CHAPTER 3

Around the same time Philyaw honked his horn, Roland Sussman was pulling out of the airport in a taxi. He’d spent the last three years on a sparsely populated island, and Los Angeles assaulted him with its nervous energy. Billboards, traffic, impatience. Everything along the highway seemed poised to leap at him. Buy this. Do that. There was no mildness to it. Even the sunshine was intense.

When he reached home, he overtipped his Central Asian driver and stepped out into a caressing breeze. He’d given away possessions accumulated during his stay at the commune and carried only a small valise. His waiting house, though situated in a pricey beach neighborhood, was humble considering his status as an outrageously famous author. During his absence, Pick, a former girlfriend, had managed his worldly affairs, including his mutt, Lucy, who barked as he fumbled with the lock but recognized him as soon as he entered the vestibule. Jumping with delight, she was chubbier now. He pulled her down and calmed her. Good doggy. Everything looked convent clean, neater and more tightly organized than the way he’d left it. The plants burst with health.

Pick had already informed him she probably wouldn’t be around when he arrived. Excellent. He needed depressurization, not conversation, certainly not questions. Dressed for the cooler clime of Puget Sound, he briskly climbed the stairs to wash off the plane stink and look for a clean T-shirt. He thought he might meditate a little, but first he opened the sliding door to his bedroom closet . . . and a stranger burst out waving a black commando knife. “Yahhhh!” Sussman heard himself scream. Well, if this didn’t give him a heart attack, nothing would.

Lucy, who’d followed him upstairs, recommenced barking. Seventy pounds of portly indignation, she jumped harmlessly all around the intruder’s legs, just as she’d done to Sussman at the front door. Submissive even to cats, she must have decided it would be impolite to bark at the intruder until after he sprang out at Sussman with a knife in his fist. Although everything was moving at lightning pace, Sussman’s mind saw it all in slow motion. He expected his life to end within moments. He’d always assumed you receive advance notice in some way, a telegram or something, though there probably weren’t any more telegrams.

The man from the closet was built like a redwood, his head a huge yellow moon, the nose squeezed flat into pig cheeks like something inside a jar. His eyes were tiny lizard eyes peeking out of an oversized baseball cap pulled down over his eyebrows. He was probably Asian or Hispanic, with hairless bull-moose shoulders exposed by a tank top. No discernible neck, the arms heavily tattooed. His cap bore Kelly green initials that Sussman didn’t take time to read, color-coordinated with white athletic shoes and Kelly green laces. Coming forward, he waved his weapon left, right, left, like a snake head, his fingers fat coils of fiber. Nothing about this nightmare made less sense than the knife. Why bother with a weapon? This guy could tear a sofa in half. The blade had, if Sussman was not mistaken, a partially serrated edge and the knife appeared new, perhaps purchased specifically for this occasion.

With so much at stake here they should have much to talk about, but Sussman had the feeling that saying anything would defy etiquette. It all felt so strange and awful, incredible but starkly real. And true. The blade was truth.

Sussman hadn’t expected to be knifed on such a cozy, sun-splashed, 72-degree afternoon, especially not in palmy, pastel Hermosa Beach, which teemed with trendy trust-funders. A lavish redoubt where 1 percenters could settle in with their jewelry, emergency gold bars and petty anxieties reasonably certain they were safe from subterranean sore losers harboring homicidal intentions.

Retreating, Sussman looked for something to use as a shield or weapon, but he stumbled over his own feet and hit the floor with a heavy thump. Oh God. That’s when Pick, bless her, charged in from somewhere with a tennis racket raised in chopping position. Also strangely mute, she took a desultory sideways swing that missed. The invader reached out with his left to try to grab the racket but got his ear bonked by a second, quicker swing that made a hideous thwak. The intruder rubbed his ear and searched his fat fingers for blood. She swung again. Thwak! “Get away from me!” he shouted, the voice high-pitched and, not surprisingly, excited. If Sussman didn’t know better he’d have thought the intruder was some poor innocent soul attacked for no good reason and that Pick was the stalking maniac. They stood facing each other, neither advancing, until the intruder suddenly turned and sprinted out and down the stairs with ape-like quickness. The retreat revealed an enormous fat braid hanging almost to the small of his back. Lucy licked the face of Sussman, whose ankle throbbed with white-hot pain. They assumed the prowler was gone but couldn’t say for sure. Pick had never seen him before either. Obeying the 9-1-1 operator’s instructions, they locked themselves in the bedroom and waited for the cavalry.

The cops who showed up five minutes later couldn’t find the intruder or anyone in the neighborhood who’d seen someone of his description. It was as though a grizzly ran outside and blended in with the beach crowd. Police determined that he’d entered through an open window along the side of the house, but they found no usable prints.

