Watchlist (11 page)

A digital clock says it's 3:00 a.m.

The phone rings, the camera pulls back.

A hand reaches from the bed, hits a button. The host speaks softly to the phone. “Hello?”

The voice-over says,
Go to Silver Lake, swim to the fountain, find the next clue.

And then, as always, darkness.

Our theory is that clip #8 follows #24, at least chronologically. #8 is a long and quiet night sequence, filmed from a car we cannot see. We are following taillights—presumably the host's—and that is the only visual. The voice-over speaks softly.
Los Angeles at night, the 110 freeway, always puts the host in a pensive mood. This is the hidden freeway, curving through hills, past homes where men once raised cows, planted corn and squash, didn't care about the gleam of Dodger Stadium, Chavez Ravine, a canyon named for a hacendado from the nineteenth century, an old husband of a daughter of a son-in-law of a conquistador who killed Indians with muskets and put plow to land and lived by that one word all men in this land once lived by: build. The host knows this, reflects on this now, during his late-night drive. He knows that the landowners died, that the land was parceled, the ranch house fell into disrepair, was razed, the land scooped up by speculators, Broad and Bren, Kaufmann and Argyros, Emmerson, Roski, great place for a ballpark! The history as it always is in this state—vanished. Gone. Amazing.

Amazing. Amazing. The word is his now. Several years ago he interviewed an etymologist who explained the word's origin. It was unsurprising, after all—maze, labyrinth, to be confused, confounded, caught in a world of unseen connections . . . but still there is a logic to mazes, isn't there? The spool of thread in the first labyrinth, Ariadne, spider's web. Amazed.

Night brings back memory, how he was taunted once as a child back home in Tennessee squalid Tennessee where to dream to delight to awe was not correct. Smoky Mountains sunset, sad, evocative. He had an old Pentax Q10 rigged to a fencepost as tripod and took time-elapsed photos of dying light. He showed the pictures at school. Isn't it amazing? he whispered.

The teacher and the older kids beat him after class. He has admitted this to no one.

The voice quiets but the taillights keep moving, pulling farther away, until the clip's end.

“W
HAT IT IS IS
a meditation on the nature of television, of film,” Don suggests one night. We've all had too much to drink. Now we're frustrated—this week's clip, #62, is blank. Nothing. Angrily we blame the creators of this absurd virtual chase that never leaves our living rooms. We assign petty motives. “Bored rich kids,” we agree. “Avant-garde assholes,” we say.

But Don has a larger and more complex point; he's an academic. “Isn't television after all the great medium of our time? Our country? This state? We live fifteen minutes from Hollywood. We
are
the image, not the thing itself. We are the gaze
and
the object. Why trust these clips as real? They are
film
! Two-dimensional!” Don spills his drink and swears loudly. He's under pressure. Up for tenure in the fall, struggling to complete his book, to find a publisher. Normally we cut him off but tonight we let him ramble. “What do we know about the host? He is like us—like us, he loves television. He remembers moments—moon landing, Watergate, Ali-Frazier, Munich, those transcendent moments offered only by television. Television is one-way immersion without obligation. You sit, you flip a button, you look away, you read the paper, you look up, you mute, you change channel, take piss, heat pizza, wander house, push-up, sit-up, phone call, text. The Internet? You can't wander from it, it's too needy. Only television is so accommodating!”

He's almost shouting. “It wouldn't work on the Internet! This is film, this is community! Here we are in other worlds—real ones, real people! The world used to be parks! Then it was benches! Then it was sofas at home!” He stares at us, desperate. “I've seen gaming chairs in Target, speakers built in and wires for kids to sit in for hours!” He looks madly. “Quick! I need to write!” Someone passes him a pen and napkin, he grasps them, begins jotting furiously.

We pity and loathe Don. I hold Cynthia's elbow as we walk to our cars. She smiles sadly.

“Now calm down, that was an ocean of gin you drank, cowboy.”

She blows me an air kiss, is gone.

I
N AUGUST I
take to night-driving, Mulholland, very quick, very romantic, clichéd, stupid.

