The Man With No Time sg-5 Read online

  “Let me know if you figure it out,” the waiter said, turning away.

  “Spring, summer, fall, winter,” Sonia said, counting each off on a finger. “You remember a year when they came in a different order?”

  “And garlic bread,” Hammond called after the waiter.

  “Oh, sure,” Orlando said. “And day and night, high tide-slash-low tide, waking-slash-sleeping, the phases of the moon, the apparent motions of the planets and stars, the solstices, circadian rhythms-I mean, give me a break. Local phenomena, card tricks. So the planet circles a star. So it rotates. Mercury doesn't. On Mercury, it's the same day all year. A Mercurian's circadian rhythms would last forever. So what? We have a day every twenty-four hours, but it's never the same day.”

  “I told you he was bright.” Sonia didn't sound entirely happy about it.

  “And why do you care about this so much?” I asked.

  “It just pisses me off. Our brains are the most complicated things in the universe, and we don't use them. We understand time intuitively in ways we don't even consider.” He picked up the salt shaker and threw it at me.

  It was a pretty quick snap. I caught the shaker left-handed, and salt poured over my forearm. “Great,” I said. “And I've been trying to cut down.”

  “You just performed dozens of complicated calculations about time and space,” Orlando said. “You estimated the thing's velocity and trajectory, and you timed it to the split second. Your brain told your arm where to go and then interpreted the information from the nerves in your hand to let you know that you'd caught it, and then you made a joke. Not much of a joke, of course, but you were busy. You can do all that literally without thinking about it, but you and lots of other people persist in thinking that time is like a … a clothes dryer or something, just going around and around in easy, predictable, stupid little patterns.”

  "I could have done without the 'of course,' " I said as the waiter put two carafes of wine on the table and gestured for a black-coated acolyte to set the green salads. He watched critically, dismissed the acolyte, bent forward from the waist in military fashion, placed Sonia's more exactly in the center of her place mat, and retreated, a puffy little blister of white shirtsleeve protruding through the hole in his jacket.

  “Watch him go,” Orlando said. “What do you see?”

  “What do you mean, what do I see? I see the waiter heading for the bar.”

  “What you see,” Orlando corrected me, “is a man with his back to you, moving his legs and getting smaller. You know what it is because you're time-binding-you think of the waiter as a more or less permanent object in space and time, and you put together the different pictures you see every moment to conclude he's leaving. Otherwise you might think he's one man getting smaller and smaller, or a succession of men, each smaller than the other. Same thing when you listen to music: You hear a succession of pitches over a period of time and you put them together into a melody. Listen to something moving in the dark, and you know it's the same thing although you can't see it. It's called time-binding. Even birds can do it. Migrating starlings take off when their clocks tell them to, and stop when they get there, the same place every year. And they use, birds use, time-binding. Starlings can fix on a permanent object, like the rising sun, and use it as a reference point for takeoff every morning, even though they haven't seen it for twenty-four hours. Obscure the sun and show them its reflection, and they'll take off in the wrong-”

  “Here's a man getting bigger,” Hammond interrupted, grating pepper over his salad and offering the mill to Sonia.

  The maitre d' leaned in and addressed Eleanor. “Miss Chan?”

  “Good guess,” Eleanor said.

  “You have a phone call.”

  “Where are we,” Hammond asked heaven, “the Polo Lounge?”

  “I left the number on my answering machine.” Eleanor smoothed a hand over my shoulder, but not before I'd asked her to give my regards to Burt. She grabbed a lock of my hair and yanked it as she followed the maitre d’.

  “Burt, huh?” Hammond grunted, shoveling a bale of romaine lettuce into his mouth. “Talk about permanent objects.”

  “The reptilian brain, on the other hand,” Orlando continued as though no one had interrupted, “can't really time-bind. Its prey has to be the right shape, the right size, and moving. Surround a frog with dead flies, and it'll starve to death.”

  “And that's enough,” Sonia commanded. “No more flies, no more dung. We've been very patient.”

  Orlando started to say something, then closed his mouth so sharply I could hear his teeth crack together. He prodded at his salad with a forefinger, the picture of a man looking for dead flies.

