B008J4PNHE EBOK (55 page)

A navy blue darkness wiped out the last of the daylight. The open air made Sam’s buzz crisper, more austere.

The only thing missing from
The Pit,
he thought, had been Booth. Booth would have fit right in. He could have played some bellowing local yokel. That was it: the shady-cowboy used-car salesman who, after hemming and hawing, does the decent thing and hands over one of his Winnebagos to the sinkhole survivors, so they can quickly traverse a particularly dangerous section of the decimated city. Allie would have loved that, Booth as a used-car salesman. She wouldn’t have hesitated to give him his proper share of shit for it, and Booth would have taken it.

Sam accepted the bong from Wesley and took a belt.

They were seated shoulder to shoulder, Tess, Wesley, Sam, and Farah.

Wesley leaned forward to address Tess. “Raise Farah’s awareness of the tragic plight of the graveyard stuffies.”

Farah was a short, broad-hipped young woman who spoke in the sedated manner of the perpetually stoned—as if words were cars and she a roadway construction worker, waving them through a few at a time. “Yeah, fill me in.”

Tess did. “They’re out there right now,” she finished, “even as the darkness gathers.”

Farah fiddled with her vest’s single gold button. For a woman who exuded mellowness, the theater attendant was also surprisingly engaged, an appealingly professorial combination. Earlier, while she packed the bong, it had emerged that she was saving the money she made from dealing drugs for college and health emergencies. Right now Farah was thinking urban planning, but she wasn’t committed.

“I doubt that the guy in Laos,” said Farah, “on his assembly line, gluing bear eyes—by candlelight. Or whatnot. I doubt that’s what—he envisions. That his bear is ticketed—for a cemetery. I’m sure he’d be—bummed.”

None of them proved capable of responding to this observation. It was a very heavy deal, the stuffed animals in the graveyard.

Wesley took a cell-phone picture of a purplish growth on his chest and sent it to the WOUND database. While the response was loading, he gave the phone to Farah and asked her to tell him what it said. Wesley was worried it was cancer.

The phone burbled; the message had loaded. Farah stared at the phone. “It’s a—an ingrown hair.”

“Thank God,” said Wesley. He raised his shirt and petted his growth.

“We saw a guy on a Segway,” Tess said brightly, changing the subject. “He was just—” She cut slowly and smoothly through the air with her hand.

“Yeah.” The theater attendant nodded. “Just—” She echoed Tess’s gesture, cutting slowly and smoothly through the air.

Tess reached out for Sam and took his hand. “It made me pretty excited for the future,” she said.

Before they checked in to the early-evening show of
Fair Share—
Farah threw in free passes with any purchase of weed—Tess drew Sam into the alcove off the theater lobby. The last time a girl had taken him into the alcove, he was sixteen and her braces had slashed his lips. Within the small maroon-tiled space was a Flash Gordon pinball machine that had been dead since he was in high school.

Tess pressed him against the wall beside the pinball machine. Her mouth clamped over his mouth. Sam tasted pot, salt, and spit. His hard-on was terrific, but insensitive from the dope. It wasn’t a disagreeable feeling. He knew it was down there, his penis, doing its level best.

After a minute or so, Tess pushed off to wheel around in a circle, letting her hand scrape over the walls of the alcove, giving the flippers on the darkened pinball machine a whack. Then she dashed back to kiss some more and swerved off. This pattern repeated itself several times.

“What are you doing with me?” Sam asked.

“You’re cute,” she said. “I liked your weddingographies.” She kicked her left foot and slowly spun around on the toe of her right sneaker, like a wind-up ballerina. Her eyes were fevered. “You seemed miserable.”

“Is that a plus?”

“With me, it tends to be, I’m afraid.”

“What if you make me happy?” asked Sam.

Tess leaned against the pinball machine. Seconds elapsed. Sam’s heartbeat was steady but unusually reverberative; it was like he was
made of wood, and hollow, like an acoustic guitar. He couldn’t remember being ever quite this high.

“I don’t know,” Tess said. “That might spoil it. Have to take the risk, though.” She stepped to him, and they kissed some more. She stopped, and they stood there and held each other.

