After the Plague

Death of the Cool

First there were the kids on the beach. What were they, fifteen, sixteen? Big ugly kids in big shorts with haircuts right out of a 1963 yearbook, all thatch and no shag, but what did they know about 1963? They were drunk, one-thirty in the afternoon, and they’d lifted a pint of tequila and a forty-ouncer from the convenience store or raided somebody’s mother’s liquor cabinet, and so what if he’d done the same sort of thing himself when he was their age, so what? — that was then and this was now. Drunk, and they had a dog with them, a retriever that had something else in it around the ears and snout and in the frantic splay of the rear legs. They were throwing a stick — an old scrap of flotsam spotted with tar and barnacles — and the dog was bringing it back to them. Every time the exchange was made and the stick went hurtling back into the ribbon of the surf, they collapsed with the hilarity of it, pounded each other’s freshly tattooed shoulders and melted right into the sand, because there was nothing under the sun funnier than this. Come to think of it, they were probably stoned too.

“You want to buy a dog?” they were shouting at everybody who came up the beach. “Cheap. He’s real cheap.”

They asked him — they asked Edison, Edison Banks — as he kicked through the sand to lay out his towel in the place tucked into the rocks where he’d been coming every afternoon for a week now to stretch out and ease the ache in his knee. He’d just had arthroscopic surgery on the right knee and it was weak and the Tylenol-codeine tabs they’d given him were barely scratching the surface of the pain. But walking in the sand was a good thing — it strengthened the muscles, or so the surgeon told him. “Hey, man,” the ugliest of the three kids had shouted, “you want to buy a dog?”

Edison was wearing a pair of shorts nearly as big as the stiffened shrouds they’d somehow managed to prop up on their nonexistent hips, and he had his Lakers cap on backwards and an oversized T-shirt and beads, the beads he’d been wearing since beads were invented back in 1969. “No, thanks,” he said, a little ruffled, a little pissed off at the world in general and these three kids in particular, “—I had one for breakfast.”

That was the end of the exchange, and on a better day, that would have been the end of the encounter and let’s turn the page and get on with it. Edison wanted to lie in the sun, shuffle through the deep sand above tideline for maybe a hundred yards in each direction, thrash his arms in the surf a bit and let the codeine work on the pain till cocktail hour, and that was it, that was the day he was envisioning, with dinner out and maybe a movie after that. But the kids wouldn’t let it rest. They didn’t recognize Edison as one of their own, didn’t appreciate his wit, his graying soul beard and the silver stud in his left ear. They saw him as a gimpy, pinch-faced old relic, in the same camp as their facially rejuvenated mothers, vanished fathers, and the various teachers, principals, deputy sheriffs and dance club bouncers who washed through their lives each day like some stinking red tide. They gave him a cold sneer and went back to the dog.

And that would have been it, but no sooner had Edison stretched out on his towel and dug out the sunblock and his book than the stick came rocketing his way. And after the stick, half a beat later, came the dog, the wet dog, the heaving, whimpering, sand-spewing whipcrack of a wet dog with a wet smell all its own. The stick vanished, only to come thumping back at him, this time landing no more than two feet away, so that the sand kicked up in his face. Were they trying to provoke him, was that it? Or were they just drunk and oblivious? Not that it mattered. Because if that stick came his way one more time, he was going to go ballistic.

He tried to focus on the page, his eyes stinging with sweat, the smell of the sunblock bringing him back to the beaches of the past, the sun like a firm, hot hand pressing down on his shoulders and the heavy knots of his calves. The book wasn’t much — some tripe about a one-armed lady detective solving crimes in a beach town full of rich people very much like the one he was living in — but it had been there on the hall table when he was limping out the door, a relic of Kim. Kim had been gone three weeks now, vanished along with the Z3 he’d bought her, an armload of jewelry and a healthy selection of off-the-shoulder dresses and open-toed shoes. He expected to hear from her lawyer any day now. And the credit card company. Them too, of course.

When it came this time, the final time, the stick was so close it whirred in his ears like a boomerang, and before he could react — or even duck — it was there, right at his elbow, and the black panting form of the dog was already hurtling over him in an explosion of sand and saliva. He dropped the book and shoved himself up out of the sand, the tide pulling back all along the beach with a long, slow sigh, gulls crying out, children shrieking in the surf. They were smirking, the three of them, laughing at him, though now that he was on his feet, now that he was advancing on them, the line of his mouth drawn tight and the veins pounding in his neck, the smirks died on their faces. “Hey, Jack,” he snarled in his nastiest New York — transplanted — to — California voice, “would you mind throwing that fucking stick someplace else? Or do I have to shove it up your ass?”

