6

MICKEY’S ELATION DIDN’T COMPLETELY FADE AS they drove along. He felt light-headed and had to pay attention to the road. Whenever Sunset Boulevard took a big curve, it felt like the car was turning into a glider. As if it might swoop into the air and catch the next breeze.

“This is unreal,” Mickey murmured softly.

“It’s more unreal not to feel this way,” said Francisco. “This is your bliss. Soak it up.”

Mickey looked out the window at the stream of cars racing in both directions and the handsome stucco houses drifting by. He had heard of out-of-body experiences. He wondered if this was one. Neither man spoke, and it seemed as if the ribbon of road would unfold forever. Sunset Boulevard dipped toward the ocean. The western sun came straight into Mickey’s eyes, and the glare made him blink.

“I’m coming back down. I can feel it,” he said.

Francisco glanced over at him. “Don’t worry. Glide a little longer. We’re in no hurry to make a landing.”

Mickey kept having the sensation that he wasn’t driving but merely watching the road unfold. Gradually, though, he returned to what he thought of as his senses.

“Why is all this happening to me?” he asked, turning to Francisco. “I really need to know.”

“I’m only playing my part,” Francisco said. “It’s like a game of tag. I found you just the way somebody once found me.”

This was the first time that he had made any reference to his personal life. Mickey pounced on it. “Someone walked up to you on a beach?”

“No, at work. I was a builder. A stranger showed up on-site. I got annoyed, but pretty soon that didn’t matter.” Francisco saw the curiosity in Mickey’s eyes. “Nothing from before much matters. You’ll see.”

An hour earlier it would have scared Mickey to hear this. Some part of him had accepted the process, but another part had kept alive the belief that he could go back to normal anytime he wanted. But normal was shifting, and he wasn’t scared now. “Does the process last your whole life?” he asked.

“Yes, but it keeps changing. When I started out, I felt as much fear as you did. I resisted every bit as much, even though I didn’t have your inflated ego. No offense. And don’t worry. When the process is over, that will be gone, too.”

The prospect suddenly seemed like the best news Mickey had ever heard.

“I want to go for it,” he said. “Can we speed things up?”

Francisco was amused. “You might singe your eyebrows or melt your wings. Be careful.”

“Were you careful?”

Francisco shook his head. “No. I went off course. Just for a while. My guide was worried.”

Now that they had reached the beach, Mickey expected to turn south, the direction of home. Francisco pointed to a supermart on the corner. “Just pull in there.”

Mickey pulled off the road and parked. “Who was your guide?” he asked.

“His name was Martin. He was a one-man mystery school. What he knew about life…” Francisco’s voice trailed off.

He turned to Mickey. “None of this is magical. Guides aren’t wizards. They don’t float down from another world,” he said. “They are just striking a match in the darkness, or offering a jump start. Anyway, you and I still have some unfinished business.”

Fishing inside his shirt pocket, Francisco handed Mickey a folded piece of paper. He said, “Bliss comes and goes unless you nail it down. That’s the next step.” He watched as Mickey opened up and read the latest riddle.

One day you love me, the next day you hate

But you never resist the hook and the bait

You cry for escape, but what do I care?

The net that I cast is a permanent snare

Mickey furrowed his brow. “I don’t get it. This is about cravings or something.”

“Close.” Francisco took back the riddle and wrote a word on the back: “Addiction.”

Mickey shook his head. “I’m not addicted. I’ve never even checked into rehab for the publicity.”

“This isn’t about drugs, or sex, or alcohol. That blissful feeling you just experienced? It goes away because you keep going back to your old self. That’s the worst addiction. As long as you crave the old self, you can never fully contact the unknown.”

“So I’m addicted to myself?”

“You’re addicted to your old self. Everyone is.” Francisco looked in the direction of a nearby bus stop. “To be continued. I have to go.”

Mickey didn’t want to be left with nothing but a few frustrating clues. “Wait,” he said. “Aren’t you going to tell me how to break out of this?”

Francisco was already out of the car. “It’s time you start fending for yourself.”

“What does that mean?” Mickey asked sullenly.

Francisco leaned back into the open passenger-side window. “Cheer up. You’re on the right track.” Looking over his shoulder, he saw a city bus easing toward the curb. He said, “Send me off with half a laugh. A quick one, before that bus goes away.”

“You know the difference between a bar and a pharmacy?” said Mickey. “Smaller inventory.”

