Radiance: A Novel Read online

  “You think I won’t get lost up there?”

  “It’s not complicated up there. And me, I’m an employee of Fantasy Vacations. I don’t want to involve them if the police do catch you-all trespassing. I’ll be much more useful on the outside of this. So. Better hurry.”

  Mark just stood there looking at her, trying to show as much selfdoubt as possible.

  “Take my word for it,” she said. “I’m more useful if I don’t get arrested.”

  “Dad, are you there?” said Lotta’s voice in the thimble of the phone speaker.

  ALL HE HAD to do was aim for the place where the helicopter had come out. Throughout the area, the true, original Los Angeles desert here opened up and showed itself, in a dry slope of scrubby little plants, crisscrossed with any number of footpaths to choose from, all braided back and forth. Plainly there was always plenty of hiking here beyond the no-trespassing notices. A flashlight wouldn’t have been necessary, because Los Angeles’s nightlong orange radiation never fails. The terrain all around was becoming clearer as he rose on the slope—his Berkeley shoes in the pulverized gray talcum—and then a dry streambed of a soapy hardpan, in streaks, white, as if the soil here caked up in fluffy salts, carbonates, CaCO3, NaHCO3, looking as if he might find it citrus tasting and caustic on the tongue if he pinched up a bit of it. Though he didn’t. When he got up on a rise, he stopped, to look downhill and uphill, and orient himself, and he realized that the Hollywood Sign had been visible for some while, a kind of assumption in his mental periphery, looming ghostly in the diffuse orange haze, the tall letters personifying themselves perfectly, just as on TV. Monuments do that: by immense constancy they attain an invisibility. And by invisibility, omnipresence. He took out his phone to try calling Lotta, rather than shouting for her at this point.

  Then although he didn’t hear the far ringtone in the upper slope, he saw the candlelight opening up: it was her cell phone’s screen in the distance. Lotta’s voice in the phone said, “I see the light of your phone.” And he told her, “I see the light of your phone.” It was romance. They were two lightning bugs from the backyards of Illinois out here in California. He could pick out a route. Soon he was following the tracks of the wheelchair’s wheels in the dust. The land steepened and tossed. It was admirable how Lotta and the wheelchair boy had made it as far as they did, all under their own efforts, probably Lotta pushing and jamming from behind, in her sweater-and-sneakers outfit, while Bodie would have powered himself along by his own grip on the wheel rims. When Mark arrived, breathing hard, he seated himself where Lotta had been sitting—(she had stood up for him, in her flat-footed, sneaker-shod way, to give him the daughter-hug, awkward and lopsided)—and he said:

  “Where’s the Fig Newtons. I hope you didn’t eat all the Fig Newtons.” He wanted his daughter and Bodie to know that, while this was a very bad idea of theirs, he wasn’t going to make them suffer for it. Always, of the two parents, he’d been the one to spoil Lotta. Whenever he and Lotta’s mother disagreed—over, say, the forgiveness of a flippant remark, or the purchase of expensive shoes—Mark was always the lenient one. By the time of her adolescence he had reached a point of finding himself defending the whole practice of spoiling your child, on principle, spoiling her as much as you can, as long as it’s still possible.

  She asked where Blythe was, and he told her Blythe had stayed down. “She’s got the car. I’ll call her.”

  But he didn’t get his phone out. He was still out of breath.

  “Hey there, Mr. Perdue,” said Bodie, reclining at the bottom of the little cliff he’d gone over. Bodie addressed all grown-ups by their surnames, keeping them in their place. At first he’d been calling Mark Doctor Perdue.

  “I guess you’re not injured, there, ah, Mr. Lostig,” Mark said.

  “No, no, I’m great.” He made a little embarrassed flip of the hand, reclining on an elbow, looking uncharacteristically elegant in a tuxedo. Usually the boy seemed to prefer old threadbare Tshirts, which let the virtue of his pectorals and biceps shine through. His wheelchair was down there too, its chrome gleaming in the general diffuse light pollution. He said, “I see you brought the rope. That is most excellent.”

