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She hadn’t felt this lost in a very, very long time. If Charlie were here, he’d show her what to do next. He’d only need to smile at her and she would know in her soul what to do. But he wasn’t. He was locked up twenty miles away in a concrete cell. Why couldn't anyone listen to him? She hadn’t been able to stop listening to him since the moment she first heard his voice, since he had first promised her there was another world, another life, a real life. His voice sang. It made her think of sweet oranges in December and the sound of guitars, a creek in stony burnt desert scrub. A Garden of Eden. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed…
But it was a hot September night, and Charlie was gone, and the smog lay thick over Sacramento. She sat alone in the park near the train station watching the headlights of cars passing in the dark, smelling the exhaust and the cigarette smoke drifting from their open windows. She had nothing better to do. She leaned back and pulled out a joint she had in her pocket, already rolled up. Charlie had told her and Sandy that they shouldn’t smoke anymore because of his new idea about the air and water and trees, and she could feel him watching her even then, but she couldn’t help it, and — shit — she realized, searching her pockets, she'd forgotten her lighter anyways.
“Need a light?” said a calm voice next to her.
She turned to its source. A man stood half-obscured by shadow, offering what appeared to be a small matchbook. She was not surprised by this. Things always seemed to just turn up when she needed them. “Yeah,” she replied.
The man handed it over silently.
“Kinda old-fashioned, huh?” she remarked, fumbling with the match until it finally caught alight. “Don’t have a regular lighter?”
“No, I don’t,” said the man, sounding amused.
She lit her joint and flicked the match to the ground, watching it burn for a moment longer before extinguishing it with the toe of her sandal.
“Now, may I ask what a young girl like you is doing out on the street, alone, in the middle of the night?” The man moved into the light of the streetlamp, and the odd way the orange light flashed over his eyes made her catch her breath. She could always tell something about a person by their eyes. Charlie had taught her how. This man had strange eyes.
“You look like you’re younger than me,” she replied with a short, harsh giggle. “The mustache isn’t working, man.”
The man smiled wryly. “No, as a matter of fact,” he said, “we’re both twenty-six, but I dare say I’m older than you are.”
She stopped still for a long moment, staring at the man.
“How’d you know that?”
“I know lots about you, Lynette,” he said, sitting down beside her. He had a funny accent. It drew out the syllables of her name like a song.
"You know my name,” she said with a look of wonder. “How come?”
“I know a lot of people.”
“So what else do you know about me?” She leaned towards him, intrigued. A person had to be really tuned-in to know things like that about other people. To go above their own thoughts and see somebody else’s.
“Born 1948 in Santa Monica. You had a happy childhood. You were a dancer. But you always felt like you belonged somewhere else. So you dropped out of college to go to the desert with Charles Manson until they threw him into jail. Now you're living in an attic apartment a couple blocks away from here. You share it with your friend Sandy Good. And yet you feel as if you are completely and totally alone.”
A terrifying thrill of excitement ran through her body. The last time someone had looked at her like that and seen everything — absolutely everything —
“Did Charlie send you?” she breathed.
He smiled again. It was a handsome smile, but harsh and unreadable. “I sent myself.”
“I never met anyone else who just knows things like that. Nobody but him.” She paused, letting out an amazed breath of laughter, searching his face in disbelief. “Who are you?”
“You can call me John.”
“Names don’t matter,” she told him. “Charlie always says names are just different clothes you can put on and take off. Who are you?”
“I’m your friend.”
“I can tell. You have this look like I can talk to you about things,” she said matter-of-factly. “I miss being able to talk to people like that. Nobody ever listens.”
“No, they don’t, do they?” John crossed his arms thoughtfully.
“It’s like — everything in the whole world is falling apart and nobody can hear me shouting to just do something about it. You know the redwoods are dying? Charlie gave me the job of taking care of the redwoods and they're dying. All the pollution is killing them. All this smog. I’ve been writing letters to everybody. Even the President. And nobody listens to me.”
“See, that’s why I came to talk to you, Lynette,” replied John. “I know a way you can make them listen to you. And to Charlie. Even the President.”
“Yeah?”
His eyes flashed in the dark. He leaned closer and spoke as if telling her a secret. “He's coming to town in the morning. President Ford. He's just a few hours away. And he'll be a few blocks away, at the State Capitol, isn’t that right, Lynette?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Do you have a gun?”
She was silent for a moment, then looked up to meet those frightening dark eyes. “I got a friend who has a gun. I can take it if he’ll let me borrow it.”
“That’s my girl,” he said, halfway to himself.
“That’d really make them listen, huh,” she said, a broad grin creeping over her face. “Killing him. The President of the United States. Yeah. They’d listen to that.”
“And if you do that,” he replied, low excitement building, “do you know what it will mean?”
She tilted her head curiously. “What?”
“You’ll be immortal, Lynette. Everyone will hear you. You'll have something to belong to forever. I've got a lot of friends like you. They want to meet you. They've all been lost and alone. You know what that’s like, don't you? And you remember what it was like to find something better. You can have it all back. All you have to do is aim a gun and pull the trigger. It's not hard to do.”
Everything was still. She imagined she could hear the oranges swaying in the trees, hard and green and waiting for winter. She was hanging on a precipice and it felt as though the whole city was silent, holding its breath for her to just tip over the brink.
“Who are your friends?” she asked.
“They’ve all done the same thing that you're going to do,” he replied.
She became aware of many eyes on her, of dark figures slipping out from behind trees. There were people surrounding her who hadn’t been there before. Her eyes flickered to each strange man. She wasn’t afraid of them. In fact, she felt love for them, the kind of love you feel for someone who is you, and you are them. She had missed feeling love like that.
“And so have I. In fact," continued John, "I was the first." That explained the funny air about him. He didn't belong to this time. “It's nothing to be afraid of.”
“I'm not afraid of killing him,” she said softly. “Killing somebody is an act of love. You have to love somebody very much to do that for them. But Manny keeps his pistol locked up in a lockbox and if I can't make him give it to me then what am I supposed to do?”
John just nodded knowingly. He took something from his pocket — a key. She held out her hand and he pressed it gravely into her palm. “You'll get the gun from him in the morning.”
She felt dizzy with joy as she closed her fingers around it. “Thank you,” she said. The other people had slipped away to wherever they had come from, but she still felt their presence. Comforting.
John walked with her as far as the front steps of her dingy old house on P Street. Cute sort of thing to do. Old-fashioned, she supposed, a thought that made her giggle. About a hundred years old-fashioned. Wouldn't Charlie laugh and laugh if he were here. Won't he be happy when he finds out. The key seemed heavy in her hand. She imagined the feeling of a gun in its place and it felt just wonderful. Everything seemed so clear now. It was like the smog was already floating away. And all she had to do...
“Till then, think of the world,” John called to her as she unlocked the front door. By the time she turned to say goodnight, he had gone.