Skyscape Page 4

  No one would blame him. Just one little skin-pop. That’s all it would take.

  Can you imagine a picture like that, worth millions, consumed by fire, Patterson thought. That wasn’t helping his mood at all. It was depressing. It was not the thing he needed to be thinking about right now.

  He had been feeling fine. A death threat. Big deal. But now all he could think about was the famous painting burning, and the transitory nature of reality bit into him.

  “Angie’s going to meet us at the airport,” Loretta Lee was saying. “They see this as a real threat and they want everyone to see how nice they are to you.”

  “They ought to be,” said Patterson. And he had been in such a good mood just an hour before.

  The aircraft taxied. In the absence of any air traffic there was no hesitation, no wait for a chain of jumbos to get sorted out. It was quick. The craft picked up a little speed, and then the jet was off the runway. The acceleration pushed Patterson back into the cordovan-upholstered seat.

  Some people grew casual about flying, adopting a form of executive macho, never fastening a seat belt. Patterson always fastened his, as bored as he sometimes was with this sort of plane. A pilot has certain habits, a way of looking at machinery, the sky. To fly you learned to follow procedure. You kept records. A good physician was often a good pilot.

  Loretta Lee sat beside him looking at the printout of former clients who had at one point or another killed someone. Patterson thought it was a sensible idea, but at the same time he felt the search was hopeless.

  Patterson had worked with killers. He had shown the videotape of a man gunning down his wife at a barbecue just a couple of weeks before. He had interviewed the man. The overweight, sweating killer had provided a voice-over as his image was doing the shooting, bending down over the heap of bloody clothing that had been his wife. The man had wanted to explain. He had wanted to tell his story. He had wanted to be free of the “terrible guilt.” The police had put cuffs on the man, right there in the studio, while the end credits rolled.

  That was the point: if you appeared on Patterson’s show you were healed, you accepted your future, you didn’t have problems anymore.

  Usually.

  Bishop piloted the jet, a gift from a securities exchange broker doing time in federal prison. Patterson didn’t mind the plane, finding it a quick way to switch from point A to point B, but the aircraft was too functional, devoid of romance. The jet gained altitude too fast for Patterson’s taste, nose-up at an angle that would stall any of the real aircraft.

  Bishop knew what Patterson wanted without being told. He circled Owl Springs once, wing down hard so Patterson could get a good look.

  The oasis was an astounding green against the ashen-gray of the desert. Nothing grew on the alluvial waste that stretched down the hillsides. The verdure surrounded the Spanish-style villa, a style of architecture Patterson thought of as Seville married to Hollywood.

  He had to plan the recorded message for his 900 number. People called it from everywhere. It only cost them a couple of dollars for a three-minute burst of Patterson on Life. Loretta Lee reported that the phone service was turning a profit of what she called “one-hundred proof dollars.”

  He switched on the little black Sony recorder, but he saw that it didn’t have a tape in it. Loretta Lee nudged him and handed him a microcassette without being asked. She had a recorder just like his, and sat there with the black strap dangling, telling the recorder things she would have to do when she was back on the ground. She kept a taped diary sometimes. She was one of those people who would rather talk than write.

  He wanted to work in the phrase from Jung, the one about the “uncontrollability of real things,” and that other dusty psychological concept, Freud’s Reality Principle. But it happened so often these days—he couldn’t apply what he now knew to any of the famous theories in the field. Traditional psychiatry was a failure. It had no way of helping eighty percent of the people who desperately needed help. Of course real events were uncontrollable. Of course the physical facts of the world intruded on the psyche. Patterson found himself wondering if either Freud or Jung had ever bought car insurance.

  So by the time they were in San Francisco, Patterson had a few thoughts on tape, but they weren’t the big thoughts he had hoped for. He talked about death and violence, and how he felt when he made love with Loretta Lee, because that was his approach in his 900-number calls, intimate and frank. Patterson was someone you could believe in. People needed that.