Only an hour later Sussman saw an old photo of himself on the evening news over an emergency room TV screen: Author Surprises Armed Intruder was the teaser. Eventually when he would see print versions of the episode some accounts referred to Pick as a girlfriend, others as an assistant, still others as a “friend.” Her bare thighs hinted of sex, which spiced a story already made tasty by celebrity violence. Storyteller Sussman knew that only the element of betrayal was needed to give the story, as journalists liked to say, legs. Pick was in fact a compelling presence now that she’d grown her hair long and straight and dyed it black with hipster bangs and lipstick to match. It all diverted attention from the freckles and mild acne scars.

IF, AS the doctor feared, he’d suffered a third-degree tear to his ligament, Sussman might eventually need surgery. Pleased to be alive, he felt even more pleased after he scored a second Percocet off a nurse and felt his old friend the buzz. “You saved me,” he told Pick as it kicked in. “You’re my wench in shining armor.”

“Tennis shorts,” she corrected him.

Two detectives interviewed Sussman as he sat up in his curtained-off emergency room space. Repeating the same questions they and other cops had asked him in a hasty interview at the house, they didn’t seem to have any new ideas. As he’d told them earlier, the attacker was a man of medium height, built like a Hummer, and probably around thirty, though he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t recall specific images in the tattoos, and couldn’t be sure of eye color. Nor, it turned out, could Pick. They vividly remembered the braid. Hanging between the man’s massive shoulders, it somehow made him appear even more enormous. Yet Pick, seeing Sussman helpless on the floor, had attacked without hesitation, like trained infantry. Quite a babe.

The intruder’s voice was high-pitched for such a big man, but alarm did that to voices. Sussman remembered no distinct accent or unusual speech pattern. All he had to go by were four words: Get away from me. Was Sussman sure he never said anything else? Yes. Sussman was terribly verbal. Words stuck to him like briars. What he remembered in this instance was the absence of words, as though they were all actors in a silent film. The man carried no discernible booty out with him. Pick would be a better judge of what might be missing from the house, Sussman said, explaining once again that he’d been up in the San Juan Islands of Puget Sound for the previous three years.

Sussman tried to pay no attention to the fact that one of the detectives was blue. It was as though a screeching monkey were bouncing around on his shoulder yet mentioning it was taboo. Sussman was pretty sure he knew the source of the man’s pigmentation. He’d read about these blue people once or twice, but seeing one in the flesh startled him anyway. In most modern cases their condition originated with the Y2K scare, when fearmongers and crackpots predicted the first moment of the year 2000 would create a crippled, darkened planet swept by famine, plagues, cannibalism, and poor TV reception. Some of them worried that antibiotics and other medicines would be unavailable when digital clocks struck the Hour of the Wolf, which would quickly degenerate into Night of the Living Dead followed by a millennium or two of generic deprivation and horror. According to the theory, unchecked microbes would romp across earth, and, Glocks or no Glocks, even the most prepared survivalists could therefore end up dead. (Sussman had briefly considered writing a novel about the Y2K fanatics but ultimately consented to write an essay for the New Yorker instead. He never finished it.) Some Y2K extremists seized upon a preventive measure—silver! It was, they concluded, a time-tested antidote to lots of maladies. By ingesting it in carefully rationed doses, they’d float harmlessly above the death-dealing microorganisms that would thrive in the Road Warrior world to come.

It must have been a terrible disappointment to the silver-eaters when computers kept humming, civilization persisted, and the repeated doses turned their complexions blue. Sussman wondered whether there might be thousands more of these blue-skinned Chicken Littles scattered around—more than anyone suspected—bitterly hunkered down and praying for some apocalypse to come along and prove them correct after all.

MOST OF the cops who’d showed up to the house seemed genuinely concerned for Sussman and Pick. But this big blue one that followed them to the hospital, the tall one who kept his lips closed while he talked, treated Sussman with deadpan contempt, addressing him as though he were reading his words off a soup can. Over the years Sussman had run into a fair number of antagonists who despised him as the hippie Jew bastard who’d written Marching with Kings. Most of them despised the book so deeply that they could never bring themselves to read it. Or maybe Officer Blue just despised crime victims in general. Hard to tell. In the hospital he’d been paired with a muscled Latino in uniform. Now he was accompanied by a polite plainclothesman playing the role of good cop. Yet it made no sense. Wasn’t good cop-bad cop supposed to be used against suspects? Sussman had to remind himself he was the victim, not the perpetrator. Perhaps he was fulfilling his role as the injured party inadequately, failing some test he knew nothing about, like that college nightmare when you’re suddenly faced with the final exam and hadn’t realized you were enrolled in the course. Sussman was impressed by the enormity of Officer Blue’s disdain. He seemed to be biding his time, waiting for a predetermined signal to rise up with his confederates and, in a riot of blood and stymied passion, spring upon everyone that displeased them, especially Sussman. Sussman was disturbed to discover that after shutting himself off from the world for three years he might still carry a celebrity target on his ass, as had John Lennon, Lenny Bruce, and so many others brought down by madmen—in Bruce’s case, government madmen. He’d hoped that the news media, which normally suffer from striking memory loss, would forget about him, even though his opus was still taught in college classrooms.

