I didn’t have the slightest idea what Kaposi’s sarcoma was, either, and decided I didn’t want to ask. I knew more than I wanted to already.
‘You can maybe understand why it slowed me down a little on your book,’ he said. ‘Can’t you, Clyde?’
I nodded.
‘I pushed on, though. Mostly because I think make-believe is a great healer. Maybe I have to believe that. I tried to get on with my life, too, but things kept going wrong with it — it was as if How Like a Fallen Angel was some kind of weird bad-luck charm that had turned me into Job.
My wife went into a deep depression following Danny’s death, and I was so concerned with her that I hardly noticed the red patches that had started breaking out on my legs and stomach and chest. And the itching. I knew it wasn’t AIDS, and at first that was all I was concerned with. But as time went on and things got worse . . . have you ever had shingles, Clyde?’
Then he laughed and clapped the heel of his hand to his forehead in a what-a-dunce-I-am gesture before I could shake my head.
‘Of course you haven’t — you’ve never had more than a hangover. Shingles, my shamus friend, is a funny name for a terrible, chronic ailment. There’s some pretty good medicine available to help alleviate the symptoms in my version of Los Angeles, but it wasn’t helping me much; by the end of 1991 I was in agony. Part of it was general depression over what had happened to Danny, of course, but most of it was the agony and the itching. That would make an interesting book title about a tortured writer, don’t you think? The Agony and the Itching, or, Thomas Hardy Faces Puberty.’ He voiced a harsh, distracted little laugh.
‘Whatever you say, Sam.’
‘I say it was a season in hell. Of course it’s easy to make light of it now, but by Thanksgiving of that year it was no joke — I was getting three hours of sleep a night, tops, and I had days when it felt like my skin was trying to crawl right off my body and run away like The Gingerbread Man. And I suppose that’s why I didn’t see how bad it was getting with Linda.’
I didn’t know, couldn’t know . . . but I did. ‘She killed herself.’
He nodded. ‘In March of 1992, on the anniversary of Daniel’s death. Over two years ago now.’
A single tear tracked down his wrinkled, prematurely aged cheek, and I had an idea that he had gotten old in one hell of a hurry. It was sort of awful, realizing I had been made by such a bush-league version of God, but it also explained a lot. My shortcomings, mainly.
‘That’s enough,’ he said in a voice which was blurred with anger as well as tears. ‘Get to the point, you’d say. In my time we say cut to the chase, but it comes to the same. I finished the book. On the day I discovered Linda dead in bed — the way the police are going to find Gloria Demmick later today, Clyde — I had finished one hundred and ninety pages of manuscript. I was up to the part where you fish Mavis’s brother out of Lake Tahoe. I came home from the funeral three days later, fired up the word-processor, and got started right in on page one-ninety-one.
Does that shock you?’
‘No,’ I said. I thought about asking him what a word-processor might be, then decided I didn’t have to. The thing in his lap was a word-processor, of course. Had to be.
‘You’re in a decided minority,’ Landry said. ‘It shocked what few friends I had left, shocked them plenty. Linda’s relatives thought I had all the emotion of a warthog. I didn’t have the energy to explain that I was trying to save myself. Frog them, as Peoria would say. I grabbed my book the way a drowning man would grab a life-ring. I grabbed you, Clyde. My case of the shingles was still bad, and that slowed me down — to some extent it kept me out, or I might have gotten here sooner — but it didn’t stop me. I started getting a little better — physically, at least — right around the time I finished the book. But when I had finished, I fell into what I suppose must have been my own state of depression. I went through the edited script in a kind of daze. I felt such a feeling of regret . . . of loss . . . ‘ He looked directly at me and said, ‘Does any of this make any sense to you?’
‘It makes sense,’ I said. And it did. In a crazy sort of way.
‘There were lots of pills left in the house,’ he said. ‘Linda and I were like the Demmicks in a lot of ways, Clyde — we really did believe in living better chemically, and a couple of times I came very close to taking a couple of double handfuls. The way the thought always came to me wasn’t in terms of suicide, but in terms of wanting to catch up to Linda and Danny. To catch up while there was still time.’
I nodded. It was what I’d thought about Ardis McGill when, three days after we’d said toodle-oo to each other in Blondie’s, I’d found her in that stuffy attic room with a small blue hole in the center of her forehead. Except it had been Sam Landry who had really killed her, and who had accomplished the deed with a kind of flexible bullet to the brain. Of course it had been. In my world Sam Landry, this tired-looking man in the hobo’s pants, was responsible for everything.
The idea should have seemed crazy, and it did . . . but it was getting saner all the time.
I found I had just energy enough to swivel my chair and look out my window. What I saw somehow did not surprise me in the least: Sunset Boulevard and all that surrounded it had frozen solid. Cars, buses, pedestrians, all stopped dead in their tracks. It was a Kodak snapshot world out there, and why not? Its creator could not be bothered with animating much of it, at least for the time being; he was still caught in the whirlpool of his own pain and grief. Hell, I was lucky to still be breathing myself.
‘So what happened?’ I asked. ‘How did you get here, Sam? Can I call you that? Do you mind?’
‘No, I don’t mind. I can’t give you a very good answer, though, because I don’t exactly know.
All I know for sure is that every time I thought of the pills, I thought of you. What I thought specifically was, “Clyde Umney would never do this, and he’d sneer at anyone who did. He’d call it the coward’s way out.” ‘
I considered that, found it fair enough, and nodded. For someone staring some horrible ailment in the face — Vernon’s cancer, or the misbegotten nightmare that had killed this man’s son — I might make an exception, but take the pipe just because you were depressed? That was for pansies.
‘Then I thought, “But that’s Clyde Umney, and Clyde is make-believe . . . just a figment of your imagination.” That idea wouldn’t live, though. It’s the dumbbells of the world — politicians and lawyers, for the most part — who sneer at imagination, and think a thing isn’t real unless they can smoke it or stroke it or feel it or fuck it. They think that way because they have no imagination themselves, and they have no idea of its power. I knew better. Hell, I ought to — my imagination has been buying my food and paying the mortgage for the last ten years or so.
‘At the same time, I knew I couldn’t go on living in what I used to think of as `the real world,’
by which I suppose we all mean `the only world.’ That’s when I started to realize there was only one place left where I could go and feel welcome, and only one person I could be when I got there. The place was here — Los Angeles, in 1930-something. And the person was you.’
I heard that faint whirring sound coming from inside his gadget again, but I didn’t turn around.
Partly because I was afraid to.
And partly because I no longer knew if I could.
VI. Umney’s Last Case
On the street seven stories below, a man was frozen with his head half-turned to look at the woman on the corner, who was climbing up the step of the eight-fifty bus headed downtown. She had exposed a momentary length of beautiful leg, and this was what the man was looking at. A little farther down the street a boy was holding out his battered old baseball glove to catch the ball frozen in mid-air just above his head. And, floating six feet above the street like a ghost called up by a third-rate swami at a carnival seance, was one of the newspapers from Peoria Smith’s overturned table. Incredibly, I could see the two photographs on it from up here: Hitler above the fold, the recently deceased Cuban bandleader below it.