“Let’s don’t worry about that now.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to get back to work, but if you want, I can take you up to ICU for a couple minutes first.”
“I can’t have time alone with him?”
“That’s correct,” he said. “For one thing, he’s still unconscious. For another, it’s my responsibility to keep him safe. I answer to the department, no ifs, ands, or buts. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but that’s the way it ‘Is.”
“Let’s get on with it then,” I said, suppressing the surge of rebelliousness. Clearly, I’d have to yield to him in everything. This man was officially the keeper of the gate. Seeing Mickey was more important than bucking authority or winning arguments.
I got up when he did and followed him through the lobby, feeling like a dog trained to heel. We took a right down the corridor, saying nothing to each other. He pressed for the elevator. While we waited, he pulled out a package of gum and offered me a piece. I declined. He removed a stick for himself, tore it in half, peeled off the paper, and popped the gum in his mouth. The elevator doors slid open. I entered behind him, and we turned and faced front while we ascended. For once I didn’t bother to memorize the route. There was no point in scheming to find Mickey on my own. If I pulled any shenanigans, Detective Aldo was going to nail my ass to the wall.
We entered the 7-E Intensive Care Unit, where the detective was apparently known by sight. While he had a brief conversation with the nurses at the desk, I had a chance to get my bearings. The atmosphere was curious: the lights slightly dimmed, the noise level reduced by the teal-and-gray patterned carpeting. I guessed at ten or twelve beds, each in a cubicle within visual range of the nurses’ station. The beds were separated by lightweight green-and-white curtains, most of which were drawn shut. These were the patients who teetered on the edge, tethered to life by the slimmest of lines. Blood and bile, urine, spinal fluid, all the rivers in the body were being mapped and charted while the soul journeyed on. Sometimes, between breaths, a patient slipped away, easing into the greater stream from which all of us emerge and to which all must return.
Aldo rejoined me and steered me around the desk to the bed where Mickey lay. I didn’t recognize the man, though a quick glance at Aldo assured me this was him. He wasn’t breathing on his own. There was a wide band of tape across the lower portion of his face. His mouth was open, attached to a ventilator by a translucent blue tube about the same diameter as a vacuum cleaner hose. The top half of the bed was elevated as if he were on permanent display. He lay close to one side, almost touching the side rails, which had been raised to contain him like the sides of a crib. He wore a watch cap of gauze. The bullet wound had left him with two blackened eyes, puffy and bruised as though he’d been in a fistfight. His complexion was gray. There was a tube in the back of one hand, delivering solutions from numerous bags hanging on an IV pole. I could count the drips one by one, a Chinese water torture designed to save life. A second tube snaked out from under the covers and into a gallon jug of urine accumulating under the bed. What hair I could see looked sparse and oily. His skin had a fine sheen of moisture. Years of sun damage were now surfacing like an image on film bathed in developing fluid. I could see soft down on the edges of his ears. His eyes weren’t fully closed. Through the narrow slits I could watch him track an unseen movie or perhaps lines of print. Where was his mind while his body lay so still? I disconnected my emotions by focusing on equipment that surrounded his bed: a cart, a sink, a stainless-steel trash-can with a pop-up lid, a rolling chair, a glove dispenser, and a paper towel rack, utilitarian articles that hardly spoke of death.
The presence of Detective Aldo lent a strange air of unreality to our reunion. Mickey’s chest rose and fell in a regular rhythm, a bellows effect forcing his lungs to inflate. Under his hospital gown, I could see a tube top of white gauze bandages. When I’d met him, he was thirty-six. He was now almost fifty-three, the same age as Robert Dietz. For the first time I wondered if my involvement with Dietz had been an unwitting attempt to mend the breach with Mickey. Were my internal processes that obvious?
I stared at Mickey’s face, watching him breathe, glancing at the blood pressure cuff that was attached to one arm. At intervals, the cuff would inflate and deflate itself, with a whining and a wheeze. The digital readout would then appear on the monitor above his head. His blood pressure seemed stable at 15 over 80, his pulse 74. It’s embarrassing to remember love once the feeling’s died, all the passion and romanticism, the sentimentality and sexual excess. Later, you have to wonder what the hell you were thinking of. Mickey had seemed solid and safe, someone whose expertise I admired, whose opinions I valued, whose confidence I envied. I’d idealized him without even realizing what I was doing, which was taking my projection as the stone-cold truth. I didn’t understand that I sought in him the qualities I lacked or hadn’t yet developed. I’d have denied to the last breath that I was looking for a father figure, but of course I was.
I became conscious of Glan Aldo, who stared at Mickey with a silence similar to mine. What could either of us say beyond the trite and the obvious? I finally spoke up. “I should let you get back to work. I appreciate this.”
“Any time,” he said.
He walked me down through the hospital and across the plaza. I punched the elevator button and he waited with me dutifully. “I’m fine,” I said, meaning he could leave.
“I don’t mind,” he said, meaning not-on-your-sweet-life.
When the elevator arrived, I got in and turned, giving him a little wave as the doors slid shut. I found my car, unlocked it, turned the key in the ignition, and put the gears in reverse. By the time I made the three circles upward to ground level, he was waiting in his car by the exit, his engine idling. I pulled out of the lot onto Tiverton, and when I reached Le Conte I turned left. Detective Aldo did likewise, keeping pace with me as I headed toward the freeway. He was still asserting his control, as I was keenly aware. I could understand his desire to see me off, though I felt like the villain in a Western movie being escorted out of town. I kept track of his car in my rearview mirror, not that he made any effort to disguise his intent. West on Sunset, north on the 405, driving toward the 101, we formed a two-car motorcade at sixty miles an hour. I began to wonder if he was going to follow me all the way home.
I watched the cross streets go by: Balboa, White Oak, Reseda, did the man have no faith? What’d he think I was going to do, circle back to UCLA? At Tampa, I saw him lean forward and pick up his radio mike, apparently responding to a call. The subject must must have been urgent because he suddenly veered off, crossing two lanes of traffic before he headed down the exit ramp. I kept my acceleration constant, my gaze fixed on the mirror to see if he’d reappear. Detective Aldo was a sneak, and I wouldn’t put it past him to try a little misdirection. Winnetka, DeSoto, Topanga Canyon passed. It looked like he was gone. For once my angels were in agreement. One said, Nobody’s perfect, and the other said, Amen.
I took the next off-ramp.
TEN.
Mickey had been shrewd in listing an address on Sepulveda. According to the Thomas Guide, there are endless variations. Sepulveda Boulevard seems to spring forth in the north end of the San Fernando Valley. The street then traces a line south, often hugging the San Diego Freeway, all the way to Long Beach. The North and South Sepulveda designations seem to jump back and forth, claiming ever-shifting sections of the street as it winds from township to township. There are East and West Sepulveda Boulevards, a Sepulveda Lane, Sepulveda Place, Sepulveda Street, Sepulveda Eastway, East Sepulveda Fire Road, Sepulveda Westway. By juggling the numbers, Mickey could just about ensure that no one was ever going to pinpoint his exact location. As it happened, I’d collected three variations of the same four digits: 805, 085, and 580.