The Star-Spangled Future Page 4

  Marvin kept walking across the black rug without exchanging a look or a word with Krell, but he noticed that there was quick eye contact between Krell and Karen, and at that moment he felt the fleeting taste of cinnamon in his month.

  Krell’s private house fronted on a rich, rolling green plateau across the highway from the Pacific end of the Santa Monica Mountains. Rustic bungalows were scattered randomly about the property, along with clumps of trees, paths, benches, a tennis court, a large swimming pool, a sauna, a stable, the usual sensitivity-resort paraphernalia. The parking lot was tucked nicely away behind a screen of trees at the edge of the highway, so as not to spoil the bucolic scene. But the whole business was surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped by three strands of barbed wire, and the only entrance was a remotely controlled electric gate. As far as Marvin was concerned, that pretty well summed up Golden Groves. This area north of Los Angeles was full of this kind of guru-farm; the only thing that varied was the basic gimmick.

  “All right Karen, what’s Krell’s number?” he said as they walked toward the parking lot. “Let me guess… organic mescaline combined with acupuncture… tantric yoga and yak-butter massage… Ye gods, what else is there that you haven’t been hung up on already?”

  “Synesthesia,” she said in deadly earnest, “and it works. You’ve felt it yourself; I could tell.”

  Uneasily, Marvin remembered the strange moments of sensory hallucination he had been getting ever since he met Krell, like short LSD flashbacks. Was Krell really responsible? he wondered. Better than turning out to be the results of too much acid, or the beginning of a nervous breakdown…

  “Harry had some kind of serious head injury three years ago—”

  “Probably fell off his surfboard.”

  “He was in a coma for three weeks, and when he came out of it, the lines between his senses and his brain were all crossed. He saw sound, heard color, tasted temperature… synesthesia, they call it.”

  “Yeah… now I remember. I read about that kind of thing in Time or somewhere…”

  “Not like Harry, you didn’t. Because with Harry the connections keep changing from minute to minute. His world is always fresh and new… like being high all the time… like… it’s like nothing else in the world.”

  She brought him up short with a touch of her hand, and a flash from her eyes, perhaps deliberate, reminded him of what she had been, what they had been, when they first drove across the San Fernando Valley in the old Dodge, with the Hollywood Hills spread out before them, a golden world they were sure to conquer.

  “I feel alive again, Bill,” she said. “Please don’t take it away from me.”

  “I don’t see—”

  Overwhelming warmth enveloped his body. He tasted the wine of her hand on his arm. He heard the symphony of the spheres, tone within, tone within tone, without end. He saw the dark of inky night punctuated with fountains of green, red, violet, yellow, fantastic flowers of light, celestial fireworks. He felt his knees go weak, his head reel; he was falling. The fountains of light exploded faster, became larger. He put out his hands to break his fall, smelled burning pine, heard the whisper of an unfelt wind.

  He was crouched on the grass supporting his body-weight on his hands, staring down at the green blades. “Are you okay? Are you all right?” Karen shouted.

  He looked up at her, blinked, nodded.

  “What Harry never let the doctors find out was that he could project it,” she said.

  Marvin got shakily to his feet. “All right,” he said, “So I believe that that greasy creep Krell can get inside your brain and scramble it around! But what the hell for? What dumb spiel does he throw you to make you want it, that you’re experiencing the essence of Buddha’s rectum or something?”

  “Harry’s no mental giant,” she said. “He doesn’t know why it opens you up—oh, he’s got some stupid line for the real idiots—all he really knows is how to do it, and how to make money at it. But, Bill, all I can tell you is that this seems to be opening me up at last. It’s the answer I’ve been looking for for five years.”

  “What the hell’s the question?” Marvin said, an old line that brought back a whole marriage’s worth of bad memories, like a foul-tasting burp recalling an undigested bad meal. Acid trips that went nowhere, two months of the Synanon game learning how to stick the knife in better, swinging, threesomes both ways, trial separations and trial reconciliations, savage sex, battle sex, dull sex, and no sex. Always searching for something that had been lost somewhere between crossing the continent together in that old Dodge and the skin-flick way of life that meant survival in Los Angeles after it became apparent that he wasn’t the next Orson Welles and she wasn’t the next Marilyn Monroe.

