Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

  So I was understandably interested to see, when the song was over, that there was an article about Jimmy in the Time I’d bought, called “Up, Up, & Away in 18 Months.” Raised in Oklahoma and Texas, Beatle-coifed tunesmith Webb, twenty-one, had studied music at San Bernardino Valley College but dropped out because of his mother’s death and because he was—quoting the article—”struggling to sort out his life.” Then he broke up with this girl he’d met at San Bernardino Valley and wrote “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” his first hit, about the experience. Smashes became a matter of habit for the youthful cleffer, and now his twenty-two-room house in Hollywood was—quoting again here—

  a raucous rehearsal hall for clients and colleagues. Self-possessed amid the noise and confusion, he still manages to get to his Yamaha concert grand or his electric organ to work on new music, sometimes with incredible facility (he wrote “Up, Up, and Away” in 35 minutes).

  Everything written about Jimmy during that period calls attention to this thirty-five-minute business, and I’ve made a point of seeing all the literature on him. The piece in Time also quoted some lyrics from “MacArthur Park,” which was just starting to make new friends for the heartbroken fireball then (“MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,/All the sweet green icing flowing down . . .”), and said that these were “typical of his personal and provocative imagery.”

  Then, in the Business section, there was an article about me, “Vacco and TTW: On the Blink,” saying I had

  simply stopped coming to work early last month, leaving senior staffers at TechTron West no choice but to declare his snug $30,000 annual berth as Executive Vice-President temporarily —but alarmingly—open.

  Phone calls to Vacco’s Beverly Hills home only deepened the mystery, according to Creative Head Marvin Loewinson, who shares credit with the absentee VP—a balding, taciturn, 46-year-old former Wesleyan physics professor—for shaping TTW into a “little giant” in the systems implementation area.

  “We’d call him up,” Vacco’s colleague told a Time reporter, “and as soon as he heard it was one of us on the phone— [Chairman Lewis] Brophy and I were calling a few times a week—he’d start playing these crazy tape recordings into the phone, just weird sound assemblages, pieces of old radio dramas and news broadcasts and whatnot. He’s got quite a library of tapes out there, so I guess he’s been spending a lot of time splicing them together and so on, I don’t know.” Visits to Vacco’s house proved no less frustrating, with Vacco greeting guests cordially, then refusing to discuss any subject but the Los Angeles Dodgers’ pennant prospects in the current season. “That’s the other strange thing,” Loewinson mused at week’s end, “Justin was never what you’d call a big baseball fan. I don’t even look to them as contenders myself.”

  Pieces into place

  Indeed, if Vacco had leisure interests, he kept them to himself during his seven-year tenure at TTW, maintaining a low personal profile and garnering a reputation for fair but firm decision-making in a field characterized by fast shifting of costs and prices against a free-swinging competitive backdrop.

  Vacco’s colleagues at TTW and elsewhere in the mini-mushrooming industry were ready to write off his actions as an aberration of personal behavior, until an investigatory audit last week revealed that over $600,000 in corporate funds had been “abstracted”—Chairman Brophy’s euphemism for the complex and as-yet still-to-be-unraveled financial gymnastics which allowed the money’s disappearance to go unnoticed for so long, and its actual whereabouts to remain a stern cipher at press time. Vacco’s antics are being watched more seriously now, and TTW lawyers have advised him that a full investigation, spearheaded by the firm in cooperation with IRS, SEC, and U. S. Attorney’s Office personnel, begins next week.

  “Once you see the disappearance of the funds,” Loewinson observed darkly, “pieces start falling into place.”

  Well, okay. Actually there’s misinformation there, and I’m not concerned as much about the kind you can pinpoint and refute on a factual basis as I am about the over-all miscarriage of meaning. The people who write news put a lot of emphasis on accuracy in regard to specifics, which diverts attention from their real problem. If you talk to the individuals whose moves have been the subject of any reporting that is in the least interpretive, or who were present at reported events, their final assessment is almost always the same: even when the details are right, even in accounts by participants, the feeling at the event and the feeling given off by the record don’t match up. The reporter’s empathy and understanding may be perfect, but the essence’s resistance to being caught is better than perfect, is magnetic, is beyond his control, and so reliably it will steal a nuance and ruin him. The honest reporter knows he can’t be honest.

