talking about herself sometimes, and she wasn't compulsively competitive with other women. And then at the bottom of the emotional ninth inning, Prentice dropped the ball. He had an affair with Nina Spaulding, a rather pretentiously arty and very full-figured young dancer, and Amy found out. Maybe on purpose, Nina left an indiscreet message on the answering machine. Amy's fragile self esteem couldn't take it. She went off her meds and back on the wrong kind of drugs. Three months later, three months of near constant argument with Prentice, and she left him: and left New York for L.A…
The ballgame on Jeff's TV was winding up. The Dodgers were doomed. With the fickleness of the L.A. sports fan, Jeff swore at them, gave the screen the finger, threw Doritios at a shot of the Dodger's pensive manager. 'The hell with you lamebrains! You had the playoffs and you let the Padres, my God, the Padres take it from you, do you know what kind of average those guys have got? It's fucking humiliating.'
Prentice got up to pee. All that beer. He called out from the bathroom, 'You don't have to watch the game to the bitter end, you know. Maybe there's some basketball on. Or, I don't know, backwards speed-skating or something. Check ESPN.'
'No, I got to see how bad the humiliation is. Whether or not I should go so far as to wear a bag on my head for being a known Dodger fan.'
Prentice came back into the living room and did a couple of kneebends. He'd been sitting down too long. Outside, twilight was whispering into evening. The noise from the pool was almost gone. There were other television sets faintly audible through the walls, mumbling softly to themselves in news anchor cadences.
Another beer commercial came on. Jeff stood up and went to the French doors, stared out at the frayed ends of the tangerine ribbon of sunset, visible above the opposite roof. It was a clay-tile roof, on the imitation-Spanish- style apartment building beyond the pool. Identical to his own building. 'Goddamn that kid, too'.
Prentice sighed. Okay, maybe if he listened to the latest on Mitch, it'd distract him from thinking about
Amy. 'When was the last time you saw him, you say?'
'Six or seven weeks. I mean, I could've called the cops, do a missing persons thing, but he's not really missing, exactly, because he said he wanted to go off on his own, make his fortune, like, and he had a chance to sing in some rock band that was going to get a record deal…' He shrugged.
'He's too young to 'make his fortune, like', Jeff.'
Jeff was a silhouette against the windows now, his back to Prentice. But Prentice could see his shoulders stiffen. 'You telling me I shirked my responsibility?'
'I'm not really qualified to be selfrighteous about responsibility to people,' Prentice said. Seeing a mummy in a file drawer.
'No, you're not. But maybe I did blow it, I don't know. You know what? I think I liked the kid looking up to me. I was mad when he thought he could do without me. So he moves out and – I just wanted him to come home on his own.'
'With his tail between his legs.'
'Sort of. It was stupid. I did call around, yesterday, to find him. Asked some people I knew he used to see. They hadn't seen him in a while. He's got this black girlfriend, Eurydice, I'd like to date her myself. Foxy. She claims she hasn't seen him. Kid could be dead in a culvert somewhere.'
'He was doing drugs?' Prentice looked for a light switch. The room was getting darker and darker.
'Sometimes. Mostly not, around here. I don't tolerate it. But without me around…'
'He could be in jail, then. They've been doing a sweep for crack users'.
Prentice switched on the light. Jeff turned to face him. Moving in slow motion, he brushed corn-chip crumbs from his small, neatly trimmed black beard, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. His eyes were glassy with unshed tears. 'I'm gonna call the cops, the hospitals. See what I can find out.' He went to the touch-tone phone on the end table beside the futon, put his hand on it – and froze. 'I just thought of something. You know who was maybe the last person I know who saw Mitch? Your ex. Amy.'
South Los Angeles
It wasn't a prison clinic, Mitch decided, after he'd been awake for a few minutes. It was a general kind of hospital, and it had the rundown, used look of the public hospital that poor people had to go to, and maybe they got turned away and maybe they didn't.
He felt okay till he tried to move. It felt like he was strapped down with barbed wire. Lay still and it didn't hurt much; move and it tore you up. And it felt, too, that his bones had turned to lead. They were that heavy to lift.
He just had a glimpse of his arm, all stitched with fine black thread, the stitched wound and the skin around it discoloured with orange-coloured disinfectant. He was sewn up like a badly made rag doll, with seams on his chest, his legs, his arm. Had he done his groin too? Had he done the thing he'd been thinking of when he'd lost consciousness: slashed up his own dick?
The More Man had wanted him to do it.
But he'd been drawn into unconsciousness, pulled down into it, and he'd lost the More Man and everything else. Until he woke up in this bed and in this hospital gown and in this pain.
Don't move. Just don't try to move. Because if it hurts much more you'll vomit, and if you vomit you'll move your arms and legs with the convulsion of it, and the pain that would come, then – that was not something to even imagine.
So he lay there, floating in a septic pool of nausea, cotton-mouthed with dehydration, until a nurse came and looked him over, shaking her head with amazement. She asked him how he felt, and he said, 'Hurts.'
She looked like she was half-Indian, half-Hispanic. She had a Mexican accent. 'Chure, I bet it hurts,' she said, taking his pulse.
'Painkiller?' he rasped.
'We see what the doctor say.'
'Water?'
'You not supposed to have any in the stomach yet but I give you some IV glucose water, you feel better.' She set up an IV stand, put a needle in his right arm; she chewed her gum vigorously the whole time. She smelled like cigarette smoke. The glucose bottle fed by a rubber tube into a long needle that bit into the mainline vein of his right arm. She taped it down, and whisked out of the room without another word, probably to grab a quick cigarette in the nurse's lounge.
The bottle ticked out bubbles from its tube every so often, and coolness fed into his arm.
They'd put him in a loony ward, on medication. That's what'd happen, eventually.
He wondered if they'd posted a guard outside, or if the orderlies were supposed to keep an eye on him, or what.
He was sick, disfigured, and he was a prisoner too. They probably wouldn't even let him call his brother, without the juvenile hall authorities giving some kind of approval. His wounds were beginning to itch nastily, as well as burning and throbbing with pain. He couldn't scratch them.
He squeezed his eyes shut, as hard as he could, thinking that he was going to lay here and suffer for a long time.
Not if you don't want to.
'I have to.'
You can come with us. We're sending someone to help you come back to us. They haven't got a guard on you right now. You're just a juvenile. You're not important enough. The orderlies are supposed to keep an eye on you, but they're not bothering to. We can get you away .
'Look what you've made me do to myself.' Said with more disbelief than resentment. He didn't have the guts to be mad at the More Man. And the more he heared the More Man's voice, the better he felt.
That's right. If you hear me, if you really listen, you'll feel better.
He felt a trickle of the Head Syrup ooze through him, easing the pain a little.
That's all I can give you, until you come. The connection isn't quite there.
'I can't. I can't move.'
We're coming to help you.
Terror and giddy anticipation. First one, and then the other. Wanting to yell for someone, ask them to get Jeff, and wanting to go with the More Man.
He knew he couldn't yell for help. He knew just where he was going. He had as much choice about it as a