  “What I think is that this synesthesia must be the natural way people are supposed to experience the world. Somewhere along the way our senses got separated from each other, and that’s why the human race is such a mess. We can’t get our heads together because we experience reality through a lot of narrow windows, like prisoners in a cell. That’s why we’re all twisted inside.”

  “Whereas Harry Krell is the picture of mental health and karmic perfection!”

  They were nearing the parking lot now; Marvin could see his Targa, and he longed to be in it, roaring along the freeway away from Golden Groves and Karen, away from one more expensive last hope.

  Once again, she presented him with her flesh, touching both hands to his shoulders, staring full face at him until something inside him ached with yearning. Her face was as soft as it had been when they had been lovers instead of sparring partners, but her eyes were full of an aging woman’s terrors.

  “All I know is what I feel,” she said. “When I’m living in a synesthetic flash, I feel really alive. Everything else is just waiting,”

  “Why don’t you just try smack?” Marvin said. “It may not be cheaper than Krell, but at least it’s portable ”

  “Harry claims that eventually we can learn to do it on our own, that he can retrain our minds, given enough time—”

  “And enough money.”

  “Oh, Bill, don’t make me lose this! Don’t let me drown!”

  Her hands dug into his shoulders, her body slumped toward him, wrinkles formed in the corners of her mouth, the stench of pathetic desperation—

  He saw huge woman’s hands knotted in fear raise themselves in prayerful supplication toward him from a forest of sharp metallic edges. He felt her flesh moving over every inch of his body in long-forgotten personal rhythms, and how it had felt to snuggle toasty beside her in bed. He tasted bitter gall and the nausea of panic, smelled musky perfume.

  He heard his own tears pealing like church bells as they rolled down his cheeks; he drew the giant hands to him, and they dissolved into an armful of yellow light. Wordless singing filled his ears, and he smelled a long night by the fireside, felt the freshly warm glow of nostalgia’s sad contentment.

  He was holding Karen in his arms; her cheek was nestled against his neck. She was crooning his name, and he felt five years and more younger. And suddenly scared silly and burning mad.

  He thrust her away from him. “It won’t work,” he snarled. “You’re not going to play me for a sucker again, and neither is Krell!”

  “You felt—”

  “What you and Harry Krell wanted me to feel! Forget it, it won’t work again! See you in court.”

  He sprinted the rest of the way to his car, tearing little divots out of the moist turf of Golden Groves.

  With four underground films totaling less than ninety minutes to Bill’s credit and with Karen having “starred” in the last two of them, the Marvins had left New York to seek fame and fortune in the Golden West. What they found in Hollywood was that beautiful women with minor acting talent were a dime a dozen (or at best fifty dollars a trick) and that Bill’s “credits” might as well have been Cuban Superman flicks.

  What they also found out after four months of starving and scrounging was that Los A
ngeles was the pornography capital of the world. For every foot of feature film shot in Hollywood, there were miles of split beaver, S&M, and just plain stag films churned out. The town was swarming with “film makers” living off porn while waiting for The Big Break and “actresses” whose footage could be seen to best advantage in Rotary smokers or the string of skin-flick houses along Santa Monica Boulevard known as Beaver Valley. Porn was such a booming industry that most of the film makers knew less about handling a camera than Bill. So when the inevitable occurred, he had plenty of work and the Marvins had an abundance of money.

  Seven years later, Bill Marvin was left with his excellent connections in the porn industry, a three-year-old Porshe Targa, a six-room house in Laurel Canyon which he would own outright in another fifteen years, enough cameras and equipment to live well off pornography forever, and no more illusions about Making It Big.