They were kids, lean and loose, flat stomachs, the beginner’s muscles starting to show in their upper arms and shoulders like a long-delayed promise, just kids, and he was a man — and a man in pretty good shape too, aside from the knee. He had the authority here. This was his beach — or the community’s, and he was a member of the community, paying enough in taxes each year to repave all the roads personally and buy the entire police force new uniforms and gold-capped nightsticks to boot. There were no dogs allowed on this beach, unless they were leashed (Dogs Required on Leash, the sign said, and he would joke to Kim that they had to get a dog and leash him or they were out of compliance with the law), and there was no drinking here either, especially underage drinking.

One of the kids, the one with the black crewcut and dodgy eyes, murmured an apology—“We didn’t realize,” or something to that effect — but the big one, the ugly one, the one who’d started all this in the first place by giving him that wiseass crap about did he want to buy a dog, just stood his ground and said, “My name isn’t Jack.”

Nobody moved. Edison swayed over the prop of his good leg, the right knee still red and swollen, and the two blond kids — they were brothers, he saw that in a flash, something in the pinched mouths and the eyes that were squeezed too close together, as if there weren’t enough room on the canvas — crossed their arms over their tanned chests and gave him a look of contempt.

“All right,” he said, “fine. Maybe you want to tell me what your name is then, huh?”

Up on the street, on the ridge behind the beach, a woman in an aquamarine Porsche Boxster swung into the last open spot in a long line of parked cars, pausing to let a trio of cyclists glide silently past. The palms rose rigid above her. There was no breath of wind. “I don’t have to tell you nothing,” the kid said, and his hands were shaking as he drew the stub of a joint out of one of the pouches in his shorts and put a match to it. “You know what I say? I say fuck you, Mister.”

And here was the dog, trembling all over, a flowing rill of muscle, dropping the stick at the kid’s feet, and “No,” Edison said, his voice like an explosion in his own ears, “no, fuck you!”

He was ten feet from them, fifteen maybe, so imprisoned in the moment he couldn’t see the futility of it, standing there on the public beach trading curses with a bunch of drunk and terminally disaffected kids, kids a third his age, mere kids. What was it? What did they see in him? And why him? Why him and not one of the real geeks and geezers strung out up and down the beach with their potbellies and skinny pale legs and the Speedos that clung to their cracks like geriatric diapers?

That was when the tall kid snatched the stick out of the dog’s mouth and flung it directly at Edison with everything he had, a savage downward chop of the arm that slammed the thing into his chest with so much force he found himself sprawling backwards in the sand even as the kids took to their feet and the harsh, high laughter rang in his ears.

Then it was the bar, the scene at the bar at four o’clock in the afternoon, when the sun was still high and nobody was there. Edison didn’t even bother to go home and change. He hadn’t gone near the water — he was too furious, too pissed off, burned up, rubbed raw — and aside from a confectioner’s sprinkle of dry sand on his ankle and the dark stain in the center of his T-shirt, no one would have guessed he’d been to the beach, and what if they did? This was California, beach city, where the guy sitting next to you in the bleached-out shirt and dollar-twenty-nine Kmart flip-flops was probably worth more than the GNP of half a dozen third world countries. But there was nobody sitting next to him today — the place was deserted. There was only the bartender, the shrine to booze behind him, and a tall slim cocktail waitress with blue eyes, dimples, and hair that glistened like the black specks of tar on the beach.

He ordered a top-shelf margarita on the rocks, no salt, and morosely chewed a handful of bar mix that looked and tasted like individual bits of laminated sawdust, his dark blood-flecked eyes sweeping the room, from TV to waitress to the mirror behind the bar and back again. His heart was still pounding, though he’d left the beach half an hour ago, humiliated, decrepit, feeling like the thousand-year-old man as he gathered up his things and limped up the steps to his car. It was irrational, he knew it, a no-win situation, but all he could think about was revenge — Revenge? Murder was more like it — and he methodically combed the street along the beach, up one narrow lane and down another, looking for any sign of his three antagonists. Every time he came round a bend and saw movement up ahead, he was sure it would be them, drunk and stoned and with their guard down, whacking one another with rolled-up towels, shoving and jostling, crowing at the world. He’d take them by surprise, jerk the wheel, and slice in at the curb to cut them off, and then he’d be on them, slamming the tall kid’s face, over and over, till there was no more smirk left in him….

