Radiance: A Novel Page 12

  “We know. There’s cameras all up in here. We saw you go in the hole.”

  Bodie, fast as a squid, or like some beast specially evolved for propelling itself by its forelimbs, had opened his collapsible chair and slithered up and mounted himself in it, in his tuxedo. Now he looked like what Mark had heard he was: the president of the senior class back home in Ohio; and he actually gave a little speech. “Officer? I’d like to say something. I just want to say you’ll find we’re cooperative. I understand police deal with unpredictable, violent people. So I want you to know that, in the case of us, you’re not dealing with citizens who are resisting what you do. We’re totally appreciative of the great service to society you provide. We want to cooperate with whatever.”

  The policeman was taking a mental snapshot, the picture of the articulate, handsome, golden-haired boy. Then he looked at Mark, while, with one finger, he sketched little triangular diagrams among them—“Daughter?”—his finger tilted to Lotta. Then it tilted toward Bodie, ticktocking between the girl and the boy. And Mark had to nod and shrug, meaning yes, they’re friends. They’re an item. All three of them confederates in this stupid crime. Which would cost them an undisclosed amount in fines. And some hours in a police station. But oddly, Mark wasn’t tired. Rather a pleasant, mean irresponsibility had begun to kindle. It arose from a spark deep inside, a spark that had been born at the moment in his hotel room when (the exact time on the bedside clock face was 11:17) he hung up the phone and left “bedtime” in the dust and started getting dressed again for a night on the town. He liked this calamity as it was shaping up. He invited it. He loafed and invited it, in the words of a grade school poem that came back to him. He liked its getting worse because none of this was his life. These detours could lead to yet further detours, so it felt. And in L.A. he could go on indefinitely getting farther.

  THE BACK SEAT of a police car turns out to be more posh and squishy than one might expect; and this particular one happened to be clean, and new, so that the situation reminded Mark of the fancy Town Cars they send out from big conferences or TV stations. But a police car turns out to have a few crucial, existential differences from a limo. The cage grid segregating front seat from back, the bare lack of interior door handles: such things remind the passenger of his very nonexalted condition. The two young police officers (one a female) who rode in the front seat didn’t talk. His Lotta, however, beside him, talked unself-consciously and brazenly as if this were a Town Car taking them around to one more adventure on their Fantasy trip. “Bodie’s really nice, Dad,” she told Mark for openers, settling in. “We want to visit each other after this weekend. Me go out there. Him come to San Francisco.”

  By a daughter’s spoiledness, a father can be fortified. In a jam like this, her presence was a good-luck charm furnishing his bravery and good cheer; he knew that. A spoiled girl is an attainment, she’s money in the bank, here and everywhere, magically promising a comfortable decline for himself in his old royalty. The indulgent streak first came out in the case of a certain pink electric guitar. When she was five she set all her desires on a small electric guitar with a pink finish, which she’d only seen from the passing car, in a shop window on the way to day care every day. It turned out to be a real, actual, working guitar, not a toy at all, though half-sized. And cost two hundred dollars. Her mother disapproved, with vehemence. She was even too-quickly resentful of the idea, saying—and she was making a valid point—that Lotta’s little fingers couldn’t yet begin to play it, and she’d probably end up leaving it out in the dew—but Mark went out and bought it anyway. Audrey was stunned, and importantly betrayed. The outcome was, Lotta never touched the pink guitar. It never once came out of its little curvaceous case. Having won it, she put it in the closet and never needed to even look at it again.

  Mark turned to Lotta, “Well, yes, may I ask about him, in general?”

  Bodie had been taken in a separate police van—one that could accommodate wheelchairs in the manner required by regulations—so Mark and Lotta were alone together for this trip to a Santa Monica precinct, to be reunited with him there. Mark began by inquiring, “He seems awfully self-confident. That is, he seems awfully self-assured.”

  It wasn’t meant to sound critical. All he meant was, obviously, the boy stood out like a brochure for a well-adjusted, impressive, ambitious young man. He was thinking for example of that patronizing little speech he’d given the arresting officer. Mark just wanted to get to the bottom of that personality. Find its wellsprings.

