Ghost Lights Read online

  According to your typical tax protester the potential oblivion of all things living was rightly the province of government, but not so a measly ten-or fifteen-percent garnishment of their salary.

  It was not the mandate of the Service, of course, to psychoanalyze or proselytize. It was not the purview of the Service to take taxpayers under its wing and baby them. It was the task of the Service simply to evaluate, assess and finally collect. But Hal often chose to engage personally despite the fact that, under the law, he was not required to do so or even, frankly, encouraged.

  In truth, no matter what facts and figures he marshaled to defend government, the protesters were never converted. Simply, they cherished their right to direct fear and loathing at government bureaucracy. It was a God-given right, and one they insisted on exercising to the fullest. All he could give them, in the end, was an impression of having been listened to and reasoned with. Though they stoutly resisted reason—it was another God-given right to be unreasonable, indeed to hate reason almost as much as they despised government—they might not forget that he had made them a cup of coffee.

  “Let me get you some coffee,” he said to the libertarian, who was jiggling one foot. “Milk? All we have is that powdered dairy creamer.”

  While he was in the hallway pouring the coffee the libertarian might notice the pictures on his desk, of Susan in a dress and Casey in her wheelchair. Casey hated the picture and accused him of pandering, but he genuinely loved it and in any case could not bear to have earlier pictures of her around.

  His coworker Linda came up behind him at the coffeemaker. Her large round earrings were like Christmas tree ornaments. “Hal,” she said, reaching for a tea bag, “the papers room is a mess. Where are the 433-D’s?”

  “New stack,” he said. “Beside the obsolete forms? Second shelf. On your left.”

  Protesters often rejected reason without even pinning down what it was they rejected, he thought as he tapped in the dairy creamer. They understood in the most nebulous terms the difference between argument and debate, or even raw unquestioning instinct and rigorous logic. Finally what they cherished most, he thought—and he made these generalizations only after decades of service—was their relationship not to morality or individualism but to symbols.

  The symbols had about them an aura of immanence, and to the symbols many protesters cleaved. It was often not one symbol for them but many—say a flag, say an eagle, say a cross; say a pair of crossed swords. The symbols were richly pregnant, pregnant with a meaning that would never be born.

  It never needed to be.

  Against a symbol there could be no argument.

  “Here you go,” he said, in his office again, and handed over the coffee mug.

  •

  His colleagues in general were not believers like him but cynics. They were cynical about their jobs and cynical about the tax code; they were cynics about human nature and about civil service. Indeed his own deep convictions on the subject of taxes and government would likely have been objects of their ridicule if not for the fact that, due to Casey’s paralysis, he often got a free pass on everything.

  And it wasn’t simple pity either. Everyone came to know illness in the course of their lives, everyone came to know death, and somewhere within this grim terrain was the situation of Casey, Susan and him—a situation in which people beheld the inverse of their own good fortune. In Casey they saw a lamb on the altar: there others suffered for their sin. If they did not believe in sin they tended to be superstitious at least, believing her affliction filled some kind of ambient bad-luck quota that might otherwise have to be filled by them.

  He reorganized a taxpayer file idly. The dog had slept at the foot of the bed last night, where she’d whined until lifted, and left short white hairs all over the red quilt. He did not like these hairs but he had liked the feel of the dog on his feet while he was falling asleep. In the morning, as he was pouring coffee into his travel mug before leaving, Susan had called Casey from the wall phone in the kitchen. “We have his dog,” he heard his wife say, watching the dog lap at her new water bowl, and then, “No. Still nothing.”

  A knock on his office door.

  “Come in,” he said.

  It was Rodriguez, who wore his pants belted high.

  “Hey, man,” said Rodriguez.

  “Hey.”

  Often a single habit of an otherwise unremarkable person, such as wearing high-waisted pants, struck Hal as tragic.

  “So you coming to lunch? It’s Linda’s fiftieth.”

  “Fiftieth,” said Hal. “Whoa.”

