THE TRAFFIC ON the Hollywood Freeway had been moving slowly but steadily until he got off at Barham Boulevard. The traffic on Barham was backed up all the way from the overpass to the top of Barham Hill.
Highway construction of some kind, although he couldn’t tell exactly what it was.
He crept up the hill in his rented car.
It took him almost twenty minutes to reach the hilltop overlooking Burbank. The other side of Barham Boulevard led straight down to the Burbank Studios where he had an appointment with Cromwell. The traffic on the downside of the hill was just as backed up, if not worse. By the look of things, it would take him at least another twenty minutes to make his descent.
The angle of the hill was such that when he had a chance to creep forward a few feet at a time, he just released the pressure on the brake pedal. There was no need to touch the accelerator.
His appointment with Cromwell was for three o’clock and it was almost three. He had left the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with plenty of time to spare, intending, as was his habit, to be at the Burbank Studios long before three.
The unexpected traffic delay was going to make him late for an official meeting for the first time in memory.
It pleased him that he would be late. That he would keep Cromwell waiting.
The pain in his lower back made him predisposed to be pleased about something.
Ever since the trip to Chicago, a little over three months ago, maybe it was the snow shoveling, or the way he fell down on his knees in front of her, or maybe even the way he got up from his knees, but ever since then, the pain in his lower back had become a fixture of his life.
It became especially acute when he was forced to sit in one place for too long. Long plane trips. Driving a car. Watching a movie in a theater. Things like that.
It was as if a living paw with retractable claws had been surgically implanted around the base of his spine and almost anything, from sneezing to laughing to stepping too hard on the brake, could trigger the claws to snap out of their hiding place and sink into his flesh.
He knew that he should see a doctor, but he also knew that he never would.
Just as he would never see a dentist about getting his broken teeth bonded.
It was too late for that. He was bonded with them as they were.
He would eventually bond with his backache as well.
The traffic, moving in spasms of a yard or two at a time, kept stopping and going … stopping and going … and then it stopped completely.
And then it resumed stopping and going again.
The rhythm was that of dots and dashes in Morse code.
An endless line of cars draped over a hill, sending a message in a repeated linear sequence to the cosmos.
Dot. Dot. Dot. Dash. Dash. Dash. Dot. Dot. Dot.
Maybe, he thought, maybe Elke Höhlenrauch had been right. Maybe the pain he was feeling in his lower back was simply the result of his spine contracting.
The less spine, the more pain.
Until eventually you were all pain and no spine.
He sighed. It even hurt his back to sigh freely, so it was a cramped, constricted sigh.
The thought of Elke reminded him that he still had no medical insurance.
It seemed to him, however, that the number of life’s afflictions against which there was no insurance of any kind was growing.
There were, he thought, disasters in life that no Lloyd’s of London, or Lloyd’s of the World, or Lloyd’s of the Universe, could ever underwrite.
No comprehensive insurance against folly and tragedy, against unreached destination and unrealized yearning.
He wished he had a policy right now to insure him against what he might agree to in Cromwell’s office.
He had arrived in LA late Monday night.
Today was Wednesday.
But this particular Wednesday fell on both the end and middle of the work week.
Wednesday, the third of July, 1991.
Judging by the traffic, the start of the long weekend had already begun.
Cars creeping up Barham Hill and cars creeping down crept past each other, and the people inside those cars, those going up and those going down, looked at each other through their windshields like participants in some lonely diaspora.
Everyone was trying to get somewhere, but since they were trying to do so in both directions, it didn’t take much imagination for Saul to imagine that the traffic jam he was caught in was in a loop and that those going up and those going down would pass each other again and again, but heading in reverse directions.
Life on a loop, like the water in recycled fountains, which neither flowed from somewhere nor went anywhere but looked busy and pleasing to the eye, going around and around.
There were no destinations anymore. Only turnaround points on loops of various sizes.
Even time, which was supposed to be linear, seemed to be on a loop to Saul.
He had a growing suspicion that the year 1991 was pivotal in this regard.
Pivotal to whom, he didn’t know.
