Spaceland Page 14

  8

  A Date With Tulip

  Something big had changed inside me when I saw Jena in our bed with Spazz. It was like there’d been a rope or a vine or a leash from Jena to me—and now it was gone. Suddenly I was done with wanting Jena’s approval. For the last however many years, I’d been getting my personal validation from her. I’d been counting on Jena for my self-esteem. And now I realized that if I was ever going to feel good about myself, it was solely up to me.

  I was naked except for the sack at my waist, sitting in my SUV on the clothes that Momo had mounded onto my front seat right before our trip, the SUV sitting in the driveway of the whipped old rental house. There weren’t any pedestrians to notice me, so I didn’t bother to dress just yet. I lit up a cigarette and sat there thinking.

  Obviously I didn’t make Jena happy, or she wouldn’t be getting it on with another guy. In my old mode, I would have begun cursing myself for not trying harder; I would have scolded myself for being a self-centered, number-skulled, numb-nuts businessman. But, hey, I was who I was. Why be down on myself?

  It was probably a childhood thing. When I was growing up, Dad was mentally a million miles away, scheming about his girlfriends and his business deals. And Mom wasn’t emotionally available either. She was consumed by her neuroses, practically nuts. Between the two of them I grew up feeling invisible. But Jena—the first time I met Jena, she laughed at everything I said and she looked at me like I was her hero. It was just what I needed.

  Jena wanted admiration back from me, plus financial security, plus something else I could never quite put my finger on. Something she needed to feel happy. Over the years I’d come to devote more and more of my energy to her, always trying to make Jena happy and, when it didn’t work, trying harder to try. I wasn’t doing it out of any basic goodness or generosity of spirit—in fact, I’d come to resent Jena’s demands, to despise how quick she was to throw out everything and lapse into depression. But pleasing Jena had become the only game in town. My only path to love and approval. And the more I needed her, the less she needed to give.

  But now we’d reached the end of the road. The leash was broken. My new deal was this: It was up to me, and me alone, to tell myself I was okay. I said it out loud.

  “You’re okay, Joe. You’re good. God loves you.” God? Why not. Saying the big word seemed to help. Not that I’d turned religious all of a sudden. Mom’s half-hearted attempt to raise Sis and me in the Catholic church had barely left a trace. But after the trip to Klupdom—well, it was pretty clear that the world was a hell of a lot bigger than I’d ever thought it was.

  And me too, I was bigger than I used to be. I was augmented. I was the only one on Earth who’d been to the fourth dimension. Until now, I’d never felt like I was big enough to help myself. But now I was ready. Next topic.

  I looked out the windshield at the grimy yellow clapboards of the future headquarters of Mophone, Inc. The green and brown trim was kind of pretty. I was already feeling proud of the dump. Be it e’er so humble, there’s no place like home. What I needed to do now was to make my way over to the local Wells Fargo and—make a withdrawal. I hadn’t told Momo, but I was planning to hit the vault.

  I was on the point of starting my car, but then I realized I could just as well flap over to the bank once I was in hyperspace. Much smarter not to be seen at the scene of the crime. I’d gotten pretty nimble with my higher muscles up in Klupdom, and the grolly had me feeling strong. It would be easy to peel vout into the fourth dimension.

  No wait, better peel vinn. The Empress’s soldiers had instructions to shoot me if I came back vout. So I’d go vinn to the Dronian half of the All. The other side of Spaceland from the Kluppers. No soldiers or grolly guards there to hassle me. Though there was of course the little matter of Wackle and the Dronners. Oh well, what the hell. I’d started getting the feeling that some of the things Momo said weren’t true. Maybe the Dronners wouldn’t bother me at all.

  I switched to my third eye so I could see all around me and check if anyone was watching me in my car. Not hardly. There was a steady stream of traffic stopping and starting at the light, but each and every single Silicon Valley ant was intent on his or her mission. Work, work, work, buy, buy, buy. If anyone noticed me and my SUV at all, they probably thought I was a Realtor. And nobody paid attention to Realtors.

