Soft Invasions

By James Reich

Los Angeles, 1942. Psychoanalyst Maxwell McKinney and his wife Joan await the return of their son after the sinking of the USS Yorktown. With sections of the city under camouflage and ordinances against “enemy aliens,” McKinney is troubled by his ambivalent feelings for his son and fears that California will be invaded by the Japanese. A chance encounter with a man who appears to be his double, a screenwriter named Sid Starr, allows McKinney to confront his guilt. Entwined with McKinney, Starr finds that his own identity is at stake, and between the two, McKinney’s wife and son fight against their own destruction.

Punctuating great American fears, James Reich targets the zones of recent history where worlds and anxieties collide, among them UFOs, the Battle of Midway, Hollywood, psychoanalysis and Japanese internment. SOFT INVASIONS is an existential thriller about cowardice, cruelty and betrayal that invokes David Cronenberg's body-horror classics as well as the cold California glamor of Joan Didion, the ominous noir of Horace McCoy and the psychic angst of Norman Mailer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312160620

Book preview

1

ISN’T ONE OF us supposed to fall down, dead?

Maxwell McKinney met Sidney Starr—or Sidney Starr met Maxwell McKinney, since neither man would ever be able to say who had apprehended whom first—in Little Tokyo, February 1939, each man for a time mistaking the drear and drunken space between them for a mirror, each smoking, and pecking inarticulately with their chopsticks. Finally, it was McKinney, carrying the smeared and briny remains of his martini, who rose, scuffed across the damp crimson carpet, and emerged though a billow of kitchen steam and paper lanterns at Starr’s table. He sat down, and Starr stopped eating, reaching for his own martini glass. Starr’s face gleamed, slick with the melancholy promise of the hour. The two sat in silence, fixed in uncanny appraisal.

Both men would recall that the sensation was perversely agreeable, for each was flattered by the attentions of the other. They waxed like moons, each gathering more light, more surface from something between them that was demonic and without limit, and easy with the torpor of vampirism. McKinney noted that Starr was wearing the more expensive gray suit, and vice versa, and that he radiated a cool urbanity, even in his cups and red-eyed from the gin. Starr’s features were marginally sharper than McKinney’s—an origami simulacrum, folded and rendered in the stucco canyons of Hollywood—merely that, and a faint jaundice at the rim of his lips and the joints of his fingers, distinguishing them.

My wife stood me up, McKinney said.

Happy Valentine’s. Starr studied the black lacquer of McKinney’s hair, the dark of his analyst’s eyes, the strong cheekbones, satisfied, and pulling on his cigarette. I was going to the Biltmore, after. Shall we?

For Maxwell McKinney, as the great men of his profession—Freud now in desperate sickness, cancer bulging his jaw—had predicted, after a brief warp of discomfort, there was reassurance in the double. Starr’s easy confidence might even alleviate the gathering fear McKinney felt in the swell of coming war. Recollecting Freud’s writing after the Armistice, he felt the anxious grip of unfulfilled futures peeling away from his nerves, leaving an empty palm and the blandness of fate. He was inside the blue centrifuge of a coiling wave with one exit. In the same moment, in opposition, he knew that this strange encounter during a pink evening in Los Angeles represented the existence of, perhaps, one alternative, the overlay of another life. This attractive doppelgänger promised the most seductive of outcomes: the twin bind of erasure and continuity. It was irresistible.

Yet, that evening was the last time that the two men materialized in public together, and, for good or ill, no one remembered them together. As they studied one another as two dogs over stray flesh, Sid Starr betrayed none of the nervousness that caught him later. Nor had he won his first and last Academy Award. McKinney loved his louche confidence. Later, years later, Starr would labor under the haunted aspect of an animal run to ground, or a man under a sap.

2

FEBRUARY 1942. THREE years later, Maxwell McKinney vomited over the railing of the Santa Monica Pier, moonlit flecks of bile thrushing the shins of his gray flannel suit. Shivering, he lit a cigarette and looked back toward the shore, past the warpwood tangle of the roller coaster, the rictuses of Loof’s lacquered carousel horses, and the empty pleasure dome of the old marathon dances—dreams revolving in the chambers of a gun—back to the blacked-out city. Though he stood over them, he could not hear the waves, nor could he hear the anti-aircraft guns that flacked the fog.

