Panorama City (12 page)

 

His story made an impression on me, Juan-George, I had never heard of ghosts appearing at the end of hospital beds, I
thought the Lord must have had something special in store for JB. I wondered, too, what it would be like to be a conduit myself, what it would be like to have that experience, it was more of an idle curiosity in that moment than a deep feeling, but then again the ground was stable under my feet, I hadn't yet been buffeted by what JB had called fortune's shifting winds. I was concerned about Paul, we had pulled up to his building, I wasn't sure how I was going to explain to JB that I needed to talk to Paul about the clinical trial, JB hadn't given me a chance to explain while we were in the car, he had talked the whole time. And so I told him I'd left something on the roof, on the penthouse patio, which was true, I don't like to lie. We took the elevator to the top floor and went out the door I'd used before, the one with the alarm bell on it, but this time a bell rang. JB didn't seem fazed, he pulled a card from his wallet and wedged it into the door jamb and the bell went silent. Old habits, he said. The patio looked so different I wondered if I'd accidentally come into the wrong building. Everything was gone. Everything was cleared away. Later Paul would explain to me that zoning issues had resulted in a total impasse between him and the building's owner, which was the reason he had been arrested, which was the reason the charges had been trumped up, but at that moment I couldn't comprehend why someone had taken all of Paul's things and disposed of them like this, especially the massive supply of valuable antioxidant cream and ultraviolet penlights, we had amassed an arsenal of rude commerce in the war for time to think and now it was gone. JB asked whether I was okay, he asked me if I needed to sit down. Before I could answer, a man appeared on the roof, holding an aluminum baseball bat, he asked if we were with the asshole who'd made a mess of his building. I couldn't speak, my tongue swelled in my mouth, I couldn't make words. The man informed us that if we were looking for all that shit it was gone and that we should get gone too. We could take the stairs or he would send us down the quick way, his words. JB and I walked to the door, we walked past the man with the baseball bat, he smelled like coconut and mint.

 

I couldn't believe that Paul's entire penthouse patio was gone. It was as if I'd found out that there never had been a Paul Renfro, that I'd made up everything, that those late night conversations about the scientific method with a fellow thinker had been figments of my imagination. I came to my senses, Juan-George, I mean it was ridiculous to imagine that I'd made him up, but the feeling stuck with me, the feeling of showing up on that roof and seeing nothing left, everything swept away. JB started the car and we drove away and while I was feeling shattered, completely shattered, JB laughed, not at my being shattered but at what had just happened. He told me that I knew how to have fun, that he'd never had so much sober fun in his life. He told me that back in his heyday he would have thrown that guy off his own roof, no questions asked. I told him I couldn't believe there was nothing left, I couldn't tell him about Paul Renfro, I told him I couldn't believe the roof had been swept clean of everything. He didn't ask me to explain, he only said that I should stick with the Lighthouse, that I needed the Lighthouse. I had the feeling he was right, that feeling stayed with me for a while. Later, Dr. Rosenkleig told me that on the roof I had experienced the loss of the father all over again, a so-called variation on a theme. He suggested that discussing my father's death through the lens of Paul's disappearance might help us dig deeper, which made no sense to me, I couldn't see what one had to do with the other, but then again Dr. Rosenkleig lacked insight into the workings of the human mind, which was why he had become a professional in the first place.

 

