He stays on all the way to Fashion Island, trying vainly to catch proper hold of his breathing. The more time he has to think, the angrier he gets at himself. So that I’ll go out and do something even stupider! he thinks. Which will make me angrier, which will make me do something even more stupid!… Hopping out at Fashion Island he goes immediately to a Japanese plastic bonsai garden with some real, and truly fine, rocks in it. Rocks like shot puts. After pulling some of the plastic trees apart he picks up these rocks, and has one big one in each hand as he approaches the Bullock’s and I. Magnin’s. Huge display windows, showing off rooms that could house a hundred poor people for five hundred years. All there to display rack after chrome rack of rainbow-colored clothes. He takes aim and is about to let fly with both of them at once, when there is a grunt of surprise from behind him, and he is grabbed up and lifted into the air.

He struggles like a berserker, swings the rocks back viciously, where they clack together and fall out of his hands; he kicks, wriggles, hisses—

“Hey, Jim, lay off! Relax!”

It’s Tashi.

Chapter 75

75

Jim relaxes. In fact, when Tashi lets him down and lets go of him, he almost falls. When he recovers from the little blackout he tries to pick up one of the rocks and heave it at the I. Magnin’s, but Tashi stops him. Tash takes the two rocks, underhands them back into the shredded garden. “For Christ’s sake, Jim! What in the world is wrong?”

Jim sits down and starts to shake. Tash crouches beside him. He can’t seem to breathe right anymore. He’s hurt something inside, every breath spikes pain through him. “I—I—” He can’t talk.

Tash puts a hand on his shoulder. “Just relax. It’s okay now.”

“It’s not! It’s not!” The hysteria floods back.… “It’s not!”

“Okay, okay. Relax. Are you in trouble?”

Jim nods.

“Okay. Let’s go up to my place, then, and get you out of sight. Come on.” He helps him up.

They walk uphill, along the lit sidewalks through the dark of Newport Heights, and reach Tashi’s tower. A police car hums by, and Jim cowers. Tash shakes his head: “What in the hell has happened?”

Up on Tashi’s roof Jim manages to stutter out part of the story.

“Your breathing is all fucked up,” Tash observes. “Here, lid some of this.” He gets him to lid some California Mello. Then Tash stands in front of his big tent and thinks it over.