  Lotta, sensing criticism, didn’t answer but stared out the window.

  “What exactly is his medical condition?” He was aiming to set an example by speaking lower than she had, within the hearing of the two cops in the front seat.

  “Yes, isn’t he strong?” she cried. “When he pulled up the wheelchair?”

  It was true, as he hauled the rope, his bicep was like a grapefruit inside the cheap tuxedo fabric.

  “Bodie’s amazing, Dad. He’s got his own car at home, and he does all the mechanical work on it himself. He put hand controls on the steering-wheel part, for brakes and accelerating, so he could drive without needing his feet. But he got rid of it. He sold it. Because of the environmental thing. And now he’s building himself a quadricycle!”

  “Yes, Bodie is amazing,” said Mark.

  There was not the slightest slant of sarcasm there, absolutely none, but she discerned it anyway; and by way of scolding her father, she said, “If we can ever get out of this mess tonight, he and I still plan to go walking upon the shore together.”

  Not the beach but “the shore.” And “upon the shore.” There was a whole new pretentiousness at work tonight in his sixteen-year-old, which, however, struck him as a not-bad development. Not at all. A pretentiousness was a kind of first blossom.

  “Let us just defer making any decisions about tomorrow, Lott. If we can get out of this, there’s going to be food and some sleep first.”

  “You can rent wheelchairs that are all-terrain right here in L.A. with big yellow balloony wheels. He showed me an Internet site. They’re like space-vehicle rovers, so you can go out on the beach. Or wherever! And really, Dad, this kind of entertainment-business fantasy, it’s toxic to the soul. It’s egoism.” She had turned on him, though restrained by seat belt and handcuffs, and she carried on, talking in this spiritual vein, so garrulous, the girl who never spoke around the house, who was so determined to get away to Connecticut that the only sign of her presence at home was the firmly closed bedroom door. In Connecticut, she was of course fleeing not just her own social failure at school. She was fleeing home, the waiting area their five-room semidetached condominium had become. Mark sometimes got the irrational feeling she knew he didn’t really understand gauge symmetry and was avoided in the department corridor, knew by her inborn radar, the ovarian radar, not the specific facts, just the doom in his aura when he came in the door at night from his Berkeley commute. At this moment in the police cruiser, hoping to keep her talking as if they really did have a rapport, it felt like trying to sustain her on a bicycle: he could only watch in suspense. As she went on, she made eye contact with him, for a longer period than ever in her life, or at least ever since she’d become a beautiful young woman. Finally, having denounced and reprehended all the self-centeredness in modern society, she subsided back in her corner of the police car. “How much better just to walk upon the shore.”

  “Does he, like … practice a faith or something?” he asked recklessly.

  “Bodie?”

  How to begin sketching himself out of this?

  “Well, there’s a kind of philosophical, ethical … atmosphere I’m sensing around Bodie.”

  But he was onto something: it was, yes, precisely the look of a convert or devotee, the just-massaged look, the just-anointed look.

  “You see that! You notice that!” She was so pleased she bounced to face him again in her deep-upholstered seat, limited by the seat belt, which had been so ceremoniously app
lied by the attending female cop, who was extremely careful never to come in physical contact with her at any point in the process. She glared at her father evaluatively for a minute. “You know, Dad, with Bodie’s obvious situation,” she shrugged toward the fact of the boy’s inert legs, “he has really had to face some things.” She spoke with a leaden solemnity: the point was, Bodie had faced things Mark had never faced.

  She sat deeper back in the seat. As a courtesy the police had released the prisoners from the behind-the-back cuffs, so they could sit more easily with hands cuffed in their laps. Nevertheless, father and daughter were riding along together in actual manacles. Maybe years from now it would be something they would be able to joke and reminisce about, about the time they’d been arrested and booked together as a father-daughter team, trespassing on the grounds of the Hollywood Sign. The arresting officer—the African American one, whose name was McCuddy—said the entire arrest procedure was required by law, including “detainment,” and including “determination of arraignment,” which must be how they extract the fine.