“You want another one?” the bartender was asking. Edison had seen him before — he was the day man and Edison didn’t know his name and he didn’t know Edison’s — and he had no opinion about him one way or the other. He was young, twenty-eight, thirty maybe, with a deep tan and the same basic haircut as the kids on the beach, though it wasn’t cut so close to the scalp. Edison decided he liked him, liked the look of him, with his surfer’s build and the streaks of gold in his hair and the smile that said he was just enjoying the hell out of every goddamned minute of life on this earth.

“Yeah, sure,” Edison said, and he found that the first drink, in combination with the codeine, had made his words run down like an unoiled machine, all the parts gummed up and locked in place, “and let me maybe see the bar menu. You got a bar menu?”

The cocktail waitress — she was stunning, she really was, a tall girl, taller than the bartender, with nice legs and outstanding feet perched up high on a pair of black clogs — flashed her dimpled smile when Edison cocked his head to include her in the field of conversation.

Sure they had a bar menu, sure, but they really wouldn’t have anything more than crudités or a salad till the kitchen opened up for dinner at six — was that all right, or would he rather wait? Edison caught sight of himself in the mirror in back of the bar then, and it shook him. At first he didn’t even recognize himself, sure that some pathetic older guy had slipped onto the stool beside him while he was distracted by the waitress, but no, there was the backwards Lakers cap and the shades and the drawn-down sinkhole of his mouth over the soul beard and the chin that wasn’t nearly as firm as it should have been. And his skin — how had his skin got so yellow? Was it hepatitis? Was he drinking too much?

The bartender moved off down the bar to rub at an imaginary speck on the mahogany surface and convert half a dozen limes into neat wedges, and the cocktail waitress was suddenly busy with the cash register. On the TV, just above the threshold of sound, somebody was whispering about the mechanics of golf while the camera flowed over an expanse of emerald fairways and a tiny white ball rose up into the sky in a distant looping trajectory. A long moment hung suspended, along with the ball, and Edison was trying not to think about what had happened on the beach, but there it was, nagging at him like grief, and then the bartender was standing in front of him again. “You decide yet?”

“I think I’ll,” Edison began, and at that moment the door swung open and a woman with a wild shag of bleached hair slipped in and took a seat three stools down, “I’ll … I don’t know, I think I’ll wait.”

Who was she? He’d seen her around town, he was sure of it.

“Hi, Carlton,” she said, waving two fingers at the bartender while simultaneously swinging round to chirp “Hi, Elise” at the waitress. And then, shifting back into position on the stool, she gave Edison a long cool look of appraisal and said hi to him too. “Martini,” she instructed the bartender, “three olives, up. And give me a water back. I’m dying.”

She was a big girl, big in the way of the jeans model who’d married that old tottering cadaver of a millionaire a few years back and then disappeared from the face of the earth, big but sexy, very sexy, showing off what she had in a tight black top — and how long had it been since Kim had left? Edison, the T-shirt still damp over his breastbone, smiled back.

He initiated the conversation. He’d seen her around, hadn’t he? Yes, she had a condo just down the street. Did she come in here often? A shrug. The roots of her hair were black, and she dug her fingers deep into them, massaging as she talked. “Couple times a week maybe.”

“I’m Edison,” he said, smiling like he meant it, and he did. “And you’re—?”

“I’m Sukie.”

“Cool,” Edison said, in his element now, smiling, smiling, “I’ve never known anybody named Sukie. Is that your real name?”

She dug her fingers into her scalp, gave her head a snap so that the whole towering shako of her hair came to life. “No,” she said.

“It’s a nickname?”

“No.”

“You don’t want to tell me your real name? Is that it?”

She shrugged, an elegant big-shouldered gesture that rippled all the way down her body and settled in one gently rocking ankle. She was wearing a long blue print skirt and sandals. Earrings. Makeup. And how old was she? Thirty-five, he figured. Thirty-five and divorced. “What about you?” she said. “What kind of name is Edison?”

Now it was his turn. He lifted both hands and flashed open the palms. “My father thought I was going to be an inventor. But maybe you’ve heard of me, my band, I mean — I had an eponymous rock band a few years back.”