  He was set for life. Sex, both instant and long term, was certainly no problem in his line of work; four months of screwing around between serious relationships that averaged about six months in duration seemed to be his natural pattern. In the porn business, you connect up with a good lawyer and a tricky accountant early if you know what’s good for you, so he had come out of the divorce pretty damn well: fifteen grand in lieu of her share of the house and one thousand dollars a month, which he could pay without feeling too much pain.

  He had felt that he could breeze along like this forever, happy as a clam, until that scene last week at Golden Groves. Now he was rattling around the house as if it were the dead shell of some enormous creature that he was inhabiting like an overambitious hermit crab. He couldn’t get his head into a new project, sex didn’t turn him on, drugs bored him. He could think of only one thing: Harry Krell’s head on a silver platter. And the fact that his lawyer had told him that the sanity-hearing ploy probably wouldn’t work certainly hadn’t improved his disposition.

  What possible difference can it make to me that Karen is throwing my money away on Krell, he wondered as he paced the flagstone walk of his deeply shadowed overgrown garden. If it wasn’t Krell, it’d be some other transcendental con-man. The hills are full of them.

  If this were a Universal TV movie, I’d still be carrying a subconscious torch for Karen, which is why Krell would be getting under my skin—guru-envy, a shrink might call it. But I wouldn’t have Karen back on her hands and knees. No, it’s got to be something about that crazy creep, Krell—

  That crazy Krell!

  Bill Marvin did a classic slow-take. Then he double-timed through the ferns and cacti of his hillside garden, trotted around the edge of his pool, through his living room, and two stairs at a time up to his second-floor office, where he called Wally Bruner, his hotshot lawyer.

  “Look, Wally, about this con-artist my wife is—”

  “I told you, you miss one alimony payment, and she’ll have you in court as defendant, and unless you succeed in getting her committed—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know I probably can’t have her declared incompetent. But what about Krell?”

  “Krell?” Wally’s voice had slowed down about twenty miles per hour. Marvin could picture him leaning back in his chair, raising his eyebrows, rolling the word around in his mouth, tasting it out. “Krell?”

  “Sure. This guy had a head injury so serious he was in a coma for weeks, and when he came out of it, he claimed he could see sound, hear light, feel taste, and then he goes into business claiming he can scramble other people’s brains the same way. What would that sound like in court?”

  “Who swears out the complaint?” Bruner said slowly.

  “Huh?”

  “The only way to get Krell into court is on a fraud charge, claiming that he can’t really project this synesthesia effect, and that he’s swindling the marks. That puts him in the position of having to defend himself against criminal fraud by proving he’s got this strange psychic power, which, let me tell you, is not a position I’d care to defend. If I was his lawyer, I think I’d have to plead insanity to try to beat the felony rap. If he wins, he spends a few months in the booby hatch and this Golden Groves thing is broken up, which is what you want. If he loses he goes to jail, which you’d like even better. If he tries to convince a Los Angeles judge that he’s got psychic powers, he won’t get to first base, and, if he tries it before a jury, I’ll get him and his lawyer thrown in the funny-farm.”

  “Well, hey, that’s great!” Marvin shouted. “We got him coming and going!”

  “Like I say, Bill,” Bruner said tiredly, “who’s the complainant?”

  “In English, please, Wally.”

  “In order to get Krell into court on a fraud charge, someone has to file a complaint. Someone who can claim that Krell has defrauded him. Therefore, it must be someone who has paid Krell money for his hypothetical services. Who’s that, Bill? Certainly not Karen—”

  “What about me?” Marvin blurted.

  “You?”

  “Sure. I go up there, pay Krell for a month’s worth, stay a few days, then come out screaming fraud.”

  “But according to you, he really delivers what he claims to…”

  “As of now, I never told you that, right?”

  “You’d have to testify under oath…”

  “I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

  “You really think Krell will take a chance on letting you in?”

  Bill Marvin smiled. “He’s a greedy pig and an egomaniac,” he said. “He tried to get Karen to help convince me he was Malibu’s answer to Buddha, and he’s more than jerk enough to convince himself that he succeeded. Will it work, Wally?”

  “Will what work?” Bruner said ingenuously. “As of now, this phone conversation never took place. Do you read me loud and clear?”