1991, reading as it did the same way left to right as right to left, was corroboration for his thoughts as he crept along in his rented car toward Burbank Studios.
The last year anybody will ever need.
It read the same way coming and going, and whether you came or went, there was no getting out of it.
He wasn’t sure when these thoughts first began to assail him, but perhaps it had something to do with the victory parades on television after the Gulf War.
He hadn’t followed the war itself. He hardly knew there had been a war because of his own problems. But he did watch some of the victory parades.
He could still recall some of the faces he had seen in them.
What he saw in the faces of people lining the parade routes, either because it coincided with what he was feeling or because he chose to impose his own disease upon the cheering multitudes, was a celebration of nothing less than the triumphant victory over privacy itself.
Something was revealed in those faces that human beings up to now had kept to themselves.
He didn’t know what to call it, but it was as if some line had been crossed that could only be crossed once. Once crossed, there was no going back, but only around and around within the loop of the year 1991.
He had missed the war entirely, he knew nothing about its causes, but on the strength of seeing a few victory parades on television Saul Karoo saw himself as some latter-day Clausewitz who had a comprehensive theory about the causes of all wars to come.
And his theory was this.
All wars were now evasions of privacy. Wars, big and small, civil and otherwise, were collective evasions of private lives. Many, many wars would be needed until mankind was free of privacy altogether and the memory of its existence forgotten.
Wars on a loop.
He heard a car horn, several short repeated blasts, and saw somebody waving to him from an uphill-bound car on Barham Boulevard.
Squinting through his windshield, Saul recognized the smiling, almost laughing face of young Brad. Cromwell’s former Brad. Cromwell had dismissed him and replaced him with his new black Brad, but the old Brad still had a job at Burbank Studios and was leaving work early like everybody else.
Saul returned the wave and the smile. But because the two cars were creeping past each other so slowly, both men kept waving and smiling, as if to suggest some close bond between them that would last no longer than it took their cars to pass each other.
Oh, Brad, Saul thought.
Brad was young enough to be Saul’s son, and just as Saul could not think of his own mother, or any mother, or even the word “mother” without thinking of Leila, he could not think of any young man anymore without thinking of Billy.
And so from one name he went to the other.
Oh, Billy, he thought. My boy.
Billy was dead. Leila was dead. The Old Man, Mr. Houseman, was dead. And this death on a loop reminded him of his visit with the Old Man while he was still alive.
When he went to visit his mother in Chicago, he had had no plans of either going to LA or seeing the Old Man, but by the time he left his mother’s house three days later, his plan of doing both had materialized.
He remembered, in a loop-within-a-loop kind of way, the last time he saw his mother.
Their parting.
They were in the living room when the cab arrived and honked its horn.
He was sure they were going to part right there, but she offered to walk him to the waiting cab.
And so they went out together. The snow had all melted, the sun was shining, and a warm southwesterly wind was blowing. March was going out like a lamb as the two of them walked slowly toward the yellow cab.
His memories of his mother up to then had been of a woman inside the house. He could not remember the last time he had seen her outdoors. Nor could he tell if the bright sunlight illuminating her face made her look a little older or a little younger than she was. But she did look different.
A whole series of women he had never seen peeked out of her old eyes, and each one of them seemed to remember a different sunny day from her life, with a promise of spring in the air.
They embraced like a couple trying out a new and unfamiliar dance, a bit clumsily, a little self-consciously, but with an eagerness both could feel.
Then he took his bag and his backache and got into the cab.
She stood there waving. Maybe it was because it was such a breezy, springlike day that she reminded him, despite her age, of a whole school-yard full of schoolgirls waving goodbye to him.
He tried to figure out on the plane why he was doing what he was doing.
He knew why he was flying to LA, but he couldn’t figure out how he had come to his decision.
Maybe it was that videocassette of the Old Man’s film. Maybe just having it in his suitcase had caused the idea to be born. Or maybe it was knowing, from the newspapers, that the Old Man had only a handful of days left. Or maybe it was both. Or neither. All he knew was that he had to go there, had to see him, had to beg the dying old artist to forgive him for what he had done to his work.
