UPON RECEIVING THE CALL, DUNNY AT ONCE responds to it not by automobile this time but by highways of fog and water, and by the idea of San Francisco.
In a Los Angeles park, he pulls about him a cloak of earthbound cloud, and hundreds of miles to the north, he arrives through the soft folds of another fog, having traded the footpath in the park for the planking of a wharf.
Because he is dead but has not yet moved on from this world to the next, he inhabits his own corpse, a strange condition. After he died in a coma, his spirit had resided briefly in a place that had felt like a doctor’s waiting room with neither tattered magazines nor hope. Then he was readmitted to the world, to his familiar mortal shell. He is no mere ghost, nor is he a traditional guardian angel. He is one of the walking dead, but his flesh is now capable of whatever amazing feat his spirit demands of it.
In this more northern and colder city, no rain falls. Water laps at the pilings of the wharf, an unpleasant chuckling that suggests mockery, conspiracy, and inhuman hunger.
Perhaps the thing about being dead that most surprises him is the persistence of fear. He would have thought that with death came freedom from anxiety.
[481] He trembles at the sounds of the water beneath the wharf, at the ponk of his footsteps on the dock planking wet with condensation, at the briny semen scent of the fertile sea, at the frosty rectangles, fluorescent in the mist, that are the large windows of the bay-view restaurant where Typhon waits. For most of his life, he had perceived no meaning in anything; now dead, he sees meaning in every detail of the physical world, and too much of it has a dark significance.
One finger of the wharf leads past the restaurant windows, and at a prime table sits Typhon, in the city on business but currently alone, beautifully dressed as always, regal in demeanor without appearing pretentious. Through the pane of glass, their eyes meet.
For a moment, Typhon regards him somberly, even severely, as though with displeasure certain to have consequences that Dunny does not wish to consider. Then his plump face dimples, and his winning smile appears. He makes a gun of thumb and forefinger, pointing it at Dunny as if to say, Gotcha.
By way of fog and glass and the candlelight on the table, Dunny could in a wink travel from the wharf to the chair opposite Typhon. With so many people in the restaurant, however, that unconventional entrance would be the essence of indiscretion.
He walks around the building to the front door and follows the maitre d’ through the busy restaurant to Typhon’s table.
Typhon graciously rises to greet Dunny, offers a hand to be shaken, and says, “Dear boy, I’m sorry to have summoned you at such a critical moment on this night of all nights.”
After he and Typhon settle into their chairs and after Dunny politely turns aside the maitre d’s solicitation of a drink order, he decides that disingenuousness will not play any better here, and perhaps far worse, than it had the previous night at the hotel bar in Beverly Hills. Typhon had explicitly required integrity, honesty, and directness in their relationship.
“Sir, before you say anything, I must tell you that I know I’ve [482] stretched my authority to the snapping point again,” Dunny says, “by approaching Hazard Yancy.”
“Not by approaching him, Dunny. By the directness with which you approached him.” Typhon pauses to sip his martini.
Dunny starts to explain himself, but the white-haired mensch begs his patience with a raised hand. Blue eyes twinkling merrily, he takes another sip of his martini, and savors it.
When he speaks, Typhon first addresses a matter of deportment: “Son, your voice is raised just a tad too loud, and there’s an anxiety in it that’s likely to make you an object of interest among those of our fellow diners who are too curious for their own good.”
The clink of flatware and china, the almost-crystal ring of wineglasses lightly knocked together to the accompaniment of toasts, the graceful music of a piano caressed rather than pounded, and the murmur of many conversations do not swell to the pitch that had so conveniently masked Dunny’s and Typhon’s exchanges in the hotel bar.
“Sorry,” Dunny says.
“It’s admirable that you wish to ensure not only Mr. Truman’s physical survival but also his emotional and psychological well-being. This is within your authority. But in the interest of his client, a guardian ............