Ryan looked up from the till, was about to say one thing and then visibly stopped and began to say something else. «Oh, you know, we all need an obsession, and mine's La Colgate: 3184 Prestwick Drive, Benedict Canyon, Wyoming driver's license 3352511, phone unlisted but messages can be left with Adam Norwitz, the IPD Agency.»
John stared at Ryan.
«She rents stuff here.»
John looked down at the tapes, some episodes of
«Fair enough. An LAPD guy told me I was the last person to ever leave a message on her phone line before her plane crashed — a few years ago. I can't explain it. And now here you are tonight. So I'm bonding with her again.»
The shrine fit neatly in the car's back seat. The air outside was surprisingly cold and John's skin felt clammy. «Here's the script,» said Ryan.
«Yeah, yeah,» said John, grabbing it.
«John — listen to me.» John stopped — he was unused to being addressed like this but didn't mind. «You're going to read this script and then you're going to get back to me right away. But that's not all.»
«It's not, is it?»
«No. You're also going to call me up whenever you need to, and we can talk about Susan.»
«Do you have any idea how fucking psycho that sounds, Ryan?»
«Psycho or not, I mean it. Other people aren't going to understand this when it breaks out. And it will. Not from me, but from you, because you're in love so you have a need to blab everything. Other people won't get it.»
John laughed. «Okay, Ryan, you win. When my heart gets ready to sing, you can be my Yoko Ono.»
«Good luck, Mr. Johnson.»
John gave the thumbs-up and drove immediately to 3184 Prestwick, parked across the street and looked at Susan's small blue Cape Cod house surrounded by overgrown ornamental shrubs. A porch light was on, but otherwise it was dark. An hour crept by, and the only activity John noticed was a dog walker and three cars driving by. He gave up, and late in the night he drove back to the guesthouse. The streets were surprisingly empty, and at Highland and Sunset he noticed a fog, but then realized it couldn't be because Los Angeles almost never had fog. His cell phone rang, but the caller hung up. John conceded that something must be on fire.
That night John didn't sleep. He read Ryan's script and drank raspberry juice cut with stinging nettle and mango. He looked at his cordless phone wondering what might be a remotely plausible time to call Susan. Seven- thirty? Too early. Eight? Yes. No. He'd look desperate. Eight-thirty?
By six o'clock the sky was lightening and a few doves skittered about in the shrubs. He put down Ryan's script, «Tungaska.» It was good. A Texas woman inherits a strange metal hoop from her father, which looks like an unjeweled crown or a creweling hoop. She holds it up to the light from a TV set for a better look and suddenly licorice-whip tornadoes descend from the sky, smashing her Galveston subdivision into a landfill of cracked plywood, broken furniture, branches, toys and cars and clothing. Only the room in which she's sitting is spared. It turns out the hoop is a portal that converts human psychic energy into nuclear energy.
John heard a hum up the hill — Ivan's treadmill buzzing to life at its usual six-thirty time slot. Company! He walked up to Ivan, who was also watching the morning news on an ancient 14-inch TV placed on its usual perch on a lawn chair. «John-O.»
«Ivan.»
«You look like shit. Up all night?» Ivan's treadmill was on 3 out of a possible 10.
«Yeah.» This was not uncommon.
«Watch anything good?»
«Actually, no. I read something.»
«You
«A script, actually.»
«My,
John had to think. «Yeah, yeah. Whenever.»
«Something we can use?»
«I think so. It's okay.»
«Okay good, or okay crap?»
«Okay good. Okay
«Spiel forth, pardner.»
John started to describe the film.
«What happens after the Galveston blowup?» Ivan was hooked.
«We go back in time — to the famous Tungaska “meteor explosion” of 1909.»
«Isn't that the one where half the trees in Siberia got knocked down?»
«That's it — except it turns out it wasn't a meteorite explosion. It was this hoop thing.»
«Not aliens, I hope. The market's supersaturated with alien shit.» Ivan timed some sort of pulse or throbbing in his body with his stopwatch.
«Not aliens. The hoop is from Switzerland. From Bern, Switzerland. It's from 1905, and it was made by a voluptuous Russian Jew down the hall from Einstein's apartment. That was the year he discovered the Theory of Relativity.»
«Vol
«Okay okay. But she's hot.»
«She's
«God, Ivan. She's hot in a cold kind of way. Her parents died and she had to go back to Siberia from Bern. But when she's there, there's the accident — the Tungaska explosion.»
«What kind of psychic energy creates an explosion that levels half of Siberia?»
«The woman's first orgasm accidentally funneled through an amplifier ring within the hoop.»
«Anyhow, she's at the center of the explosion, so she's safe. That's part of the deal. Imagine the special effects on this one, Ivan. Anyhow, by now the bad guys know all about this hoop.»
«Who are the bad guys?»
«A Swiss banking consortium just before WWII. The guys who were about to rake gold fillings out of the death camps.»
«Go on.»
«These banking guys want it. All of the governments want it, but she keeps both herself and her hoop hidden until 1939 and the war. She's sent to a death camp and the Nazis get the hoop. Then the Americans steal it from the Germans, and the Americans use it to nuke Japan. And after that the hoop moves to Nevada, where they suck in the gambling energy and the desperation energy from Las Vegas to do their nuclear tests. But then the woman's son, a ballistics scientist working there at the Nevada test site, makes these connections and realizes what the hoop is really about — and also that it belongs to
«So he manages to swipe it — that's when the nuclear testing stops — in the eighties — and he smuggles himself and the hoop down to Galveston. But he has a stroke. His daughter, played by the same actress, puts the hoop into a luggage closet. It's when she's cleaning out the closet that she has the accident with the hoop up against the TV set. The tornado alerts the bad guys, and so there's this chase and it ends with a hurricane of blood. Fish turn inside out. Roses bloom at midnight. It's Revelations. At the end the woman takes the hoop to Hawaii and throws it into one of the live volcanoes on Oahu. Whaddya think?»
Ivan was measuring his breath as his treadmill kicked into a hill simulation. «Sounds to me like there's lots