  He ought to call Blythe. He still had his phone.

  The thought of calling home—and telling Audrey—had crossed his mind. But that was a different world. Audrey would be asleep. She would have spent the evening on the couch switching around from CNN to the History Channel, from PBS to Animal Planet to Comedy Central, while, in her tall, cylindrical glass of black beer, the band of beige foam collapsed and soapily clung. By now she would be in bed.

  So instead he would call Blythe. At the jailhouse they might take away his cell phone. Or even make him empty his pockets altogether. At this point they’d been patted down, but nothing had been taken away, and he was able, with both chained-together hands, to get out his phone.

  “But,” he went on, “Bodie has some kind of systematic ‘program,’ though? He’s an environmentalist? In some thoroughgoing way?”

  “Oh, it’s complicated. He believes we’re always constantly committing crimes against humanity. We should sit down seriously some day,” she warned her father. This apparently wasn’t the moment for serious talk: she turned her attention and watched the street go by.

  But then, anyway, she plunged straight into it: “Like for instance, ideally in a perfect world, there wouldn’t be packaging. Packaging is just one aspect! Packaging alone is some huge percentage of global warming. It’s disgusting, the packaging industry during this past century. The packaging industry got way out of hand.” (This was the new syntax taking root. It so impressive Mark found he was sitting back and turning over the controls.) “Did you know that beer distillers will have, like, two different can designs—like one brand of beer will be called, like, “Schlumpf,” and it’s for fat, lowbrow guys, and the other is called “St. So-and-So Lager,” and it’s for high-class snobs—but the same beer goes in the two cans. It’s the same beer. Literally from the same big vat, like in Milwaukee or someplace. So really, the consumer is just buying a label. He’s buying a self-image for himself, high-class or lowbrow. They’re selling us ourselves. That’s what we’re buying. A self. By holding a package. By holding a package design in your hand, you get a self. It doesn’t matter what’s in the package. People only want a label. Label for themselves. And meanwhile the oceans are dying.”

  Bodie Lostig had been instructing her on many topics. Maybe he wanted people to bring Mason jars to the store and scoop things out of bins. It was a delight seeing her run through the whole speech.

  He ventured, “What’s the ‘crime against humanity’ though? If you’re just buying beer.”

  She sighed in admiration of Bodie, “Oh, he’s got this whole thing. Ideally, nothing would leave people’s property, ever. And almost nothing would be purchased, or bought, to come on the property. Ideally, people would do a little agriculture at home. And fix their own stuff, instead of buying new. In Shaker Heights everybody has big yards, and every house could grow vegetables and have a goat and a few chickens and even their manure could stay on the property. He founded an organization called S.T.O.P. It stands for Stay On the Property. Because every time an American buys something or flips a switch, something dies. Something dies out there in the world.”

  As she spoke she kept watching Los Angeles go by. Storefronts. Mongolian barbeque. Tanning salon. Discount women’s shoes. Nobody here was going to start staying on his own property all day. To feed the goat. And do the laundry in a tub.

  Lotta had started frowning. “I don’t know. Bodie’s father says he’s Baha’i, supposedly. Since you ask. Whatever ‘Baha’i-ism’ is. But Bodie’s father—” her tone indicated a blanket contempt of the father.

  In any case, Baha’i-ism wasn’t it. Baha’i-ism had nothing to do with what was wrong with Bodie.

  “So, sweetheart, I guess, then, this all explains why he eats so simply? Why he eats raw vegan food? Because cooking it causes global warming and coal mining and oil wars and deforestation.”

  He sounded derisive, unintentionally. But Lotta didn’t seem to notice. Her mind had flown to new things, and she watched the boulevard go by, the rhythm of passing streetlamps, endless shops and restaurants.