Others had come on that Wednesday afternoon to pay their last respects to the master. Some were legendary figures in their own right, movie stars who had worked for the Old Man when all of them were young.
People were leaving when Saul came and people would be coming when Saul left. It was like an open house. There were parked cars everywhere on the huge expanse of land surrounding the house. Liveried drivers standing outside their limos, smoking. There was a large trampoline with some kids jumping up and down on it, but in complete silence.
The whole event had the feel of an occasion that had been announced, without Saul’s knowing it, in the papers.
I am dying. Come say goodbye. Arthur Houseman.
He was met at the door by a young woman who told him to go upstairs, where he was met by another young woman who told him where to sit down and wait his turn.
There were others in the waiting room, waiting theirs.
Yet another woman, this one neither young nor old, was in charge of escorting the visitors to the room of the Old Man himself.
The procedure, Saul observed, was always the same. She first inquired about the identity of the visitor, then went off, probably to announce the person to the Old Man, then returned to escort him or her to his room. Several people ahead of Saul were so well-known that she escorted them to the Old Man’s room without any inquiries.
Saul sat on a straight-backed wooden chair and waited his turn. On his lap was a yellow manila envelope with the videocassette of the Old Man’s film. Inside the envelope was also a letter he had written to the Old Man explaining who he was and why he had come. He had written the letter just in case Mr. Houseman proved to be too sick to receive visitors.
The room, the whole house, in fact, smelled of cigar smoke. The Old Man had been, among his many legends, a legendary cigar smoker and either the house had absorbed the smell of Cuban cigars or the Old Man was smoking them on his deathbed.
People left the waiting room. Others came in. The room seemed to contain the same number of visitors at all times.
When his turn finally came, Saul gave the manila envelope to the woman and told her that the letter inside would explain everything.
He stood up while handing her the envelope and remained standing when she left.
Then he sat down to wait.
It seemed to take longer than usual for her to return, and when she finally reappeared (with the yellow manila envelope in her hands), she seemed to make a point of looking elsewhere while walking toward him.
Saul stood up as she approached.
The envelope in her hands, he saw, was perfectly flat. The videocassette had been removed. In a moment of joy, Saul imagined himself being forgiven by the Old Man and the two of them watching his masterpiece together.
“Mr. Karoo,” the woman addressed him, stopping a few feet in front of him.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Houseman has instructed me to tell you that you must leave his house. He doesn’t wish for you to be here,” she told him and extended her hand with the envelope in it.
Saul’s entire body was suddenly made of knee joints that one by one began to buckle.
He had made no contingency plan for this possibility and didn’t know what to do next.
The people in the room could not help overhearing what the woman had told him and now they turned their heads and looked at him, wondering who he was and what it was that he had done.
“Please,” the woman said, gesturing toward the door.
Taking the yellow manila envelope from her hand, he somehow made his way downstairs and out of the house.
Inside the envelope was the letter he had written to Mr. Houseman, pleading for forgiveness.
His need for forgiveness had been so great that it had never occurred to him that transgressions existed that were unforgivable.
The Old Man’s house was located in Topanga Canyon, and Saul sped down the canyon, with drought-dry trees on both sides of the road rising high above him, their branches knitted together to form a tunnel of trees. And then suddenly, hurtling out of the tunnel, he saw the Pacific Ocean. Its vastness, reminding him of human vastness and of his inability to measure up to it as a man, caused his heart to ache and his cheeks to burn with shame.
He stopped at the gate and cracked open the window.
“Saul Karoo,” he told the uniformed guard guarding the entrance to Burbank Studios. “I’m here to see Jay Cromwell.”
The massive guard responded with monumental lethargy. He checked the list of names on his clipboard and, finding Saul’s name there, told him where to park.
The lot was almost deserted, but he parked his car in the visitors’ lot where he had been told to park.
He was in no particular hurry anymore. It was almost three thirty. Too late for haste since he was late already.
