Nothing to Declare Read online

Isabel seemed charmed and favored me with an admiring look. She whispered into Lucy’s ear, which goosed a grin across her face. I lost my footing there, went dry. I’d been shading the truth from the outset, hatched my story out of air, one sentence at a time. My friends, I thought, would have me pegged in half a second. I never would have guessed they’d be so easily misled.

  You’re not surprised, are you? The actual events were nothing to advertise—Wham Bam Thank-You Ma’am in the dressing room while the final encore was still banging in my head. Facts are dependably small and lacking in kindness, don’t you think? They lead us only where we suspect they’re going to. Where’s the lift in that?

  I took a breath, the sour iron of fatigue and hangover. Then I confessed. Turned on a dime, if you want to know, made myself dizzy. There was a van of surfer dudes from Malibu who stopped for me on PCH. I crashed at their party shack on Zuma Beach in the shadow of the cliffs where Charlton Heston barebacked his horse in Planet of the Apes. They were growing sinsemilla in their closet, and I helped them sex the plants. The money’s in the female buds. The rest is trash.

  Jesse’s eyes were liquid, his smile had boiled down into a chalky line. Isabel was fidgeting against the kitchen counter and I wondered if she planned to bolt. God, she was beautiful then, frisky with uncertainty. I can’t remember when I loved her more.

  She pushed herself from her ledge, came to me in a few bold steps, her dancer’s glissade. Her arms crept around me, her lips were spidery against my neck. And then her fingers prowled beneath the open collar of my shirt. Before I saw what she was after, she’d yanked a handful of my chest hairs out by the roots.

  A jolt flamed through me, tears welled. Isabel was dazzling, absolutely pure in her anger. The roommates were laughing and I tipped my straw fedora, took my bows. “Welcome home, Marty,” I remember Isabel saying. “All your bullshit perked up my appetite. If you’ve got any batter in the bowl, I’d like a short stack, please, and let’s go heavy on the syrup.”

  We were all right after that. Back on track, and for a good long while, better than before.

  That evening Marty decamps with his belongings to Isabel’s cottage, where he remains out of sight until New Year’s. From time to time his leavings wash up at Escalona House like the residue of a mysterious civilization. A bushel bag of baby artichokes, a pair of orange freeway hazard cones, a carton of T-shirts honoring the Comet Kahoutek, an envelope of Deutschmarks equal to Marty’s share of two months’ rent. Jesse plays organizer, dividing out what the roommates want and chucking everything else into Marty’s abandoned room.

  It becomes Jesse’s custom to visit Lulu’s after Friday supper. From the bar he watches the dancers and sips a Red Stripe beer. Lulu urges partners on him, finding women who are twice his age and who smell of rum and lipstick. For a samba or two, Jesse sways with them beneath the spinning mirror ball. Their thighs, encased in pantyhose, wedge into his crotch; their cocktail rings dig against his fingers when he shakes their hands goodnight.

  He and Paul devote their Saturday afternoons to the Million Dollar Movie on channel eleven, auditioning candidates for Paul’s new treatment on his rats. Paul’s interest has moved from cartoons onto films. According to him, cinematic images have infused a new order of fears into the American psyche. The deadliest are those in black-and-white, the color of dreams.

  Staring at the TV, notebooks in hand, the two roommates catalog lava eruptions and deep-sea diver drownings, pyramid entombments and monster attacks. Paul’s favorites are period drama beheadings where the screen goes blank at the moment of impact.

  “It’s all about control,” Paul says. “What they show you and what they won’t. There’s the ax, see, and the thud and the black screen. That black is something very groovy, believe me. I gotta see how my little guys up at the lab respond. I bet they’ll do the hokey pokey over a guillotine. Spike my graphs up to the roof.”

  Natalie walks behind them toward the kitchen. She lugs a box of vegetables from the food co-op, and Jesse feels the urge to sit up straighter, as if he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t. “Do they have feelings, your rats?” he asks Paul.

  “Fear and hunger. They get depressed if you fuck with them enough.” Paul stares at Jesse, fingers tapping on his lips as though he’s working his mind around a problem.

  “What?” says Jesse. “You’re weirding me out.”

  “I’m thinking about Christmas,” Paul says. “Going to see your ma and pa?”

