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Show 65 Twenty-one Rod drives. For the first part of the trip, John sits in the front with him, Evan in the back with Annis, but after they stop for coffee they switch Annis into the front: they want her to be able to see. Many miles down the road they see the first groups of stark white buildings spreading across the dry brown California countryside, low and close together, and as they approach they can distinguish several different types: low, two-story apartment blocks; single-level houses; the several high towers that are the nurse-attended residential units. They drive through the gate of the surrounding wall, past the guard in his glass sentry-house, then past vivid green lawns and elaborately tended beds of red semitropical flowers, towards the information and sales office. Rod has made an appointment in advance, but the salesman is not the smoothly-worded, subtly-pressuring sort they had all expected, but an innocently honest, guileless young man, embarassingly sincere, who has not a touch of the salesman in him, and seems as willing to display the faults of the leisure-world way of life as its advantages. Even so, he recognizes the scene: a slightly sceptical ageing couple, piloted through the retirement complex by adult children anxious for a solution of their problem. The adult children stub the toes of their shoes into the grass, and keep themselves from asking questions which might unsettle their parents; the victims themselves look tremulously about at the vast strange place they are expected to learn to call home. They begin with the two-story apartment units; they are decorated in garish |