“That’s half a laugh. Now go home and look in the mirror again. You’ll meet someone who has the answers you want.”

Francisco ran for the bus, which had let out its last passenger. He jumped on, and after the doors swung shut behind him Mickey could see Francisco making his way down the center aisle looking for a seat. How many passengers, he thought, had any idea who was among them?

 

MICKEY HAD THOUGHT that he would go look in the mirror, but once he got home he put it off. He was feeling flat. Payback had been lonely, cooped up all day. She jumped on him with hysterical yaps. Mickey fed her, then scrounged up some leftover sushi and a beer from the fridge. His voice mail contained seven new messages. He wasn’t in the mood to answer any of them except his agent’s.

“What’s been going on?” Alicia said when he got hold of her.

“Do you think I’m addicted?”

“What?”

Mickey repeated the question.

“Yeah, you’re addicted,” Alicia said. “To money, approval, and chocolate, just like the rest of us. Unless you mean the hard stuff.”

“Anything else?”

“Let me see. Single-malt Scotch, golf, and being funny. Should I go on?”

“I didn’t know you thought I was funny,” said Mickey.

“Off and on. What’s with you? You sound different.”

I got a gig in a mystery school. A complete stranger tapped me as a freshman. Next week he thinks I’ll be ready to fly.

Mickey didn’t hint at what he was thinking. “I’ve been relaxing. Working on some one-liners,” he said, and rattled off a couple.

“A clear conscience is the first sign that you’re losing your memory.

“A flashlight is a device for finding dead batteries in the dark.”

Idly munching on the sushi, Mickey opened a sliding glass door and carried the cell phone out on the deck. He had the urge to really make Alicia laugh. “Forget those. Here’s a good joke,” he said.

“A 911 operator gets a call from a man who sounds frantic. ‘I’m on a hunting trip, and I accidentally shot my friend.’

“The 911 operator says, ‘The first thing we have to do is make sure if he’s dead.’

“She hears a loud bang, then the guy comes back on. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘He’s dead. Now what?’”

Alicia gave a muffled groan that could have bespoken amusement. She told Mickey to keep working, and hung up. By then Mickey no longer wanted to watch the sunset. He was slipping back into his old self. Francisco told him this was his addiction, and now Alicia had more or less sealed the case. He got up and shooed Payback back into the house, shutting the sliding glass door behind them.

Look in the mirror again. You’ll meet someone who has the answer.

The moment had come. Mickey found a mirror in the guest bathroom off the front entry. He leaned against the vanity and stared at himself. Narrowing his eyes, he concentrated, waiting for something to happen.

Nothing happened.

Maybe it wasn’t about concentrating. Mickey smiled at his reflection. “How’s it going? I’m great, too. Thanks for asking.” The eyes staring back at him weren’t flat and empty the way they had been in the car. That part was good. He relaxed and gazed into his eyes again. A few minutes passed.

He got bored.

But if he gave up now, he’d have nothing to show for his effort. Mickey leaned closer to his reflection. He pretended that he was an optometrist peering into his eyes with a scope, right into the pupil….

His pupils grew larger. Then one eye, the right, kept on dilating, until Mickey thought his iris would disappear. Freakish as this was, he kept calm. Only then did he realize that his pupil wasn’t expanding—he was being drawn into its growing point of darkness. As it began to envelop him, Mickey remembered a TV image from his childhood, Zorro flourishing his black cape in the air. The cape swept over Mickey like nightfall, and then everything faded to black.

“Hello?” he called. His voice echoed as if in an empty auditorium.

“Hello?”

In answer, a tiny point of light appeared in the distance. There was nowhere else to go, so Mickey headed toward it. When he got closer he saw what it was. A flashlight. The man holding it was sitting on a stool.

“Look out, kiddo,” the man said. “The ice is slippery and not all that thick.”

It was Larry.

Mickey rushed toward him, hearing the ice creak beneath his feet.

“What are you doing?” he said, although he knew. A man sitting on a stool staring into a hole in the ice must be ice fishing. It had been Larry’s favorite winter pastime when Mickey was a boy. He remembered his father dragging him out of his warm bed and driving their old Ford pickup to a godforsaken lake in Wisconsin.

“I’ve become a fisher of men,” said Larry, tugging on his line.

“Really?” Mickey said.

“I caught you, didn’t I?”