  “Do you really think,” Sonia asked, softening, “that Eleanor might introduce him to someone?”

  On cue, Eleanor beckoned to me from across the room. Even at that distance I could see that something was wrong.

  “I'll ask her,” I said, getting up.

  “Collar the waiter while you're up,” Hammond said. “No Russian dressing?”

  “Getting smaller now,” I said as I left the table. Orlando fixed me with a poisonous look.

  The Christmas tree twinkled hyperactively at me, silhouetting Eleanor in its prism of light. She grabbed my wrist and led me toward the phone, out of sight of the table. The receiver dangled by its coiled cord, and she picked it up and gave it a shake, as though there were someone unpleasant inside it.

  “I don't know whether to laugh or cry,” she said, hanging it up. “I wish I'd been born an orphan.”

  “What is it?”

  “It's Horace,” she said. “The jerk. He's left Pansy and the kids in Vegas and gone after Uncle Lo.”

  9

  Hill Street Ooze

  My room in the TraveLodge on Hill Street was mercifully lacking in Christmas cheer. No dying tree, no cards lining the mantel. For that matter, no mantel. I'd checked the window for a glimpse of festivity and found myself looking at a concrete wall two feet away. After my first night on the street, I'd found the dour little room a relief from the faux-Oriental facades of Chinatown, sparkling with lights and ringing with scratchily amplified carols, as though a missionary had seized control of a small Asian country and decreed a cure for his homesickness.

  Tossed over the sagging princess-sized bed a stained lemon-yellow spread struggled for chromatic dominance with a carpet the color of decayed teeth, an irregularly mottled brown over which you could have changed the oil in a car without leaving a noticeable stain. I'd dropped my keys on it the second evening I was there and spent ten minutes on my hands and knees trying to find them by touch. They didn't move or jingle, so I didn't get a chance to practice my time-binding.

  This was my fourth evening, which made it Sunday night. One week since I'd stared at Lo over the red candle.

  One wall framed a door and a mirror, below which were a narrow Formica counter and a curved plastic chair. The chair and counter had seceded from the color wars and assumed a sort of spit-gray neutrality. The decor was completed by a simulated wood dresser shoved up against the wall with the pictureless window in it. Above the dresser a bent nail supported an impossibly vivid laser-generated photo of two kittens in a basket. That was it, except for two more doors, one leading to the tiny closet and the other to a bathroom where the grouting was in serious need of attention.

  Sitting becalmed on the lemony pouf of the bed, I tried to convince myself that I knew what I was doing. I knew I was putting on my Reeboks because my feet would hurt later if I didn't, but long-term goals were conspicuous by their absence. I didn't really think I would turn a corner and bump into Horace, or that my two murderous Vietnamese kids would wave cheerfully at me from across a room. But the kids had come from Chinatown and Uncle Lo had been assaulted in Chinatown-or so he'd told Mrs. Summerson. Or so Mrs. Summerson had said he'd told her. Still, Eleanor had been sure that Horace was in Chinatown, and more than anything in the world right then, I needed to find Horace. I needed to find him
for Eleanor and Pansy, and I needed to find him for me. So I'd sentenced myself to wandering aimlessly around Chinatown morning and night, working my way through Horace's known haunts, and enduring the TraveLodge so I could get an early start.

  After three nights of merciless Cantonese meals-lop sop, Eleanor called it, dismal imitation Chinese food the restaurant help would never eat themselves-and after wearing down the tread on my Reeboks tracking kids who, on closer inspection, looked like visitors from the Valley, I'd come to one firm conclusion. I'd concluded that I'd eat at McDonald's.

