Self-Defense (31 page)

“We’ll just take it as far as it goes,
Lucy.”

“But I want to find out—for Karen’s sake.”

“It’s possible Karen has nothing to do
with the dream.”

“She does,” she said quickly. “I
feel
it. I know that sounds as if I’m letting my imagination get out of control. But
I’m not. I didn’t wish this upon myself. Why would I want to be dreaming about
him
?”

I didn’t answer.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll just take it as
it comes. Is today the day you go up to see him?”

“Today at one.”

She scratched her knee.

“Has that been on your mind?” I said.

“A bit.”

“Any change of heart about my meeting
him?”

“No.... I guess I’m a little
nervous—though why should I be? You’ll be dealing with it, not me.”

I left the house at twelve-thirty, turned
off PCH at the red clapboard buildings of the Malibu Feed Bin, and headed up
Topanga Canyon Road, cutting through the palisades.

The drought had stripped the mountains
down to the chapparal, but last month’s freak rains had brought back some
tender buds and the granite was freckled with weeds and wildflowers. Randomly
planted eucalyptus appeared on the west side of the road. To the east was a
gorge that deepened and darkened as I gained altitude.

There was little to break up the scenery
for the first few miles other than an occasional shack or abandoned car. Then a
scattering of small businesses appeared among dry, yellow clearings: a
lumberyard, a general store and post office, a lean-to advertising magic
crystals at discount.

At the top of the road was a fork that
separated Old Topanga Road from the newer highway that led into the Valley.
Both routes were empty.

The original Topanga settlers had been
Californio homesteaders and New England gold panners, asking for little but beauty
and riches and privacy. Their descendants still owned land in the canyon, and
individualism remained the Topanga way.

During the sixties and seventies—the time
of the Sanctum party—the hippies had invaded in giddy droves, living in caves,
scrounging for food, and eliciting outrage the natives hadn’t known they had in
them. Gary Hinman had a house in Topanga back then, as did lots of other
musicians, and he was recording rock ’n’ roll tracks in his home studio when
the Manson family murdered him.

No more hippies now. Most had wandered
off, some had died from overdoses of freedom, a few had become transformed to
Topanga burghers. But the canyon hadn’t turned into Levittown. Artists and
writers and others who didn’t keep regular hours continued to homestake here,
and I knew several professors and psychotherapists willing to brave the
hour-plus drive to the city in order to return here at night. One of them, a
man who studied the biochemistry of rage, once told me he’d come across a
mountain lion in his back yard one night, savaging a raccoon and licking its
chops.

“Scared the shit out of me, Alex, but it
also took me to a higher spiritual level.”

I turned left onto the old road. The next
couple of miles were darker and greener and cooler, shaded by sycamores,
maples, willows, and alders that arched over the blacktop.

Pretty, lacy trees.

Houses appeared every hundred to two
hundred feet, most of them modest and one-storied and set into vine-crusted
glades. Those on the left side of the road sat behind a dry wash, accessible by
footbridge or through old railroad boxcars turned into tunnels.

Mine was the only car on the road, and
though I could smell horse manure, there were no steeds in sight. I pulled over
and read the directions the woman had given me.

Look for a private road around three miles
from the bridge, and a wooden sign to the east.

I drove a slow mile. There were several
dirt paths cutting into the hillside on the east, all unmarked, and I made a
couple of false starts before spotting a wooden sign nearly obscured by a heavy
bank of scarlet honeysuckle.

S  NC   M

The road, if you could call it that, was
an acutely slanting dirt path lined with elderberry and ferns and sugar bush. I
traveled a thousand feet of kidney-jarring, hairpin solitude. The trees, here,
were thick-trunked and hypertrophied, the brush beyond them impenetrable. The
growth was so thick that branches scraped the roof of the car, and in some
places the vegetation sprouted in the center of the road and brushed the
Seville’s underbody.

Soon I heard the high-note trickle of a
stream. Groundwater. That explained the lushness during the drought. Looking
for trees here would be like searching for pedestrians in Times Square.