Getting out of the air-conditioned car, he was unprepared for the equatorial heat that awaited him. Heat rose up from the pavement and heat fell down from the sky. A heat-induced vertigo caused his head to spin, forcing him to hold on to the frame of the car door for support. With hands draped over the top of the door frame and his head bowed, he waited for the vertigo to pass.
He wondered if he was having a stroke or something, or if maybe it was just his blood sugar dropping like a rock.
The pain in his lower back was killing him. His lower back seemed to be located six or seven feet lower than usual. And somewhere far below his lower back was the pavement on which he stood, which spun like a pinwheel when he looked down at it.
Shutting his eyes didn’t help. If anything, it made things worse. Made it seem that his mind was orbiting around him, like the earth around the sun.
The Topanga Canyon loop came back to him and looped around and around. He saw himself coming and going. Saw himself driving up toward the Old Man’s house, anticipating forgiveness, and then, on the same loop, driving back down, unforgiven.
It seemed unfair to have to relive that pain at the same time that his lower back was hurting so.
One pain at a time, please, he pleaded, but there was no help for it. Both continued.
His mind continued to reel.
Instead of feeling the shame caused by the Old Man’s refusal to forgive him, he now felt something much worse. He saw the smallness of his motive in seeking that forgiveness in the first place.
All he had really wanted was a convenient sense of closure to the whole episode. He had desecrated another man’s masterpiece, but the dying artist would forgive him on his deathbed and that would be that. And then he would be on to something else.
It now seemed to him that seeking to be forgiven was even more vile than the crime he had committed.
He wondered if he had ever loved anything in his life. If he had ever really loved Billy or Leila. If what he had loved all along was only the motive behind loving them.
A motive that promised a personal payoff.
The grand consummation he had planned for the three of them in Pittsburgh was now revealed to him for what it really was. A cheap way of justifying all the aborted and dead-end story lines of his life by wrapping them up with a happy ending. As if there was an ending that could make up for the life he had lived.
His motive had murdered everything.
What else was love with a motive but the murder of love itself and those he had claimed to love?
The reeling slowed.
His vertigo began to fade.
One by one, the loops and reels in his mind began to wobble in their orbits and finally, like so many psychic hula hoops whose momentum was fading, to collapse in a heap somewhere in the back of his head.
There only remained the problem of the terrible ache in his lower back.
Holding on with both hands to the top of the door frame, he bent his knees to an almost full squatting position, trying to stretch the pain away.
Hanging from the car door frame seemed to have no effect on his back pain, but it did cause a sudden and completely unexpected loosening of his bowels. Before he could tighten his sphincter muscle, he felt a squirt of waste dampen his underwear.
What next? he thought.
He pulled himself up, hoping that the stain had not soaked through his trousers.
The building in which Cromwell’s office was located was a long rectangle four stories high. The dingy yellow stuccoed walls were cracked and peeling. All along the length of the building were chips of stucco of various sizes and shapes, fallen from the walls and gathering there in the exposed earth in ever greater accumulations over the years.
The whole building brought to mind some downtown community college in a town that no longer had a downtown or a community. One of those forlorn places where night students went to learn new skills that were out of date when they began.
Judged on appearance alone, it was the last place you expected to house the headquarters of the single most powerful producer in the movie-making world.
But then, Saul thought, the buildings and the offices and the private residences at Los Alamos, where the A-bomb was made, were even more unimposing in appearance.
There were three entrances, one at each end of the rectangle and one in the middle.
Saul took the middle one.
There were two sets of doors. When Saul opened the second of the two and stepped inside, it was like going directly into a walk-in fridge.
He shuddered.
He was used to these exterior-interior extremes in temperature when he was in LA, but this felt more extreme than usual. He wondered if the bone-cold he was experiencing was the result of his own body’s faulty thermostat or the building’s. But how was one to tell?
The lobby floor, usually peppered with people walking in and out of offices at this time of the week and at this time of the day, was completely deserted. Perhaps the start of the long weekend had swept through the premises and carried everyone away.
Walking slowly toward the elevator (with that wad of damp waste in his shorts), he could hear the sound of telephones ringing in deserted offices being answered by the sound of answering machines.
