Panorama City (18 page)

 

Outside, though, the wind had calmed and changed direction. People had started to appear on the streets, and cars. Sunrise wasn't far off. I walked as quickly as I could, I extended my stride to get the burgers and fries to Paul in the ceiling as soon as possible. I didn't run, Juan-George, I don't run, because when you run people chase you. People and animals. Always better to extend your stride. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the house, having taken so much time to walk to and from the fast-food place, and having been delayed by Carlos's insistence on making the food fresh, and perhaps also by my needing to feed myself, Aunt Liz had already established herself at the kitchen table, where she was sipping coffee and flipping through the newspaper, one page at a time, reading each page completely and then flipping to the next. She lived according to the philosophy early to bed, early to rise, which was not her philosophy alone but had come from somewhere else. She could see the front door from where she was sitting, she
could see me walking through the front door, trying to be as quiet as I could, and the look on her face was pure horror. She shouted that she thought I was a burglar. I said that burglars don't typically use the front door. She demanded to know where I'd been, she thought I'd been in my room, she thought she'd heard me in there, stirring in my sleep, she was going to wake me when she'd finished her newspaper. What if she'd gone in there, she asked, and found me missing? I didn't know what to say or do so I kept my mouth shut and stayed put. Then she saw the bag, she needed to know what was in the bag, she asked me if it was from the fast-food place, she asked me how I had gotten there. I told Aunt Liz that I had been unable to sleep because of the wind, and that Panorama City was oddly peaceful without anyone on the streets, and that while walking I'd gotten hungry and gone to the fast-food place to eat, at which point Aunt Liz, whose face had turned red, cried out, Enough! I had not lied, I had told the truth, I was on my way to telling the whole truth, but Aunt Liz stopped me before I could. Later, Paul Renfro would say that I'd obfuscated perfectly, he had heard the whole thing from up in the ceiling, despite his nearly being catatonic with hunger, he had heard me and said that I had done a perfect job of obfuscating, his word. Sometimes all it takes, Paul said later, is telling the whole truth until people can't bear it anymore. Aunt Liz glared at me, she removed her reading glasses, she glared at me with utmost seriousness, a seriousness underscored by the fact that she had not yet put on her face, as she liked to say. She said that the reason it was so peaceful was that nobody in their right mind would go wandering around Panorama City in the middle of the night, it was too dangerous, which didn't quite make sense to me, there had been nobody around to make it dangerous, but she didn't give me a chance to speak. She held her hand up like a stop sign and said that I was not permitted to go out at night. As a matter of fact, she said, I wasn't to go out at all without telling her where I would be, she wanted to know where to find me at all times. I nodded, her glare softened. It's not safe out there, she said. You don't understand, she said, you've never understood, the world is full of people dying to take advantage of someone like you.

There are worse things in the world than being taken advantage of, was what I came up with after I had made my way back to my room. I pulled the chair into my closet again and poked my head up into the ceiling and passed Paul Renfro the bag of burgers and fries. I apologized for the fact that they weren't warm but he didn't seem to mind. He poured whole ketchup packets in his mouth and then filled his mouth with fries and chewed until he was able to swallow. Aunt Liz knocked on my door and said she was going to drive me to work this morning, she was going to deliver me herself, we were leaving in a half hour, she didn't want me getting into trouble on the streets of Panorama City. Paul asked if I could bring him some water as soon as possible. And some pushpins or thumbtacks. I knew Aunt Liz would take a while to get dressed and made up, she would not be caught out in public without painting her face, which I took for granted at the time but which gets stranger the more I think about it. I provided Paul with pushpins recovered from Aunt Liz's corkboard, she kept a corkboard by the phone, with pictures and cards and old invitations on it. All of the pushpins were in use, but I was able to remove some without disturbing the alignment of the pictures by causing some pins to do double duty, holding up more than one picture or invitation by taking advantage of where they overlapped, which was a perfectly reasonable way to arrange a corkboard. I provided Paul with water from the laundry room, where Aunt Liz kept a water dispenser. I lifted a still-sealed jug into the ceiling for Paul to drink from. It was quite heavy, he could hardly move it, he said it must have been five gallons at least. I wanted to make sure he had enough water for the whole time I would be gone, it could get hot up there, I wanted to keep him hydrated so that his thinking could be clear and productive instead of delusional and incorrect.