  In fact he’d forgotten about the rope, but there it was in the dust before him, right where he’d dropped it. Blythe must have thrust it into his hands. And luckily he’d carried it on up.

  “I just need a little traction,” Bodie said. “I’m in good-enough shape to pull myself up. Right there beside you is a bush with a strongenough trunk.”

  Lotta had picked up the rope and was scratching at the heavy shrink-wrap but finding it too tough for her fingernail to break open. So she started digging in her purse. Probably for something to poke it with. She was too young to be carrying a purse. A purse looked all wrong on her. In her red dress and yellow cardigan and her trademark black canvas sneakers, she’d found a way of squatting so as to preserve the gown’s fabric. She was really just a tomboy playing dress-up, in a red dress, using her house key now, to stab holes in the shrink-wrap, lifting the package to tear at its seam with her teeth.

  “Here’s my plan,” said Bodie from twenty feet below. Mark couldn’t entirely, freely dislike Bodie Lostig. Not disliking Bodie Lostig was something that had begun congealing around him at the moment, ten minutes ago on the phone, when Lotta had said she was throwing Fig Newtons down to “the poor guy,” and in that expression the poor guy, Mark recognized a badge of woman’s admiration, and woman’s condescension, and so he saw womanliness and authority in his daughter, too, along with the sight of that new, old shape displayed in her red gown. When a female confers the fond honorific poor upon a fellow, the fellow has, by that condescension, been admitted to a fraternity, a secret knighthood, but a comical knighthood among all the poor guys, so that even Bodie Lostig, poor guy, could suddenly matriculate toward the status of son-in-law, as they were all, somehow, all playing dress-up, him too, masquerading as Father.

  Bodie meanwhile had described his plan. He wanted the rope tied at its midpoint to the manzanita trunk. Then the two loose ends of it would be thrown down to him. He would tie one end to his wheelchair. Then, on the other length of the rope, he would pull himself up, hand over hand, by the sheer strength of his biceps. Once he’d dragged himself up, he could hoist the wheelchair up after.

  “Is the wheelchair damaged?” Mark wanted to know—because that would make a big difference in the task of getting him out of here.

  “You could drop one of these out of an airplane and it would bounce and be good as new. We’ll see how it rolls when I get up there.”

  Seen from above, the two big bicycle-sized wheels still looked to be mounted straight and true.

  Meanwhile, Lotta stood up. She had liberated the rope and was whipping it to limber it up, freely as a microphone cord. “Like this?” she asked Bodie, squatting down at the base of the manzanita.

  The boy down in the ditch said to Mark, “I’ve always wanted to sit out under the stars with a real astrophysicist. Too bad we don’t have a minute or two.”

  “Too bad there’s no stars,” grumbled Lotta while she tied the knot.

  Mark of course wasn’t an “astrophysicist,” but one grows tired of making such fine-cut little distinctions. He told Lotta, while she worked on the rope, “You were great onstage tonight,” saying it for perhaps the fourth or fifth time, tiresomely, but it was a remark that was supposed to bear so much heavier meaning, like how much he admired the whole package, her, the emerging woman, the competence she was showing in simply tying a knot. He was passing the torch, lying back while she did the work. Here they were in this stupid, mistaken situation, and he was simply jazzed to be with her, as if it were a picnic.

  She dropped back from the finished knot at the shrub’s trunk, kneeling now to face him, and she said, “Dad?”

  She was seizing a serious moment.

  “Bodie and I don’t want to do any of the activities tomorrow. The video shoot, the awards ceremony. We’re done.
We graduate.”

  “You don’t?”

  He didn’t mean to sound so crestfallen. Because in fact such a development would be interesting. Dropping out of the Fantasy Weekend seemed not to be a matter of any shame or failure. It was rather some kind of new adventuresomeness of theirs.

  “Bodie thinks it’s self-indulgent, and so do I.”

  “While of course we do understand that everybody has the best intentions.” So spoke Bodie, from below. He was tying the rope to the chrome frame of his wheelchair, giving it smart little yanks to harden the knots.