  “Five by five,” Marvin said. He hung up on Bruner and dialed the number of Golden Groves.

  Sprawled across his green couch, Harry Krell’s body contradicted the lines of tense shrewdness in his face as his eyes for once focused sharply on Marvin. “Maybe I’m making a mistake trusting you,” he said. “You made it pretty clear what you think of me.”

  Marvin leaned back In his chair, emulating Krell’s casualness. “Trust’s got nothing to do with it,” he said. “You don’t have to trust me and I don’t have to trust you. You show me that you can give me my money’s worth; that should convince me that Karen is getting my money’s worth, too. Turn me down, and it’s one thousand dollars a month you stand to lose.”

  Harry Krell laughed and microscopic pinpricks seemed to tickle every inch of Marvin’s body. Beside Krell on the sofa, Karen’s body quivered once. “We don’t like each other,” Krell said, “but we understand each other.” There was something patronizing in his tone that grated on Marvin, an arrogant overconfidence that was somehow insulting. Well, the greedy swine would soon get his!

  “Then it’s a deal?”

  “Sure,” Krell said. “Come back tomorrow with your clothes and a five hundred dollar check that won’t bounce. You get a cabin, three meals a day here in the house, free use of the sauna, the tennis courts, and the pool, at least two synesthesia groups a day, and whatever special events might go on. The horses are five dollars an hour extra.”

  “I’m paying for the two of us,” Marvin said. “I should get some kind of discount.”

  Krell grinned. “If you want to share a cabin with Karen, I’ll knock two hundred and fifty dollars a month off the bill,” he said. There was something teasing in his voice.

  Involuntarily, Marvin’s eyes were drawn to Karen’s. There was an emotional flash between them that brought back long-dead memories of what that kind of eye-contact had once meant, of what they had been together before it all fell apart. He found himself almost wishing he was what he pretended to be: a pilgrim seeking to clean the stale cobwebs out of his soul. He had the feeling that she just might agree to shack up with him. But the glow in her eyes was forced by desperate need. Los Angeles was full of faces like that, and the Harry Krells sucked them
dry and let them shrivel like old prunes when the money ran out. He had to admit that his body still felt something for Karen’s, but he was long past the point where he’d let sex drag him where his head did not want to be; the going up was just not worth the coming down.

  “Pass,” he said. Karen’s expression did not change at all.

  Krell shrugged, got up, and walked out onto the porch in that strange uncertain gait of his, inhaling sharply as he crossed the shadow-line into sunlight.

  “I know you’re up to something cheap and tricky,” Karen said.

  “Then why did you agree to warm Krell up for me?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  She sighed. “Because I still care a little for you, Bill,” she said, “You’re so frozen, so tied up in knots inside, and who should know what that’s like better than me? Harry has what you need. Once you’ve been here a while, you’ll see that, and it won’t matter why you originally came.”

  “Saving your alimony had nothing to do with it, of course.”

  “Not really,” she said. And as the words emerged from her mouth, they became brightly colored tropical butterflies, and she became a lush greenness from which they flew. There was a soft musical trilling, and the smell of lilacs and orchids filled the air. In that moment, he felt a pang of regret for what he had said, saw the feeling she still bore for him, heard the simple clarity of her body’s animal love.

  In the next moment, they were staring at each other, and tension hung in the air between them. Karen broke it with a small, smug madonna-smile. Marvin found himself sweating at the palms, and somewhat leary of what he was getting himself into.

  The cabin was sure a dump for five hundred dollars a month: a bed, a dresser, a couch, a bathroom, two electric heaters, and a noisy old motel-type air conditioner. Breakfast had been granola (sixty-nine cents a pound), milk, and coffee, and Marvin figured that Krell would use the same health-food excuse to dish out cheap lunches and dinners. The only thing that required expensive upkeep was the riding stable, and that ran at a profit as a separate operation. Krell must be pocketing something like half the residency fee as clear profit. Fifteen cabins, some of them double-occupancy… that would be seven grand a month at least!