  My third eye still stuck vout of Spaceland into the Klupper side of the Cave Between Worlds, and it took only a slight twitch of my eyestalk to be able to look and see what Momo and the Empress’s soldiers were up to. They were hovering not too far off, apparently in a discussion. It definitely wouldn’t be good to go vout there right now.

  I felt down into my augmented body and made sure I remembered how to twitch myself to the vinn. It was important to get this right the first time. Once I had the motion all set in my mind, I did it. And then, whoa, I was out of Spaceland again, floating in the Dronner side of the Cave Between Worlds. It felt different right away; the air on this side was cool and thick, almost like water. Even so, I could breathe it.

  I flapped a bit, rolling over so that my third eye pointed vinnward towards Dronia. Just as on the Kluppers’ side, there were some things like cliffs a few miles away from Spaceland. But while the Kluppers’ cliffs were gray with a few pastel patches of grolly, the rocks of Dronia were like a tropical reef, covered over and over with bright growths that, given their distance from me, must have been enormous. I noticed some things like lacy, city-sized coral fans, and next to them was a cluster of mountainous—anemones? Immense bunches of waving tentacles. I planned to stay away from those guys for sure. The whole vicinity of the cliffs seemed to shimmer; each nook and cranny was filled with the darting flashes of small moving things. And the air was a clear, sparkling jelly. It was like being deep undersea: fascinating, but scary.

  Though I’d been doing my best not to think about Jena, she came back to me now on a wave of memories about the time last year we’d flown down to Cabo and taken SCUBA diving lessons together. On the third lesson we’d gone down to ninety feet and I’d freaked out. Everything had turned heavy and slow and sinister, with the bubbles like devils’ laughter in my ears. The surface had looked way too far away, a wrinkled mirror high above me as a cloud. I’d swum straight up to the top, barely remembering to breathe out on the way. The guy waiting in the boat had hauled me in, and down below Jena and the guide had finished the dive.

  By the time Jena surfaced, I’d calmed down. Jena had been in a really up mood. That night we’d had a candlelit dinner on the hotel patio, our skin tight from sunburn. And Jena had told me how much she loved me. Reached out and touched my cheek. I could still feel her fingers. If only—

  I stopped right there. It was up to me to validate myself. And even though Jena was gone, there were plenty of other women out there, and I’d find one before long.

  If the Dronners didn’t kill me, that was. One of the big anemone things was stretching out its tentacles to alarming lengths. I hung there in the thick Dronian air for a while, staring vinn towards the living walls, waiting to see if anything was going to come for me.

  But for now nothing did. Maybe the Dronners weren’t as interested in me as Momo claimed. So now I rolled myself back voutward, turning my third eye’s attention to Spaceland. There was Los Perros, with everything open to the fourth dimension, everything at my mercy. I flexed my augmented body and flapped like a bat. Count Joe Dracula.

  In a minute or two I was next to the Wells Fargo on Santa Ynez Avenue in downtown Los Perros. I scooted in close to Spaceland, right beside the Wells Fargo vault, not the main vault, mind you, but the vault where the safe-deposit boxes were. Most likely, the serial numbers of the bills in the safe-deposit boxes wouldn’t be in the bank’s records.

  I used my third eye to scan back and forth across the boxes till I found a big one that was loaded with hundred-dollar bills wrapped into ten-thousand-dollar packets with yellow paper bands. Dozens of packets. Good deal. I’d had a feeling I
’d find a box like this. Hidden money from somebody’s shady deals. Not that I was in a position to call other people shady. I made a mental note of the box number, promising myself that once I got good and rich, I’d put the money back. And then I reached vout and grabbed three packets and stuffed them into the four-dimensional sack that I still had tied to the cord around my waist.

  When I reached vout for more, my hand banged against the metal side of the safe deposit box, and it made a big noise down in Spaceland. You would have thought the bank would be empty on a Sunday afternoon, but there were a bunch of tellers and managers there, I guess to check things over for Y2K bugs. One of the tellers on the other side of the vault wall cocked her head, stopped what she was doing, and walked into the vault, looking around to see what had made the noise. Damn. I held still, watching the teller, a good-looking Latina woman. I looked at her skin inside her clothes, and at the calm inner workings of her body. I could see inside the other bank employees as well, and for a minute I had this odd sensation that they were all parts of a single organism that just happened to cross Spaceland in different places. The Mystical Body of Christ, as they called the Church in parochial school. I’d always wondered how a bunch of different people were supposed to be part of one body, but now, looking down at my fellow Californians in the bank, I could get a feeling for it.

