Skyscape (6 page)

There was still some makeup on his neck. He ran a finger under his color and it came out with hypoallergenic foundation-moisturizer, a dawn-pink stuff a Japanese manufacturer gave him gratis ever since he had taped three shows in Tokyo, three shows in five hours. They sent it over airfreight and Patterson had to give it away; he couldn't use the stuff fast enough.

A death threat made it so you didn't want to sit at the mirror, all those little light bulbs around your reflection. A death threat made things simple.

The big door boomed open, and there was the squeal, the gasp, the rush he always felt when people saw him and
knew
.

There was a tight, dead feeling inside. There were too many people.

He was out, under the sky, surrounded, alive. “Good show,” said a perfect stranger. They were all perfect, faces, voices, his multitude.

“Thank you, Dr. Patterson,” called another perfect stranger, female, slim, with a figure Patterson allowed himself to look upon with a moment's appreciation.

“You helped me quit eating!” cried a wild-eyed, wild-haired young woman whose mascara had run. Patterson thought she looked horrible, right out of Auschwitz, death-thin. “Thank you, Dr. Patterson! Please!”

Please
because the security people, brave, farsighted, always people you could count on to muscle aside the innocent, step on the toes of the halt and the lame, were man-handling the bleary-eyed young woman, forcing her back.
Red Patterson Live
was the biggest show on in the late afternoon. There was a big surge in hand-carried televisions among office workers, and the gross national product was said to sag during Red Patterson's segment of the day. Love affairs were interrupted, pizzas got delivered late. The bars jammed with pre-supper drinkers, but booze sales stayed low until after the show. And kids were a surprise target. The brighter kids loved the show.

The young woman was still reaching out her hand, her eyes beseeching Patterson:
Please
.

“Dead man,” said Patterson to himself, turning, laying a hand on the security guard's shoulder. “I'm a dead man.” He knew what they saw, saw as though through their eyes, all of their eyes, the way it was every afternoon after he taped the show.

“We're never going to get out of here!” cried a voice, a security guard acting as an ad hoc Greek chorus.

It was a tourist event now—a brochure they gave out at Fisherman's Wharf had a star beside the paragraph, a red star. It was a must-see. The taping of Dr. Red Patterson's show, or “If you can't beg, borrow, or steal one of these premium tickets, cop a look for free when he exits the stage door on Van Ness. He shouldn't, but he still does.”

He slipped by the guard, worming, fighting, and stretched forth his hand, and the woman's eyes widened in hope so keen it was like pain. She couldn't quite reach him. The crowd tossed, cameras were flashing, and Patterson reached out as far as he could over shoulders, through the crowd.

And touched her hand.

He hated this when it happened. It never failed to drive him crazy: the woman fainted.

It was a hysterical swoon, one of those rock-star syncopes, something that always embarrassed Patterson and annoyed him. What if someone swallowed her tongue when she passed out like that, or fell down and broke something, if she wasn't so squished by the bodies of the people around her that she
had
to remain upright? What if she cracked a skull on the sidewalk? Think of the lawsuits.

But it wasn't just that. Patterson cared about these people. He almost hated to admit it, but he did. He was exasperated and tired, but he couldn't stand to see these poor people suffer. It was the last thing this woman needed to fall down and get trampled to death outside a television studio in San Francisco.

The producer had begun making suggestions: tape the show in LA like you used to, or use one of those independent video bunkers in Marin or Berkeley, where the musicians lipsynched and people spent all night making close-ups of model space ships.

He made sure the woman was okay, made sure she was conscious and smiling—weakly, but it was a smile. It was a brave smile—emotion had swept her. She thought she was happy.

Patterson felt the familiar inner refrain: got to do something different.

Can't go on like this.

He shook hands, wrestled his arm back out of one frenzied grasp after another, smiled all the while. He couldn't believe himself. Here he was, smiling, waving, and he knew the risk.

He snaked his way to the limo, tangled with the CBS security like a running back shoving his own blockers ahead of him. People everywhere. This was tight security? This was a slow, steady riot.