Later that week I found JB and his gold Datsun waiting for me after work. I asked him if Aunt Liz had sent him to monitor my activities. He told me he hadn't seen Aunt Liz since we had all sat down at the table together, he told me he'd come to pick me up and take me to the Lighthouse, he was a soul tender, his words, and my soul needed tending. All I had to do, his words, was come with him and keep my eyes and ears open. That sounded easy enough. We arrived just in time to hear the speaker, Scott Valdez, founder of the Lighthouse. Everyone had arranged the chairs facing the front, toward a simple podium, though some people stood along the walls or sat on the floor or on tables, I don't quite know how to say it, they made a show of being informal. We took two seats in the back and I kept my eyes and ears open. Scott Valdez began by saying that he was going to talk about grace, he spread out his arms, which were alarmingly short, and repeated the word
grace.
Or maybe his arms were normal length, it's impossible to know, maybe they were normal length but his body had swallowed them at the shoulders. He was built like those football players, linebackers I think, I don't know much about football, I was only on the team at Madera High for one day, it wasn't my talent. He had a massive round head, with spiky hair on top, his head looked like a pineapple. And I didn't see this then, I was looking at the front of Scott Valdez, I didn't see it until later, but when he sat down a bulge appeared at the back of his head, above his neck, or at the top of his neck, a bulge of flesh appeared there, like a pillow, flesh that had nowhere else to go. He was a man of strength, his physical strength reflected his spiritual strength, JB's words later, which made me wonder what the bulge of flesh represented, spiritually. Scott Valdez's face cramped up and he said to everyone that Jesus is Lord and whosoever believes in him shall have eternal life. Which didn't mean much to me, but in pursuing Aunt Liz's plan one hundred percent, without any reservations, I set my feelings aside, feelings being mutable unlike God's immutable love, JB's words. Scott Valdez said that Jesus'
father loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten son, so that whosoever believed in him should have eternal life, this was straight from the Bible. The father in question here was not Jesus' actual father, but God the father, the first of the three Gods. The Old Testament of the Bible was about him and the New Testament was about Jesus. The Holy Spirit didn't have his own testament. This was because there was a rule somewhere that the only thing that couldn't be forgiven was talking against the Holy Spirit, and so to avoid talking against him by accident, nobody talked about him at all. I listened with an open mind, I have to admit I was confused, so many new ideas were flying into my head with nothing to connect them to. But the main subject of Scott Valdez's talk was grace, this is the important part, Juan-George, not because you need to know what grace is, I don't think you do, if you want to know more you are free to find out, but because Scott's words echoed in my head in a particular way. He talked about how God's grace was strong enough to forgive all of our sins, and then he said that while being a good person was important, it wasn't enough, good deeds weren't enough to earn entrance into the kingdom of heaven. All the good deeds in the world without accepting Jesus as your lord and savior would land you in hell with the rapists and murderers, Scott's words. Which didn't sound right to me. At the pearly gates, Saint Peter, I don't know why God himself couldn't let people in, at the pearly gates Saint Peter wasn't going to pull out a calculator and add up our good deeds. When Scott said that, when he mentioned the calculator, I realized that I had heard it before, I had heard it and much of what Scott was saying from JB's mouth. This was a revelation, Scott could talk all day about grace and it wouldn't have had the impact that the word
calculator
did. Because grace had nothing to attach itself to in my head, while the calculator was already in there. It dawned on me that JB was a repeater. He collected things that Scott said and spread bits and pieces to people Scott hadn't met. When JB talked about being a conduit, he talked about being a conduit for God, but he was in fact a conduit for Scott Valdez.

 

I have talked before about how the head gets filled with other people's words, how in sleep we transform those words and make them our own. The measure of a man's thinking is in how those words are transformed, the measure of a man's thinking is what he does with other people's words, they must penetrate him deeply, they must penetrate him to the core, they must filter through his piled-up experiences and opinions, and they must return transformed. I didn't have this philosophy straight while at the Lighthouse Fellowship, it came later, I knew only that JB had repeated Scott Valdez's phrases without transforming them at all. What came out was what had gone in. Which meant that the phrases hadn't even grazed JB's core, they'd only bounced off a series of mirrors inside JB.

 

After Scott Valdez was done talking JB introduced me to him, he displayed me to Scott as if I was a fish he had caught. Scott extended his short arm and welcomed me warmly but in his eyes I didn't see the instant friendliness I had seen in JB's eyes, in Scott's eyes I saw something else, he was a fellow thinker.

