'I did? You must be seeing things.'
I left her standing there and followed the blue Ford. It caught a yellow light at the entrance to the freeway and turned off to the right in the direction of the university. I sat behind a long red light and watched the spoor of oil smoke dissipating, mixing with the general smog that overlay this part of the city.
When the light changed, I drove on out to the campus, where Fred's friend Doris Biemeyer lived.
V
The university had been built on an elevated spur of land that jutted into the sea and was narrowed at its base by a tidal slough. Almost surrounded by water and softened by blue haze, it looked from the distance like a medieval fortress town.
Close up, the buildings shed this romantic aspect. They were half-heartedly modern, cubes and oblongs and slabs that looked as if their architect had spent his life designing business buildings. The parking attendant at the entrance told me that the student village was on the north side.
I followed a winding road along the edge of the campus, looking for Fred Johnson. There weren't many students in sight. Still the place seemed crowded and jumbled, like something thrown at a map in the hope that it would stick there.
Academia Village was even more haphazard than the campus proper. Loose dogs and loose students roamed the narrow streets in about equal numbers. The buildings ranged from hamburger stands and tiny cottages and duplexes to giant apartment buildings. The Sherbourne, where Doris Biemeyer lived, was one of the big ones. It was six stories high and occupied most of a block.
I found a parking place behind a camper painted to simulate a log cabin on wheels. No sign of the old blue Ford. I went into the Sherbourne and took an elevator to the third floor.
The building was fairly new but its interior smelled old and used. It was crowded with the odors of rapid generations, sweat and perfume and pot and spices. If there were human voices, they were drowned out by the music from several competing sources along the third-floor hallway, which sounded like the voices of the building's own multiple personality.
I had to knock several times on the door of Apartment 304. The girl who opened the door looked like a smaller version of her mother, prettier but vaguer and less sure of herself.
'Miss Biemeyer?'
'Yes?'
Her eyes looked past me at something just beyond my left shoulder. I sidestepped and looked behind me, half expecting to be hit. But there was nobody there.
'May I come in and talk to you for a minute?'
'I'm sorry. I'm meditating.'
'What are you meditating about?'
'I don't really know.' She giggled softly and touched the side of her head, where her light hair hung straight like raw silk. 'It hasn't come together yet. It hasn't materialized, you know?'
She looked as though she hadn't quite materialized, herself. She had the kind of blondness you can almost see through. She swayed gently like a curtain at a window. Then she lost her balance and fell quite hard against the doorframe.
I took hold of both her arms and pulled her upright. Her hands were cold, and she seemed slightly dazed. I wondered what she had swallowed or sipped or imbibed.
With one arm around her shoulders, I propelled her into her living room. On its far side a screen door opened on a balcony. The room was almost as bare as a coolie's hut: a few plain chairs, a pallet on a metal frame, a card table, fiber mats. The only decoration was a large butterfly made of spangled red tissue paper on a wire skeleton. It was almost as big as she was, and it hung on a string from the central ceiling fixture and very slowly rotated.
She sat on one of the floor mats and looked up at the paper butterfly. Under the long cotton gown that seemed to be her only garment, she tried to arrange her legs and feet in the lotus position, and failed.
'Did you make the butterfly, Doris?'
She shook her head. 'No. I don't make things. It was one of the decorations at the dance when I got out of boarding school. It was my mother's idea to hang it in here. I hate it.' Her soft little voice seemed out of sync with the movements of her mouth. 'I don't feel very well.'
I went down on one knee beside her. 'What have you been taking?'
'Just some pills to calm my nerves. They help me meditate.' She began to struggle again with her feet and knees, trying to force them into position. The soles of her feet were dirty.
'What kind of pills?'
'The red ones. Just a couple. The trouble with me is I haven't eaten, not since sometime yesterday. Fred said he'd bring me something to eat from home, but I guess his mother won't let him. She doesn't like me-she wants Fred all to herself.' The girl added in her gentle sibilant voice, 'She can go to hell and copulate with spiders.'
'What about your own mother, Doris?'
She let go of her feet. Her legs straightened out in front of her. She pulled her long dress down over them.