Jesus, it was starting to hurt, that rictus he kept for all comers. He had made it to the automobile, but the car door was blocked by photographers, squinting up at him, cameras whining.

“Get that door open!” someone was bellowing. “Open the door!”

This was controlled hysteria, the forces of order barely more coherent than the citizens themselves. The station had beefed up its complement of uniforms, but the result was that the usual mob was simply increased in size, in weight.

The door was open at last, and Patterson was pushed inside, someone's hand pressed down on the top of his head, to protect it from the top of the doorframe, a gesture both solicitous and commanding: you go here now.

Patterson was on the seat, arm on an armrest, and now the door wasn't closing, slammed against an ankle or a briefcase. The engine started, but there were cries of “Hold it! Hold it!” People were in the way, tangled around the car, in the door handle, the bumpers, the street a mass of people shouting and taking pictures.

Patterson had wanted to be a doctor. What did he mean
wanted to be
. He
was
a doctor. An M.D. His drawings of the bones of the hand had been sold and framed. He had published articles on the spleen when he was only a resident at Oakland's Highland Hospital, probing gunshot wounds for the pumper, the trauma-severed artery that was spurting life.

He knew quite enough about bullets, soft-nosed, high-velocity, every sort of projectile. He had been continually amazed and horrified at the power of guns, the abrupt, unnatural navel of the entry wound giving way to the blossom-burst of the bullet's exit. He had contemplated a career of research or clinical, hands-on medicine before drifting into psychiatry because, if the truth were told, he was afraid of having patients who might die.

Disease terrified him—not that he was entirely squeamish. He admired the graceful, thread-thin vine of the lymphatic system, the lovely, burgundy lobes of the liver, the busy brain-gray plumbing of the guts. As an intern he saw people dying, and he felt abashed in the face of pain, in the face of the grief-stunned family, and had hoped for living patients, people who were likely to survive.

“Please move so we can shut the door please,” a voice was calling. It was Poole.

Patterson could have chosen urology, with its reservoirs and ducts, or podiatry with its faith in bone to heal, like living wood, chalk fusing with chalk. But he believed in hope, an invisible, airy presence in the body. He wanted to be a physician. He wanted to be a living doctor, with living patients. He wanted to be a therapist.

The door would not shut. Someone was trying to thrust something in through the half-closed space, a bunch of color, reds, yellows—flowers. Patterson reached for the bouquet, and called out that it was all right, but security guards had the woman—if it was a woman—and the flowers were snatched away, scattered.

People responded to the logic of the times. It made sense. It was what happened when you became famous: people wanted you dead.

Everything comes to an end: the door was slammed. The limo parted people, guards, cops, photographers, figures helping each other out of the way, a Laocoön of traffic police, uniformed figures yelling into transmitters, stocky women holding back tourist's aiming what could have been pistols but which were, from the lack of effect, mere cameras, the latest in miniaturization, magnetic tape or Kodachrome capturing what would turn out to be an enigmatic shot, one that would require a voice-over in a living room down the years: “There's Dr. Patterson, you can sort of see him. Look at all the security; someone was going to shoot him.”

“We're out of here,” said the driver cheerfully, another stranger, a large, dark man. But he wasn't a stranger. He was a driver Patterson knew, someone provided by the city or the station or the network. But even he could be the assassin, driving off with his victim.

They weren't out of there. They were going nowhere. Patterson closed his eyes. He wanted to practice medicine. That was all. He wanted to help someone, just one person, in the way he had been trained. He was a healer. In his intellect, his heart, his scheme of the future, he was still just that—a physician.

They were moving at last. This was where the sniper would have a clear shot.

He couldn't go on like this, eyeing the rooftops as they glided past. He wondered which billboard, which gable, which parked car, hid the rifleman. Or the pedestrians at the curb—the windows, although high-impact, were not bulletproof, not at this angle, so close.

You won't even hear it, thought Patterson. The burst that blows all this away will be the single most important thing that ever happens to you.