Y
OU KNOW HOW
it goes, of course—the strange things that matter don't go on forever.

First we get a call: there is a new clip, yes, but we will not be watching it.

Why? The police have been contacted. The host has been notified. Much grave concern.

We move harried through the week. Worried at each police car, flinching at each phone ring. Don dutifully sends panicked emails at the top of each hour. The police call some of us in, those who've hosted screenings. One, at the police station, being led to an interrogation room, sees the host. “Of course I'm concerned!” the host is yelling at a detective. “Who wouldn't be?”

Enraged, he looks at our passing friend. The host's face is red, wild, incensed.

A few of us meet in a bar Friday night, sitters for the kids, those with kids. Cynthia can't make it. I tell you as much later. You don't believe me. Another goddamn fight. Over drinks we murmur, booth-cramped. What we know—thanks, police—the clips aren't old. They're made each week. The host has recognized several—he knew where he was, what he was doing. The detectives want answers but the consensus is they don't suspect us. As if that reassures us.

“Why
should
they suspect us?” we protest. “We're not suspect!”

We drink our drinks and agree that police are fools. Someone else is the guilty party.

Or maybe we just can't bear suspecting each other—your cruel theory all along.

Y
OU TELL ME
they like monkeys so Saturday, monkeys. Of course a gorilla escapes its cage.

Really. I need to piss so I leave them in the cotton candy line. Too much water in me, it's too hot in this city, this state. Thirty-five million people roasting three months a year. Madness.

I wash my hands and outside lean over the water fountain. I hear a snorting, a snuffling.

I turn. A gorilla is staring at me. He's much larger than me. Wider. Firmer base. His eyes are dilated, he looks stressed. His muscles are enormous and shagged with coarse hair. Such fingers. He could destroy me. We turn at a siren coming through trees. He grunts, scoots along.

They are at a picnic table, lips coated in pink puffed sugar, and what do I say to them to explain the police swarming the zoo? That those peaceful gorillas can get loose and maybe if you're lucky you won't get hurt? Is that the lesson here? Instead I tell them a story about a father who invents magical glass boxes for his children, all they have to do is push a button and whoosh, glass walls all around, safe and sound. They say what about air? Food? Xbox? I reassure them. These are advanced glass boxes! Totally decked out! They exchange skeptical looks.

I drop them off and you say to me, “Hear the one about the escaped gorilla?”

I tell you the gorilla was me and you don't understand how such a thing could be true.

O
N MONDAY NIGHT,
in my mailbox, a large yellow envelope. No return address.

I open it inside, lights out, feeling nauseous.

A film canister.

C
LIP #49 BEGINS
as many do—nothing but darkness. Then a voice from the void.

“Like Genesis,” murmurs Cynthia, fanning herself with the business section.

I ask for quiet and listen to the words.

He has seen and touched every part of this state literally traveled every paved road, been to every county seat, every damn landmark and boy there are a few thousand, aren't there, has spoken to professors and town folk to historical society ladies and blue-collar workers to illegals and Border Patrol to vigilantes and human rights crusaders has sat with mayors and senators and oh so many civil engineers, dam builders bridge builders highway designers public transportation consultants architects and other assorted madmen, the oldest living woman in the state, and when she died the next one, and the next, and the next, plucked fruit with original fruit pickers packed crates with original crate packers flipped patties with original burger makers made fries with the sad McDonald brothers and once talked with Ray Kroc himself before that rich and sleazy salesman kicked the bucket has surfed with surfers dived with anemone divers flown with kite fliers sand volleyball players racecar drivers rock climbers artists of every color ate donuts with Sonny Barger Sonny Bono a very young Arnold and so many cultural representatives schnitzel tabbouleh pupusas cricket tacos Oaxacans Basques Guatemalans Romanians Filipinos even Tasmanians all here in this Popeye-arm-shaped state

At this point the darkness recedes. Light enters the frame. It reveals a swastika.

“Holy shit,” says Cynthia.

