The Dust Will Answer by Richard Risemberg

Author:Richard Risemberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, drugs, los angeles, noir, quest, punk, missing person, lost girlfriend, hobo jungle
Publisher: Richard Risemberg

26.

Fatigue overcame my native fretfulness, and I did finally sleep, with my mind still attuned to the sound of a phone I knew wouldn’t ring. When I awoke, it was late afternoon, and I felt refreshed and miserable. It was an odd pairing of sensations, like the garlic ice cream served in Gilmore up the coast, a little town that bills itself as “The Garlic Capital of the World” and puts on the inevitable yearly festival. Kate and I had been there once on a road trip and tried it. The ice cream wasn’t bad. The bright-eyed angst I was feeling now was not to be recommended.

I was pretty sure that Kate had met Dutton through her circle of friends, the people she knew before I met her. This was the bunch that included Percival. College friends that she gathered round her in the heady days of sloppy dorm rooms and lazy sex. I didn’t live on campus and was not part of that crowd, though I tried to be for a while. Also, I was odd man out because of my lack of interest in drugs. That would be considered strange now and was seen as defiantly peculiar then, in our age cohort. We were the half-generation that came of age after Woodstock, and though the Sixties glowed bright in our collective memories, we had not actually participated in the Summer of Love, that brief flowering of confidence in an immediate resolution of the world’s discords. We had missed the Magic Bus, and the next one that pulled up to the stop eventually let us off in the disco-riddled Eighties, but we really had no decade of our own. Kate’s friends looked to the far future and the distant past, immersing themselves in science fiction on the one hand and sword & sorcery on the other, dressing in costumes at elaborate conventions that were always spiced with anachronistic stimulants and cradled in the sterile comforts of hospital-like airport hotels. I found them insufferably pretentious, and they no doubt found me amusingly priggish. Kate, bless her, found us all “fascinating” in one way or another.

She’d dutifully brought me along to meet her friends several times, usually at parties. Whether it was to show off her conquest or to try to habituate me to her lifestyle, it didn’t work. I was not a theatrical person and they were. This is not to say that they were literally interested in the theater and its disciplines; I would say that they enjoyed play-acting at play-acting. The costumes meant more than the roles; researching what accents might actually have been like in medieval days, and learning the vernacular grammar of all the “prithees” and “by your leave, good sirs” was tedium to them. Sad to say, that sort of thing was exciting to me. I was quite the stuffed shirt, though at least I was a relatively quiet one. The disparity was even broader in the other temporal direction: their futurism was entirely too

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