Jim’s depressed. He’s a part-time word processor for a title and real estate company, a part-time night school teacher at Trabuco Junior College. His father thinks he’s a failure; his friends think he’s a fool. This last has been his angle, of course, he’s cultivated it because laughs are at a premium among his friends, and they’re all comedians; the fool routine keeps Jim from being nothing more than part of the laughtrack. But it can get old, old, old. How much nicer it would be to be … well, something else.

Sandy shows up, three hours late to his own party. SOP. “Hellooo!” he shouts, and Angela Mendez his ally comes over to give him a kiss. He moves on, his pale freckled skin flushed with excitement. “Hey, hello! Why are you just sitting there?” He goes to the music wall, cranks the volume up to say a hundred thirty decibels, Laura’s Big Tits singing “Want Becomes Need” over thick percussion that sounds like twenty spastics in a room full of snare drums. “Yeah!” Sandy pulls some girls off the long beige couch in the video room, starts them dancing around the screens hanging from the ceiling, he won’t be satisfied until everyone is dancing for at least one number, this is understood and everyone gets up and starts to bounce, happy at the action. Sandy flies from dancer to dancer, shoves his face right in theirs, psycho grin pulsating, pale blue eyes popping like they might fall out and bob at the end of springs any second now: “You look too normal! Try this!” And they’re holding eyedroppers full of Sandy’s latest, Social Affability, Apprehension of Beauty, Get Wired, who knows what the little label will say this time, but it’s sure to be fun. Sandy’s the best drug designer in OC—famous, really. And he doesn’t disdain the old-fashioned highs either. Angela is mixing pitchers of margaritas in the kitchen, Sandy is stopping at certain broad-leafed houseplants and pulling giant spliffs from hiding places, lighting them with a magnum blowtorch, throwing them at people, shouting, “Smoke this!” Jim, looking in from the balcony, can only laugh. There is a Sandy who is subtle, thoughtful, quick-witted, a culturevulture in Jim’s own league; but that isn’t him in there, putting the jumper cables to his own party. Time for a different act: Wired Host. Is there an eyedropper with that on the label?

Jim goes to work on an eyedropper called Pattern Perception (so his name has been chosen!), with a couple whose names he can almost remember. Blink, blink. Are those stars or streetlights? “I’m fourth-generation OC,” he tells them apropos of nothing. “I have it in my genes, this place, I have a race memory of what it used to be like when the orange groves were here.”

“Uh-huh.”