  “Not this year,” Jesse says. “I had to convince them not to fly out here. I’m solo, which is fine.”

  “So you got nothing on the books? Wild.”

  “The factory is on vacation. I’m hanging out and looking for trouble.”

  Paul straddles the couch arm and tells Jesse about a psych department associate who is desperate for subjects for her master’s thesis project. His face blooms with scientific zeal. “It’ll be a gas, you get to be a footnote.”

  “Doing what?”

  “She’s keeping it super hush. Gotta be something in b-mod, this chick graded term papers for B.F. Skinner at Harvard when she did undergrad.”

  Natalie has overheard the conversation and comes over to the couch, plunks herself between them. “We can do Christmas here, guys. Or Hanukkah, or something else, solstice, maybe. Nobody has to go solo. Isn’t that why we choose to live together? Solidarity?”

  Paul’s grin tightens into an unhappy line. The muscles of his jaw are working hard, his inner monologue made flesh. Paul is not an arguer, though, especially not with the love of his life. Jesse waits to see which way things break. But Paul is silent, Natalie’s hand on his knee as a reminder of what she wants. December has been almost constant rain and the gray light flickers through the living room window, populating the TV picture with undulating shadows. The only sound in the house is the lush Franz Waxman movie score.

  “Give me your psych friend’s number,” Jesse says to Paul. “I’ll call her tonight.” He turns to Natalie. “Wonderful idea, solidarity. Love you for it, Nat. You cool if I beg off? My favorite holiday is None of the Above. A psych experiment sounds just my kind of weird.”

  She offers him a tiny sigh. “Your call, do what you will.”

  “Trying to,” Jesse says. “It’s why I’m signing up for Paul’s friend’s thing. My behavior could use some modification.”

  TWELVE

  THE EXPERIMENT IS SET FOR THE EMPTY DAYS between Christmas and New Year’s. Paul’s friend coordinates by telephone, limiting her conversation to details of time and location. Her goal is to explore the effect of solitude on short-term memory. For the sake of anonymity, Jesse’s label will be Subject Blue. A good choice, Jesse decides, a name of particular moods and textures. “I’ll jump to anything you want,” he says. “But what do I call you?”

  “We won’t be meeting. You’re not hanging me out to dry, are you? I gotta have people I can depend on, otherwise fuck it.” New York, he decides, the union of hostility and need.

  “I’m your guy,” Jesse says.

  On December 27, the S.C. grounds are deserted. In solitude, the whitewash of the campus buildings, the tended paths of redwood mulch advance the hasty cheerfulness of newly built shopping centers and apartment complexes. At the highest point on campus, Jesse peers out over the distant harbor, the water churned by weeks of rain into a quilt of clay-brown swell and foam. Where head shops and burrito parlors jam the Beach Boardwalk, Spanish pirates once moored their boats to count their spoils.

  For the next five days, Jesse inhabits a windowless basement room within the Psych Department complex in College V. There is a contract to sign before the experiment begins: no visitors, no phone calls, no unscheduled bathroom breaks, no personal belongings. The list goes on for more than a page. “Want it in blood?” Jesse asks the undergrad who logs him in.

  “No talking to the monitors without permission,” the student says. “I have to mark you off for this.”

  “I hear you,” Jesse says. “My God
is an angry God. Far out.” He pens his signature without reading to the end.

  The plan requires him to study out-of-order chapters selected from the King James Bible. Eight times a day he takes a test of fifty questions on each section, then slips his papers to a grader through a mail slot in the door. Surely the chapters have been chosen for their stony prose—a wilderness of begats and ancient place-names and the titles of kings and prophets.

  By the end of the first session, his oxygen feels stepped on by mimeo fumes and the pallid after-bite of his TV dinner. Stretched out on his army cot, Jesse waits for someone outside his door to dim the overhead lights. The brilliance presses through his eyelids like a thumb. Irad begat Mehujael. Mehujael begat Methusael. Methusael begat Lamech. He falls asleep in his clothes.

  As the week blurs onward, Jesse decides his keepers have been playing careful football with his body clock; they’re ringing reveille at cocktail time and calling lunch break after midnight. He could figure the hours, carve hash marks on the walls, but that would violate his compact with the rules. Hell, he’s being paid to lie around and daydream and jerk off when he’s too bored for anything else. What does Marty say—the secret of enhanced living is to cultivate your hobbies into a career.

