Around eleven forty-five he passed the ravine and stood and took in the moonlight. He felt nervous and yet very serene and tired. Along the road were just a few cars and a few people and a few cows led on ropes and a few dirty children throwing Pop-its at the side of the bridge. He walked toward the road but then stopped abruptly. The woman from the arcade had turned the corner and walked, a rose in her hand, in his direction. They could not possibly walk together to their rendezvous. That would defeat the entire purpose of their meeting, he thought. He hung back and waited for her to pass, then continued, watching the steadiness of her gait. She twisted off the stem of the rose and began to put it in her hair.
He walked several yards behind her, then watched as she fixed the collar of her coat and smoothed out her skirt as she waited, looking around nervously in the dark for him. She did not look as garish as she had earlier that day in the arcade. She curled the end of a strand of her hair around her finger, then let it go. She looked beautiful. It was almost just as he’d imagined, only the striped shadows of the iron bars did not fall across her bosom, for she was standing on the wrong side of the gate. The faint light that was cast down on her was from the neon sign across the road. It made her look intelligent, he thought, wise, savvy, in a way.
He was not sure he could approach her.
He decided to send her a text.
“Go stand behind the gates. I will stand under the neon sign. If you like me, clap your hands. If you don’t, whistle.”
He took a deep breath and lit a cigarette and went and stood in the light. He looked at his phone, then up, looking straight in her direction. He turned to the side, to the back, then to the front again. He waited for a clap, a whistle, but heard nothing. He waited five minutes. He had his answer.
? ? ?
Mr. Wu went back down the road and bought an armful of fireworks and took them up to the karaoke bar over the dry-goods store and up onto the roof and started sending them off into the ravine. They made a delightful wheezing and whipping noise before they exploded. He watched the white and green and red and yellow lights fizzle out and extinguish in the dirty ravine sludge. He decided to send one higher up into the sky. It sailed over the ravine and hit the banner announcing the opening of the new supermarket. The banner lit on fire. He quickly ducked back into the doorway and went down into the bar, said good night, and stumbled down into the road. He walked home under the burning banner and down the dark and quiet road, pausing now and then to raise his arms in victory.
MALIBU
In order to collect unemployment benefits, I had to fill out this log of all the jobs I’d applied for. But I wasn’t applying for any jobs. So I just wrote down “lawyer” and made up a phone number. Then I wrote down “lawyer’s assistant” and put down the same phone number. I went on like that. “Law-firm janitor.” I looked at the number I’d made up. I tried calling it. It rang and rang. Then a woman got on the line.
“Who’s this?” is how she answered the phone.
“I’m doing a study,” I said. “How do you feel about people seeing you naked?”
“I was a nude model for an art school,” she said, “so I have no problem.”
She said her name was Terri and that she lived out in Lone Pine with her mother, who had Parkinson’s. She said she wanted to get pregnant so she’d have something to think about all day.
“I’m an Indian,” she said next. “Chumash. What are you?”
“I’m regular,” I told her.
“Good. I like regular men. I wish I wasn’t an Indian. I wish I was black or Chinese or something. Well,” she said, “how about you come out here and we see what we can do? I’m not after your money, if that’s what you’re thinking. I get checks in the mail all the time.”
It sounded like a vulture was squawking in the background. I thought for a minute.
“One thing,” I said. “I have pimples. And a rash all over my body. And my teeth aren’t great either.”
“I’m not expecting much,” she said. “Besides, I don’t like perfect-looking men. They make me feel like trash, and they’re boring.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
We made a date for dinner the next day. I had a good feeling about it.
? ? ?
It was true: I had pimples. But I was still good-looking. Girls liked me. I rarely liked them back. If they asked me what I did for fun, I told them lies, saying I Jet Skied or went to casinos. The truth was that I didn’t know how to have fun. I wasn’t interested in fun. I spent most of my time looking in the mirror or walking to the corner store for cups of coffee. I had a thing about coffee. It was pretty much all I drank. That and diet ginger ale. Sometimes I stuck my finger down my throat. Plus I was always picking at my pimples. I covered the marks they made with girls’ liquid foundation, which I stole from Walgreens. The shade I used was called Classic Tan. I guess those were my only secrets.
My uncle lived out in Agoura Hills. I called him sometimes out of desperation, but he only ever wanted to talk about girls.
“I don’t like anybody right now,” I told him over the phone. I was looking in the mirror over the bathroom sink, doing some one-handed picking.
“But women are good,” he said. “They’re like a good meal.”
“I can’t afford a good meal,” I said back to him. “Anyway, I go for quantity over quality.”
He told me to go ask if Sears or T.J.Maxx was hiring, or Burger King. For someone else, maybe that was fine advice. He himself didn’t need to work. He was on disability for having a gimp leg. Also, he had a colostomy bag he didn’t care for properly. He used a lot of peach-scented air freshener around the house to cover the smell. He rarely left the living room and liked to order in large Mexican dinners or whole pizzas. He was always eating something and dumping out the colostomy bag right afterward.
“I don’t feel very well,” I told him. “I’m too sick to find a job.”
“Go to a doctor,” he said. “Look in the phone book. Don’t be a fool. You need to care for your health.”
“Can I borrow some money?” I asked him.
“No.”
? ? ?
I found a cheap doctor in a Korean shopping mall on Wilshire.
The mall was basically empty, just a lot of fake brass and cloudy windows and orange fake-marble floors. I looked up into the galleria. The glass ceiling was cracked all over. A pigeon soared around, then rested on a strand of unlit Christmas lights. Someone had spread newspapers around the floor. There was a luggage store, a place to get your photo taken, a hair salon. That was it—all the other stalls were empty. A homeless Korean lady padded by me in dirty, quilted long underwear, pushing a baby carriage full of trash. I took a long whiff.
I found the clinic down a dim hallway of unmarked offices. On the door there was a poster of all the services the doctor offered. I found my symptoms: weight gain, hair loss, rash. I went inside. A fat lady stood at the counter in front of the receptionist.