The camera pulls back farther. The swastika resides on the face of a deranged man.

“Whitman?” wonders Cynthia.

The voice continues,
and still the most famous, the one above them all, the firmament over this state is and always has been him, the single most unsettling person the host has ever spoken to, and the host believes that there is something of this man in us all, in the water, in the air, we are all this man, a derangement not as the rest of the country thinks, not Californians as hippies and crystals and free love but anger to the bone that anchor on Popeye's arm swinging round and round the chain digging into the skin of the palm that pressure that needs burst.

Staring at us steadily is Charles Manson.

That's it. That's the last of the clips.

*

Y
OU LEAVE VOICE
messages via can-and-string, say they're worried about me, you are, too.

Stop working. Take a break. Come inside. Dinner's ready.

But mustn't we believe that if we can unravel just one thing the maze will come undone?

I dream of walking at night in the dark.

I see a large man ahead of me, saying,
Who are you? Why are you following me?

Carter Sullivan and Jack Benny, oh Jack,
Your money or your wallet
. . . golden silence.

California gold? Television! That clever image, those flashing lights! We are all moths!

I lie awake tonight, thinking of mankind fleeing darkness, flapping at bright screens.

It's not a lightly thought thought.

The state of California. Been there. Not sure I made it back.

Cynthia blocks my number. Don gets tenure. Everyone sort of tolerates me but they don't hide it well. I move out of the city, to an apartment in Eagle Rock. We don't see each other anymore, them, me, you, us. We were part of the group of smart people, so smart, our group of smart clever smart people, and then you and me baby we split and sure we tried to make up, but we split again and they all chose you. No, no, that's not exactly what happened but it's close. I call Don late the way I used to, drunkenly smoking on our porches, but he's married now, has to sleep, notes for tomorrow's lecture. “Those were some strange days,” I tell him, my voice thick, I can't help it. He's polite. “Yes, indeed. Strange days. Like in that the Doors song,” he says.
That the.
Always smart, Don. “Gotta tuck up, bud,” he tells me. “We'll get together soon.”

Some days I sit watching reruns of the host's television show. How cheery he is! How sated! I know that TV-him isn't real-him, that he's a different man with his own fears, his own struggles, I know I need to stop need to let go of Cynthia/her the kids/them you/you so I/me can move on but the words trip me up every time, move on, isn't moving on just moving back? Yielding? A surrender? I've never liked this state, it's always felt uneasy to me, trembly, on the verge of explode, it's the air, the winds, the fires, tides under ocean, deserts, I don't know, such foreboding, just a sense is all. You can come to the West what you can do is you can come to this land of grand scale and learn to think in shadows, in shadows men will pan for gold backroom deals buy all the land steal the water forces align, it's obvious, look around, such tremendous forces after all. Look, that dome, that volcano, that geyser. That beach. That bear. Eagle. Whale. Ronald Reagan. Woolly mammoth. Joshua tree. Death Valley. Donner Party. Neverland Ranch. John Muir. Manson. To think no forces are conspiring would be to be a fool! Sometimes I think I could learn a bit by reading up on Manson but what good would that do? It'd only make me obsessive and it's bad to obsess over crazies. Obsess over normal things. It's healthier.

U
NPACKING BOXES THIS
week, I find these words in an old notepad:

Go to Silver Lake, swim to the fountain, find the next clue.

I laugh about it. So silly, all that, the days of magical mysterious clips, when everything was so cosmic and fraught. Nostalgic, I take a drive to the area. I walk the path that loops the reservoir. There's live music from a bar. Young people laughing. Couples walking past, smiling.

I consider swimming to the fountain. Instead I sit on a bench in sight of the fountain.

A man walks past me. He pauses. Of course I know who it is—of course it's the host.

We stare at each other.

“You're the one,” he says. “I dream about you. You're always following me.”

I shake my head in denial.

“Why are you here?” he asks. “Who are you?”

“I'm no one,” I say.

His voice is soft. He sounds tired. I feel bad for him. He's old. “You did all this,” he says.

“All what?”