  Midday on what he suspects is his last, Jesse is sitting at his worktable as a monitor enters with a meal. This one is new, a woman who wears a gray jumpsuit and a sporty, long-billed army cap in the manner of Fidel. Her plentiful burnt-red hair is the only concentrated color he’s seen in days. Her ankle socks show lacy eyelets on a scalloped cuff.

  “Hey,” Jesse says, his voice sandpapery and unfamiliar.

  The monitor tries to restrain emotion from her face, but her eyes spark with interest. Jesse gestures at his food.

  “There are only six Tater Tots here. I had eight last time. Eight yesterday, eight the day before. You think I’m not paying attention?”

  She writes in a small notebook and watches him, her arms clasped in the casual posture of someone looking into a shop window. Jesse spreads his palms in surrender. “Pardon me, silence is golden, it slipped my mind. Just venturing a point, you know, in the interest of science.”

  The monitor wags a chiding finger; her hair rustles at her shoulders. Henna, coppery as a penny and so freshly applied its scent muds the air long after she’s gone.

  The afternoon’s exam is on an especially relentless section of the Book of Ezra. Jesse’s keepers have gotten sloppy and the questions are marred by misspellings and references to material he’s sure he hasn’t seen. He double-checks his answers, dredges up a lineage of Levite priests and sons of priests in the time of the Babylonian exile. Let the bastards bounce him how they want—this test may be his grand finale, he’s going to ace it.

  There’s a scrabbling in the hallway and the unmistakable clamor of Marty in full throat: “Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on, could it be a faded rose from days gone by?” As Jesse stumbles to his feet, the door flips open. Marty balances an oily pizza box on his upthrust palm. In the month since Jesse’s seen him last, he’s regrown his brushy, gray-flecked beard.

  “Hey there, lab rat. Miss me?” He swings the door closed with the sharp tip of his boot.

  Heat shakes through Jesse’s chest. “You’re not supposed to be here. How’d you find me?”

  Marty drops the pizza on the table and commences measuring heel to toe the yardage between the walls. “Don’t let the pie go cold. It’s a Hawaiian Special—pineapple and Canadian bacon. Sacrilege, I guess, but who’s counting?”

  “You’re screwing with the data. I’m supposed to be in isolation.”

  Marty licks his finger to browse the pages of Jesse’s exam booklet. “Maybe I am the data.”

  “Which means?”

  “Well, there’s always layers upon layers, aren’t there, the thing observing alters the thing observed. I know a chunk or two about this kind of thing. They tell you the exercise is designed to test your mental faculties under isolation, blah blah blah. Layer one. Who says that’s what their hard-on’s really for? Maybe they want to push some different buttons, see how you pop or if you pop or when. Maybe they turn warm and loosey-goosey if I drop by to rattle your cage. Hey, for all you know, I’m on the goddamn payroll. Layer two.” Marty gives his beard a professorial caress.

  “You’re serious,” Jesse says.

  “I take an interest. So, spill it, how’ve these motherfuckers been yanking your chain?”

  Jesse shrugs and tells him how they’ve fiddled the test questions and the lighting and the time.

  “Banzai, Little Brother. I left the Volvo running. We’ll hoof it up to Bel’s and eat a Hawaiian Special and tell our fortunes.”

  Jesse summons the energy required to stay in place. “I want to finish what I started.”

  “Don’t put me on,” Marty says. “You’re being done to, don’t you care?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I made a promise. I want to see how this turns out.”

  Before he leaves, Marty begrudges Jesse a slim bow. “I guess you’ll wear them out long before they dent your stubborn carcass. Kudos.”

  Jesse sits to review his last five questions. Marty’s foxtrot wanes down the corridor, and further along a furnace ignites with an explosive whomp like a boxing glove landing on a bag. The pizza, by some blessing, is furiously hot. Salt and greasy-sweet and sour all at once.