  With the pants tightly cinched right below his rib cage, Rodriguez limited his options. Figuratively speaking, Rodriguez shot himself in the foot every time he got dressed.

  “Who woulda known, right? She doesn’t look a day over sixty-five,” said Rodriguez, and laughed nervously.

  “Thanks for thinking of me. I have an appointment with my daughter at lunchtime, though,” said Hal regretfully. It was his standard excuse, but in this case a lie and thus in need of fleshing out to have the ring of truth. “She’s in the market for a new car. I have to go with her to a dealership to talk about conversion. You know—hand controls, wheelchair loader. You’d be surprised how many of those mobility-equipment folks try to rip off paraplegics.”

  “Oh man,” said Rodriguez, looking pained. “You kidding?”

  “Yeah,” said Hal. “I am. They’re all right. But she needs help with the process.”

  Rodriguez was not a real cynic but wore the guise of cynicism to fit in. His attempts at sarcasm had the air of a strained joke, and from the rare moments when he allowed his actual persona to reveal itself Hal suspected he was secretly and painfully earnest. The earnestness and the high-waisted pants were connected, of course. Intimately. Anyone could tell from looking at his beltline that the cynicism was a juvenile posturing. But Rodriguez was a guy who could watch comedians on TV make fun of nerds simply by wearing their pants belted high and laugh heartily along with the crowd, never suspecting that their target was him. Essentially he had a blind spot—as everyone did—but Rodriguez’s blind spot was in the public domain, like Casey’s paralysis.

  “Sure, man. Too bad though. We’re going to that place with the kickass enchiladas.”

  Hal had a weakness for Rodriguez. And he presumed that his own sincerity—mainly his devotion, which had become known to his colleagues only by dint of their collective involvement in taxation, to the quaint idea of a wise and kindly government—would look practically jaded next to the near-cretinous gullibility of Rodriguez.

  But this genuine, earnest persona of Rodriguez, being kept in lockdown, was never allowed into Gen Pop long enough for Hal to be certain.

  “Eat one for me, OK?” he said in what he hoped was a tone of finality. “With New Mexican green chiles.”

  “No way,” said Rodriguez. “Those chiles’d be repeating on me.”

  “Jesus,” said Hal, and waved him away. “Enough said then.”

  Rodriguez retreated with a swaggering manner, as though his remark about vomiting into his mouth placed him firmly within the pantheon of the suave.

  •

  At one o’clock Hal drove west, partly because he was committed to his fabrication and partly because he wanted to pay his daughter a visit. Casey had recently relocated from her Soviet-style tenement in the Marina to a pleasant building dating from the thirties or forties, rare for Santa Monica, with large, airy rooms and arched doorways. He was delighted with the move, which signaled a rise out of apathy. Calla lilies grew in profusion beneath the front windows.

  She had a new job in telemarketing. Difficult to see how selling timeshares in Jamaica could satisfy her in the long run, but for now at least she had a steady income. He should have called before he left but if she wasn’t home, fine: he had to get out of the office anyway.

  The freeways were open and before long he had parked on the street and was walking around to the back door. Through an open window h
e heard her voice—“Uh huh. And what do you want me to do then?”

  The tone struck him as wrong for telemarketing. Of course she was a novice, she might not have it down yet. Casey had a nice voice, low and husky, which to him had always seemed tomboyish. It occurred to him she was probably, in fact, talking to her new boyfriend, a man from the support group, and he felt sheepish. For the so-called differently abled, privacy was a chronic problem.

  He rapped on the window and waved to her inside; she turned, wearing a telephone headset, smiled, and mouthed at him to wait. He nodded as she rolled into the next room and out of earshot.

  He was used to waiting: he waited for her often. Sitting down on the ramp, he gazed out at the backyard. Behind a small patch of grass, the usual deep and lush L.A. green that looked fake but in fact merely represented an extravagant level of water use … but here she was, already.

  “I hear you got yourself a new cripple,” said Casey from the back door. It was automatic and had swung open silently. “I’m so jealous!”