  “That’s right,” said Lotta. “We’re both thankful! We both know we’re lucky that we have parents who did all this for us,” she gestured around at the city of Los Angeles.

  Lotta never spoke this way. It was something she’d learned within forty-eight hours. “But you know, I’m not so … materialistic, Dad.”

  She broke that news gently and with a soft wince of sympathy. For of course all dads are materialistic, doomed to materialism, all besotted with unevolved caveman materialism. Now by his daughter’s decree, Mark was going to be freed from all that. “Bodie and I want to go walking on the shore tomorrow together. That’s all we want to do. They rent all-terrain wheelchairs. We can give our poor chauffeurs a day off. These tours for young people who want to be famous, it’s all so …” she shuddered.

  This was a new kind of syntax or grammar for her, literally: she was starting to build her sentences in a whole new way, but she lacked, yet, the complete arsenal of new jargon.

  He’s a philosopher: so the dark circle of Celebrities at the Studio Lot had muttered, on the topic of Bodie. He’s holy, he’s intense, that was the refrain of the little chorus around the table. Now Lotta was “reordering her priorities” and aspired to be “a humbler person.” The impression was, yes, she’d joined a new religion, and Bodie Lostig was its prophet.

  “I’ve got it all planned, Mr. Perdue,” said Bodie. He had begun now pulling himself up, by hand-over-hand grips on the rope. “Los Angeles actually does have public transportation. Little-known fact. It actually has a light-rail system. And it’s got wheelchair accessibility out to the beach.”

  He was an athlete all right, trained in a Shaker Heights high school gymnasium. He was dragging himself up the slope and didn’t seem taxed for breath. Neither of them appeared to be embarrassed about any of this. Whatever petting or embracing had happened in the back of their limousine—and however gleefully the scandal had been publicized by their fellow Celebrities—none of it seemed to bother them now. Mark didn’t want a pair of errant kids to be ashamed, or remorse-ridden; and he didn’t see their shamelessness as any sort of “audacity” or “impudence.” He just found it remarkable. It was almost as if, possibly, not much had happened in the back seat of Bodie’s limo. That was a real likelihood. Maybe the first report of scandal was exaggerated. Himself, imagining a scene of love in the car, he had no desire to picture exactly how nurselike or charitable would have been the ministrations of his daughter, his brave, good-hearted daughter, upon this merman, her “trained seal” as she’d referred to him, and on the whole it was better for him to guide his thinking away from it. Really, maybe it was true: maybe not much had happened.

  “No kidding,” said Bodie as he came up level upon the beach of earth beside them to evolve toward equal stature, no longer to be pelted with Fig Newtons. “I do have lots of questions for you about your work sometime, as an astrophysicist.”

  “You’re so strong!” Lotta told him, while she clapped at the dust on his tuxedo jacket.

  Bodie said, “I was telling Lotta—though I’m sure you get this question a lot—I want to ask you what everything is made of these days. Underneath atoms and quarks, et cetera, down where you smash up atoms.” His fingers strummed in the dust as illustration. “Isn’t that what physicists really know? The fundamental thing? Supposedly?”

  This inquiry was some kind of challenge. There was almost the repressed grin of defiance, or a leer, or a sneer.

  It would be odd if inquiring into his ideas as a physicist should seem more insolent than kissing his daughter.

  Uphill above them, there was a motion. It was a flashlight, winking, as it swept a path in the steep scrub. And of course it was in the hand of a policeman. He was picking his way down the slope, taking his time, while above him another policeman waited, holding his ground. Which is probably standard police procedure. Because if, say, something like a gunfight ensues, one of the two partners should be at a safer distance.