Tracer fire spat into the darkness over Venice Beach, thousands of bullets raining into the cold ocean, the huge Wurlitzer churn of the water between the West Coast and Japan. Within his muted field, he regarded the clouds, strobed in eerie, violent bursts. Klieg lamps and searchlights carved the night like the furious tentacles of some electrical monster. Setting his face against an unbearable melancholy, he lifted the collar of his trench coat around his throat, gripping it with one hand, smoking his cigarette with the other, trying to imagine the air raid sirens howling along the shoreline. It all came to him like a silent film, this cannon-fire séance, when—even as his first tear fell—the lights narrowed, and the firing concentrated upon a brilliant reflective shape high over the water. Maxwell McKinney’s chapped lips opened and his cigarette fell to the deck, readmitting—in that red flicker—the roaring of the night and the clash of the AA guns against something huge and metal hanging in the floodlit clouds.

Flinching at the onslaught of noise, he bent to retrieve the butt, and drew from it again—The boy stood on the burning deck—The enemy surfed over the black screen, ripping through the spray of white hot shrapnel. Thousands of faces must have been turned upward toward it. On Wilshire, he determined, a theatrical agent would be leaning from his window, firing a stage pistol into the knot of the battle—musclemen would be waiting on the Redondo and Venice sand with baseball bats and greased biceps, watching for the washed-up pilots—an émigré would be reaching for a cyanide pill, taking the motel phone off the hook—these absurdities without solace.

Like racing chrome in drunken headlights, the enemy flared in the blinding munitions, a weird pacific presence over the water. It would not be brought down. It could not be brought down. Maxwell McKinney was the only man in the city who understood that the machine in the moonlight was sustained and protected by five hundred years of unconscious desire for invasion. They weren’t trying to shoot it down. They were worshipping it.

Shrugging deeper into his coat, he lay down on one of the wooden benches at the end of the pier, where the boards were stained with fish guts, under the pale incense of gun smoke. Coldly, he recalled sitting at the back of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the beam of the projector ghosting over his shoulder as Joan slid her fingers inside his zipper. He wondered if she was awake now, finding herself alone in their bungalow, watching the projection, the ritual, as Los Angeles fought with its dreams, or had her nightcaps done their work? The barrage was sustained for another hour before the enemy moved south along the coast, descending almost imperceptibly toward the border latitude, moving out of range of the impotent guns. In a few hours more, The Examiner would begin printing Air Battle Rages over Los Angeles; The Times, L.A. Area Raided!—Fifth Column Acts Reported During Raids. He tasted bile, conscious that he had not had that much to drink to make him sick; no more than usual. The wash of his sorrow, the nauseating fear, tilting the skinny pier on its splintered stilts, was for the Boy, somewhere out at sea . . . Jutting into the swell, the pier had come to represent—for Maxwell McKinney—the endpoint, one last, pathetic reach at the carnival limits of the nation. From here, there was only the desire to sniff the boot of alien power; a frightened, masochistic, and penitential squirming, the perpetual anxiety of kings, enemies without and within, reaching back to Columbus, and the destruction of the Mayans. And, out there, in the unknown sea, the Boy on the carrier deck waiting for the avant-garde of death. Hirohito, Hitler, Quetzalcoatl, invaders from Mars, it did not matter. And it could be only months, years, perhaps a few decades before desire and dream would become doom and daylight. Maxwell McKinney began his walk home, doubtful that he would ever see his Boy again.

In the blacked-out city, he considered the image of himself lifting a lit match to the blind street signs, and the minuscule flame seen from the air in a sea of night. He thought of the fire drawn down upon him, but then, no—No bombs and no shells. Whoever, or whatever hung over the water did not shoot back. It was like a dream of war, neutered and safe—lifting his finger in a pistol shape—bang! bang!—silent skin.

In monochrome, Los Angeles crouched under the guns, creamy bungalows sweating and benighted swimming pools empty and still. McKinney walked the hollow streets after the beach struggling to imagine the overlay of this alien species—Delicate waitresses with chopsticks in their claws—Vast Mayan reliefs on the Hollywood freeway—Neon swastikas lining Laurel Canyon. There was nothing to do but wait. Five centuries of tough guy bullshit falling in five years. And he wondered if having never been part of real violence afforded him this luxury of prurience. Since Pearl Harbor, everyone was acting tough, like beaten drunks rushing back into a nightclub. Performance was everything. His face would still be wet with tears as he lifted the coverlet and joined his wife in bed. He would tell her, in the morning, over the newspapers—no bombs fell, no aircraft downed, report from army—that he had been detained by a difficult patient, a tender and terrible suicide averted.

What was this hallucination city? Could thousands—tens of thousands—share the same delusion? Of course they could, he reminded himself. They did it every day. Shining in the shrapnel over the Santa Monica Pier, it had only shifted its position on the screen of existence. Los Angeles could turn the spotlight