Larry sounded so much like Larry that it was all Mickey could do not to reach out and touch him, to make sure he was real. But his instincts told him not to try.

His father waved his flashlight in the dark. The beam landed on a second stool on the other side of the hole. Mickey sat down.

“I don’t think it’s legal to use a flashlight,” he said.

“Damn souls won’t bite unless you do,” said Larry. He grinned. “Same as pike.”

Maybe because this was the second time, Mickey wasn’t at all surprised to see Larry. He felt relaxed but cold, happy to be spending time with his dad, but not really loving the fishing. It wasn’t all that different from when he was ten.

“Everything changes and nothing changes, eh, kiddo?” said Larry.

“Are you still in limbo?”

Larry shrugged. “It’s okay. I get out once I stop worrying about you.”

This news unsettled Mickey. “You can stop worrying,” he said. “Go where you need to go.”

“Settle down. I’m not in prison. Didn’t you come to ask me something?” said Larry.

“I came to ask somebody something,” Mickey said uncertainly.

“Ask your old man.” Larry looked over at his son and read the expression on his face. “We never talked much. I regret that,” he said.

“I could have tried harder, too,” said Mickey.

Larry sighed. “Remember the day you got cut from the school baseball team? You were pretty good for your size, but they wanted bigger players for varsity. You had the skill but not the beef. You were really broken up.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“When you do wrong, it stays in the present, no matter how much time passes.”

“What did I do wrong?” said Mickey.

“Not you, me.” Larry fiddled around with his fishing line, thinking something over. “You wanted me to comfort you, but I didn’t know how. You ran up to me the way you used to when you were eight or nine, and you tried to hug me. All I could think of was, the kid’s too old for this. I pushed you away. Remember that?”

“You said, ‘If you want a hug, go hug your mother,’” said Mickey. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Yes, it was.” Larry paused. “I cut the cord between us. The worst of it was, I knew it. I could feel that you and I were never going to be the same. I loved you, damn it, and I pushed you away. For what?”

The sorrow in his father’s voice put a lump in Mickey’s throat. “Sons go away, Dad.”

“You didn’t come back,” said Larry. “You do have to send a son away. But you do it when you both know it’s right, and you do it in such a way that he can come back again.”

What could Mickey say? It scared him to think that Larry was in limbo because he had so much guilt. Before Mickey could open his mouth, his father’s gloom lifted as suddenly as it had come over him.

“Not to worry. I had to tell you, but it’s gone now.” Larry looked upward and scanned the darkness. “You can’t see them, but they really do help. God’s people, I mean.” He coughed and his body gave a small shiver. “Where was I? Oh, the question you wanted to ask.”

Mickey hadn’t recovered yet from his father’s admission. Larry had been old-fashioned when he was alive. He didn’t show emotion. When he hugged you, it was a man hug, where you put one arm around the other man’s shoulder and give a few reluctant pats.

“Give me a minute,” Mickey said.

“Okay. You want to hear God’s favorite joke?” Larry asked.

“Sure.”

Larry sat up and looked Mickey in the eyes. “Sin,” he said. He started to chuckle, but nothing else followed.

“That’s the joke?” said Mickey.

“Absolutely. Whenever God hears that people believe in sin, it cracks him up.”

“And you can hear him laughing,” said Mickey.

“To beat the band,” said Larry. Then he caught himself. “I have way too much leisure time these days.” He pulled his trotline out of the water and started to wrap it up around his gloved hand. Mickey noticed that the line had no hooks or bait. “Doesn’t matter,” said Larry. “Souls aren’t biting anyway.”

He gathered his tackle and stood up. “So it’s now or never, kiddo. Ask me your question. I gotta go pretty soon.”

His tone was lighter now, but Mickey knew that his father wanted to make amends. Regret hung over him like mist rising from the ice. Mickey didn’t expect any kind of answer, but he asked anyway.

“I’m stuck on myself, on my way of doing things,” he said. “I don’t love the way I am, but I’m addicted to it, and I don’t know how to stop.”

“That’s easy,” Larry said, looking relieved. “I thought you were going to ask me how to get your wife back. No one can help you there.”

“Help me here,” Mickey implored.

“Okay. Are you listening?” Larry cleared his throat. “You keep on doing what never worked in the first place. Don’t.”

“What?”