  THE FIRST THING Mark had the presence of mind to do was call Blythe. While the police were still far above, he turned his back and dialed her to say very softly into the phone that it was just as she’d predicted, the cops had shown up, and she should stay away to avoid getting involved. He would phone her later, as soon as he could. He also told her not to bother with recruiting her two strong friends: they wouldn’t be needed; and he hung up fast. She hardly had a chance to respond, except to say “Oh, Mark!” Meanwhile, the one policeman had come shambling down the slope, in an apologetic forgiving kind of way. He was a tall African American, in great physical condition, bulked-up, like one who exercises by lifting weights, but he moved with a middle-aged sedentary man’s mincing reluctance to be on a steep slope—to be outside of his comfy patrol car at all—in a uniform dry-cleaned and pressed—his immense feet in polished shoes picking out landing places among the woody shrubs. Before he arrived, Bodie murmured, “Sorry, Mr. Perdue.”

  His daughter added, “Probably they just kick you out. They don’t arrest you.”

  “Or make you pay a fine,” Bodie suggested.

  The policeman, holstering his big black flashlight, arrived and began by spreading his palms around in air, “Are you folks aware you’re trespassing on private property?”

  Bodie Lostig, of Ohio, wearing a tuxedo, spoke up, “We thought it was owned by the City of Los Angeles.” He was seated in a seductive bathing-beauty pose for the policeman.

  “May I see some identification?” he circulated a finger meaning everybody in the circle should come up with something.

  Fortunately Lotta had her purse. She would be able to show her new DMV learner’s permit; it was just a folded-up page rather than a real license, but it was something. Mark, as he hauled out his own wallet, felt glad to be just a common lowly tourist, here on his daughter’s “Fantasy Vacation.”

  The policeman examined the documents he’d been handed.

  His younger partner, still standing far up the slope, shifted his weight, and folded and refolded his arms. He, too, would rather be back in the patrol car.

  The policeman focused on Mark, tapping the face of his driver’s license: “Is this you?”

  Mark didn’t answer. Meaning yes.

  He went back to examining the other things—Bodie’s Ohio driver’s license, Lotta’s unfolded sheet of paper.

  Lotta put in, “We’re really just visitors. All we wanted to do was touch the Hollywood Sign.”

  This cop had heard that before. “Well, I’m going to have to take you all in.”

  Mark’s little heart attack then did come back, not the thing itself, just the moral idea of it, the melodrama, being a victim of circumstances here. An arrest procedure would take hours. “I suppose there’s probably a fine, too,” he said. Symmetrically his jaw was applying pressure to each of his molars in turn, alternating between left and right, four pulses of pressure per tooth, four molars on each side. He got to the end of a series before pausing to speak again. “Can you tell me how much the fine is?”

  “I have no idea, sir,” he said.

  That meant for sure there was a fine. Because of course he arrested people for this misdemeanor all the time and he knew the exact figures, but he wasn’t allowed to mention any numbers, because it would sound like an invitation to bribery. This whole process, including the release procedures, would take hours. They wouldn’t be walking freely out the front door of a police station until daylight.
r />   Mark told his young pals, “I’m afraid we might not make the recording session or whatever. The videotaping.”

  “No worries, Dad. We never did want to do that.”

  “Are you able to walk?” the policeman asked the beached merman.

  “This is my wheelchair. I’m paralyzed from the waist down.”

  This cop didn’t admit any admiration of the feat they’d accomplished, getting a wheelchair all the way up here. He just called to his partner, without turning away, “Jared? You’d better go bring the car down below. All the way round to Canyon Lake. We’re going to have to descend.”

  His partner—younger, Caucasian—gave a hapless flop of the arms, and then went on standing there, going nowhere.

  “Folks? Mr. Perdue? We’re going to drive you to Santa Monica. We can’t use our precinct here.”

  He again lifted his voice in the night to his partner, telling him, “Also, Jared, you better radio for a van.”

  The partner went on going nowhere and doing nothing, just standing there on the slope, stretching his neck muscles by dropping his head to one side.

  “According to the terms of the Americans with Disabilities Act, we have to provide incarceration facilities with wheelchair accessibility, and our precinct here happens to be doing construction work right now on the accessible cells, so they’ll take you in Santa Monica.”

  “May I open out my wheelchair and get in?” said Bodie. “You’ll find I’m pretty good in it and I won’t need much help. If the wheels still turn. See, I fell down in there.”