FIFTY-ONE

Nearly nine years earlier, Ryan had bought houses for his mother and father-Janice and Jimmy-and put them on monthly allowances. Considering the general indifference with which they raised him and the number of times the indifference was punctuated with craziness and cruelty, he didn’t feel that he owed them anything. But he was famous, at least in the business world; the media lived to make a goat of a guy like him, which would be inevitable if they found his parents living in near destitution. Besides, there was a kind of satisfaction in treating them better than they had treated him.

Because Janice and Jimmy divorced when Ryan was nineteen, he put his mother in a view house on the hills of Laguna Beach, and settled his father closer, in a place half a block from the beach in Corona del Mar. Janice liked glitz and square footage, but his father wanted a cozy bungalow with “attitude and funk.”

Corona del Mar, which was a part of Newport Beach, didn’t have a reputation for funk. Ryan found a 2,200-square-foot cottage-style bungalow with enormous charm, confident that Jimmy would bring plenty of attitude and funkiness with him.

Unsure of the situation he would find, he had his limo driver park a block away, and he walked to the house.

Step by step, he considered backing off until Wilson Mott could get armed escorts here.

The United States was one of the few places in the world where a wealthy man could safely live without being parenthesized by bodyguards. In the interest of leading a normal life, with as much liberty as he could keep, Ryan used Mott’s armed escorts only when absolutely necessary.

In this instance, while prudence argued for backup, instinct said he must go in alone. Instinct and a belated acknowledgment of the truth also told him that by his actions, he had narrowed his many possible futures to this one aneurysm in the time stream, and Fate would either end him here or give him another chance. Only he could save himself.

He opened a white gate in a white picket fence and walked under a trellis draped with bougainvillea in its less flamboyant winter dress but still with an impressive spray of red petals as bright as blood. A brick walkway led to a porch with side trellises up which climbed trumpet vines.

A gardening service maintained the landscape. Left to Jimmy, the lawn would be dead, and everything else would have rioted into a tangle reminiscent of a third-act set for Little Shop of Horrors.

The front door stood ajar. He did not ring the bell, but pushed the door open and stepped inside.

He seldom came here, so the time warp always surprised him, just as it always depressed him. The Age of Aquarius had passed in most of the rest of the world, but here the clocks had stopped in 1968. The psychedelic posters, the Grateful Dead memorabilia, here Sly and the Family Stone, there Hendrix and Joplin, here the Jefferson Airplane, the Day-Glo peace signs, the portrait of Chairman Mao, bamboo window shades flanked by tie-dyed drapes, and of course the hookah on the coffee table.

Jimmy sat on the sofa, and Lily’s sister, Violet, stood over him with a silencer-equipped pistol.

Seeing Ryan, his father said, “Shit, man, you took long enough. We have a situation here. Whatever you did to make it, you unmake it right now, ’cause this bitch is a stone-serious psycho.”

At sixty-three, Jimmy had no hair on the top of his head but a sufficient crop at the back to make a ponytail. He wore a headband like one that Pigpen had worn, a mustache like David Crosby’s, beads purportedly worn by Grace Slick. The only thing about him that was not copied after someone else were his eyes like burnt holes into which had drained water and ashes, the aftermath of a fire, full of childlike calculation and need and quiet desperation, restless eyes that Ryan could bear to meet only when his old man was sufficiently stoned that the fear and resentment and bitterness were for the moment drowned in chemical bliss.

“Bamping,” Violet said.

Hearing movement, he turned to see a man step into the living room from the hallway. He was Asian, Ryan’s size, and had a pistol of his own.

Indicating Jimmy, she said to Bamping, “Take him to his bedroom and keep him quiet until this is done.”

“I don’t want to go back there,” Jimmy said. “I don’t want to go with him.”

Violet put the muzzle of the silencer against Jimmy’s forehead.

“Dad,” Ryan said. “Do what they want.”

“Screw ’em,” Jimmy said. “Fascist shits.”

“She’ll blow your brains out, Dad. What can he do to you that would be more final?”

Licking his lips and the fringe of mustache that overhung them, Jimmy rose unsteadily from the sofa. He was a skinny wreck. The seat of his jeans sagged, he had no butt left, and sticking out of his T-shirt, his elbows looked almost as big as his forearms.

“She’s making this worse for me,” Jimmy said to Ryan. “Bitch won’t let me have a joint. Make her let me have one.”

“I don’t set the rules here, Dad.”

“It’s your house, isn’t it?”

“Dad, go with Bamping.”

“Go with what?”

“Bamping. That’s his name. Go with him now.”

“What kind of name is Bamping?”

“Don’t do this anymore, Dad.”

“When they bought your company, did they buy your balls?”

“Yes, they did, Dad. They bought them. Now go with him.”

“This sucks. This whole situation sucks.”

“It’s no tangerine dream, that’s for sure,” Ryan said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“It means something, all right. Wise-ass.”

At last Jimmy allowed Bamping to escort him back the hall to the bedroom. A door closed.

“Very carefully,” Violet said, “take off your jacket.”

“I’m not carrying a weapon.”

“Very carefully,” she repeated.

He took off the jacket and draped it over the sofa, where she could examine it if she wished. At her command, he took off his shirt and placed that beside his jacket, and then he turned in a circle with his arms extended like the wings of a bird.

Satisfied that he wasn’t armed, she pointed to a La-Z-Boy recliner and said, “Sit there.”

Obeying, Ryan said, “Funny.”

“You are amused?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. But it’s funny how the warriors of the Greatest Generation and washouts of the next both like their La-Z-Boys.”

He did not recline but sat straight up, leaning forward.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“ Denver.”

She kept at a distance from him, not willing to get as near as she had been to Jimmy. “Were you running away?”

“I thought about it,” he admitted.

“I didn’t expect you to come here.”

“If I didn’t, you would have killed him.”

“Yes.”

“I guess you still might.”

“I might,” she said. “I will certainly kill you.”

“Maybe I didn’t come alone.”

“You came in a limousine, which is parked a block away. There is only the driver. He is in the car, listening to very bad music and reading an obscene magazine.”

Although Ryan’s fear was not diminished, a peculiar calm came over him, as well. He wanted not a single day more that was alike to the days of the past sixteen months. He had been saved from certain death, but he had lost Samantha, he had lost a sense of purpose, and he had lost the capacity for pure joy. His lifelong conviction that the future was worth the travails of the day, while not broken, had been shaken. He had arrived at a lever-point moment. Here he must pivot to a better future or give up the game.

“If you’re going to kill me,” he said, “may I have the courtesy of knowing fully why?”