Free Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall by Will Self Page B

you fell backwards from the parapet of the Golden Gate Bridge on to the walkway there and were brought by paramedics into the rescue centre. We get a lot of sufferers such as yourself; if there isn’t absolute proof that a person is trying suicide’ – ‘trying’, I liked that, it suggested that suicide was only one of the options available from the smorgasbord of inexistence – ‘then the Bridge cops are happy to, like, outsource—’
    ‘It seems,’ the sandy Sangha’s gentle voice was viciously clenched, ‘that someone with us this evening has a more nuanced interpretation of the three pearls; so, would you like to share?’
    The urbalist bowed his/her head in abject shame. I, however, was on the point of rising up and chinning the fraud, but was forestalled by a commotion from the doors – that and the sharp pain in the back of my head, which was – I now realized – swathed in a crêpe bandage.
    One of the slipshod sannyasas came shuffling down the aisle and bent to whisper, ‘Your friend is here now to collect you.’
    Friend? What friend? As I limped to the door, passing by the rows of outlines of devotion, I racked my bruised brain: I hadno friend in San Francisco, nor – without being self-piteous – did I have that many friends anywhere. Besides, how might such a friend have found me?
    The answer to the second question came in the form of the Barbour, thrust into my unwilling arms so that it hung, slick and black as a roosting flying fox. The answer to the first was Sherman Oaks, who stood out on the Sausalito sidewalk, pulling intemperately on a stogie.
    In that instant of recognition, my eyes drinking in the scant three feet of him, I realized a thing at once terrifying and beautiful: it wasn’t that the Buddhists had been rendered indistinct by their quest for the white void, or that the community hall within which they were assembled was any more vapid than such places usually are – it was me. Had I suffered some pinpoint-accurate injury to my visual cortex, or was this only a form of hysteria? Whichever the case, the result was the same: casting wildly about the main street of the chichi resort town, I could make out the outlines of all intermediately sized things – such as cars, people and the no-good pagoda of Spinnakers seafood restaurant – but not their infill; whereas the very large things that blocked in the horizon – the hills, the bridge, Alcatraz – retained their detailing even in the twilight.
    Then there was Sherman, who, with his potbelly and droopy ears, was truly the presiding spirit of the very little, and who stood proud of the indistinctiveness of his setting, just as the very little things in the window of the Swarovski’s across the road – crystal strawberries dimpled with brilliants, vitrified bouquets half an inch high – leapt to my retina and swarmed there as veridical as after-images.

    Naturally, I said nothing of this to Sherman, who anyway only left off barking into his own phone to bark at me: ‘They checked your phone to see who you’d called recently, then rang a few people. I happened to have been in SF for the Web 2.0 thing, flew here from Miami, so I came out to get you, you dumb fuck.’
    The outline of a Range Rover pulled up to the kerb, the outline of Baltie at the wheel.
    ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I have to see some people at Stanford in the morning, then I’ll be with you at lunchtime—’ He broke off again: ‘Go on, get in the car willya?’
    I got into the back seat and Sherman clambered into the front. Baltie’s shape said ‘Hi’, with that special tone people reserve for failed suicides, at once sympathetic and reassuringly annoyed, as if to say: See the trouble you’ve put us to!
    Within minutes we were tooling back over the bridge, the tyres of the big car drumming the deck plates, the mighty lyre of the cables strumming past. At last, shorn of the encumbrance of any human scale whatsoever – no finicky aerials or watertank