When I’d returned to my room in Vegas, there was a message on my phone, from Polly: “Isn’t luck supposed to be a lady? I just remembered that this morning. Anyway, things happened, thoughts, actions, you know the drill. My flight lands at 10:22. Could you be a lamb and pick me up?” It was 9:54 when I got the message. Unpredictable. I picked her up and we went to a casino before leaving town. As it turned out, she was good luck for me, I started winning for the first time since I’d arrived in Vegas. Polly argued that since she was the reason I started winning, she should get to take a vacation where ever she wanted. She picked San Diego. I remembered rainy Portland and Seattle and even though I was anxious to head home, I agreed that she deserved a little sun. After San Diego, though, I was heading east and I wasn’t sure what she was going to do. Or how I’d feel.
Vegas had been a vacation for me. The pure statistics, the numbers everywhere. It really was my idea of something like a spa. Yet, the craziness in the Monte Carlo had left me a bit shaken. It didn’t fit into any explainable category that I knew. Still, though, I was energized by the end of my visit and now that I was in San Diego on Polly’s vacation, I could start to answer a question of my own “Where was Morton Petes buried?”
I called Boston, specifically Cambridge. Half of the Boston area is not actually Boston. The dividing line is the Charles River. North of the river is Cambridge and that’s where Morton died. The Middlesex County Medical Examiner’s assistant promised me that he’d call me back.
The body of Jacob Phillips was confirmed missing. Polly had finally managed that. Tuns out that the Medical Examiner’s office takes anonymous phone calls suggesting empty graves more seriously than family members requesting exhumations. Somehow the calm voice on the phone had much more credibility than the sight of the unlikely pairing of a lanky nerd and his attractive and flirty friend. Polly had a male friend make the call, saying that he had evidence that the grave was empty, then hung up. A week later a crew arrived and excavated the grave. Polly slipped fifty dollars to a gardener at the cemetery and then she knew. The grave had contained nothing but some personal effects and bags of sand. So what had happened to the body of Jacob Phillips? Polly seemed to be getting her mind off of things just fine by shopping here in the Hillcrest neighborhood of San Diego.
I stood on the sunny sidewalk thinking about Morton. Now that Jacob’s body was missing, and Polly’s demons proved not to be at rest, I needed to know that mine were. I, like Polly, just wanted to be able to see his memorial and start moving on. Or trying to. The San Diego sun fell down and as thoughts of Morton rolled through me, I noticed something unusual. On the corner of the block, near a palm tree, a man wearing headphones held a giant arrow with the word “CONDOS” on it. Then, he began to spin the sign. First he spun it clockwise, then counter-clockwise, then he flipped it in his arms and finally it was pointing in the original direction. He yawned. There in the hot sun, stood a human ad for condos.
“Hey math-boy, can I get another twenty from the winnings?” Polly was at my side.
“Sure. Hey check out the guy with the condo sign. Isn’t that weird?”
“Yeah. I guess. Actually, as an unemployed woman, it doesn’t sound like bad work.”
“He just stands there for hours, spinning that sign? Couldn’t they get a post for it? Or attach a motor to spin it? What’s next, using people as coffee tables?”
“You would make a good lamppost, skinny.” She said this and hugged me. I smiled and let her, but the image of the sign spinner stayed with me.
I was staying with my childhood friend Smiler and Polly was staying at the Del Coronado Grand Hotel on Coronado Island. The island is actually a peninsula as the T-shirts in shops there tell you. It is just across the San Diego Bay from downtown and Polly liked to remind me that it was delightful. She offered to let me stay with her there, but somehow I felt more comfortable sleeping on the couch of my buddy. His cozy bachelor bungalow made me feel more at home than I’d thought.
Smiler was a good looking guy with reddish blonde hair. I had nicknamed him Smiler as a kid. His face helped the name stick. He had remained single his entire life, but not for lack of interested women. Still, he preferred a simple bachelor’s life and he was doing it better than I was back in Massachusetts. He was content. He didn’t need to drive around the country. He enjoyed his job and he enjoyed his social life, and mostly, he’d held on to his namesake smile.
“So why are you staying here, when a hot girl is in the nicest hotel in the area, and she wants you there with her?”
“How are you Smiler? Ask any indirect questions ever?”
“I’m just saying that you are acting a bit weird, Buddy. I know that things were hard for you when Chloe left, but life keeps falling forward. Did you know that at the rate of cell death and replacement, on a cellular level, you are an entirely different person than the one that got divorced?”
“Huh. So, that’s what I’ve been feeling. The feeling of being slowly replaced. My cells are conspiring against me.” But I did laugh. Even as kids, Smiler had a knack for seeing the bright side of things. The San Diego sun couldn’t hurt the perspective.
“Seriously, dude, that girl is cute. You should be there instead of on my couch.”
“I’m working things out in my head, my friend. Were we going to get that beer or what?” I asked, oddly anxious to change the subject.
“Yes, yes. Are we picking up Polly at the Del Cash-a-nado?”