A couple of turns, then I saw a two-piece
gate up ahead. Heavy-duty chicken wire framed by planks of weathered redwood.

Latched, but not locked.

I got out, freed the bolt, and swung both
gates open. They were heavy and rusty and left brown grit on my hands.

Another five hundred feet. Another gate, a
twin of the first. Beyond it was a big, low-slung, lodge-type building flanked
by enormous bristlecone pines and backed by a forest of more pines and firs and
coast redwood. The roof was green asphalt shingle, the walls, logs.

I parked in the dirt, between a black Jeep
Cherokee and an old white Mercedes convertible. A row of iron hitching posts
fronted the lodge. Behind it, wide wooden steps led to a wraparound porch
shaded by the eaves of the building and set up with a few bent-willow chairs.
The cushions on the chairs were blue floral and mildewed. The windows of the
lodge were gray with dust.

Flat, thick silence; then a squirrel
scampered across the porch, stopped, and shimmied up a rain gutter.

I climbed the stairs and knocked on the
front door. Nothing happened for a while; then it was pulled open and a woman
looked out at me.

Thirty-five or so, five-seven, with
straight, shoulder-length black hair parted in the middle and painted with
copper highlights. Her face was a tan oval, the skin smooth as fresh notepaper,
the jawline crisp. She wore second-skin black leggings under a bright green,
oversized, sleeveless T-shirt. Her arms were bronze and smooth, her feet bare,
her eyes orange-brown.

She had the kind of face that would
photograph beautifully: perfectly aligned, slightly oversized features. Both
ears were double-pierced.

“Dr. Delaware?” she said in a bored voice.
“I’m Nova.”

She waved me into a gigantic main room
furnished with sagging tweed couches and thrift-shop tables and chairs. To the
right was a clumsy, narrow staircase. The grubby plank flooring was covered
haphazardly with colorless rugs. The ceiling was beamed with more planks and
raw logs, and each beige stucco wall bore two large windows. Plenty of
furniture and still enough room to dance. Along the rear wall, beyond the
stairs, what had once been a reception desk had been turned into a wet bar
crammed with bottles. On either side of the bar were doors.

The walls were covered with scores of
mounted animal heads: deer, moose, fox, bear, a snarling puma, lacquered trout
with their vital statistics engraved on plaques. All the specimens looked
moth-eaten and tired, almost goofy. One was particularly grotesque—a gray,
lumpy, porcine thing with Quasimodo features and yellow mandibular fangs that
hooked over a sneering upper lip.

“Wally Warthog,” said Nova, stopping next
to a serape-covered couch.

“Good-looking fellow.”

“Charming.”

“Does Mr. Lowell hunt?”

She gave a staccato laugh. “Not with a
gun. These came with the place and he kept them. He planned to add some of his
own—critics and reviewers.”

“Never bagged any, huh?”

Her face got hard. “Wait here, I’ll tell
him you’ve arrived. If you need to, fix yourself something to drink.”

She walked off toward the left-hand door.
I went over to the bar. Empty bottles lined the floor. Premium brands, mostly.
On the counter were eight or nine cheap glasses that hadn’t seen water
recently. An old refrigerator was filled with mixers. I washed a glass and
poured myself some tonic water, then returned to the center of the huge room.
As I sat on a needlepoint rocker, dust shot up. In front of me was a coffee
table with nothing on it. I waited and drank for ten minutes; then the door
opened.

His face appeared two feet lower than I
expected. He was sitting in a wheelchair, pushed by Nova.

The famous face, long and hatchet-jawed,
with a bulbous nose and deep, dark eyes under shelf brows, now white. His hair
was gray-black, worn past his shoulders and held together with a beaded band:
the Venerable Chief look. His skin, liver-spotted and creased, was as rough as
the ceiling beams.

My eyes dropped to his body. Wasted and
spindle-limbed, reduced to almost nothing above the belt-line.

He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and
dark pants. Everything bagged and sagged, and though the trouser fabric was
heavy wool, I could see his kneecaps shining through. His feet were encased in
cloth bedroom slippers. His hands were huge and white and grasping, dangling
from the thin wrists like dying sunflowers.