  The teller took out her compact, fixed her lipstick, and then started on her eye makeup. This was going to take a while. Longer than I wanted to be floating here with my naked butt an easy target for the Dronners. Maybe I could have sneaked more money out of the boxes with the teller still there—after all, my hand would only be appearing on the insides of the boxes—but I decided not to take the chance of making another noise. It would be easy enough to come back later on.

  I flapped a little distance vinn from Spaceland, and then I rolled myself over and stared again at the overgrown Dronian cliffs. The more I looked at them, the creepier they were. The colors of the cliffs were shivering and rippling like the grain in a field of wheat. And some of those anemone tentacles really did seem to be reaching out in my direction. Time to quit while I was ahead.

  Hurriedly, I flapped my way back to the car. First I pulled the money out of my four-dimensional bag and set it down into my front seat. The packets of bills snapped themselves back into ordinary reality as soon as I held them vout at the correct angle to Spaceland. And then I had an awkward minute trying to get my own bod back into the car; the first time I tried, I banged myself against the roof and got bounced back into hyperspace.

  Another try and I was in the front seat of my SUV. Winter’s early dusk was setting in; the wind was blowing the trees around. There was a chill in the air. I got my clothes on and counted the money. Thirty thousand bucks. I filled my wallet to the point where I had to rock over at an angle to sit on it, and I stuffed the rest of the bills into the front pockets of my leather jacket. It looked like I had breasts. But I didn’t want to park any money in the haunted attaché case. I wondered if Momo was watching over me, and if she’d be able to stop Wackle from robbing me again. The sooner I could spend my money, the better.

  I hustled over to Welsh & Tayke Realty on Santa Ynez Avenue, practically across the street from the Wells Fargo I’d just robbed. Kay Harmid was just stepping out the door, locking the place up.

  “I got my deposit!” I cried.

  She gave me and my car a thoughtful look. “I was just about to show the property again,” she told me. “A third client. I showed it to someone else earlier this afternoon. I noticed that you’d left your car in the driveway?”

  “I have friends near there,” I said vaguely.

  “Well, nobody else has signed on yet, so it’s still yours to rent. Come on in and we’ll settle up.”

  So that took care of about ten thousand bucks. And then I went down the street to a new bank I’d noticed that was open on Sundays, a place called the eBank. They got around the state laws about banking hours by having you interact with a terminal. Bur there were people there to help you. Like in a video arcade. They called themselves bankpersons. I opened a business checking account in the name of Mophone, with me on the signature list. It seemed like a good idea to get the money onto a bank’s books before Wackle could make off with it. I fed fourteen thousand into a machine and kept sixty of the hundreds in my wallet.

  I asked a bankperson about finding a lawyer to draw up some quick incorporation papers for me, and she told me about a local guy who worked late on Sundays in the Latham Building at the corner of Main Street and Santa Ynez Avenue. Business was so important in the Valley that things never fully closed down.

  The Latham Building was an old two-story granite building, kind of Wild-West-looking. The lawyer was on the second floor over a home decorating shop called Yupnip. Yupnip was filled with over priced furniture and clever, highly expensive gewgaws made of things like rocks and wire and sticks. Hundreds of bucks for something you could find lying on the ground. Like a dot-com company, in a way. Jena liked Yupnip; in fact we’d gotten a lamp there. It was basically a two-gallon tin can with seashells epoxied onto it.

  Upstairs from Yupnip I met with a tall, soft, curly-haired lawyer called Stu Koblenz, and we had the incorporation papers drawn up in less than an hour.

  “What’s Mophone’s core business gonna be?” Stu asked me when we were done.

  “We’re still in non-disclosure,” I said.

  “I hear a lot of that.” he said. “Give me a call when you’re ready to talk patents or IPO. I can do it all.”