  Only in a city as horizontal as Los Angeles would Hill Street be called Hill Street. Most of it is as level as a billiard table, four lanes of flat black asphalt distinguished from a million other L. A. streets only by the two-story, Chinese-cheesy architecture that crowds it on either side, replacements for the original buildings, slapped together in 1938 by the ephemeral architects of Paramount Pictures as a gift to the Anglo city's fantasy life. The development had been so romantically and persuasively inauthentic that scenes from The Good Earth had been shot there before the whole mishegas burned to the ground. The canned-Cantonese frippery that replaced it was no less unauthentic but much less glamorous, sets for a movie starring Victor Mature, with someone like Veronica Lake playing the Chinese girl he loves, all shorthand Asian Mystery and inscrutable proverbs, pidgin English, horsehair wigs, and rubber eyelids. The wigs were in plentiful evidence, re-Orienting the Western mannequins modeling Chinese robes in the shop windows. The eyelids, the ones on the street, that is, seemed to be real.

  Of course, not all of them these days belonged to Chinese. Hill Street, its two parallel streets, and the web of cross streets, alleys, and walkways that connected them were relics of what had at least been a real Chinese neighborhood all those years ago. Now the Asian presence in Los Angeles was more complex, a confused stew of people with nothing in common but tonal languages. The Chinese and Japanese had been joined by the refugees from wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Add the ambitious economic opportunists from Korea and Indonesia and Thailand to the mix, and you had the diverse population that the Anglo newspapers lumped together as “the Asian community.”

  Grumbling loudly enough to draw stares, I angled across Hill and into a little pedestrian walkway between shops, on the way to my car and a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. I didn't make it.

  My car, Alice, was in view, gleaming horsefly-blue under a street-lamp thirty yards away, when the girl screamed. She was tiny and Asian, and she burst from an alley twenty feet ahead of me and to the right, and then an arm snaked out and grabbed her down jacket at the neck and jerked her back in. I heard the squeeee as her rubber-soled tennis shoes left the pavement, and then another scream, higher and more urgent than the first.

  Well, so it wasn't a time for reflection. I wrapped my fist around my car keys so that the points protruded between my knuckles, and sprinted after her. Fist-first, keys raking the air, I rounded the corner and dove headfirst into sucker heaven.

  Something hard and heavy landed on the back of my neck, coming from the left, and the whisper it made as it parted the air gave me just enough warning to launch myself off the balls of my feet, subtracting my forward velocity from its momentum, and it struck my neck and folded my left ear forward and pasted it to my head like the flap on a glued envelope, pushing me forward and off my feet. I felt hot blood pour down my neck as I landed on my stomach, and the girl giggled.

  Scuffle of shoes behind me. If the girl hadn't giggled I might have been dead then and there, but the giggle galvanized me and I rolled to the right, away from the shoes and into some wooden packing crates. They folded themselves noisily down over me, and whatever had hit me on the neck swooped down again and pounded them into confetti. The feet I'd heard were right next to me and had ankles attached to them, and I drove the points of the keys into the left ankle, trying for the little bones that you can separate but never quite put together again. One of the keys went all the way home.

  The giggle was lost in a yowl, and the ankle I'd hit disappeared from view. I rolled farther under the scraps of wood and put both hands against the bottom of a crate and heaved a big piece of it in the direction of the vanishing ankle. Then I stood up, new blood heating my face and neck, and a fist hurtled toward my eyes. Orlando's claims for the miracles of the mind notwithstanding, I failed to calculate the fist's trajectory and velocity properly, and it treated me briefly to a new and gaudily unattractive version of the star-spangled banner. Still, the mind had sufficient time and electricity to suggest that the proper course of action would be to fall down and play almost-dead, and the broken slats of the crate folded themselves cozily over me like a masochist's bed of splinters, and I ignored the shard that had put a second hole in my right ear and lay still. I smelled fish, an odor seeping up from the wood uninvited, like someone else's memory.

  “Motherfucker,” panted a familiar voice.

  “Is he dead?” That was the girl. She sounded winded.

  “Not half,” said the kid I'd treated to the Torture of a Thousand Fingers. “But second half is easy.”

  Hands grasped my Reeboks and groped their way up my ankles. The other kid, the one with the ruined ankle, was whimpering. Okay, one down, for the moment. I let Dumbo-Ears pull me out into the alley, grunting with the effort.

  “He's fast,” said the girl.

  “He's through,” said Dumbo-Ears.