  Even that little buzz fear can provide had worn off. He felt wary and tense, a bad way to feel, although it made him realize that he was human. Nothing like feeling human.

  The San Francisco airport was cold after the desert. There were dim figures, plainclothes cops, even a police dog. Patterson liked dogs, but this one didn’t even wag its tail.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” said Angie.

  “We don’t worry,” said Loretta Lee.

  In the limo on the way from the airport, Angie sat across from him, the lights flowing over her. She looked pert and wide-eyed, a blonde emissary from the City of San Francisco to one of its famous residents. “We think it’s just a threat,” said Angie, “but we also think it’s time to change the way we handle things.”

  “People come from all over the world to see Dr. Patterson. We go in the same way as always, we come out the same way,” said Loretta Lee.

  Patterson liked the we. Loretta Lee watched the show on remote, if she went to the studio at all. She was usually too busy with the calls and the mail, although she kept a tape of every show ever broadcast.

  “I like things the way they are,” said Patterson with a smile.

  “It’s not that simple anymore,” said Angie.

  “It was never ‘simple,’” said Patterson.

  “We’re getting a lot of pressure.” Angie touched her hair. “From segments of the medical community, among others.”

  “San Francisco must be the only city in America where anyone listens to those fools,” said Loretta Lee. She had been in therapy for years before coming to Patterson.

  “After the city government,” said Angie, smart enough to smile slightly here, as though to say: the people who sent you me, “the university medical center is the city’s biggest employer.”

  “Those guys are scared,” said Loretta Lee. “Psychiatrists can’t stand what Red’s doing. He cures people. It drives the doctors crazy.”

  Patterson laughed, but quickly stopped himself. What was he laughing at? He was a physician himself, trained at UCLA, his skills polished in a ghetto emergency room. He had reached the point that he thought of the medicos as people far away, hostile and very unlike himself. But he was one of them—a trained professional. There was a smell of cadavers in his nose to this day. They used Formalin on the “bodies left to science,” and medical students risked passing out and even worse, kidney damage from months of inhaling cadavers pickled in formaldehyde.

  Even at a well-funded school like UCLA the air conditioners were not efficient enough to suck off that kind of indoor toxicity. He had found anatomy fascinating, but the thought of having to go to medical school again made him sick.

  “I want you to know I support you, Dr. Patterson,” said Angie. “I want to do everything I can to help you. More and more people are criticizing you. I’m not one of them.”

  There must be something about being around politicians all the time, thought Patterson. It teaches you to give little speeches wherever you go.

  Loretta Lee stirred, shaking open a briefcase. “What you need to do is find out who wants to assassinate such a good man.”

  “We’d prefer it,” Angie said, “if you let us keep the crowds on Van Ness behind a barrier.”

  “If the City of San Francisco doesn’t cooperate, we can do the show somewhere else,” said Loretta Lee.

  “We don’t want that. Besides, I personally believe in the work Dr. Patterson is doing. He proves that television can cure.”


  People talked in a stark, bluntly lyrical way around Patterson. He wasn’t sure why. They used phrases like “doing good” and “terrible guilt,” bare, emotional clichés without a trace of irony. Patterson brought out something earnest in people, something sincere and innocent and even a little stupid. Maybe, he thought, that was the secret to his power. People weren’t complicated. They only wanted to believe.

  People needed to see him, to be close. He owed people that. Still, if Loretta Lee hadn’t been beside him in the car Patterson might have let himself be talked into a police barrier, or an increased bodyguard, or maybe a brace of German shepherds to keep the needful at bay. He wasn’t proud of being nervous—but he was.

  Still, he believed it when he said, “All I want to do is help people. They need me so badly.”

  He meant it. Here he was, anxious, worrying about being shot, and he was saying, basically, “Suffer ye the little crazy people to come unto me.” And he meant it. He absolutely meant it.

  Loretta Lee’s eyes were bright, and Angie’s, too, both of these experienced women hushed by what they thought they saw in him.

