!” Melody shouted. She pushed the MUTE button and scampered toward him, kissing him on the forehead.

  “Melody—shit—what day is it?”

  “It’s Saturday, you brute. You had the flu. And pneumonia. The doctors said they thought you had AIDS because you have almost no immune system left.” The sun had nearly set outside. A supply trolley rolled past the door.

  “You’ve been here all this time?”

  Melody looked guilty. “Well, only about ten minutes, really.”

  John flopped his head sideways, caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror. He closed his eyes. “Jesus.”

  Melody was rustling about in her purse and found some mints. “Want a mint?”

  John’s stomach turned. “No.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  Melody popped a mint and then stared at John, who closed his eyes and tried to recapture the face and voice he’d just seen. Instead he heard Melody tell him what had happened and how sick he’d been, then bridge into snatches of gossip. The captive nature of the sickbed reminded him of his childhood illnesses. He didn’t want to remember that, and he brusquely let Melody know it.

  “Excusez-moi. I’m just trying to be friendly. I didn’t have to come down here, you know. Ivan called from Switzerland and put me on sentry duty. Me and all none of your friends.”

  “Mel—”

  “Oh shit.” Melody felt she’d gone too far. “I’m sorry, John. For what it’s worth, your mother’s been camping out here for forty-eight hours. I sent her home to sleep.”

  “Forget it.”

  “No. I feel terrible for being so mean when you’re so sick.” Her eyes became frantic. “I know—I’ve got some wonderful welcome-back pussy for you—twins!”

  “I don’t want twins, Mel. Shit, I don’t want anybody. Or anything.”

  “How about a bit of toot, John?” Melody removed a pink plastic Hello Kitty heart-shaped box from her fetal calf leather handbag. “Straight from Miss Bolivia’s falsies. Yummie, yummie.” She held out the box to John, and he slapped it with a wave that was just forceful enough to read as purposeful. The box fell onto the floor and exploded.

  “John! That was really stupid.”

  “Mel, please. I don’t feel so good. I want to be alone.”

  “Oh cute—like a Simon and Garfunkel song. You remember who your friends are. And remember—twins! From Florida no less.”

  John stared at her.

  “I’m going to leave now, John, before you go and say something else stupid. I’ll tell Nurse Ratchet outside that you’re awake. Au revoir, Johnniepoo.”

  Chapter Four

  Susan’s earliest memory was powerful and clear. She was four and a half, and she was in the elevator of the Benson Hotel, Portland, Oregon, wearing a beaded strapless evening gown paid for with the proceeds of rabbits her mother Marilyn sold from hutches adjoining the double-wide trailer back in McMinnville.

  Marilyn had toiled for umpteen hours on each of the gown’s beaded filaments, in between furtive glances at walls papered with gown photos ripped from ladies’ magazines and specialized pageantry publications. Marilyn had also recently purchased a glue gun and she had had great plans for fastening sparkly objects to belts and accessories.

  Susan’s face was heavily pancaked in a manner calculated to add fifteen years to her age. She was wearing a diagonal rayon sash across her chest reading PETITE MISS MULTNOMAH COUNTY—FIRST RUNNER-UP, and her face was so moist from tears it felt like an unsqueezed dish sponge. She remembered pushing a button for each of the floors. The doors opened sixteen times from penthouse to basement, each time revealing the absence of Marilyn.

  Earlier, just before Susan had gone onstage, Marilyn had clasped her shoulders, looked her dead in the eyes and said, “Only the prettiest and the best-behaved girl gets to win, and if you don’t win, I’m not going to be here waiting for you afterward. Do you understand this? Is this clear?” Susan had nodded and gone onstage with the fluid military precision drummed into her on a mock catwalk Marilyn had chalked onto the concrete at the cul-de-sac’s end back in McMinnville. And yet she hadn’t won, and had no idea what mistake had caused her to lose.

  Once the elevator reached the lowest level, Susan pushed all the buttons on the pad again, and rose upward. When the doors on the main floor opened, she saw dozens of the mother-daughter molecules specific to pageantry, milling their way out the front door. Marilyn was speaking to the concierge. She looked at Susan exiting the elevator and, cool-as-you-will, said, “Oh my, a runner-up.” As Susan came closer she added, “I have a daughter, yes, but she’s a winner, and you couldn’t possibly be her because your sash says FIRST RUNNER-UP, which means the same thing as losing.”

  Susan burst into tears.

  “Oh, shut up,” said Marilyn, and she gave her daughter a handkerchief. “You’ll stain the dress. Come on. Let’s walk to the car.”

  Susan followed, brimming with the shameful gratitude of a puppy in training. The night was cool, on the brink of discomfort.

  “Oh Susan,” began Marilyn, “You know how long we worked on this one. It’s been weeks since I’ve touched a bingo card with Elaine or even watched TV. I think of the time I spend trying to make you the winningest little girl in Oregon and I start to feeling like those inmates in orange jumpsuits picking up litter on the sides of the Interstate.”

  Bums heckled them as the
y walked through the town center. Marilyn looked their way and said: “They can’t pave this city fast enough. Put a ten-lane freeway right through these old heaps, call it a mall, and gas those wretched winos.”

  Susan sniffled and her heels clicked on the sidewalk like a sous-chef’s cutting knife on a board.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?” asked Marilyn. “You’re so quiet, like a Barbie doll, except Barbie wouldn’t have muffed her lighting cue on the ‘Spirit of Recycling’ dance routine.” Marilyn breathed a sigh like a deflating parade balloon. She lit a cigarette. “You could at least show a bit more spunk with me—fight back—a little bit of give-and-take.”

  But Susan remained silent. Susan was going to be Barbie. She was going to be more Barbie than Barbie, and in having made this decision, she unwittingly followed Marilyn’s dancing lead.

  They reached the car, the sunroofed Corvair Susan considered the one truly glamorous aspect of her family’s life. It appeared that Marilyn was not going to assist her, so as she got in, she carefully lifted and folded her dress so as not to damage it when shutting the door.

  Marilyn started the car, and they pulled out of the downtown core. “Okay then, Susan. Your ramp walking was pretty good. A good stride. And the makeup worked well under that lighting. A bit too tarty, maybe, but good.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s ‘tarty’?”

  Marilyn deemed it inappropriate to discuss tartiness with her four-and-a-half-year-old. She ignored the question. “Next time you’re going to have to approach the fore-catwalk more naturally, and I truly think those bangs of yours are going to have to grow out some.” She looked over at her daughter. “Susan, your eyes look like two cherry pits spit onto the floor,” but Susan was drifting off to sleep. A gentle rain was falling and the wipers were slapping. “I was never able to enter pageants myself, Susan. I could only dream of them. The excitement. The dresses. The winning. I was stuck out in the boondocks with my wretched family.” She pulled onto the highway back to McMinnville. “I never had what you have now—a mother who cares for you and who wants you to win. And certainly not what you’re going to have—a big success in life—and trust me, you’re going to have it. Me, I’ll never be the prettiest or the purest or the best, but you—you will.”