  “Hi, sweetie. Hey, you meet any of the neighbors yet?” he asked, and stood.

  Good if someone close by was looking out for her.

  “Dad, please. I mean I know your little girl is coming out of her shell finally, every day is a blessing, rise and shine and like that, hell, I’m full-barrel on the positive attitude. But I didn’t get a lobotomy. I don’t roll around to the neighbors smiling and doing the meet and greet.”

  “A lobotomy wouldn’t have that effect,” he said, and went up the ramp and inside.

  “So the three-legged dog thing, it’s like a classic empty-nest syndrome, child-surrogate deal. Am I right?”

  She went ahead of him through the kitchen, where an electric teakettle was whining. She switched it off and poured.

  “You want a cup of tea? I’m having peppermint.”

  “Thanks. I’ll just get a glass of water I think,” he said, and moved around her.

  “I knew this couple that when their basketball-playing kid went away to college—and this guy was like seven feet tall—they went out and got a dog two days later. Thing was though, the dog was a hundred-and-sixty-pound English mastiff. Came up to their chest level. True story. Remember Cal Shepard? From Samo?”

  “The kid that drooled,” he said, nodding.

  “Cal Shepard did not drool. He was a popular jock. That was Jon Spisiak.”

  “A kid that drools in high school,” he mused, shaking his head. He stood at the open refrigerator looking in. It was almost empty. “You don’t have bottled water?”

  “And I wouldn’t even say Jon drooled per se,” she said, and gestured at a white watercooler in the corner. “It was more like he had extra saliva. Oh. So Sal’s coming over, by the way.”

  “The new boyfriend from group? This is great. I can submit him to the rigorous screening process.”

  “He’ll fail. I have to warn you.”

  “Of course. They always do.”

  “But more than usual. Trust me.”

  “What. Is he a protester? A militia member?”

  “He used to be a cop. Now he wears fatigues and sometimes a balaclava.”

  “Guy wears a balaclava in L.A.?”

  “He took me up to Tahoe once. He wore it then. A black one. He looked like a paraplegic ninja.”

  He was following her into the living room, where a leather couch and chairs surrounded a low glass table.

  “What, he wants to keep his face hidden?”

  “I dunno, Dad. Ask him yourself.”

  “I can’t ask him about the balaclava if he’s not wearing it.”

  “OK. I’m like officially tired of this subject.”

  “Touchy!”

  She spun her chair slowly and stopped, picked her mug out of the cup holder. He sat down opposite.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Anyway. I look forward to meeting him.”

  “So T. still hasn’t been heard from.”

  “No. And I think it’s time your mother moved on.”

  Casey blew across the surface of her tea.

  “I realize she’s loyal,” he went on. “But who knows what’s happening with him. You know? It could be anything. Maybe he had legal trouble she never knew about and a secret account in the Caymans. Right? Change will be good for her. Something new.”

  Casey nodded and sipped.

  “It’ll be hard,” he went on, and drank his water, “for her to know how long to wait before she makes key decisions, lets people go. There’s that young guy that works there, that she hired a while back. And then the financial situation. I say find a good lawyer and pass the buck.”

  “She filed a missing persons report,” said Casey softly. “And she’s been calling the embassy every day.”

  “The U.S. embassy? In Belize?”

  He heard the front doorbell ring.

  “That’ll be him. The father of your grandchild.”

  “What?”

  “Kidding.”

  “I’ll get it,” he said, and rose.

  As usual she was right; as soon as he pushed the button to open the door he knew the guy was a loser. Tamped-down anger, free-floating rage.

  “Hey, welcome,” he said affably, and stood back.

  “Who are you?” asked the guy.

  “My father,” called Casey from within. “Hal, meet Sal.”