  Not that specific incorrect statements are any help. I played one of my tapes over the phone only once, when Lewis Brophy called up, and at that point I was still frightened. It was only a week after I’d stopped coming to work. I handled the other phone calls pretty well, I thought, showing interest in office social life, asking smart production questions. They seemed like fairly pleasant phone calls to me; at least I made an effort to be pleasant. So that’s where I started getting uncomfortable about the article, and then this thing about the Dodgers. The only time I brought up the Dodgers was when Marv Loewinson came out one evening in the third week, and then only because he was too embarrassed to carry on a normal conversation and I know he likes baseball. The other thing is that even then I wasn’t “balding,” but bald. I had no hair on my head. That’s it. Bald. Bingo. But as I say, what frightens me most is the estrangement from the real feeling, and that’s harder to track. Take this first thing, “simply stopped coming to work.” In the computer industry, nobody simply stops, even if they think they have. How could they? Once you’re using a programmed symbolic language like that you don’t just turn your back on it and go quiet when you want out. You owe that system something. Think of what it’s done for you, for all the people who worked where I did: it gave them the privilege, the opportunity, to get their hands on signals, frequencies, vibrations, the same stuff that’s within them, an opportunity to increase rarity and preciousness. Predictably, they refused to recognize that, insisting instead on acting as if it were all numbers. This way they get to have mature responses, something they always wanted. You can tell they were once quiet kids who tinkered, because some of them are still a little creepy, but in any case there’s very little that’s beyond their capacity to accept and account for. If something is beyond them, they’re pretty calm about that too, because it’s not in their area and nobody’s going to bother them about it. Meanwhile their areas are shrinking. But what good is an expert’s knowledge without an expert’s attitude? Knowing the implications of what you’re doing makes all the difference in the world. What you owe the system, when you’re ready to go, is the respect indicated by your expertise, the comprehension needed to invade all areas simultaneously and plot the reaction. So I sat it out until I was good enough, reading sales reports and newspaper headlines every day and seeing the meanings squirm and tease like code. When the code broke was when I went to Sacramento. The last bits of information I looked up were two names in the phone book, a first one and a last one. I used them to get out.

  But remember what a factor interference is, for the Time people as well as for me. Later that year, around Christmas, Newsweek did a piece on Jimmy, called “Webb of Music.” It mentioned that he had “developed expensive tastes in clothes, his wardrobe running from a $1,000 spotted silver sealskin coat to Italian hiphuggers and brown pigskin bell-bottomed pants.” But what you want to watch are the contradictions with the Time article. The lost girl friend who touched off “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was now the drill-team captain at Jimmy’s high school instead of a college classmate, and the reason for quitting college in this version was that his “music professor said, ‘Why don’t you do yourself and the college a favor and try to become a songwriter in LA.’” Newsweek also said “MacArth
ur Park” was “overblown,” which moves the contradictions to the critical level.

  So it’s not hard to see how these things get scrambled, and in one sense it’s all for the best. One condition under which Jimmy operates is that his material be strongly sentimental, and he’s in contact with it all the time; it gets all over him. So hopefully he can contain several legends. I was in the business of permutations, and wanted no less for myself. Already there were two versions, mine and theirs. Let’s take that into account. Because we’re going at an elegant problem here. We can start thinking of these discrepancies as increments of romance. Does that help?

  * * * *

  I sat there, in my Navy chinos, white polo shirt and white canvas deck shoes, eating my white salad in the fogbound airport and waiting for my ride. First I worried about whether he’d show up and then about whether he’d be a safe driver, because I’m frightened of accidents. But as it turned out the kid had a convincing style. I asked him if he’d been listening to jazz and he said yes. He had a jazz system, immediately distinguishable from rock driving, which is what you see so much of in LA. The rock driver, trusted with a standard shift, automatically regards the top end of each gear as a climactic dominant chord preceding a break and leans on it for several bars of crescendo before he upshifts. With Steve Golden there were no such cheap releases, but an extended flexibility of speed and steering that dealt with each dark street on its own terms. I got comfortable and then I got sleepy. In half an hour we were there, a two-story white frame house on S Street. He led me up the stairs to a room with a cot. There was also a desk, but no chair, and a small table lamp with a red lampshade on the floor beside the bed. I went right to sleep.

  The airport was separate from town, the distance supported by flat farm fields. I counted four dead animals on the road, a dog and three cats or raccoons. The fog broke as soon as we got away from the airport. Steve said the airport was in the foggiest part of the valley, that if there was fog anywhere in

  Sacramento on a given day, there would be fog at the airport. He told me the house we were going to had four people living in it: himself, one other man, and two women. He said all four were working on artistic and political projects. His was devising a new reading program for illiterate adults. He said his household and their friends had decided to get me out of LA before the investigation started, if I wanted to go, because they liked what they’d read about me, particularly the part about playing the tapes over the phone. The wire services had played that up. He laughed about it when he mentioned it and turned to look at me. I smiled.

