Cheating at Solitaire(139)

The boardwalk here was really awful. It was true in Oscartown as it was true everywhere else that the rich got better treatment than the poor, even when it came to public services. Someone ought to come out here and do a good job of snow removal and then sand and paint the thing, and replace the rotten boards. He thought about Gregor Demarkian, and his head hurt. Did a man like that, a man who had worked with presidents, who had headed up one of the most important sections of one of the most important law enforcement bodies in the world, did that man really think that movie producers sent henchmen around to murder prop boys and second assistant grips when they got in the way of finishing a motion picture? What about a bad motion picture? There was a story about G. Gordon Liddy that Carl had heard just after he left college. He had no idea if it was true, but it was a perfect illustration of what was wrong with everything and everybody these days. The story went like this: In the last days before the Watergate mess had unraveled, when the break-in was still secret but didn’t look as if it would be for long, Liddy had shown up at the White House and asked to talk to Halderman and Erlichman. “All right,” he was supposed to have said, “I know how this works, and I’ll make it easy for you. I’ll be on the corner of K Street and Connecticut at twenty minutes after midnight tonight, and I won’t do a thing to stop you from taking me out.”

Carl remembered hearing that story the first time and thinking how funny it was, thinking that it summed up Lid-dy’s goofiness even if it wasn’t true. Life was just not like that, and sane people knew it, but nobody seemed to be sane anymore. Why ever would someone like Michael Bardman, who could eat the cost of a failed minor movie out of his own checking account, bother to pay somebody to murder somebody like Mark Anderman? You could say anything you wanted about Michael Bardman—and Carl had said a lot of it; in some ways, the man was a loon—but he was the most important producer in the history of movies, and not just movies in Hollywood. He was practically a force of nature. It wouldn’t hurt Michael Bardman’s career if Arrow Normand went down in flames, or even if the movie did.There was a difference between not wanting a failure and needing not to have one.

The boardwalk had come to an end. Carl looked up and around himself. He was in an area of small, low houses, the kind that looked, from the road, as if they were too low to stand up in. Here and there he saw a pickup truck parked in a drive next to one. He couldn’t see any proper garages. There was a lot of snow, and a lot of what seemed to be random items piled up on porches that didn’t look long for this world. People fished here, not for relaxation, but for money. People chopped cordwood and cleared other people’s driveways and mowed lawns when the fishing wasn’t good. People used whitewash instead of paint. Carl could remember houses like this. They existed on the edges of every small town in rural America, existed and not much more. He found the sign that said Bellwether Road and counted down from it until he reached number 6. The ocean was here, right here. It came right up to the back doors of half these places, and yet none of them would ever be described as “waterfront property” in any real estate brochure. It was funny how that worked.

He stepped off the boardwalk onto Bellwether Road and was very careful of his shoes, which were not made for wading through the snow. People like Michael Bardman had a certain amount of responsibility for the way everybody was acting these days. They made the movies that used conspiracy theories as their foundations: the ones where the crop circles really were made by mysterious aliens; the ones where Kennedy really was killed by Lyndon Johnson’s undercover dirty-tricks operators; the ones where everything you see and everything you know and everything you do is just code for something else, something darker, something more sinister, something secret. Maybe it had always been like this in one way or another, although he doubted it. He was fairly sure that, at least for his parents’ generation, there had been times when most people would have rejected this kind of thinking in favor of living in the mundane day to day. Entertainment had simply become so big a part of everything, so integral a part of everybody’s day-to-day lives, that nothing else felt real anymore. Carl’s professors in college would have called it the “narrative instinct,” although Carl didn’t think it was an instinct. Lately, though, he’d understood what they’d meant better than he had when he’d first heard them. Human beings were narrative animals. They liked stories. Their brains were hardwired to think in stories. Nothing sounded true to them if it didn’t fit into a story. The Michael Bardmans of the world made it possible for people to live in stories, all day, all night, all of their lives. It took training and practice to learn to think logically. Nobody who spent his life at the movies was ever going to get that far.