She just blinked.

“Edison Banks. You ever hear of them — of us, I mean? Early eighties? Warner Brothers? The Downtown LP?”

No, she hadn’t heard of anything.

All right. He knew how to play this, though he was out of practice. Back off—“We weren’t all that big, really, I don’t know”—and then a casual mention of the real firepower he could bring to the table. “That was before I got into TV.”

And now the scene shifted yet again, because before she could compress her lips in a little moue and coo “Tee-vee?” the door swung open, loudly, and brought in the sun and the street and three guys in suits, all of them young, with haircuts that chased them around the ears and teeth that should have been captured on billboards for the dental hygienists’ national convention. One of them, as it turned out, would turn out to be Lyle, and when she saw him come through the door, Sukie froze just for the briefest slice of an instant, but Edison saw it, and registered it, and filed it away.

The roar went down the other end of the bar, and Edison asked her if she’d like another drink. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. But it’s been nice talking to you,” and already she was shifting away from the stool to reach for her purse.

“How about a phone number?” he said. “We could do dinner or something — sometime, I mean.”

She was on her feet now, looking down at him, the purse clutched in her hand. “No,” she said, and she shook her head till her hair snatched up all the light in the room, “no, I don’t think so.”

Edison had another drink. The sun slid down the sky to where it should have been all along. He gazed out idly across the street and admired the way the sunlight sat in the crowns of the palms and sank into the grip of the mountains beyond. Cars drifted lazily by. He watched a couple turn the corner and seat themselves under a green umbrella on the patio of the restaurant across the way. For the briefest moment the face of his humiliation rose up in his mind — the kid’s face, the poised stick — but he fought it down and thumbed through a copy of the village paper, just to have something to do while he sucked at his sweet-sour drink and chewed his way through another dish of sawdust pellets.

He read of somebody’s elaborate wedding (“fifteen thousand dollars on sushi alone”), the booming real estate market, and the latest movie star to buy up one of the estates in the hills, browsed the wine column (“a dramatic nose of dried cherries and smoked meat with a nicely defined mineral finish”), then settled on an item about a discerning burglar who operated by daylight, entering area homes through unlocked doors and ground-floor windows to make off with all the jewelry he could carry — as long as it was of the very highest quality, that is. Paste didn’t interest him, nor apparently did carpets, electronics, vases, or artwork. Edison mulled that over: a burglar, a discerning burglar. The brazenness it must take — just strolling up the walk and knocking on the front door, hello, is anybody home? And if they were, he was selling magazine subscriptions or looking for a lost cat. What a way to make a living. Something for those little shits on the beach to aspire to.

By the time he looked up to order his fourth drink, the place had begun to fill up. The cocktail waitress — Elise, he had to remember her name, and the bartender’s too, but what was it? — was striding back and forth on her long legs, a tray of drinks held high above the jostling crowd. Up on the TV in the corner the scene had shifted from golf to baseball, fairways and greens giving way to the long, dense grass of the outfield — or was it artificial turf, a big foam mat with Easter basket fluff laid over it? He was thinking he should just eat and get it over with, ask what’s his name for the menu and order something right at the bar and then hang out for a while and see what developed. Home was too depressing. All that was waiting for him at home was the channel changer and a thirty-two-ounce packet of frozen peas to wrap around his bad knee. And that killed him: where was Kim when he needed her, when he was in pain and could barely get around? What did she care? She had her car and her credit cards and probably by now some new sucker to take to the dance—

“Excuse me,” somebody was saying at his elbow, and he looked up into the face of one of the men who’d come in earlier, the one the big blonde had reacted to. “I don’t mean to bother you, but aren’t you Edison Banks?”

The codeine was sludge in his veins, and his knee — he’d forgotten he had a knee — but he peeled off his sunglasses and gave the man a smile. “That’s right,” he said, and he would never admit to himself that he was pleased, but he was. He’d lived here three years now, and nobody knew who he was, not even the mailman or the girl who counted out his money at the bank.

“I’m Lyle,” the man was saying, and then they were locked palm to palm in a rollicking soul shake, “Lyle Hansen, and I can’t tell you how cool this is. I mean, I’m a big fan. Savage Street was the coolest thing in the history of TV, and I mean that — it got me through high school, and that was a bad time for me, real adolescent hell, with like all the rules and the regimentation and my parents coming down on me for every little minor thing — shit, Savage Street was my life.”