“Addictions are artificial substitutes. You’re stuck on things that never bring you what you really want. You can’t have real roses, so you buy plastic ones. You can’t think sweet thoughts, so you gobble down sugar. You can’t figure out how to be happy, so you make other people laugh.”

“When will I stop doing that?”

“Good question.”

Larry seemed increasingly restless. From time to time he glanced over his shoulder into the surrounding night.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” he said impatiently.

He turned back to Mickey. “They give me limited access. I guess I told you that the first time. What can you do?” He gave a shrug and began to walk away, his heavy rubber boots causing the ice to groan.

Mickey called after him. “Why didn’t you come through the TV? I still believe in television, just like you said.”

Larry didn’t look back. “Don’t worry. You believe in darkness, too.”

And then he disappeared.

 

MICKEY CAME BACK without knowing how. One minute he was on the ice in the darkness, and the next minute he was standing in front of the mirror again. It was a mystery, but it had to wait in line to be solved. Mysteries had been piling up around him pretty thick recently.

He went back into the kitchen where he’d left the last of his sushi and beer. Mickey felt calm. The house seemed very quiet around him. Payback stared up from her terrycloth bed by the stove, whined, and wagged her tail. Mickey walked over. He whispered in her ear. “Did you hear about the paranoid dyslexic? He was sure he was following somebody.”

Payback yapped and nipped at his nose.

“That’s okay. Bite all you want. In dog years I’m already dead.”

Mickey didn’t know why he was in such good humor. He sat down at the kitchen counter sipping his beer, not thinking about anything. But Larry’s words returned on their own.

You keep on doing what never worked in the first place.

Okay. Now what?

Francisco had told him it was time to fend for himself. Mickey wanted to. He had been yearning for a different life for a long time. It had taken Larry’s death to make him realize it. But how could he give up his addiction?

Mickey tossed the empty beer can into the trash and picked up Payback.

“Come on, girl. You and me.”

It was barely ten o’clock when he and the dog got settled in bed. Mickey grabbed the remote and channel surfed. What caught his eye was a familiar sight. A helicopter hovered over the 405 Freeway. Down below, the cops were in pursuit of a stolen SUV. Mickey turned up the sound.

“What began as a high-speed chase several hours ago has turned into a grueling slow-motion endurance test,” the announcer said over the helicopter shot. “The suspect, now identified as Alberto Rodriguez, was originally fleeing to the Mexican border. Now it seems that he is leading police in circles.”

From the overhead shot, it looked like the SUV was barely crawling down the road, tailed by five cop cars. Mickey had seen such images before. But this time he imagined himself being the driver. What was he thinking? The end of the chase was inevitable. He would run out of gas, the car would stall, and the police would close in.

The driver was just continuing to do what hadn’t worked in the first place.

Mickey hit the mute button and phoned his mother. It was midnight in Chicago, but he knew she liked to stay up late.

“Hello?”

“Mom, it’s me.”

His mother sounded surprised. They had talked right after Larry’s death. She hadn’t come to the funeral. Her second husband didn’t want her to, and anyway, she hadn’t been on speaking terms with Larry for the last twenty years.

“Is something wrong?” she said.

“No, Mom, everything’s fine. I wanted to ask you something. Why did you and Larry fight so much?”

“You want to ask me that now? It was so long ago. I can’t remember.”

“But you remember fighting?”

“God, yes. It was awful. We were both scrappers.” Her tone became abrupt. “Do we really need to go into it right this minute?”

Mickey knew his mother was uncomfortable, but he couldn’t get the image of the slow-motion highway chase out of his mind.

“Didn’t you see where it was going?” he said. “People who keep on fighting end up getting a divorce.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

“That’s not what I mean. I can’t figure out why you didn’t try something different.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

“Neither of you was going to win, but you kept hacking away at each other.”

“Honey, I don’t want to throw stones, but you and Dolores got a divorce, too. You had fights. Did you ever stop thinking you’d win?”

Mickey wanted to say, That’s different. You were my parents. I was a kid when I got married. I couldn’t handle it.

Instead he said, “You’re right. I shouldn’t have called. Go to bed, Mom.” He mumbled an apology and hung up.

On the television the slow-mo car chase was still unfolding. The driver refused to quit. He’d eventually have to stop; it was inevitable. But his brain wouldn’t accept the inevitable.

“Poor bastard,” Mickey muttered.

He left the picture on mute as he rolled over in bed. TV helped him get to sleep. The morning news would tell him how it had all turned out.