  None of this was going to the heart of Bodie’s mysterious humorless zeal, his unusual rectitude or self-certainty—or fanaticism—or whatever it was inside him compelling that angelic vigilance of his, from his perch. Lotta, looking out the window, observed, “He and I haven’t ‘discussed’ Baha’i-whatever.” She turned. “But you know what he does do? Which he does? He does his little weekly meetings for people whose parents are drunks. He goes at least every week. His father is an alcoholic.”

  The constantly evolving Bodie. Now Mark had to picture him in a suburban Cleveland church basement, wheeling in to take his place for an evening, among the folding chairs. Those organizations are themselves religions. “So this would be his—” Mark patted his own heart area, with manacled fist “—his ‘inner voice’?”

  “His father is such an alcoholic he’s irresponsible, and he lies, and he screws around with money. So Bodie grew up with that. He says having a weak father is the best thing that ever happened to him. Because it made him mature.”

  “How awful for him,” Mark conceded, in a slightly singsong tone, begrudging Bodie a little actual heroism.

  “Well, his father isn’t ‘violent.’ Like he doesn’t ‘do’ anything. He just has a series of schemes that never work out.”

  “What does he do? For a living?”

  Lotta reflected, despondent. “He’s just rich. And drinks and makes promises. I think he’s just rich.”

  So, if the Lostigs were still planning to fly out here, Mark wouldn’t anymore have to picture himself confronting a leather-jacketed car salesman with an expensive wristwatch. Instead it would be an amiable lush. Easier to take, limper of handshake, probably letting his wife do the talking, his eyes wandering.

  Meanwhile, the cell phone still lay in his handcuffed hands.

  It would be a violation of procedure, surely, to make a call now, after the legal moment when he’d been informed he was under arrest. But the phone might be confiscated at the police station. The words incarceration and detainment, both, had been used in conversation with Officer McCuddy. He’d better try to call while he still could.

  “Interesting!” he remarked, of Bodie’s whole ethical construction, while opening his phone, “But I think I ought to try this, just for a second.” He dialed Blythe, and she answered right away:

  “Where are you?” she said. She was in her car, he could tell.

  “They’re taking us all the way to Santa Monica. Different police station.”

  “It will be two in the morning or something. And all you had was a little sashimi.”

  “I’m fine. I made a snack for myself out of the hotel minibar. But listen. Could you get together a few hundred dollars in cash? I’m sure we’ll have to pay a fine. I think they’ll put us in a cell for a little while, while they process our … ‘case.’ And then make us pay a fine.”

>   “Oh, Mark. After all this, let’s get breakfast. Champagne mimosas.”

  He told her, “I’ll get to my own bank in the morning and pay you back. Better make it a couple thousand dollars. That should be more than enough. I’ll probably have to pay for three fines: me and both kids. I think they give you a court date, like six months out. And then make you pay bail and then you have to forfeit bail,” he said. “Anyway. Sorry. I’m complaining.”

  “I’ll figure out where the Santa Monica police station is. And drive out. You know, it’s not a long drive to Santa Monica. You were already near there. It’s really right next to you.”

  “Anyway,” he said. “Gotta go.” Into that terse goodbye, he put as much tenderness as he possibly could, with his daughter listening. “I think it’s against the rules for me to be calling you.”

  So he put his phone away, without the cops’ seeming to notice. Maybe they didn’t care. He was getting the sense this was a minor infraction and they were low-security prisoners.

  But Lotta now had been watching him. With a certain expression. Then hidden it, looking back out the window.

  She knew. More than suspected. Knew. Her intuition had told her. She knew that he and Blythe shared a liking. And an understanding. Possibly she’d known for some while—while this silly Vacation was running its three-day course—that the axis of her father’s turning world had been budged, just a little, just for one weekend.

  But there was nothing in particular she would do with this knowledge. She’d always been a discerning, sharp-eyed child, from her earliest consciousness and her earliest manipulativeness. She was probably even—yes, indeed! she would be!—amused by a father’s unlikely sentimental adventure. Lotta wasn’t merely a sharp-eyed person, she was also a judicious person, capable of discretion, and a merciful and wise person, too—and cagey, too—as sometimes the exercise of mercy and wisdom takes that form, of caginess.