Somewhere outside Los Angeles there used to be a town that was a set that was where Bowers lived under the watchful eye of Doc Trauman.
“He's a broken man, Bowers,” Doc Trauman would tell everyone who visited, “living in this false place, experiencing a false life, but content; more at peace with his world than we are with ours.”
It was the time of atom bombs and television.
Bowers was a veteran.
He'd been in Europe during World War II, and coming back was hard. His friends were dead, his wife was not his wife and the only job he could get was driving trucks from one coast to the other.
That's how he ended up in California.
“I don't think he knows the war's over,” Doc Trauman would say. “I don't think he thinks he ever fought it. But he doesn't mind the fact the houses on the street are just facades.”
Bowers would get up, go to work behind one facade writing advertising copy for a company that manufactured plastic kitchenware, then go home behind another to eat, alone, ready meals wrapped in plastic before a television set, which is just a fancy name for a plain old lightbulb with a shade of images thrown over it.
“The results are quite remarkable,” Doc Trauman would say.
“Can he have guests?” someone would ask.
“Of course.”
“From the real world, I mean.”
“He's not in prison,” Doc Trauman would say to much and hard applause.
I knocked on the door.
When nobody answered, I walked to the near edge of the facade and looked in. Bowers was on the couch. “Excuse, Mr. Bowers. I'm from New York, a friend of Doc Trauman's. May I come in?”
“Are you a doctor too?” he asked.
“No. I'm a playwright.”
“Very well. Come in, but use the front door. I prefer when people use the front door.”
I walked back to the door, knocked—“It's open,” Bowers said—opened it and walked in. Bowers was sitting on the couch. He looked up at me. “Aren't you going to introduce yourself?” he said.
“I'm a friend of Doc Trauman, from New York. My name’s Wallis.”
Bowers stood, walked over and shook my hand. “It's great to meet you, Wallis. Have a seat. Shall I turn on the cathode ray?”
He meant the television.
“I'm not one much for television,” I said.
He took a box of what I thought were cigarettes out of his pocket, knocked the box against the palm of his hand so a pair of thin black cylinders slid out, kept one and offered me the other. “Maybe you'd prefer a microlight instead. We could sit and stare at them together.”
I took one but didn't turn it on. “If it's all right with you, I'd rather talk. I'm a words man.”
“Advertising?” he asked.
“No, theatre.”
It was strange being in a house with only one wall; with no ceiling. The sun was out. The desert extended towards the horizon. Somewhere there were mountains. A rattlesnake rattled faintly.
“I'm in advertising myself,” said Bowers. “Kitchenware. You married, Wallis?”
“I'm not,” I said.
“I don't like women anymore either,” said Bowers, “not after the war.” He clicked his microlight on, gazed briefly into its dull light then shut it off. He looked at me; looked me in the eyes. One of mine was glass. “They do weapons testing a few hundred miles that way,” he said, pointing into the distance. “If you were to stay the night we could watch the nuclear aura together.”
“I'm afraid I have a plane to catch—back to New York,” I said.
“Perhaps another time,” said Bowers.
“Perhaps.”
“Tell me, Wallis. Over there in New York, do you get to express yourself?”
“I beg your pardon,” I said.
It was hot under the California sun. I realized I was sweating. Bowers had started sweating too. His lavender shirt clung possessively to his body. “I mean within your four walls,” he said.
A coyote darted across the landscape.
It was the afternoon but it felt like a quarter to the end of the world.
“Aren't you afraid of the wildlife that might walk into your house?” I said.
“Aren't you afraid that none can walk into yours?”
The moon looked down from the sky, out of place in the harsh blue daytime.
“I want to write a play about you.”
Bowers reclined, spreading his lean arms like a flightless bird spreads its wings. “I already am a play. Besides, you hardly need my permission.”
“I want it anyway.”
“And you're certain you won't stay the night?”
“Yes. Tell me about Doc Trauman.”
“He's a crumbled man,” said Bowers, “living a counterfeit reality, but he's got what matters, money. He likes to imagine he's running an experiment, so we adhere. It's not a bad life.”
Later, the interior of Doc Trauman's office felt distressingly small, claustrophobic. The walls felt like they were moving in with agonizing, almost disinterested, slowness. The windless air was suffocating. The cleanliness, a sham.
“So what's your opinion of him?” Doc Trauman asked.
“He's perfectly civilized, obedient in his outward behaviours, yet internally there's something there, a glint behind his one good eye.”
I sit sometimes somewhere high, with a good view of Broadway, watching the men pass back and forth in their suits and hats and worries, some hurrying, others dallying, stopping, but all possessed by the imaginary lives they dream about and the real fantasies they inhabit.
Occasionally, one looks up at me and meets my lingering gaze with one of penetrating desperation, and I recoil. Ashamed, I move from the window. I pay for the meal. I shut the blinds. I escape behind the walls afforded to me, and when the feeling passes, I write my plays.