A vast wooden bookshelf had fallen through a flaming hole in the ceiling and now lay lengthwise in front of the door. They took in this information instantly, amid the smoke and darkness and the flames on the books, and Tom could see the metal door he’d just shut a few moments earlier, and he and Dick ran for it. They clawed away books to try to reach to the shelf.
Tom also became aware that he and Dick were both calling for help, out loud, as they kicked books away and tried to reach the bookshelf, and their clothes were catching fire.
Then a flowing mass of rug on fire from upstairs landed at Dick’s feet, and Tom turned and saw Dick screaming, his flesh melting and his arms flailing.
For a moment he was waving his arms and books were fusing to him and his clothes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Scarlet Letter lodged in his shoulders and chest.
A metal crunching sound burst out and Tom tore himself away from this terrible sight to see the door flying away from its hinges. Tom had a thought, like Jimmy Olson on TV: We’re saved!
And the hero who stepped through the door was barely a shadow in the smoke, and as he came near Tom, he reached out a tweed-sleeved arm and patted Tom’s shoulder. And Tom realized all feeling in his shoulder had gone away.
He looked down and saw blackness where a body should be, and the hero had crouched and was sifting through paper and flesh at his feet. Dick had gone silent, but Tom stayed standing, and swayed.
The hero stood up, and now his face was visible, a face with a smart beard under a Fedora and crinkled, whimsical eyes.
The man in the fedora (there was a feather in his cap!) showed Tom what he had picked up: it was a copy of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, a paperback student’s copy. Partially burnt, but a little wet and shiny.
“That’s you,” the man said, running a finger along the pages as he showed Tom the soaked pages. “Tomfat, I guess. How do you like that?” And as he came close, it looked like his face slid around of its own accord when he moved. He seemed most unnatural, did the hero, thought Tom, as he swayed on his feet.
The man bit into the Proust paperback like a sandwich, and the human fat dripped over his chin.
Tom looked down and his legs were gone, and he was falling, and it was raining books again.
The Book Man thanked a long-abandoned God for his good fortune and ate well.
Chapter 5
“The sea makes a heck of a racket,” the surfer boy said as he dropped into the sand, folding his legs under himself and holding two beers. He was probably nineteen, a college boy she figured, and Deborah Aegean nearly didn’t hear what he said because he was right: it was noisy as heck.
Deborah rolled over in the sand, switching which side would catch the most heat. All around her there was a chattering of boys and girls laughing, slapping one another around, tossing stuff into the bonfire to make it pop. Laughing to fill the air and compete with the noise of the waves, so the air grew thick with undifferentiated sound.
Above all she heard the roar of the ocean, steady and rhythmic to her right, the Pacific undulating in nighttime retreat. That way was cool. After turning over and staring at the sea for a few seconds, the skin on that side of her body had to be 8 degrees cooler than her other side, where the bonfire roared. The bonfire licked yellow and sent sparks into the black night.
“What did you say?” she asked the boy dreamily. He was tan as her father’s desk, even in the fire-lit dark you could tell his skin had taken on a deep bronze that only came from living on the beach. He had brown eyes and black hair in a crew cut, and not a jot of fat. All these boys were built that way here, the skinny legs and arms and a giant back, as if all strength were being re-routed to his latissimus dorsi.
He held out a beer, offering it to her, making his voice sound deeper than likely was real, which tickled her. “I said it makes a big noise all the time over here.”
“Does it!” she laughed.
“No, I mean—that was what Chumash beach dwellers said about this place. The big noise, they called it.”
She took the beer and sipped it, wanted to gag for a second. She hated beer. She cast her eyes to the boys and girls dancing, and some of them had sodas; she would have been fine with a Coke. But she drank.
“So get this.” The boy turned, lightly tracing loops across her shoulder with a fingertip. “They had a word for the whole phrase, ‘It makes a big noise all the time here.’ And you know what that word was?”
“What?” she asked, entranced.
“Mall-a-wu,” the surfer boy said. “Malibu. So technically, they mean Malibu. But it’s still true here in Laguna Beach.”
“I’ll say,” she said, having lost the plot of what the bronze person was saying. Divided by heat and chill, wet and warmth, she looked past him at the boys and girls with their beers and soda bottles and drank in the feeling. She looked back and laughed again.
This was what it was to be at a beach bonfire, a real bonfire like they showed in the photos of the beach magazines—really just rags they printed up to put around ads—that she grabbed at the entrance of the Piggly Wiggly with her mom. When you’re sixteen you can go to the beach, her mom had said. And here it was! Almost, anyway—it was May 5, and she wouldn’t technically be sixteen for two days, until May 7 of 1958, but that was close enough.
“What’s your name?” the boy said.
“It’s Deborah,” she said. “I live in Oakmont.”
“Oakmont, oh,” he answered, smiling.
“That’s what everyone says,” Deborah said. “Oakmont, Oh, but it’s not that bad. The houses are a little older, but...”
“I don’t know anything about Oakmont,” he said, by which he meant not that he wanted to hear more, but that he meant nothing at all and wasn’t all that interested. “I’m at Northwestern. Chicago, you know? But for the summer it’s this, every night.”
Come with me, a voice sang in her head, like a distant bird. Come with me and swim.
“Come with me and swim?” she said aloud, and the boy seemed to startle for a second, as if what she had said was an alien suggestion. He looked at his half-full beer bottle and nodded. “Yeah, okay,” he said, and swigged back the rest of the beer.
She rose, dropping her cutoff jeans to the sand and tossing her white men’s shirt, feeling the chill of air against her bare belly. She felt so scandalous! Bikinis were—what did the magazines say? Bitchin’.
The boy wore long trunks loosened below the belly in what she thought a pretty scandalous display itself, though when they reached the water, he cinched them up, tugging the draw string and tossing his sandals as they began to walk to the surf.
She shivered when her feet touched the water, and he started running. “Best to run and just dive, doll!” he said, and he did, leaping fast and heading into the water, looking like a bronze fish disappearing into the surf.
She followed, ignoring the cold as it hit her and leaping into the air, arms forward. She plunged into the water, feeling the salt as much as tasting it. She swam through the waves a few feet and came up, looked around. She saw the boy waving a few yards further out and she headed that way, diving again and coming up.
Sing with me, a voice said. Under water, her eyes came open and for a moment there flickered a white image that glowed, something she couldn’t make out through strands of seaweed.