Free Melting Clock by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page B

the underground economy, and who will suffer?”
    He looked around for an answer. The six of us didn’t have an answer. Jeremy didn’t drink and I was good for a Rainier beer about once a month. So the little guy answered for us.
    “I’ll suffer and people like you and me will suffer. The alcoholics, the winos. Drinking will go back to the middle classes. It’ll be a game. For us it’s a damn necessity and we’re the ones who’ll suffer. Now isn’t some straight citizen out there going to tell me I’ll be better off?”
    He looked around for a straight citizen to do battle with him. Jeremy and I were the closest thing to it in the small group. No one wanted to mess with Jeremy.
    “Not me,” I said.
    “Then amen to you, brother,” said the little man, clutching himself as the first drops of rain came. One man in the small group shuffled off.
    “It’s not the government’s job to save my life or tell me what’s good for me,” he said. “Why not ban smoking? Coffee? As long as I don’t hurt you, you’ve got no right to hurt me.”
    Two more in the dwindling crowd went for shelter as the rain got a little more serious. The little man was shivering seriously now but he didn’t plan to give up, though there were only three of us left.
    “The brewers, the distilleries, they’re going to fight it, but they lost before and they’ll lose again. I’m going to run for Congress and in Congress I’m going to fight, scream, and filibuster for the right of every man to have a drink when he wants or to goddammit commit suicide with dignity if he wants.”
    The rain was serious now. The man next to Jeremy moved forward and helped the shivering little man from the box. He picked up the banana crate and led the little man toward the shelter of a store awning nearby. Jeremy and I moved the other way under the protection of a wind-blown tree.
    “That man used to be a senator,” he said, rubbing the sheen of water from his smooth head. “Not a state senator, a United States senator. Without conviction and cause he would be dead in a few months. Every man needs a joy of life or a sense of meaning.”
    “No quarrel with that,” I said, and then as the rain imprisoned us in darkness against the trunk of the tree, I told him what had happened since I had last seen him.
    “The streets in Santa Monica are numbered,” I said. “But there is no Thirteenth there either. Thirteenth Euclid.”
    “Spectator,” Jeremy said pensively.
    “You’ve got an idea,” I said hopefully.
    He took the magazine from under his arm and showed it to me. It was the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly. He flipped it open, found what he was looking for, and read to me:
    “Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the silent films of yore.”
    He closed the magazine and looked at me.
    “That’s nice, Jeremy.” I felt a chill creeping through my soaked windbreaker.
    “It’s in a short story by a young man named Vladimir Nabokov,” he explained. “You have forgotten a house, Toby Peters.”
    “Can you help me remember, Jeremy?”
    “It is never so meaningful as when one remembers oneself,” he admonished.
    “Then I’ll regret my loss,” I said. “While you’re trying to improve my mind …”
    “Your soul,” he corrected.
    “My soul,” I accepted. “Another person could be murdered.”
    “Why does the note say ‘Señor’?” asked Jeremy.
    “The note’s to Dali. He’s Spanish,” I said.
    Jeremy shook his head sadly, patiently.
    “The first note had ‘Place’ in capital letters,” he said. “And this one has ‘Street.’”
    “So,” I said, watching a woman dash across the street with a sheet of cardboard over her head. “Street is someone’s name. Where? There aren’t thirteen people named Street in the L.A. phone book.”
    “Señor,” said Jeremy, “it is in the Town of the Spectator.”
    “Hollywood,” I said.
    “In Spanish, spectator is mirador,” Jeremy explained.
    “Holy