“Yeah. You can drive.”
We drove down the hills of Smiler’s neighborhood, past the green drooping trees of Balboa Park and near the highways and massive sloping bridge that lead to Coronado, but not before rising nearly ten stories above the San Diego Bay. As we waited at a red light, a loud noise suddenly filled the air. Looking up, a roaring 737 airliner had materialized what seemed like feet above my head.
“Crap!” That’s scary. And I don’t scare easily.
Smiler seemed bored. “You get used to the low flight path. I like reading the planes numbers off their bellies as they go by. I look for number 422. One of my favorite flight attendants used to fly on that baby.”
I glanced across the intersection to see the 737 slowly falling into the downtown horizon and, I assumed, a runway. There, across the intersection, stood a woman spinning a sign that said “APARTMENTS.” She wore a red hat and spun the sign with bored indifference as we drove past her and onto the giant bridge. I couldn’t stop thinking of that spinning until I saw Polly’s dress.
The night was fun. We grabbed drinks at a place called The Whistlestop. The theme of the bar was trains and train stations. It seemed like it could have been here in the 1960’s. San Diego had that: old charm. You got the feeling that the places were actually old, not just designed to look that way. Polly and Smiler played pool as I watched and annoyingly announced when they had mischosen their geometry angles. Usually I waited until they had already committed the cue to hitting the ball before I told them. This made me anything but popular with the two.
I watched them play pool. Smiler flirted with her a little bit. Predictable. Polly was happy, or at least she seemed to be. Her eyes looked less tired now and she rarely talked about things like Jacob Phillips. But I knew that she was hiding her desire to close the story. I knew that she was hiding her sadness at the death. I knew because I had seen that sadness in Seattle, and because I still felt the same way.
After a few games of pool, I returned from the bathroom to find Polly and Smiler sitting down and deep into a conversation. As I approached the two of them, I had a strange feeling. It felt a bit like jealousy. Yeah. That’s what it was. I kind of liked feeling it again.
Smiler and I dropped Polly off at her beautiful hotel. It was, in fact, the place where Frank L. Baum, author of the Wizard of Oz, had done much of his writing. It was stately white and huge. It was the sort of place where honeymooners celebrated their love. I was better off on Smiler’s couch.
“Don’t forget, Polly. I’m leaving early for Tucsun if you’re coming. I want to get there before it gets too hot in the desert.”
“Yes, boss. Pick me up early or just come up now.”
Smiler and I pulled away from the hotel. I hadn’t had the nerve to ask Polly how long she was going to be in my car with me. I didn’t ask, but she didn’t suggest that she was getting out of the passenger seat any time soon either.
That night I was laying on the couch thinking of the sign spinners on the street corners and another memory came to me. It was Morton Petes sitting in my office at MIT. He was spinning his pencil between his fingers as he waited for me to answer his question. It was annoying, as I recall. It made me wonder how serious he was about the question, if his hands could be doing such frivolous things. Wouldn’t someone who really wanted a question answered wait perfectly still for the answer? Morton never did. He was always moving. This particular day was one of the strange ones near the end.
“Do you know what makes me me?” Morton had asked.
“Your unique,” I struggled for the right wording, ”in your case your very unique DNA?”
“Yes, Theo, but by modern standards, what makes me unique is this.” He reached into his wallet and produced a blue Massachusetts driver’s license. He spun the ID between his fingers.
“That is one of the things that makes you unique, true.”
“What’s more. It’s one of the only things that makes me me. Take this away and lose the library card and the credit cards and pretty soon, who am I but just something organic? A naked human. The system doesn’t care much for naked humans. It prefers that you have cards and social security numbers.”
“That’s not true, Morton, the system loves you, and it also knows your finger prints, blood type, retina print and that very unique DNA of yours.”
“It only knows those things if I offer to give them. But, no, the identification cards, Theo, that’s what matters. That what you show to get into the bank, or the country, or the bar. I am identified by these cards, and without them, and without your good examples of blood, semen, urine, double-helix or finger print swirl, I am nothing.”
“That’s a strange perspective, Morton. What could have led you to think of such a thing?”
He just sat there, spinning his pencil. “It’s come up lately as I’ve been making some plans.”
I awoke the next morning, loaded the Ford, picked up Polly and headed east for the first time in months. I was heading home.
This time Phil was going to do it with style. He was going to write his name all over it, and there would be no doubt that a genius had passed through this place. The first step was to say good bye. He took the contents from his wallet and set them on the table. His driver’s license looked back at him and winked. His credit cards would never get paid. His library card. He looked at the stack of book at the end of the table. He decided that maybe he would return those before ending it. It wasn’t the library’s fault, after all.
Sitting in the dark apartment the light shone through a slat in the blinds and touched Phil’s graying hair. He thought about how long it would have taken anyone to find him. He thought about how few people ever really cared. What was he doing this for anyway? Maybe one person had cared. Maybe one person would try to stop him. He flipped the lid from the bottle of sleeping pills and got to work.
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