  And then I hit Kinko’s copy shop and made some Mophone business cards with the address of my new house and my cell phone number. I listed myself as Chief Executive Officer. It felt good to be the boss.

  I drove to my new house and hauled the boxes in from my car. The traffic was noisier than ever. People coming home from their Sunday outings. I took out my business card and looked at it again. It gave me the confidence to phone Tulip.

  “Hare Krishna,” answered Tulip.

  “Um, hello,” I said. “This is Joe Cube.”

  Tulip burst into embarrassed, reckless laughter. “I thought you were my sister calling,” she explained. “We always say Hare Krishna for a joke. Actually I’m Catholic.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Hail Mary.”

  “Oh, I don’t joke about the real Church,” said Tulip. “I take it quite seriously.”

  “I’m calling to ask you to have dinner with me,” I said. “I’d like to make you an offer.”

  “Offer to do what?” said Tulip. “This morning you told me you were suicidal. Are you looking for an executionress? A hangwoman?” Reckless laughter again. “I have just the right outfit. It’s this black sari my great-aunt gave me when I graduated from high school. Nothing shows but my nose.”

  “Oh, I’m feeling much better now,” I told Tulip. “In fact I’ve incorporated a new company. Mophone. We could use an engineer like you.”

  “A business date,” said Tulip. “Very Silicon Valley. We’ll synergize, prioritize, and productize. Can I pick the restaurant?”

  “You got it,” I said.

  “Let’s try Ririche in San Jose,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to go there. Eight o’clock?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hang on,” said Tulip. “I’ll multitask.” A rapid series of beeps and hisses came over my cell phone and then I heard Tulip’s voice, again. “Done,” she said. “I just used the Web to get us a reservation.”

  “You’ve got the Web on your phone?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Tulip laughed again. “I’m glad you called, Joe. My sister thinks I’m depressed about Spazz. I’ve been watching horror movie videos all day. Never a good sign.” A pause. “Any more news of our exes?”

  “I saw them together at my old house this afternoon,” I said, sparing her the details. “And then I rented a new house of my own.”

  “Fast work,” said Tulip. I sensed a hint of pain in her bright, joking tone. “Me, I
’m stuck in Fremont. They have the biggest Indian language movie theater in the Bay Area. The Naz. But that’s about it. And I like Hollywood movies. The pure product.”

  “Maybe I could sublet you a room here.”

  “Oho. The alliance of the rejects. We’d better continue this discussion face to face, Joe.”

  “Eight at Ririche,” I said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  I killed the next couple of hours getting my place set up. I put my desk and computer in the front room—this would be the office. And I stacked my boxes in one of the bedrooms, leaving the second bedroom vacant just in case. And then I made a quick trip into Los Perros to buy a futon to sleep on. The easiest thing I could think of was going to Yupnip. Hey, I had seventeen thousand dollars in the bank, and I knew where to get more. I got a futon with a holder made of bolts and weathered gray lumber, a folding butterfly armchair with a seat made of an old canvas tent, a couple of UFO-style lamps, a fancy rug with this bitchin’ design of hundreds of little pastel TV sets printed on it, and a couple of plastic tractor-seat stools for the kitchen. It felt festive to be shopping after dark. Like buying Christmas presents.

  And then I got ready for my date. Showering was a little tricky as I didn’t have any soap or towels. I was a couple of minutes late getting to Ririche. Tulip was already there, sitting at the bar drinking an orange juice, her gold earrings glinting in the dim light. She looked prettier than I remembered. Her lips made me think of chocolate ice cream. In this light, I couldn’t see the blemishes in her skin. She was wearing a gray power suit and a pale orange silk blouse. I’d gone for slacks, sport coat, and tie—a special lavender paisley tie from Macy’s.

  Ririche was exquisite, all white table cloths and heavy silver, chic waitpersons and posh customers. With my subtle vision seeing everything, I could barely keep track of which customer was me. At the same time I was politely making an effort not to look under Tulip’s clothes. Actually sitting down with her got me so flustered that I missed whatever it was she was saying to me. I thought I heard the word “elephant.”