“Have you seen it?” he asked. Tess nodded. He didn’t need to tell her what it was he was referring to. “Did you think it was funny?”

“In a sad way.” They were holding hands with both hands, like people at a wedding altar.

“So you liked it?”

“I did,” she said. “I do.”

Sam studied her hands. They were a girl’s hands, with fine, tapered girl’s fingers and chewed nails. Who wouldn’t laugh? It was funny, wasn’t it? He kissed Tess’s fingers. He kissed her mouth. She asked him if he was sad. He said he didn’t think so. “Not too sad, anyway.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

Fair Share
was a thriller replete with macabre deaths—a career IRS agent snaps and goes on a serial-killing rampage against a supercilious tax cheat and his investment firm of blueblood CPAs, the first of whom the agent burns alive on a pile of gasoline-soaked bonds—but Sam found himself only periodically checking in to the narrative. The second round of pot had dispersed what the first had gathered, and his attention toggled freely between the screen and any number of unrelated thoughts.

Did Tess have any tattoos or scars. Would he ever see them, or would she come to her senses when the drugs wore off. Was she right about everything. Was she bossy. Did he like that, really like that, in a nonsexual way. He thought she probably was right about everything. Did that make it okay that she was bossy.

The IRS agent absently slides around the beads of his ornamental desk abacus and listens to a radio report about a thrill killer.

Was Tom’s maple tree going to have to come down. What a shame that would be.

A terrified banker huddles atop a platinum-plated toilet seat in his private executive john and sweats and shakes. The psychopathic IRS agent unzips to take a leak in the platinum-plated urinal on the opposite side of the partition. The hand that isn’t holding his dick is
holding a NYSE replica gavel. Bits of bone and brain speckle the hammer’s head.

Where was Sandra now. Had they put her in a room with windows. Maybe he hadn’t given her a fair chance. God bless Mina, but she was a handful.

The coroner says he’s never seen or heard of anything like it: there were over sixty thousand dollars in bonds in the victim’s stomach. “The killer forced the poor bastard to
eat
a small fortune,” he says.

Rick had a sword-knife thing like that, with elvish runes. Sting. Brooks stole it.

Brooks with a beard. Brooks dueling with the air, strangling the air. It made sense in a Brooks kind of way. He’d stomped Brooks’s balls and made him cry.

Brooks? Could it be?

“What’s wrong?” asked Tess.

Sam was shaking his head; it had been him. It had been Brooks.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and she appeared doubtful, but he added, “Really this time. I promise.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

Out in the main hall that ran between the multiplex’s four auditoriums, he did some pacing and deep breathing. He started to feel better, less busy in the mind, like he could manage.

There was stiff brown carpet under his feet and peppered drop-ceiling panels above his head. He hadn’t known it was Brooks; he wouldn’t have hurt Brooks, or anyone else, on purpose.

Sam told himself he was okay. He was baked, but he was going to make it.

Across the hall from
Fair Share
was a family movie,
Cheeks,
about a little girl whose parents are in a nasty custody battle but who inherits a magic talking pig from her eccentric grandfather. The pig, Cheeks, can be mischievous, but he’s ultimately a very good-hearted pig. The little girl convinces Cheeks to help her show her parents how much they still love each other.

In the preview, there was a part where the kid exclaimed, “Cheeks, if you don’t help me, who will?” and the potbellied pig gulped. “You do know I’m a pig, right?”

Anthropomorphism was maybe not the best additive for the freak-out
he was trying to come down from, but Sam thought it might at least be quiet.

He entered the theater and slipped into the back row. While there were a few tall-people-short-people combinations toward the front of the theater, it was, as he’d hoped, a fairly sparse house.

On the screen, Cheeks was trying to get a farmer to give him a ride. “Why, you’re just a pig!” said the farmer.

“A pig with money to spend!” exclaimed Cheeks.

Sam leaned his head against the rear wall of the theater and passed out.