  He tried to make it sound like a take-off of a hundred dumb war movies. “There isn’t a bullet made that can hurt me,” he intoned.

  It didn’t come out like a joke. It sounded brave. It sounded like faith. Sometimes he wondered what he really believed.

  “But we think that the opposition to Red Patterson is getting organized,” said Angie. “And legitimized, ever since that AMA statement.”

  It was normal to hear himself referred to in the third person. But it was creepy, too, as though his name and his picture belonged to history and not to a breathing man.

  “I tell people,” said Angie, “that you’re a real doctor, a real psychiatrist. Some people don’t believe it.”

  “He was in therapy for years,” said Loretta Lee. “He studied with Dr. Penrose.”

  “Penrose was a respected psychiatrist,” said Angie, and Patterson knew at that moment that Angie herself was an unbeliever, that this emissary from the City was half-convinced that it would be just as well if the Red Patterson show was erased from cultural memory.

  She said respected as if the term didn’t apply to him. She smiled as she said it, attracted to Patterson and maybe hating him at the same time. Sometimes Patterson wished he didn’t understand people so well.

  “Dr. Patterson explained all that in his book,” Loretta Lee was saying. “Think of Patricia Freed, the anthropologist. He helped her with depression, so she could finish her big study of Micronesia. You must have read about that. And Allen More, the playwright. He was manic, a big drinker, stabbed his wife during a party. He was one of the first guests on Dr. Patterson’s show. Allen More swears Dr. Patterson revitalized his writing.”

  Loretta Lee was impressive tonight, thought Patterson. And he found himself remembering Dr. Penrose fondly, a moody, white-haired gnome who warned Patterson continually against “empty wishful thinking.” The wise doctor had drowned in a snorkling accident off Kauai.

  “I just bought Dr. Patterson’s book on tape,” said Angie, the passing street lights gleaming off her teeth.

  “You should carry around one of those Walkmen,” said Loretta Lee. “That way you can listen to it any place, like when it’s time to shut up.”

  6

  It was the next day, after a great taping.

  It was not just a great taping. It was a fantastic taping.

  The show had been about danger, how it made life more vivid. He didn’t know where the words came from sometimes. He just stood there, and the little white flame burned in his head. There was no script for moments like this. Even the floor director, cameramen, assistants to assistants, people who went out of their way to seem efficient and bored, had been stunned.

  People just beyond the lights had looked at him with rapt expressions as he had said, “It’s morning in our lives. Why are we still afraid? We can awaken from our fear now. We are all that we dreamed we would be.” And, with a little more than half a minute left, he continued, “We don’t need to ask when will I be whole, when will I be happy. The stranger we waited for is here, wearing our face, inhabiting our bodies, speaking in our voice.”

  Patterson had to stop and consider. Maybe there really was a Holy Spirit, and It really did feed you lines when you stood there looking into camera four.

  It was time to head for the street. Something trailed from his arm, and glancing down he realized it was the bulletproof vest an assistant had pressed upon him. “You aren’t going out without protection,” said the assistant, a little guy with a bald spot. The network usually offered him handsome men and gorgeous women. Who was this little twerp?

  “I’ve been here a month,” said the little balding man. “You see me every day. Steve Poole, with an e. I’m here to make sure you wear a vest when you’re supposed to.”

  “I would remember you,” said Patterson.

  “I’ve been taking care of you, sir,” said the little assistant.

  “You’re reminding me how bad my memory is.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of that, sir.”

  “You and I share the same first name.”

  “Steven with a V, sir.”

  “Tell me, Poole, why is it that being called sir is so irritating?”

  “We can’t go out that way,” said Poole.

  “It’s all right,” Patterson said. “All these people want to be there when it happens.” He had that tone in his voice that always amazed him. It was the sound of a man who lived in another world, the voice of a man at peace with life and with death. He let the bulletproof vest drop.

  “It’s my ass on the line, Dr. Patterson,” said Poole.