Edison took hold of his drink, the comforting feel of the glass in his hand, the faces at the bar, dark blue shadows leaning into the building across the street. There was a trip-hop tune playing on the jukebox, a languid slow female vocal over an industrial storm of guitars and percussion that managed to be poignant and ominous at the same time, and it felt right. Just right.

“Listen, I didn’t mean to intrude or anything—”

Edison waved a hand. “No problem, man, it’s cool, it’s all right.”

Lyle looked to be about the same age as the bartender, which meant he would have been out of high school for ten or twelve years. He wore his hair longer than the bartender’s, combed back up off his forehead with enough mousse to sustain it and the odd strand dangling loose in front. He kept shifting from foot to foot, rattling the keys in his pocket, tugging at his tie, and his smile flashed and flashed again. “Hey, Carlton,” he spoke into the din, “give me another one, will you — and one for Mr. Banks here too. On me.”

“No, no,” Edison protested, “you don’t have to do that,” but the money was on the bar, and the drink appeared in a fresh glass.

“So you wrote and produced that show, right?”

“Shit, I created it. You know, when you see the titles and it says ‘Created By’? I wrote the first two seasons, then left it to them. Why work when you can play, right?”

Lyle was drinking shooters of Herradura out of a slim tube of a glass. He threw back the current one, then slapped his forehead as if he’d been stung. “I can’t believe it. Here I am talking to Edison Banks. You know, when you moved into town, like what was it, three, four years ago?”

“Three.”

“Yeah, I read that article in the paper about you and I thought wow — you were the guitarist for Edison Banks too, right? I had both their albums, New Wave, right? But what I really dig is jazz. Miles Davis. Monk. That era stuff.”

Edison felt a weight lift off him. “I’ve been a jazz fan all my life,” he said, the alcohol flaring up in him till the whole place was on fire with it, mystical fire, burning out of the bottles and the light fixtures and the golden shining faces lined up at the bar. “Since I was a kid of fifteen, anyway, hopping the subway up to Harlem and bullshitting my way into the clubs. I’ve got everything—Birth of the Cool, Sketches, all the Coltrane stuff, Sonny Rollins, Charles Lloyd, Ornette, Mulligan — and all of it on the original LPs too.”

Lyle set both hands down on the bar, as if to brace himself. He was wearing a pinkie ring that featured a silver skull, and the rough edge of a tattoo showed at the base of his left wrist where the cuff climbed up his arm. “You might think I’m just some suit or something,” he said, “but that’s not me at all.” He plucked at his lapels. “See this? This is my first day on the job. Real estate. That’s where the money is. But I tell you, I’d love to hear some of that shit with you — I mean, Miles. Wow. And I know what you’re saying — CDs just don’t cut it like vinyl.”

And Edison, in the shank of a bad evening that had begun to turn clement after all, turned to him and said, “I’m up at the corner of Dolores and San Ignacio — big Spanish place with the tile roof? Come by anytime, man — anytime, no problem.” And then he looked up to see the waitress — Elise — glide by like a ballerina, that’s what she was like, a ballerina, with her bare arms held high and the tray levitating above her head. He had to get home. Had to eat. Feed the cat. Collapse in front of the tube. “Just don’t come between maybe one and four — that’s when I’m down at the beach.”

In the morning, the dryness in the back of his throat told him he’d drunk too much the night before — that and a fuzziness between his ears, as if his head were a radio caught between stations — and he took two of the Tylenol-codeine tabs to ease his transition into the day. Theoretically, he was working on a screenplay about the adventures of a rock band on the road as seen through the eyes of the drummer’s dog, but the work had stalled even before Kim walked out, and now there was nothing there on the screen but words. He took the newspaper and a glass of orange juice out on the patio, and then he swam a couple of laps and began to feel better. The maid came at eleven and fixed him a plate of eggs and chorizo before settling into her routine with the bucket, the mop and the vacuum cleaner. Two hours later, as he sat frozen at his desk, playing his eighteenth game of computer solitaire, there was a tap at the door.

It was Orbalina, the maid. “Mr. Banks,” she said, poking her head into the room, “I don’t want to bother you, but I can’t, I can’t—” He saw that she was crying, her face creased with the geography of her grief, tears wetting her cheeks. This was nothing new — she was always sobbing over one thing or another, the tragedies that constantly befell her extended family, the way a man on TV had looked right at her as if he’d come alive right there in her own living room, the hollowness of the sky over the graveyard in Culiacán where her mother lay buried under a wooden cross. Kim used to handle her moods with a mixture of compassion and firmness that bordered on savagery; now it was up to him. “What is it?” he said. “What’s the matter?”