 

After I had gotten him everything he needed, I announced that I couldn't possibly go to work. I had carefully considered Aunt Liz's plan for me, I had run a clinical trial testing her plan, or most of one, and I had found it lacking, I had found all aspects of it wanting, I needed as soon as possible to return to my original plans and goals, which were to come to Panorama City, and become a man of the world, and return to Madera, and find Carmen again. Paul reminded me that this was a time for planning and considering, not implementing. Paul said that without these lodgings, without this hermitage, his word, he would have no chance to advance his thinking. He couldn't risk expending his energies on legal struggles. If I truly wanted to help him, he told me, I would have to do so while arousing as little suspicion as possible, which meant, he was sorry to tell me, acting as though Aunt Liz's plan for me was working just fine, as if the Lighthouse Fellowship was fulfilling my spiritual needs, as if Dr. Rosenkleig was making some kind of progress, however he liked to measure it, as if I'd rather do nothing more than make french fries for people who barely seemed aware they were eating. Aunt Liz knocked again. Paul said, Make it through today and tonight we'll fix everything, tonight we'll work on your plan to become a man of the world. I did not have time to shower, I prefer to shower every day, but I did not have time, I pulled on my fast-food place uniform and went out. Aunt Liz drove me to work, where I found a balding photographer with a walrus mustache sitting on bags of equipment, waiting to shoot my Employee of the Month photo.

 

Which is why, when you pick through my old things, which you will, which I won't blame you for doing, feel free to explore the bits and pieces I've left behind, most of them once belonged to your grandfather, I've never been a collector, other than bicycles, but which is why when you find my Employee of the Month photograph, they gave me an extra copy, unframed, you'll look at me, at your father, and you'll think there is something missing. It is me, I am missing, I mean my body is there, my face, my uniform, all of that, but I am not there inside. I mentioned before that your grandfather used to say that he was only a passenger in his body. I never fully understood what he was talking about until I saw that picture of myself as Employee of the Month, shot the day after Paul Renfro moved into Aunt Liz's ceiling. I'm sure others could have done a better job, I'm sure others could have put on a more convincing smile, I'm sure there are those who go about their daily business in service of something else completely unrelated, who turn off their thinking for the promise of some other later thinking, but I have no idea how they do it. There is such a thing as pretending to live, Juan-George, I'm not good at it.

 

I spent that day terrified they would see through me and know I was only pantomiming, and suspect me of hiding something, and search the house, and discover Paul Renfro in the ceiling. But Roger Macarona did not notice. Melissa did not notice. Wexler did not notice. Harold, who couldn't be expected to notice anything other than his fingertip, did not notice. The Employee of the Month photographer did not notice. The customers certainly did not notice. Aunt Liz, who not only dropped me off at work but also picked me up afterward to take me to Dr. Rosenkleig's, did not notice. She only asked me whether the fastfood place bag I was holding was the same one from that morning, I told her of course it wasn't, she said it stank, I moved my seat all the way back. But surely, of all people, Dr. Rosenkleig would notice. This was his stock in trade, as they say. I am not a liar, I tell the truth, but when Dr. Rosenkleig asked me that day how my clinical trial was going, I knew what he wanted to hear, and I delivered the words like fries on a tray. I told him that the clinical trial was going surprisingly well, I told him that Aunt Liz had chosen correctly for me. I told him how proud I was to have been named Employee of the Month, I used some of Roger Macarona's previous words to express my disbelief, I told him how much it meant to me to have a job and duties I could call my own. I told him how someday I hoped to be a manager myself. I told him how much it meant to me to be a part of the larger fast-food place family. I had believed that once, I'm not sure for how long, or when I stopped believing it, but I didn't believe it anymore and I told Dr. Rosenkleig that I did. I told him that the Lighthouse Fellowship had put me in touch with a spiritual side of myself I hadn't known was there, and that I felt bonded with so many members of that vibrant spiritual community I didn't feel the need to make new friends anymore. I told him, in short, the opposite of everything I felt, I expressed myself using the exact opposite words, including, because I knew it would get back to Aunt Liz, and because I knew Aunt Liz would be pleased to hear it, including telling Dr. Rosenkleig what a relief it was to be somewhere where nobody treated me like the village idiot.