'What about her?' she said.
'If you need food or any kind of help, can't you get it from her?'
She shook her head with sudden startling violence. Her hair streamed over her eyes and mouth. She flung it back in an angry two-handed movement, like someone peeling off a rubber mask.
'I don't want her kind of help. She wants to take away my freedom-lock me up in a nursing home and throw away the key.' She got up clumsily onto her knees, so that her blue eyes were on a level with mine. 'Are you a shrink?'
'Not me.'
'Are you sure? She threatened to turn the shrinks loose on me. I almost wish she would-I could tell them a thing or two.' She nodded vengefully, chopping at the air with her soft chin.
'Like what?'
'Like the only thing they ever did in their lives was fight and argue. They built themselves that great big hideous house and all they ever did was fight in it. When they weren't giving each other the silent treatment.'
'What were they fighting about?'
'A woman named Mildred-that was one of the things. But the basic thing was they didn't-they don't love each other, and they blamed each other for that. Also they blamed me, at least they acted that way. I don't remember much of what happened when I was a little girl. But one of the things I do remember is their yelling at each other over my head-yelling like crazy giants without any clothes on, with me in between them. And he was sticking out about a foot. She picked me up and took me into the bathroom and locked the door. He broke the door down with his shoulder. He went around with his arm in a sling for a long time after that. And,' she added softly, 'I've been going around with my mind in a sling.'
'Downers won't cure that.'
She narrowed her eyes and stuck out her lower lip like a stubborn child on the verge of tears. 'Nobody asked you for your advice. You are a shrink, aren't you?' She sniffed. 'I can smell the dirt on you, from people's dirty secrets.'
I produced what felt from the inside like a lopsided smile. The girl was young and foolish, perhaps a little addled, by her own admission drugged. But she was young, and had clean hair. I hated to smell dirty to her.
I stood up and lightly hit my head on the paper butterfly. I went to the screen door and looked out across the balcony. Through the narrow gap between two apartment buildings I could see a strip of bright sea. A trimaran crossed it, running before a light wind.
The room seemed dim when I turned back to it, a transparent cube of shadow full of obscure life. The paper butterfly seemed to move in some sort of actual flight. The girl rose and stood swaying under it.
'Did my mother send you here?'
'Not exactly. I've talked to your mother.'
'And I suppose she told you all the terrible things I've done. What a rotten egg I am. What a rotten ego.' She giggled nervously.
'No. She is worried about you, though.'
'About me and Fred?'
'I think so.'
She nodded, and her head stayed down. 'I'm worried about us, too, but not for the same reason. She thinks that Fred and I are lovers or something. But I don't seem to be able to relate to people. The closer I get to them, the colder I feel.'
'Why?'
'They scare me. When he-when my father broke down the bathroom door, I climbed into the laundry hamper and pulled the lid down on top of me. I'll never forget the feeling it gave me, like I was dead and buried and safe forever.'
'Safe?'
'They can't kill you after you're dead.'
'What are you so afraid of, Doris?'
She looked up at me from under her light brows. 'People.'
'Do you feel that way about Fred?'
'No, I'm not afraid of him. He makes me terribly mad sometimes. He makes me want to-' She bit off the sentence. I could hear her teeth grind together.
'Makes you want to what?'
She hesitated, her face taut, listening to the secret life behind it. 'Kill him, I was going to say. But I didn't really mean it. Anyway, what would be the use? Poor old Fred is dead and buried already, the way I am.'
I felt an angry desire to disagree, to tell her that she was too pretty and young to be talking in that way. But she was a witness, and it was best not to argue with her.
'What happened to Fred?'
'A lot of things. He comes from a poor family and it took him half his life just to get where he is now, which is practically nowhere. His mother's some kind of a nurse, but she's fixated on her husband. He was crippled in the war and doesn't do much of anything. Fred was meant to be an artist or something like that, but I'm afraid he's never going to make it.'
'Has Fred been in trouble?'
Her face closed. 'I didn't say that.'
'I thought you implied it.'
'Maybe I did. Everybody's been in some kind of trouble.'