One of the cops asked him what the Kelly green and white worn by the intruder signified. They’re probably some kind of team colors, Sussman said. You can check them on the Internet, he added. Officer Blue wrote something in his little spiral notebook, apparently considering this significant new information. Sussman found that discouraging, but his principal concern wasn’t to catch the culprit anyway. He mainly wished to put the incident behind him and fade back into obscurity.

He couldn’t understand how the gorilla with the giant braid down his back could escape notice, but Officer Blue’s partner pointed out that braids could be cut or unbraided and massive muscles weren’t so distinct either. “You know how many gyms we’ve got around LA?” he asked. “They’re like Starbucks. Full of tattooed guys pumping iron.” The partner was a tenor. His voice contained elements of Jay Leno and Mickey Mouse, which made him seem more nervous than he probably was. He looked close to retirement, a medium-sized man with a trimmed brown mustache and a too-obvious hair transplant, the hairs spaced evenly like rows of corn.

No, Sussman said, this guy was almost like another species, supernaturally thick. Officer Blue snorted. He talked more than the tenor, but he didn’t talk a great deal for a man asking questions. He spoke as though the words were currency he was reluctant to spend. Anyway, Sussman told them what he could. No, he’d never seen the intruder before and had no idea of his motives. He doubted that his written works had anything to do with the break-in. The intruder didn’t look much like a reader.

After Officer Blue folded his notebook, he said, “You know where the station is, right?” The words sounded like they were coming from inside a locked trunk.

Sussman nodded.

“Stop by in the morning. Your girlfriend too.”

Although three years of commune time and his recent helping of Percocet had boosted Sussman’s serenity, he was fed up with this goofy cop. “Pick isn’t my girlfriend,” he said.

Reading Sussman’s displeasure, the tenor cop jumped in. “We’ll come pick you up if you like. How’s nine thirty?”

Sussman assured him they’d get there on their own. Later he would learn from Pick that during her separate interview Officer Blue hadn’t been terribly nice to her either.

As soon as the cops left, two employees in hospital greens showed up and loaded Sussman onto a gurney. “Off you go,” said one, wheeling him to an unknown destination. He was pushed through sad corridors that smelled of chemicals, uneaten food, silicone wiring—a range of disagreeable hospital odors that lurked beneath all the disinfectant. Patients attached to bags of fluids that hung from skinny wheeled contraptions wandered ghost-like through the corridors. They were like antiquated machinery, beyond fixing. Peeking into rooms, Sussman saw other gray, wrinkled, torpid or trembling forms lying in bed, distressed and stripped of dignity. Some murmured unpleasantly. They appeared to be decaying already, as though the organisms that would devour them in death were already teaming up with their present maladies. Some were no doubt younger than Sussman.

The ambulance ride had jolted him with the same force as the knife-wielding intruder. Sussman always assumed when he heard a siren that some frail senior, perhaps dying, was being rushed to the hospital, that the patient was probably miserable anyway, so despite the drama of the siren, it wasn’t really an emergency but a death whose time had come. Now approaching seventy, Sussman still failed to identify with the invalid in the back of the ambulance even though it was his own aging self. He thought of all his contemporaries already suffering from a constellation of unpleasantries that included cataracts, plastic hips, limp dicks, liver spots, depression, loose labia, troubled sleep, lumps, tics, stomach acid, polyps, blockages, leaks, memory lapses, arthritic disfigurement, and cardiac stents. The mounting maladies gradually squeezed other topics from their conversation, turning them into obsessed caricatures of all the yammering geezers they’d shunned in their youth. And he was struck by the realization that a dismal scene quite similar to this one would probably be the last thing he’d ever see. If not today, some other day. He vowed then and there not to die in a hospital.

Eventually he was wheeled into a private room. Assuming ownership of Sussman’s fate, a matronly nurse or doctor or someone (Sussman couldn’t distinguish ranks on their uniforms) breezily mentioned they were “keeping” him overnight, possibly confusing him with a stray puppy. She seemed to think Sussman had already been informed.