And you'll never know it.

They whisked through an intersection. Another clear shot, if someone wanted to take it. Any of those blurred figures could be cradling a gun.

The only man who had understood Patterson was Paul Angevin, and Paul was dead, lost four or five years ago. They had found his fishing boat floating empty in the Pacific. Paul had been a TV producer mildly famous for his shows on the heart, the brain.

Patterson got Loretta Lee on the limo phone. “I take it you're not dead yet,” said Loretta Lee.

“What I want to know is, why would a prospective killer call up and tell a radio station what they were going to do?” said Patterson.

“An extrovert,” said Loretta Lee.

Patterson wanted to argue the point, but he couldn't. There were people who liked to operate in secret, and people who didn't. They were living in an age of people who couldn't stop talking. “Maybe he'll blow me up on the show.”

“We'll schedule it if you want.”

“Who is this little jerk? Poole.”

“The network loves him. He's an expert.”

“Let me guess. He teaches the FBI how to keep people from copying videotapes.”

“He's been complaining. He says you want to get killed.”

There was nothing like changing subjects. “Do you think Angie is trying to seduce me?” asked Patterson.

“I thought you didn't take much seducing,” said Loretta Lee.

If I were a killer, smiled Patterson to himself, enjoying the sound of Loretta Lee's voice, I would be there, behind that approaching chimney, up on that roof. I would be chambering a shell and taking a deep breath.

Ready to squeeze.

7

Margaret's mother called. “We're both absolutely sick,” she said. “When this kind of thing happens it just makes you wonder.”

Margaret considered this. Then she had to ask. She kept her voice calm, even indifferent. “What does it make you wonder?” asked Margaret.

Andrea did not answer, except, perhaps, in an oblique way. “How is Curtis taking it?”

“You can imagine,” said Margaret. But this didn't sound quite right. So she added, “He'll be okay.”

Andrea let a pause enter the conversation, a way of indicating that Curtis must not be entirely okay. “I would so much like to talk to him,” she said.

“He's resting,” said Margaret. It was true enough.

“I was so hoping I could say something to him, offer our condolences—”

“Not right now,” said Margaret.

There was another, careful little pause. “Do give him our love,” said Andrea. “And if you need to talk to me, about anything …”

Her mother's use of
our
was something new. As she communicated polite concern, with an underlying, natural fascination with bad news, she was also letting Margaret know something about the future.

Mrs. Wye brought a plate of peanut butter cookies. The white-haired woman was stronger, now, perhaps because there was misfortune to be shared—a misfortune not her own.

“You shouldn't have come up all this way,” said Margaret.

“I just wanted to do anything I could do,” said Mrs. Wye.

Margaret thanked her, and tasted one of the still-warm cookies. It was delicious, and Margaret said so.

“I was hoping I could see the poor man,” said Mrs. Wye.

“He needs some time to himself,” said Margaret.

“Of course he does. He must be devastated.”

“It's hard,” said Margaret.

“And you look tired, too, dear Margaret.”

“Not really.”

Mrs. Wye stood there, one hand gripping an aluminum walking stick, the white rubber tip of the stick punched into the carpet. The carpet puckered there, slightly, as though Mrs. Wye was a much stronger, heavier person who had arrived to stand rooted on the spot. “I think I know what's happening.”

There were eleven cookies left, petite pats of dough that had been indented by the tines of a fork before baking. They rested on a bone-white Spode plate. Behind the cookies, on the pattern of the plate, Margaret could make out a hunting scene. A woman on a horse was barely making it over a rail fence.

Maybe I am tired, thought Margaret. Too tired for conversation, anyway.

“How is he, in fact?” asked Mrs. Wye. She emphasized
in fact
.

“You don't need to worry,” said Margaret.

Mrs. Wye gave the slightest smile—she knew. “I know how he must feel. Art is the way we expand out of ourselves, and into the future.” Mrs. Wye shivered with the intensity of her feeling. “I hope he won't suffer a relapse, Margaret.”