She was in the room now, a whittled-down woman in her thirties whose weight had migrated to her haunches. “The elephants,” she sobbed.

“Elephants? What elephants?”

“You know what they do to them, to the elephants?” She buried her face in her hands, then looked up at him out of eyes that were like two pools of blood. “Do you?” she demanded, her frame shaken with the winds of an unceasing emotional storm.

He didn’t. His knee hurt. He had a headache. And his screenplay was shit.

“They beat them. With big, with big sticks!” Her hands flailed at the air. “Like this! And this! And when they get too old to work, when they fall down in the jungle with their big trees in their noses, you know what they do then? They beat them more! They do! They do! And I know what I’m saying because I saw it on the, on the”—and here her voice failed her, till her final words were so soft and muted they might have been a prayer—“on the TV.”

He was on his feet now, the screen behind him displaying seven neat rows of electronic cards, a subtle crepitating pain invading his knee, as if a rodent were trapped beneath the patella and gnawing to get out. “Listen,” he said, “it’s okay, don’t worry about it.” He wanted to take her in his arms and press her to him, but he couldn’t do that because she was the maid and he the employer, so he limped past her to the door and said, “Look, I’m going to the beach, okay? You finish up here and take the rest of the day off — and tomorrow, tomorrow too.”

The morning haze had burned off by the time he stepped out into the drive. The sky was a clear, depthless blue, the blue of childhood adventures, picnics, outings to Bear Mountain and the Island, the blue of good times, and he was thinking of his first wife, Sarah, thinking of Cap d’Antibes, Isla Mujeres, Molokai. They traveled in those days, on the beaten path and off it. There was no end to what he wanted to see: the Taj Mahal, the snow monkeys of Hokkaido, prayer wheels spinning idly on the naked slopes above Lhasa. They went everywhere. Saw it all. But that turned sour too, like everything else. He took a minute to duck behind a bank of Bougainvillea and empty his bladder — there was no place to pee on the beach, unless you did it surreptitiously in the flat water beyond the breakers, and since he’d hit forty he couldn’t seem to go more than an hour at a time without feeling that nagging pressure in his lower abdomen. And was that cool? No, no part of it was even remotely cool — it was called getting old.

There was a discolored place on the floor of the garage where Kim’s car had been, a kind of permanent shadow, but he didn’t dwell on it. He decided to take the sports car — a mint Austin-Healey 3000 he’d bought from a guy in the movie business with a garage full of them — because it made him feel good, and feeling good had been in short supply lately. The top was down, so he took a moment to rub a palmful of sunblock into the soft flesh under his eyes — no reason to wind up looking like one of the unwrapped mummies nodding over their white wine and appetizers in every café and trattoria in town. Then he adjusted his sunglasses, turned his cap backwards, and shot down the street with a modulated roar.

He’d nearly got to the beach — had actually turned into the broad, palm-lined boulevard that fronted it — before he remembered the three kids from yesterday. What if they showed up again? What if they were already there? The thought made him brake inappropriately, and the next thing he knew some jerk in a 4x4 with the frame jacked up eight feet off the ground was giving him the horn — and the finger. Normally, he would have had a fit — it was a New York thing, turf wars, attitude — but he was so put out he just pulled over meekly and let the jerk go by.

But then he told himself he wasn’t about to be chased off his own beach by anybody, especially not some punk-ass kids who wouldn’t know one end of hip from the other. He found a spot to park right across from the steps down to the beach and pulled his things out of the trunk with a quick angry jerk of his arm — if he could run, if he could only run, he’d chase them down till their stinking weed-choked little punk lungs gave out, even if it took miles. The shits. The little shits. He was breathing hard, sweating under the band of the cap.

Then he was on the concrete steps, the Pacific opening up before him in an endless array of waves, that cool, fathomless smell on the air, the white crescent of the beach, blankets and umbrellas spread out across the sand as far as he could see in either direction. There was something about the scene that always lightened his mood, no matter how sorry for himself he was feeling. That was one thing he could never understand about Kim. Kim didn’t like the beach. Too much sun. Bad for the skin. And the sand — the sand was just another kind of grit, and she always bitched when she found a white spill of it on the carpet in the hall. But she liked it when he came home to her all aflame because he’d just watched a hundred women strip down to the essentials and rub themselves all over with the sweetest unguents and emollients an eight-ounce tube could hold. She liked that, all right.