  Patterson gave him a smile. “No, it’s not.”

  “At least let us drive the crowd up to the end of the block.”

  “With sticks, you mean,” said Patterson. “And firehoses and maybe big dogs.”

  Poole gave him a level look. Patterson realized this was exactly the sort of little guy who could kill with his bare hands. “Thanks for trying to help,” said Patterson.

  The people around him were waiting for him to decide, but he had already made up his mind; there had never been any doubt. He wasn’t going to sit around the studio while the cops beat people over the head trying to drive them back half a block. Patterson liked the feeling, a bunch of tough men waiting for his order.

  “Let’s go,” Patterson said, and they all shouldered forward.

  This was his reward for all his good work. Maybe they deserved to see him die, if that was what happened. Maybe his brains would splatter on somebody. They’d love that. He followed security down the corridor, a wedge of big men and a few big women.

  There was still some makeup on his neck. He ran a finger under his color and it came out with hypoallergenic foundation-moisturizer, a dawn-pink stuff a Japanese manufacturer gave him gratis ever since he had taped three shows in Tokyo, three shows in five hours. They sent it over airfreight and Patterson had to give it away; he couldn’t use the stuff fast enough.

  A death threat made it so you didn’t want to sit at the mirror, all those little light bulbs around your reflection. A death threat made things simple.

  The big door boomed open, and there was the squeal, the gasp, the rush he always felt when people saw him and knew.

  There was a tight, dead feeling inside. There were too many people.

  He was out, under the sky, surrounded, alive. “Good show,” said a perfect stranger. They were all perfect, faces, voices, his multitude.

  “Thank you, Dr. Patterson,” called another perfect stranger, female, slim, with a figure Patterson allowed himself to look upon with a moment’s appreciation.

  “You helped me quit eating!” cried a wild-eyed, wild-haired young woman whose mascara had run. Patterson thought she looked horrible, right out of Auschwitz, death-thin. “Thank you, Dr. Patterson! Please!”

  Please because the security people, brave,
farsighted, always people you could count on to muscle aside the innocent, step on the toes of the halt and the lame, were man-handling the bleary-eyed young woman, forcing her back. Red Patterson Live was the biggest show on in the late afternoon. There was a big surge in hand-carried televisions among office workers, and the gross national product was said to sag during Red Patterson’s segment of the day. Love affairs were interrupted, pizzas got delivered late. The bars jammed with pre-supper drinkers, but booze sales stayed low until after the show. And kids were a surprise target. The brighter kids loved the show.

  The young woman was still reaching out her hand, her eyes beseeching Patterson: Please.

  “Dead man,” said Patterson to himself, turning, laying a hand on the security guard’s shoulder. “I’m a dead man.” He knew what they saw, saw as though through their eyes, all of their eyes, the way it was every afternoon after he taped the show.

  “We’re never going to get out of here!” cried a voice, a security guard acting as an ad hoc Greek chorus.

  It was a tourist event now—a brochure they gave out at Fisherman’s Wharf had a star beside the paragraph, a red star. It was a must-see. The taping of Dr. Red Patterson’s show, or “If you can’t beg, borrow, or steal one of these premium tickets, cop a look for free when he exits the stage door on Van Ness. He shouldn’t, but he still does.”

  He slipped by the guard, worming, fighting, and stretched forth his hand, and the woman’s eyes widened in hope so keen it was like pain. She couldn’t quite reach him. The crowd tossed, cameras were flashing, and Patterson reached out as far as he could over shoulders, through the crowd.

  And touched her hand.

  He hated this when it happened. It never failed to drive him crazy: the woman fainted.

  It was a hysterical swoon, one of those rock-star syncopes, something that always embarrassed Patterson and annoyed him. What if someone swallowed her tongue when she passed out like that, or fell down and broke something, if she wasn’t so squished by the bodies of the people around her that she had to remain upright? What if she cracked a skull on the sidewalk? Think of the lawsuits.