At work the next day, Francis and I were sitting at the table behind the fast-food place, watching the drive-thru. Roger always said this about the drive-thru, you wanted three cars in it at all times. If there was just one car, you should drag ass to let a line build up, if there were four cars you'd better pick up the pace. It was the one thing of fucking value, his words, he'd ever learned from working in nightclubs. Francis was smoking, he always smoked during break. He was smoking and blinking behind his large glasses. There was one car in the drive-thru. Francis took a drag and told me that this was the end of the line for him. He wasn't coming back the next day, he was done with the fast-food place. He hadn't told Roger yet, he wasn't going to tell Roger, he wanted to shaft Roger. He made me promise not to tell Roger. He was telling me now, he said, because he wanted me to know that he'd enjoyed working with me, that in my own way I'd helped him stay on his path toward film school. I didn't understand how I had helped him. I wasn't going to question it, though, and so I thanked him. Also half the things that came out of his mouth made no sense to me, he was always quoting movies I hadn't seen. For example, he said to me, his words, It's a strange world, isn't it? And I said that yes it seemed strange, but that it was the only world we knew, so who could say? Of course he wasn't really asking me, it turned out to be a line from a film, it was the last line from his favorite film. Then he asked me what my vision of an ideal world was. Once I was clear that this was not another line from a film, I answered, I hadn't ever really thought about it, or at least I didn't think I had, but when I opened my mouth the words came out. In my ideal world everyone knows everyone else, bicycles and binoculars get the respect they deserve, there is no such thing as money, thinkers have time to think, everyone is as lucky as I am, and people are buried where they want. I could see that Francis wasn't really listening, he was only waiting for me to finish talking, he had only asked the question as a prelude to his own answer, which he had been thinking about for a long time, he said. In his ideal world, everyone knew all the films he knew, and they communicated only by using lines from films. With each line came implications and shades of mood and meaning, all perfectly communicated from one person to another. In his ideal world, he would hardly have to talk, he would only have to quote. He took a drag off his cigarette and said that I was all right, but that talking with me was the opposite of all that. He flicked the butt toward the dumpster, I would pick it up later, and pointed at the drive-thru line, which was now six cars.

***

People incorrectly use the idea of a ladder when they talk about getting promoted, it would make more sense to use the idea of caulk, because promotions don't come from hard work or honest effort but because a crack has opened up and must be filled. If Francis had not walked off the job I would not have become a french fry man no matter how hard I worked. In fact, if I had worked hard enough to make myself indispensable, I never would have received a promotion. I was unaware of all of this, I did not know any of this yet when I came home from the fast-food place after my next shift, when I came home from the fast-food place no longer a floater but a french fry man. I told Aunt Liz the good news, I let her know I had been promoted. She was floored, her words, that I'd made such quick progress. Aunt Liz set the dining table in the dining room, she lit the candles, I hadn't expected that. I thought it was reserved only for guests and for when I got a place of my own, but Aunt Liz said she was so proud of me, she was willing to make an exception. She set the table and lit candles and put back into the fridge the casserole she was about to reheat. She opened the freezer and pulled out some frozen packages I had not seen before, something she said she had been saving for a special occasion, surf and turf, her words, which were lobster and steak. Your grandfather had never been very good at celebrating, Juan-George. There was always something else coming, even when something good
happened, there was always something else around the corner, something that either took away what you'd achieved or surpassed it so much that your earlier celebrating seemed hasty, your grandfather's philosophy. Aunt Liz made a point of celebrating, she had taught herself, her words, she had decided years ago that if something good happened she was going to stop and acknowledge it, damn the torpedoes, her words. This was while she was preparing dinner, the steaks were in the broiler and the lobster was in a pot, she had opened a bottle of bubbly wine, I drank ice water. She raised a glass to my success. I was pleased that she was pleased. We ate our surf and turf in the dining room, on opposite sides of lit candles, over a fancy tablecloth. She looked softer in that light, her reddish brown hair and reddish brown lipstick didn't scream at you that they matched, her hair didn't look as no-nonsense as usual, her leopard print pants were below the table. Aunt Liz said that if we had eaten like this every night, if we had lit candles every night, we wouldn't appreciate the specialness of the occasion. I wondered aloud, I still wonder this, how did people celebrate before electricity, when candles were part of the normal routine? Aunt Liz said that I was well on my way to becoming a contributing member of society in Panorama City, and, what was more, a respectable citizen, with a sense of personal responsibility, people could look at me from across the street while I was waiting for the bus to come and could see that I was not some foreign substance mucking up the gears but an essential cog in the smooth functioning of the city itself. I liked the sound of that, essential cog. That night I celebrated wholeheartedly with Aunt Liz, without reservation, without questioning the nature of promotions, and without second-guessing. I had the feeling, I don't know how to describe it, the feeling of everything coming together in harmony. It's difficult to imagine now how I could have felt like that. We were celebrating a fluke. And yet what remained with me was not the unsound reason for our celebration but the warm feeling of sharing a happy moment with Aunt Liz, however brief.