“Tell me the need,” I say.
“A four-door Nissan.”
“Actually, what I want, my basic desire, is to get to a business meeting across town punctually, comfortably, and safely. The Nissan’s a means to an end. It’s just a detail. Try to think less about isolated tasks and more about the overarching process. It will serve you, believe me.”
“So you’re some millionaire?”
“No. Do I have to be rich to give advice?”
“For me to listen to it, you do,” he says.
The car, a new model I’ve never driven before, smells of a fruity industrial deodorant that’s worse than any odor it might be masking. The mirrors point off in random directions as though the last driver was a schizophrenic. The radio is tuned to Christian rock. Christian rock is a private vice of mine; it’s as well-produced as the real thing, but more melodic, with audible, rhymed lyrics. The artists have real talent, and they’re devoted. After the cops led away her second husband, Julie spent a summer as a born-again and worked in a St. Paul religous gift shop whose manager played in a band called Precious Blood. We took in one of their concerts, a spectacle of fog and laser lights and colored scrims. The band released white doves during the encore, and afterwards Julie and others rushed the stage and dropped to their knees before a neon cross next to the drum kit. It shook me to see such need in her, such thirst.
I turn up the station, reorient the mirrors, and drive to the guard’s booth, waving my rental papers. The old guy winks and raises the red-striped gate arm and I roll over the angled spikes, away.
On the way to Art’s house, where he insists on meeting, I dictate some lines for the preface to
Where these words come from I have no idea. Like the rest of the book, which I wrote over ten months, dictating for two hours before bed in a succession of identical suites whose regulation layouts and amenities allowed me to work undistracted, without thinking, the preface feels like a gift, a transcribed dream. What this means for its value, I don’t know. I fear sometimes that the book is just the overflow of a brain so overstuffed with jargon that it’s spontaneously sloughing off the excess. I’ve allowed myself to reread it only once, and some of the ideas felt foreign to me, with no connection to how I actually operate. Is it possible to be wiser on the page than you are in life? I’m hoping so.
Art Krusk’s directions guide me through the foothills into the smoke, which smells like burning tires. I know Art moved to a golf course recently, but it’s hard to imagine green fairways on these brown mounds. Where does the water come from? It’s a sin. The golf culture, which I’ve had ample chances to join, draws its allure, I’m convinced, from wastefulness, from the lavish imbalance between its massive inputs—acreage, labor, fertilizer, machines—and its nonexistent output. Sad. The few times I’ve played the game, I’ve come away feeling like an ecological glutton.
I reach a gatehouse manned by an old woman so flayed by the sun that her skin is like a bat’s wing, all pigmentless gray tissue and thready veins. I state my name and she consults her clipboard.
“Art said go on up, the house is open. He had an errand.”
“When will he be back?”
“He tore out of here an hour ago. Don’t know. Try to drive slowly and watch out for the carts. A lot of our residents won’t hear you coming.”
The development is unfinished, with heaps of sand along its noodle-shaped streets and cul-de-sacs. With so many tiny lanes and dead-end byways, the developer ran out of normal street names. I take a left on Lassie Drive and curve around right on Paul Newman Avenue. The houses (“Starting in the mid $200s,” according to a billboard) ape many styles, the most popular being a sort of Greco-ranch thing combining flat tile roofs with stocky columns. Art’s house is among the more elaborate models, with a fresh sod lawn whose seams still show and a faux-marble fountain of dancing cupids. For someone in his predicament, it’s offensive. His restaurants send half of Nevada to the ER and the man builds a palace in Mafia Moderne.
I’m tempted to leave a stinging note and return to the airport. Cutting Art adrift would let me build in crucial extra hours to my overloaded schedule. I could buy a thesaurus and touch up
I dial the credit card people on my mobile and wander behind the house to the pool, a free-form blue pond with an artificial island and two stray golf balls lying on the bottom, looking like undissolved Alka-Seltzer tablets. My call is passed from computer to computer and then to a person who only sounds like one.
“Where are you presently located?” she asks.
“Nevada. Reno.”
“Did you make any large purchases last Friday?”
“That’s why I’m calling. You cut my credit off.”
“Who am I speaking to?”
I lose my temper. “I’m out here in the middle of a business trip, totally dependent on your card, adhering to our agreement in good faith—”
The woman adjusts her tone and talks me down. She explains that for the past few days someone has been moving from state to state, ringing up major charges on my account: fifteen hundred dollars in a Salt Lake City