He was halfway down the steps, studying a pair of girls descending ahead of him, when he heard the high, frenzied barking of the dog. There they were, the three of them, in their boxcar shorts and thatch haircuts, laughing and jiving, throwing the stick as if nothing had happened. And nothing had, not to them, anyway. Edison froze, right there, six steps down. It was as if he were paralyzed, as if he’d suffered a stroke as he reached for the iron rail and set one gimpy leg down in front of the other. An older couple, trainwrecks of the flesh, brushed past him, then a young mother trailing kids and plastic buckets. He could not move. The dog barked. There was a shout from down the beach. The stick flew.

And then, patting down his pockets as if he’d forgotten something, he swung slowly round and limped up the steps. For a long moment he sat in the car, fiddling with the tuner until he found a rap station, and he cranked it as loud as it would go, though he hated the music, hated it. Finally he slammed the car in gear and took off with a lurch, the thunderous bass and hammering lyrics thrusting a dagger into the corpse of the afternoon, over and over, all the way down the street.

He thought of the bar — of lunch at the bar and a cocktail to pull the codeine up out of whatever hole it was hiding in — but he didn’t have the heart for it. He was Edison Banks. He’d had his own band. He’d created Savage Street. He didn’t eat lunch at one-thirty in the afternoon, and he didn’t eat lunch alone, either — or drink anything, even wine, before five o’clock. That was what the rest of them did, all his hopeless washed-out diamond-encrusted neighbors: they ate lunch. And then they had a couple of cocktails and bought flowers from the flower girl in the short skirt before picking up their prescriptions at the drugstore, and by then it was cocktail hour and they drank cocktails and ate dinner. Or ordered it, anyway.

He burned up the tires for the next half hour, taking the turns like a suicide — or a teenager, a thatch-headed, flat-stomached, stick-throwing teenager — and then the engine started to overheat and he switched off the radio and crawled back home like one of the living dead in their ancient Jags and Benzes. A nap, that was what he was thinking, elevate the knee, wrap the frozen peas round it, and doze over a book by the pool — where at least it was private. He winced when he climbed out of the car and put some weight on his right leg, but the peas and another codeine tab would take care of that, and he came up the back walk feeling nothing. He was digging for his keys, the sun pushing down like a weight on his shoulders while a pair of hummingbirds stitched the air with iridescent feints and dodges and the palms along the walk nodded in the faintest stirrings of a breeze, when he saw that the back door was open

And that was odd, because he was sure he’d shut and locked it when he left. Kim might have been clueless about security, leaving her handbag on the front seat of the car where anybody could see it, running out of the house with her makeup half on and never thinking twice about the door gaping behind her, but he was a rock. He never forgot anything, even when his brain was fuzzed with the little white pills the doctor kept feeding him. He wouldn’t have left the door open. He couldn’t have. His next thought was for the maid — she must not have left yet. But then he glanced over his shoulder, down the slope and past the fence to the spot out on the public road where she always parked her dirt-brown Corolla. It wasn’t there.

He shut the door behind him, thinking he’d have to talk to her about that, about walking off and leaving the place wide open — there was no excuse for it, even if she was distraught about the fate of the elephants or her sister’s latest lumpectomy. In the kitchen, he fought the childproof cap of the prescription bottle and chased down a pill with a glass of cranberry juice. He’d just pulled open the freezer to reach for the peas when a sound from above made him catch his breath. It was a furtive sound, the soft friction of wood on wood — as of a dresser drawer, antique oak, slightly balky, sliding open. He didn’t breathe again until he heard the faint squeal of the drawer going back in, and the answering echo of the next one falling open.

Edison kept three guns in the house, identical Smith & Wesson 9mm stainless steel pistols, two of which had never been fired, and he went now for the one he kept in a cubicle in the pantry, behind the old telephone books. He held it in his hand a long while, listening, then made sure it was loaded, flicked off the safety, and started up the stairs. It was very quiet. Shadows collided on the walls above him, and the air was thick with motes of dust and the lazy circling attentions of the flies at the upstairs window. He was in his own house, among familiar things, but everything seemed distorted and unfamiliar, because he’d never before gone up these stairs with a gun in his hand — and yet he didn’t feel nervous or tense, or not particularly. He felt like a hunter in an air-conditioned forest.