  Early next morning a monitor arrives at Jesse’s cell with a check for $85. It’s the undergrad who signed him in, and he wavers gray-faced at the threshold while Jesse puts on his clothes, the guy rocking back and forth on his Earth Shoes as though in doubt of their ability to hold him up. He has a speech prepared, Jesse realizes, and he waits patiently as the monitor shares thanks for Jesse’s invaluable service to the experimental team. His sentences are well-turned and complete; he must have learned the words by rote.

  “Don’t thank me,” Jesse says. “I should be thanking you. It was a gas.” He snares the pay envelope from the freshman’s fingers. “How’d I tote up? What was my final score?”

  “I’m not allowed to say.”

  “No, sure, that would be telling,” Jesse says. He swings onto the corridor, stretching into long, beautiful strides. “Don’t ignore my pizza,” he calls over his shoulder. “The box is on the floor. You’ll want to grade me down for dining off the menu.”

  Out of doors, Jesse jogs the campus lanes in the general flow toward town. The sunrise seems slicked out of a magazine page, washed hot with the tones of racing-car bodies and cake frostings. Everything feels over-amped: the heavy fragrance of the eucalyptus trees, the cries of the shorebirds that swoop the campus dumpsters. Even the dew cuts a pleasing acid sheen upon his skin. Unbuttoning his coat, he puts on speed down the long curve out of campus, charging through fallen arbor vitae leaves and live-oak scrub on New Year’s Day.

  Beyond the Glen Coolidge gate he follows a mint-blue VW Bug, which scrapes along the curb at low speed. Out the passenger window a leash runs to the collar of a bounding dog. Jesse feels a twitch of elation—what could toast him better into 1974 than a lazy Santa Cruzan driving her Irish setter on its walk? The woman’s voice trickles over the engine burble: good boy, that’s it, mama’s good boy. Southern molasses.

  Through the oval of rear windshield there’s a flurry of hennaed hair and a female patch of shoulder and gray sleeve. Yesterday’s warder, Jesse’s sure of it. Layers upon layers, as Marty would say. When the car slows at a crosswalk, he ambles over to tap hello upon the driver-side window.

  He never sees the airborne jolt of red until his legs fly from under him and his head thumps embarrassingly on the pavement. The setter’s teeth lock onto his pant cuffs and as he tries to squirm away, Jesse finds himself craning up at the VW’s bumper sticker. “Live Simply, So Others May Simply Live.”

  The woman reacts instantly as though familiar with the procedure. Cooing to the animal, she separates dog from man, shredding pant leg in the process, and pats Jesse onto a bus bench. Bac
k in half a shake, she promises, after she takes her puppy where he won’t bother anyone. She’ll treat Jesse to a New Year’s breakfast, if he’ll wait. Carl’s a sweet piece of business, really, if you get to know him. The Bug speeds down the street, its rear windshield glazed with the dog’s furious breath.

  There is a knob the size of a bird’s egg on the base of his skull and Jesse feels decorated by a mixture of animal drool and carbon monoxide. Down the road, the VW slithers around a corner halfway into the opposing lane. When she returns, he’ll have to ask her name. And then he’ll see if he can win a smile from her, the one she hid from him yesterday while registering his sins inside her book.

  THIRTEEN

  HER NAME IS EMILY SAVONNE and for New Year’s she wants to fix them Ramos gin fizzes and a pot of black-eyed peas and rice. Hoppin’ John, the dish is called, good luck from New Orleans, where she was raised. “We always drink fizzes New Year’s Day,” she tells Jesse, “but be careful, they have a habit of leaning up on you. You’ve had a little tumble and might want to play it safe and stop at one.”

  Her house is on a low rise overlooking the Pacific, and while the beans simmer and Carl snores beneath their feet, Jesse and Emily sit on the porch and drink and watch a band of surfers run the slate-gray surge. The temperature has fallen and thunderheads collect at the horizon, but the surfers won’t give up their play. Their whoops shred into fragments in the wind.

  “Amazing,” Jesse says. “No fear.”

  Emily looks at him. “It’s incredible out there when it’s storming. Ever been?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The stronger the rain, the wilder the trip. Everything flies through your body—the rain, the current underneath, the waves. Puts you in contact with the deepest region of your soul, I swear.”

  She is wearing a lightweight cotton dress and she squirms her legs underneath herself as though ashamed of the authority of her feeling. Her face is playful and alive to his examination.