  “We rhyming,” said Sal flatly, and rolled past him with no gesture of greeting. Hal had seen his share of bitter disabled guys and was inured to it—more or less preoccupied with this new information about Susan, he realized, turning from the door as it closed. His wife who was consumed with anxiety about the real-estate guy. The extent of her affection for Stern, the transparently maternal attachment, if examined by a professional, would likely prove rooted in some psychopathology related to the accident.

  “I should get back to the office,” he told Casey, and extended a hand to Sal. “It was nice to meet you.”

  Sal did something with his own hand that looked like a gang sign. A poser, thought Hal, as he stooped to kiss Casey’s cheek. Understandable, but hardly deserving of respect. Before he was paralyzed he had been a cop, likely a swaggerer and a bully since almost all of them were, but now that he was spinal-cord injured he identified with the same underclass he used to dream of bludgeoning.

  Outside Hal passed the suitor’s conveyance, a battered hatchback in gunmetal gray that featured a bumper sticker calling for the rescue of POW/MIAs. It was parked half on the driveway and half on the lawn, and the right-side tires had ripped up a fresh track in the turf.

  Law-enforcement officers were not his favorites among the varied ranks of persons who chose a career in public service. He recognized that the job carried with it certain personality requisites, such as a predisposition to violence, and that the demand for violent enforcers was embedded in the system, as was the supply of violent offenders. By some estimates, one out of twenty-five Americans was a sociopath.

  And that was higher than anywhere else on the globe: this great nation was a fertile breeding ground for psychos. Or rather, as the economists would put it, the U.S. of A. had a comparative advantage in antisocial personality disorder.

  And hey: these guys had to have incomes, just like everyone else.

  At the very least one in fifty.

  Casey, of course, could not be dissuaded from her choices, having become stubborn and intractable after the accident—a development he had come to accept for the strength it lent her. This boyfriend choice, like the others, had to be left to play out. Still it was difficult to believe she had been on the telephone with the cop-turned-homeboy using that tender voice. Slipping behind the steering wheel, Hal repressed a shudder.

  Remember: she is grown up. He often had to remind himself.

  Also, she carried pepper spray when she went out at night. She had taken a course in disability martial arts.

  Susan had to be frustrated, he reflected, driving. She likely felt responsible for what ha
d happened to Stern. This feeling of responsibility was completely irrational, of course, but he knew it well. When regret was strong enough, guilt rose up to greet it. Maybe she thought she should have kept Stern from traveling alone; maybe she thought she should have persuaded him into therapy or grief counseling. Not that this would even have been possible.

  They should talk more, Hal and Susan. They lay down to sleep at different hours, they rarely went out, lately there had been more distance between them than he wanted.

  An old lady with a walker stepped out in front of his car; he swerved and hit the curb hard.

  • • • • •

  The car had to be towed. He called Casey, and Sal came to get him.

  “I appreciate this,” he told Sal, mildly humiliated.

  Sometimes a sociopath helped you out.

  They drove together to a rental car agency, Hal shooting sidelong glances at Sal’s hands on the controls. The fingers bore small tattoos between the knuckles, which he was relieved to see were small plantlike designs rather than, say, LOVE and HATE. Looked like pot, possibly. There was a stale smell in the car—sweat, grease and cigarettes. He cracked the window, then rolled it all the way down. The dash was covered in stickers: rock bands, possibly, to judge by the graphics. Of course the names were unfamiliar to him. Blood, skulls in cowboy hats, sheriff’s badges and guns, tigers and poppies and roses and faux-Gothic lettering.

  Some of the paraphernalia was Mexican, some American, but all of it was equally encoded. Loud music played, a polka beat with electric guitar and an accordion. A narcocorrido if he was not mistaken: he had learned about these on National Public Radio. They celebrated drug kingpins.

  Sal was moving his head to the beat and seemed to be muttering the lyrics.

  “So your Spanish is fluent?” Hal said loudly, and smiled.

  Sal nodded and flicked his fingers against the wheel, still mouthing.

  “You grow up in L.A.?”

  “East. I used to be police,” said Sal. “L.A.P.D.”

  “Casey told me.”