When he crept into the bedroom — the master bedroom, the place where he’d slept alone in the big antique bed for the past three weeks — there was a man there, his back to the door, his arms and shoulders busy with the work at hand. A phrase came into Edison’s head: rifling the drawers. And then another one, one he’d heard on TV a thousand times — used himself in too many episodes of Savage Street to count: Freeze. And that’s what he said now, in a kind of bark, and he couldn’t help appending an epithet to it, for maximum effect. “Freeze, motherfucker,” that’s what he said. “Freeze, motherfucker!”

That was when Lyle, dressed in the same pale European-cut suit he’d been wearing the night before, turned around, his hands at his sides. “Hey, man,” he said, all the sunshine in the world distilled in his voice, no worries, no problems, and how do you spell California? “I just stopped by to see you, take you up on your invitation, you know? Cool house. I really dig your antiques — you the collector, or is it your wife?”

Edison had a gun in his hand. A gun he’d fired just once, at the indoor firing range, twelve bucks an hour, no target big enough for him to nail — or maybe it wasn’t this gun at all. Maybe it was the one under the sink in the master bath or the one behind the drapes in the front hall. The gun was cold. It was heavy. He didn’t know what to do with it now that he was holding it there in his hand like some party favor.

“Hey, come on, man, put that thing away, all right? You’re scaring me.” Lyle was wearing two-tone shoes and a hand-painted tie, very cool. He swept the hair back from his brow with a hand that betrayed him — a hand that was shaking. “I mean I knocked and all, but nobody answered, right? So I came in to wait for you, so we could maybe spin some sides — isn’t that what you say, ‘spin some sides’?”

It came to him then that Lyle was exactly like the kid on the beach, the kid grown up, all mockery and hate, all attitude. “You’re the guy,” Edison said. “You’re the guy, aren’t you?”

And there it was, the curled lip, the dead blue vacancy of the eyes. “What guy? I don’t know what you’re talking about, man — I mean, I come over, at your invitation, to, to—”

“The jewelry thief. ‘The discerning burglar.’ You’re him, aren’t you?” The knowledge went right through him, hot knowledge, knowledge like the burning needle his mother would use to probe his flesh when he came in screaming with a splinter embedded in his finger. “Let me see your pockets. Pull out your pockets.”

“Spin some sides,” Lyle said, but the phrase was bitter now, nasal and venomous. “Isn’t that what you hepcats say, you hipsters and thin white dukes? Too cool, right?” And he pulled a necklace out of his pocket, one of the things Kim, in her haste, had left behind. He held it out for a moment, a gentle silken dangle of thin hammered gold with a cluster of jewels, and let it drop to the carpet. “Let me tell you something, Edison—your show sucked. Even back then it was a joke — me and my buds’d get stoned and laugh at it, you know that? And your band — your pathetic band — was even worse.”

Outside, beyond Lyle, beyond the blinds and the curtains, the sun was spread over everything like the richest cream, and the window that framed it all was like nothing so much as an outsized TV screen. Edison felt something in him die, droop down and die like some wilted plant, and he wondered if it was the codeine or what it was. It came almost as a surprise to him to glance down and see that he was still holding on to the gun.

Lyle leaned back against the dresser and fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette, stuck it between his lips, and lit it with a quick flick of his lighter. “So what are you going to do, shoot me?” he said. “Because it’s my word against yours. I mean, where’s your witness? Where’s the stolen property? You invited me over, right? ‘Anytime, man,’ isn’t that what you said? And here I am, an honored guest, and maybe we had an argument and you got a little crazy — old guys are like that, aren’t they? Don’t they go a little crazy every once in a while?” He exhaled a blue veil of smoke. “Or shit, I mean I was just up here checking out my listings, I thought this was going to be an open house, and I wander in, innocent, totally innocent, and suddenly there’s this guy with a gun … and who is it? It’s you.”

“That’s right,” Edison said, “it’s me. Edison Banks. And who the fuck are you? What did you ever write? How many albums did you record? Huh?”

Lyle put the cigarette to his lips, and Edison watched the coal go red with the rush of oxygen. He had nothing to say, but his look — it was the look of the kid on the beach all over again. Exactly. Exactly that. But this time there would be no footrace, because Edison had already caught up.