  “Fuck you,” said the corpse, and I brought my left leg up between the kid's thighs and hit him right on his personal share of the Vietnamese genetic destiny.

  Dumbo-Ears said something that sounded like scummmpff and folded forward, landing conveniently, if heavily, on top of me. I threw him in the general direction of the girl and pulled myself to my knees, a lot more slowly than I would have liked. My hands were so far away that I seemed to be communicating with them by telephone.

  He slammed into the girl. I listened with satisfaction as the two of them struck the pavement and then, with a Herculean effort, I got my feet under me. I looked up for a point of reference that might keep me from falling on my face, and focused on the barrel of a small revolver.

  “You wouldn't dare,” I said.

  The other kid, the good-looking one, cocked the gun with a click, a welcome sound. A revolver takes two clicks. Immediately after the first, I rolled to the right, thrusting my feet forward and tangling his damaged ankle between mine. He fell sideways, and the shot gouged concrete with a resonant spang that bounced back and forth between the walls of the alley like a berserk Ping-Pong ball. I found myself standing over him and raised one leg and sank it into the pit of his stomach.

  “Ooof,” he said, lifting his knees to shrink his diaphragm, trying to catch his breath. With another shot at a set of genetic jewels presenting itself, I drove my foot into his crotch.

  It worked again. He squealed in soprano, curling himself away from me. He was painfully thin, and I did my best to shatter his ribs, bringing a Reebok-soled foot down on his solar plexus.

  I was winning. And if I wasn't, who was around to contradict me? I fumbled my way to my feet, fighting for breath, and sighted an angel.

  “That's my baby,” the angel said. As I'd thought at first, she couldn't have been more than fifteen. Her left hand came up and leveled a gun, a new gun, in the very specific direction of my brain. “You can't hurt my baby.”

  “Honey,” I said, “I was only trying-”

  “You hurt him,” she said. She cocked it. She was too far away to reach. I heard the first click and then the second, and I kissed it all good-bye. Eleanor would know that I'd tried. The eyes in the absurdly young face narrowed, and I watched the knuckles circling the trigger go white. Someone else's life flashed before my eyes, the life of some poor, dumb fool who had missed all his chances, who had turned his back on the love that might have saved him, redeemed him. Chances rejected, love denied, lifelines refused. What the hell; it was my life after all.

  “Drop it,” said a new voice,
a voice I'd never heard before. “Drop it, fish sauce.”

  She turned away from me, toward the entrance of the alley, her mouth an open, vulnerable O. A large number of Chinese men, seven or eight of them, stood there. Most of them had guns. All the guns were pointed at the angel.

  “Gone,” she said, dropping it.

  “Jesus,” I said fervently to them as they advanced. “Thanks.”

  “Forget it,” the nearest of them said. He had a semi in his hand, and he leaned down to pick up my keys. Then he smiled at me and took a step in my direction.

  The last thing I remember from the alley was the barrel of the semi hitting me on the temple. Whatever I landed on seemed very soft.

  Across the room, the girl was chained to a concrete pillar.

  So was I.

  To be exact, we were both handcuffed, and the chain connecting the cuffs had been passed behind metallic electrical conduits that terminated at the tops of boxy outlets about six feet from the ground. That put my hands directly behind my head, but the girl's arms were stretched straight up and her feet pointed downward balletically. She was even shorter than I'd thought. Her eyes were closed, but her lips were moving silently, and she was conscious. Other outlets sprouted from similar pillars studded throughout the room. The room, which was quite large, was windowless and rich in pillars. A basement, maybe, supporting the weight of the building above it. The dirty cement floor was cluttered with desks and pallid beneath a thin wash of fluorescent light. On each desk was a sewing machine, and each of them was plugged into one of the boxes on a pillar. Cartons of unfinished garments, sleeves and collars and whatever comes between them, squatted next to the desks. A sweatshop. Chinese men were yanking the plugs from the outlets and shoving the desks and cartons aside to clear a space in the center of the floor, an action that struck me as sinister for some reason that might have been related to the fact that I was, after all, chained to a goddamn pillar.