Down at the far end of the corridor, he noticed the maintenance man mopping the floor. Moving backwards, the man swung the mop from side to side in sweeping but precise scythelike strokes. Something about the man, in the mood Saul was in, struck him as mythic.
He took the elevator to the third floor, got out, and took a left. For a split second, and for a split second only, the getting-out-of-yet-another-elevator syndrome got the better of him. He didn’t know where he was or where he was going.
Then he remembered, as if the name Cromwell were an answer to all his questions.
It was almost four o’clock. He wondered if perhaps Cromwell had given up on him and gone home like everyone else.
If he was still in his office, then Saul was going to be a full hour late for their meeting. And although it had not been his idea to be so late, still he felt pleased, as if he had done it on purpose.
A full fucking hour late, he thought.
Despite his backache, despite his soiled underwear, Saul put a little rebellious swagger in his walk.
Through the opaque glass door, he saw that all the lights were still on inside Cromwell’s office, putting to rest all hope that he had gone.
So what? Saul thought.
Feeling downright insurrectionary, he meant to open the door and swagger inside, but just as he was reaching for the knob, the door opened and the momentum of his inward-bound body was met and equaled by the outward-bound body of Cromwell’s black Brad, resulting in an intimate collision worthy of two tango dancers.
Startled by the collision, lost momentarily in post-collision confusion, they both recovered quickly and then they both leaned back and laughed at what had happened.
“Mr. Karoo,” the black Brad said.
“Brad,” Saul replied.
The large and the once-beautiful eyes of the young black man, which had reminded Saul,-the first time he had seen him, of the eyes of Byzantine saints, were still large, but were now lemur-like. Large and round and drained of something, as if something private and essential had been fucked out of them, which the eyes refused to acknowledge.
“Jay’s still here and he’ll be thrilled to see you,” black Brad explained. He was very animated when he talked. “We were sure you were trapped in some nightmarish traffic jam. Jay forgot all about the start of the long weekend when he made the appointment. We tried to reach you at the hotel to tell you not to come today, but you had left already.”
Saul’s spirit sagged a little when he realized that if he had only not left so early, he could have avoided being here.
They traded places and stopped again, this time Saul on the inside and Brad on the outside.
“Have a nice weekend,” Brad told him.
“You too,” Saul replied.
Brad walked away down the corridor and Saul lingered in the doorway to watch him go.
Debating with himself whether to close the open door or leave it open, Saul resolved the issue by leaving it open, as if to assert that he didn’t intend to stay long.
The door connecting Brad’s antechamber to Cromwell’s office was open as well, but not all the way. It was as silent in one room as in the other. He waited for Cromwell to come out and greet him or to call him inside, but neither occurred.
He considered leaving, sneaking away.
Then he reconsidered.
Another involuntary discharge from his bowels dampened further his already damp underwear.
Tightening his sphincter muscle, he pushed open the door to Cromwell’s office just wide enough to peek inside.
Cromwell was on the telephone, for the moment listening to someone talk instead of talking himself. Just sitting there behind his desk and listening.
His whole face lit up when he saw Saul peeking around the door.
Great to see you, Doc, he seemed to be saying without saying a word. The wink of his eye, that little smile of his said it.
Saul acknowledged the silent greeting with a silent greeting of his own, nodding as if to say, Great to see you too, Jay.
But since Cromwell was on the telephone and since Saul didn’t want to intrude on some confidential conversation, he smiled apologetically and made as if to withdraw back to Brad’s side of the border.
Cromwell, the host of hosts, would not hear of it.
No, no, no. Come in. Come in. Come right in, Doc. This is nothing. Nothing at all. Just some jerk on the phone that I have to listen to. Won’t take a minute. Come on in. Great to see you, Doc, it really is.
All this was said in complete silence. With little winks. Little shrugs. The raising or lowering of his eyebrows.
Gesturing with the point of his chin, he instructed Saul where to sit, and Saul did as he was told and sat down in the designated chair directly across from Cromwell.