 

That afternoon, after Aunt Liz drove me home, I went up into the ceiling for the first time. The access panel was barely large enough for me to fit through, but I managed somehow
to rein in my elbows and pull myself up. Once there, I couldn't believe my eyes. Paul had transformed the space completely. It was as if his briefcase, which had always contained more inside than seemed possible from the outside, had exploded. Papers everywhere, tacked to the beams, wedged between the studs, tucked into the insulation, piled in the corners. The dozen or so pushpins I had requisitioned from Aunt Liz's corkboard were engaged in astonishing feats of redundancy, each one pressed through the corners of countless pages, diagrams, charts, and notes. A settled smell of fast-food place food thickened the air. The water bottle sat in the corner, open, a sheet of paper over the top. Paul had found a string of Christmas lights somewhere and connected them to the spare electrical outlet for the air-conditioning blower. I asked him whether he wouldn't rather have a regular lamp, I could probably find him one, and he said that he preferred the Christmas lights. At first they had bothered him as too festive for sober thought, his words, but then he realized that all the colors added up to white, and that the separation of colors was conducive to splitting the brilliant white glow of revelation into individually colored bands of thought. The space had turned out to be a boon to advanced thinking, as he had always suspected it would be, the attic being the cranium of the house. The only problem was gaining access to the toilet, he needed a way to get down to the bathroom and back again without leaving any traces, which was to say without leaving the desk chair sitting in the middle of the closet. He had been urinating in the overflow pan below the air-conditioning coil, he'd had to urinate slowly to prevent the pan from filling up, but otherwise it had been draining completely. As long as I could provide a daily trip down to earth for his more solid business it would suffice. I helped him down for that essential purpose, and once his feet hit the ground he seemed deeply uncomfortable, like a raccoon out in the middle of the day. He didn't breathe normally until he was finished and safe again up in the confines of his thinking space.

 

He showed me that he could make his way, via my ceiling, to the ceiling over the living room, from which he could see through a vent the front entrance. If someone came looking for him, he said, he'd be the first to know. This was crucial, he explained, because since we'd worked together last, meaning on the antioxidant cream, no more of that, he added, he was on the straight and narrow, since we'd worked together last, he had suffered a series of persecutions of unimaginable variety, his words. Not once during the course of them had he encountered a fellow thinker, he added, which resulted in the double indignity of not only suffering but also having nobody understand the context of his suffering. I had no idea, I would have tried to find him had I known, had I not been pursuing my clinical trial of Aunt Liz's plan for me. That was when he explained to me about clinical trials typically being tilted in favor of whoever sponsors them, and about my failure to define my terms. He blamed me for none of it, he could never blame a fellow thinker for any attempt to advance knowledge. Even missteps count when you're moving toward this kind of goal, his words.

 

I had forgotten, I think, or not realized, or I had gotten entangled in the wrong part of my head, I had forgotten that despite the avalanche of difficulties I'd faced, and the eruptions of unintended consequences arising from my every action, I'd forgotten that I had been in fact advancing knowledge, in my own way, a bit at a time. I reminded Paul that I was still seeking the path toward becoming a man of the world, not having found it as Employee of the Month, or at the Lighthouse Fellowship, or in Dr. Rosenkleig's chamber of framed diplomas, or anywhere else for that matter. Paul blew out his cheeks and exhaled. The time had come for him, he said, to talk to me about provincial types.