As Nova propelled him forward, he glared
at me. The chair was an old-fashioned manual, and it squeaked and wrinkled the
rug. She positioned him opposite me.

“Need anything?”

He didn’t answer and she left.

He kept glowering.

I gave him a pleasantly blank look.

“Good-looking piece of veal, aren’t you? If
I was a fag, I’d fuck you.”

“That assumes a lot.”

He threw back his head and laughed. His
cheeks were flaccid and they shook. He had most of his teeth, but they were
dark and discolored.

“You’d let me,” he said. “Without
hesitation.
You’re a starfucker; that’s why you’re here.”

I said nothing. Despite his crippled body
and the size of the room, I began to feel hemmed in.

“What’s in the glass?” he said.

“Tonic water.”

He gave a disgusted look and said, “Put it
down and pay attention. I’m in pain, and I don’t have time for any
lumpen-yuppie bullshit.”

I placed the glass on a table.

“Okay, Little Dutch Boy, tell me who the
hell you are and what qualifies you to be treating my daughter.”

I gave him a brief oral resume.

“Very impressive, you now qualify for a variable-rate
mortgage of your IQ. If you’re so smart, why didn’t you become a
real
doctor? Cut into the cortex and get to the root of matter.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He pitched forward, winced, and cursed
violently. Gripping the armpieces of the chair, he managed to shift slightly to
the left. “William Carlos Williams was a doctor and he tried to be a poet.
Somerset Maugham was a doctor and
he
tried to be a writer. Both sour,
pretentious fucks. Mix-and-match works only in women’s fashions; something’s
got to ebb, something’s got to flow.”

I nodded.

His eyes widened and he grinned. “Go
ahead, patronize me, pricklet. I can chew up anything you serve me, digest it
for my own benefit, and shit it back at you as high-density compost timbales.”

He licked his lips and tried to spit.
Nothing came out of his mouth.

“I’m
interested,
” he said, “in
certain
aspects
of medicine. Cabala, not calculus.... A fool I knew in
college became a surgeon. I met him, years later, at a party
teeming
with starfuckers, and the pin-brain looked happier than ever. His work; there
was no other reason for him to be satisfied. I got him talking about it, and
the bloodier he got, the more ecstatic—if words were jism, I’d have been
soaked. And do you know what brought the greatest joy to his dysphemistic face?
Describing the scummy details of exploratory surgery, while eating a
cocktail
frank. Cracking open the bones, tying off the veins, swan-diving
into the heat and jelly of a stinking, cancerous body cavity.”

He raised his hands to nipple level and
turned the palms up. “He said the greatest fun was holding living organs in his
hands, feeling their pulse, smelling their steam. He was a yawny idiot, but he
had the power to flex a wrist and rip spleens and livers and shit-filled guts
out of someone else’s flesh-ark.”

He let his hands fall. He was breathing
hard, the remnants of his chest heaving.
“That’s
what interests me about
medicine. Dropping a nuclear bomb on certain individuals interests me, too, but
I’d never waste my time studying
physics.
Man Ray once said perfect art
would kill an observer upon first glance. Damned near close to universal truth.
Not bad for a photographer, and a kike. Delaware... that’s not a kike name, is
it?”

“No. And it’s not wop or nigger or spic,
either.”

His mouth ticced and he laughed again, but
it seemed obligatory.

“Look what we have here, a wit—at least by
half. A fucking yuppie halfwit—you’re the
future,
aren’t you?
Off-the-rack Gentleman’s Farterly suits pretending to be bespoke. Politically
correct careerism masquerading as moral duty—do you drive a
Beemer
? Or a
Baby Benz
? Either way, Hitler would be proud, though I don’t imagine you’ve
ever studied history. Do you know who Hitler was? Are you aware that he didn’t
drive a Buick? That Eichmann worked for Mercedes-Benz while hiding out in
Argentina—do you know who the fuck Eichmann
was
?”