“Why?” Sussman asked her.

“Excuse me?”

“Why do they want me overnight?”

The matron, as though speaking to a slow learner, explained that the doctor didn’t like something or other about his injury and so he must remain for “observation, possibly more tests . . .” All across the country, hospitals, obeying their insurance masters, prematurely ejected gravely injured and acutely diseased patients. He had to run into one that wanted to keep him overnight for a lousy twisted ankle.

“Thanks, but I prefer to be home,” Sussman said. Up to that point he’d been on cordial terms with the people who’d examined, X-rayed, and clucked over him. It would be rude to point out that rampant hospital infections resistant to their pitifully compromised antibiotics probably lurked in every corner, but he made his intentions clear. He was leaving. Things turned ugly fast. A posse formed. How did they all get notified so quickly? He struggled to his feet, one hand on the rail and putting no weight on his tortured ankle. He was a trifle dizzy. “May I borrow crutches or a cane or something?” he asked someone. No response. His bare ass was exposed by the hospital gown, but they ignored him again when he asked for his clothes. “What’re you gonna do? Sell my underwear on ebay?”

Ultimately some clerk showed up to explain that if he left without a proper discharge his insurance wouldn’t pay anything. Less than a full day out of the commune he was already bruised by random violence and by the vile nonsense of everyday life. He recalled Albania, where he’d once given a talk. It had the same aggressively complex web of procedures that existed only to exist, entwining citizens in a hopeless, baffling tangle of absurdity, although this place had fresher paint and probably vastly better food and plumbing.

Because socialist horrors had barely penetrated the Land of the Free, the bill would be in crazy-ass thousands. Which meant Sussman must surrender his dignity and stick around. But feeling sorry for himself was foolish. He once met a drunk at a party who’d been a reporter in Congo. Everywhere he went people were missing arms, legs, lips, noses, ears. All hacked off by armed, giggling fiends, and no one could really explain why. Something so evil had preceded the reporter that he was reluctant to push on and see what lay ahead in the next village. But staying where he was, seeing the same victims day after day, none of them truly healing, was also too terrible. The drunk correspondent looked old, much older than he really was, Sussman suspected. “And it wasn’t a front page story very long,” he said in a farm-boy twang. Until the man spoke, Sussman guessed he might be French. Most men, if they live long enough, he decided, end up looking French.

Settling back in bed, Sussman contemplated Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. He’d have to wait a little longer to find out what would kill him. It was a sentiment he might get into a book if he ever wrote another. If he didn’t write it down, he might lose it forever. Those thoughts that escaped, he suspected, were the worst ones to forget. Nothing can hurt me, he reminded himself, unless my mind allows it to. But just to be sure he rang the bell to try wangling another Percocet out of the night nurse.

SUSSMAN ENTERED an empty elevator and knew not why. It took him up. The stainless steel doors opened to a rooftop high above the city. Outside was glaring sunlight, but it wasn’t the friendly kind. A sinister presence lurked out there. Not exactly hiding, just waiting. No buttons on the elevator, nowhere to go but out the door into blinding sunlight. And sure enough, something awful was tugging at his leg, the gimpy leg with the twisted ankle. Sussman woke to find a long-haired doctor with a multicolored ceramic earring examining his ankle. He was relieved to be out of the creepy elevator dream. In a room flooded with morning sunlight the doctor recommended an MRI, though not necessarily now. He turned out to be a Marching with Kings fan and gladly signed a medical release.

Sussman, in custody of his clothes again, was barely able to get his bandaged ankle through the pant leg. Zipping up his fly, he looked up to see a woman enter his room. She was African American with khaki skin, dreadlocks and a red scarf around her head. She was from the business office, she said, briskly informing him that the insurance card he’d proffered the day before had been rejected by the insurer and his Medicare status was under some kind of clerical cloud.

“I’ve been gone awhile,” he said, hoping that might explain it. Not used to handling such conversations, he asked whether he could straighten this out later, feeling almost as befuddled as he’d been during the elevator dream.

“Don’t worry, Sussman,” Pick told him when she met him downstairs. She always called him by his last name, as though they were in an Ivy League study group. She’d handle the insurance problem. Somebody in green medical attire showed up with a wheelchair to take him outside. No one knew why anymore, but you had to leave in a chair. Maybe it was a long-running practical joke. With Pick carrying his crutches they moved around a couple of paparazzi from competing gossip websites. They asked him how he felt, if he’d been scared, what he was going to do next, the usual. Struggling to ignore the camera clicks, he was tempted to suggest they might find their time better spent ferreting out corruption in the military-industrial complex.