God, no, I thought. Jacob caught my eye and nodded desperately. “I don’t see why not,” I said. It was all imagination anyway. None of it was real.
“We’re cutting a deal with his people,” said the Someone, nodding thoughtfully.
They sent me off to do a treatment for them to approve. And by them, I understood they meant the Australian Someone, although I was not entirely sure.
Before I left, someone gave me $700 and made me sign for it: two weeks per diem.
I spent two days doing the treatment. I kept trying to forget the book, and structure the story as a film. The work went well. I sat in the little room and typed on a notebook computer the studio had sent down for me, and printed out pages on the bubble-jet printer the studio sent down with it. I ate in my room.
Each afternoon I would go for a short walk down Sunset Boulevard. I would walk as far as the “almost all-nite” bookstore, where I would buy a newspaper. Then I would sit outside in the hotel courtyard for half an hour, reading a newspaper. And then, having had my ration of sun and air, I would go back into the dark, and turn my book back into something else.
There was a very old black man, a hotel employee, who would walk across the courtyard each day with almost painful slowness and water the plants and inspect the fish. He’d grin at me as he went past, and I’d nod at him.
On the third day I got up and walked over to him as he stood by the fish pool, picking out bits of rubbish by hand: a couple of coins and a cigarette packet.
“Hello,” I said.
“Suh,” said the old man.
I thought about asking him not to call me sir, but I couldn’t think of a way to put it that might not cause offense. “Nice fish.”
He nodded and grinned. “Ornamental carp. Brought here all the way from China.”
We watched them swim around the little poo
l.
“I wonder if they get bored.”
He shook his head. “My grandson, he’s an ichthyologist, you know what that is?”
“Studies fishes.”
“Uh-huh. He says they only got a memory that’s like thirty seconds long. So they swim around the pool, it’s always a surprise to them, going ‘I never been here before.’ They meet another fish they known for a hundred years, they say, ‘Who are you, stranger?’”
“Will you ask your grandson something for me?” The old man nodded. “I read once that carp don’t have set life spans. They don’t age like we do. They die if they’re killed by people or predators or disease, but they don’t just get old and die. Theoretically they could live forever.”
He nodded. “I’ll ask him. It sure sounds good. These three—now, this one, I call him Ghost, he’s only four, five years old. But the other two, they came here from China back when I was first here.”
“And when was that?”
“That would have been, in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-four. How old do I look to you?”
I couldn’t tell. He might have been carved from old wood. Over fifty and younger than Methuselah. I told him so.
“I was born in 1906. God’s truth.”
“Were you born here, in L.A.?”
He shook his head. “When I was born, Los Angeles wasn’t nothin’ but an orange grove, a long way from New York.” He sprinkled fish food on the surface of the water. The three fish bobbed up, pale-white silvered ghost carp, staring at us, or seeming to, the O’s of their mouths continually opening and closing, as if they were talking to us in some silent, secret language of their own.
I pointed to the one he had indicated. “So he’s Ghost, yes?”
“He’s Ghost. That’s right. That one under the lily—you can see his tail, there, see?—he’s called Buster, after Buster Keaton. Keaton was staying here when we got the older two. And this one’s our Princess.”
Princess was the most recognizable of the white carp. She was a pale cream color, with a blotch of vivid crimson along her back, setting her apart from the other two.
“She’s lovely.”