  He found me in the coffee shop at ten-thirty, just as I was about to go and call him. He was very tall and thin, wearing a dark green T-shirt, blue jeans, and black basketball sneakers. His red hair was short and curly. He was twenty-two or twenty-three. I immediately noticed how pleasant he was being, and he in turn noticed that I was relieved. I picked up my suitcase, the Time, and the Times, and we went out to the car, a copper-colored Mustang, a few years old, and then he drove me to the house on S Street where I was going to stay with him and his friends. I slept there, all night.

  * * * *

  TWO

  “I know I need a small vacation But it don’t look like rain.”

  —jimmy webb, “Wichita Lineman”

  The door to my room opened and a boy walked in and started taking photographs of me with a 35-millimeter camera. A Pentax. He didn’t knock first, or try to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake up; he just walked in, went into a professional squat, and started snapping. He moved the camera away from his face between shots so he could size up angles without using the view-finder while he advanced the film with the little thumb-lever. His expression was the anxious look of someone concentrating on detail work, pulling his eyebrows close together and his lower lip between his teeth. He had big eyes, almost round, a short thin mouth and straight blond hair combed back. He was wearing a dark blue shirt and a white necktie, cuffed cream trousers and hiking shoes. He took eight or nine pictures of me opening my eyes, sitting up a little, squinting, lying down again, and turning my face to the pillow. His exposure was half a second, littering the room with short buzzes. I kept hearing them after he took his last picture and left.

  I was staring, trying to think of something to say. He was assigning so much analysis work to his eyes that he never focused on my face, so it was hard to get his attention even though he was watching me.

  * * * *

  I got dressed and went downstairs. The hallway was narrow and freshly painted light blue. Opposite my door were the stairs. Downstairs, on the open left side, was a yellow living room containing a sofa with an Indian bedspread on it, a brown armchair, a table covered with books and newspapers, the radio, the phonograph, and two old floor lamps with beige shades. To the right of the stairs was a wall with a doorway in it, and straight ahead was the front door. The floors were clean, bare wood, and there was a lot of natural light.

  Through the doorway on the right, at the foot of the stairs, was a square orange kitchen. The boy with the camera sat facing the door at a low wooden table, drinking tea. To his right was a dark pretty girl in pigtails whose breasts jiggled in her Mexican blouse as she reached for the teapot to refill her cup.

  I walked in and stood at the other end of the table, near the door. She looked up at me.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling. “I’m Pat.”

  “I’m Justin,” I said. The boy looked into his teacup. “You may remember taking my photograph a little earlier.”

  He looked up, watched me for a few seconds, then turned and spoke to the girl. “You know what you want to do when you go into a room like that to shoot?” he asked her. “You get parallel to one wall and then pick out two or three basic angles.” Holding his hands flat and overlapping the thumbs, he made a rectangle with a missing side and began framing portions of the air around him. His fingers swelled slightly at the tips, forcing little cracks between them when he held them together. Light from the window behind him fell through the cracks and hit the table in long stripes, dimmed and spread a little by the distance.

  He looked at me again. “Now as a physicist,” he said, “you see what you’re going up against with still photography. The limitations.” He waved distractedly at the camera in front of him on the table. “I wanted to get something on your face right away, though.”

  “You want some tea?” Pat asked.

  “Where’s Steve?” I said.

  “He’s at the reading project,” Pat said.

  The boy turned toward the shelf behind him, half standing, and brought down a blue enameled mug from the same set they were using. “The question is,” he said, pouring, “how fast we can go from stills to film.”

  “Film of me?”

  He nodded. “Would you have just stayed in LA for the investigation?” he asked.

  “What’s your name?” I said.

  “Michael. You would have been guilty, right?” As he pushed the cup toward me, a floating layer of brown residue sifted to the bottom, first long diamond-shaped flakes, then threads, and finally the loose powder. “So you couldn’t stay there.”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  Pat saw me staring at the tea. “It’s herbal,” she said. It had a raw sweet flavor and no smell. I didn’t want to swallow the leaves. I put my upper teeth against the edge of the cup to act as a screen.

  “What bothers me is this, though,” Michael said. “You had to go into a lot of different computers to get the money out, right? So there’s an access problem.”

  “Why computers?” Pat asked.

  “There was no way to get at the accounts for so much money except by diverting it in the computers,” Michael said. “So let’s say you wrote all your programs in advance to make the changes in the accounts.” My cup was half full. He refilled it and leaned closer to me. “But it’s not just your computer,” he continued, “that’s the problem. There’s the bank, the accounting company, figure a couple of brokers. So how do you get in?
” Over his shoulder, on the wall beside the window, above the stove, was a black-and-white mounted photograph with no border. It was of an overturned highway-patrol car with broken windows, taken on a city street at night with a lot of people running in the background.