 ■ ■ ■ 

When he awoke, it was the climax. There were a hundred potbellied pigs scampering around in the gallery of Grand Central Station. Cops with nets were trying to catch the pigs, ladies in fur stoles were screeching, tourists were hanging on to their luggage, pigs were boarding trains to Rochester, the stars who played the estranged couple were looking around desperately for their daughter, and it was bedlam.

“Jesus,” said Sam. His mouth was dry, and his vision was smeary.

Tess was crouched down beside him, shaking his knee. “Are you okay?” she whispered.

“I had an episode. Too much pot. Too much everything. I got overwhelmed.”

“Does that mean you’re going to be a bitch and not smoke some more with us?”

“Yes.”

“Hmph.” Tess unzipped his fly, fished around, grabbed his penis—the cold of her hand caused him to stiffen almost instantaneously—tugged it out, and put it in her mouth.

Sam straightened, and the seat back clapped against the wall. The swabbing sensation of her tongue over the tip of his penis caused his breath to catch and his toes to curl inside his shoes. The seat clap seemed to echo; the echo seemed to announce, “Blow job back here!” While it was happening, his thoughts alternated between I’m being blown in a movie theater, and Please don’t turn around anyone. It was scary. When he was on the edge of orgasm, his eyes fell on the screen: the reunited family—father, mother, daughter—are locked in a group embrace while Cheeks the potbellied pig looks on with tears in his eyes.

Tess released him with an inhalation and rocked back onto her haunches.

He doubled forward over his exposed penis.

“You said you’d come back.”

“I was going to.” Sam stuffed his wet hard-on into his pants. His high had evaporated, he was famished, and his penis ached.

She had crossed her arms. She was still down between the seats, addressing him from below. Damp shone on her cheeks and forehead. “You need to be better. You can’t be overwhelmed by me.” Her position gave her words a particularly plaintive aspect.

“I thought I didn’t have to feel shitty about everything anymore?” He was annoyed.

Tess frowned at him. “You don’t have to feel shitty about things that are over or made up. But I’m real. You can feel shitty about letting me down. I listened to you about the Segway.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” asked Sam. He was feeling abused. “I told you it was probably better than you were giving it credit for, and that you should give it a chance, and you saw that I was right. This has nothing to do with the Segway.”

She took a ChapStick out of her vest pocket and applied it to her lips. “No. I believed you. I haven’t even tried one. I let myself get swept up in your conviction because I want to believe in you. And you need to start justifying my belief.”

Sam thanked her for her candor. She said he was welcome.

He gave her the car keys because she said she needed to go with Farah and Wesley on an “operation,” whatever that meant. Sam suspected it was something adolescent, and he was weary. Where Wesley had unearthed so much energy, he had no idea; the man regularly slept fourteen hours a day and had the bedsores to prove it. Sam brooded sulkily on the conjunction of Tess’s appearance and his roommate’s resurgence before discounting the thought for the excuse that it was. Wesley was his friend, and although Tess had given him what could only be called a mean job, he supposed he deserved it.

He had been careless with her. He had been selfish and unreliable. He had been a lot of things—and he did need to be better.

When
Cheeks
finished—Mom and Dad renew their marriage vows, and Cheeks gets a banana split—Sam purchased a large bucket of popcorn and a ginger ale.

The lobby area of the multiplex was glass-walled on three sides. He found a bench opposite the longest wall and gazed out on the parking lot at night. It looked like a parking lot at night. There were cars traced in reflected light. There were acres of pavement. Shopping carts stood stranded, looking picked clean. The popcorn tasted like butter and squeaked between his teeth.

He wanted to believe that if the patch of ground beneath him dropped out and the whole world fell, he’d be the hero who’d rally the troops and come up with a plan for getting everyone to the top. But Sam couldn’t believe that; directing a movie was one thing, death-defying adventure was something else.

Allie had gone for a walk, suffered a massive heart attack, and expired on a semi-suburban roadside. How was that for banal? You wanted to die spraying the bad guys with machine-gun fire or sealing the crack in the hull of the space shuttle, running face-first into an inferno or slashing a scimitar at zombie hordes, but in all likelihood, you went for a walk on a Sunday afternoon and ended up sprawled on the shoulder of the road.

Was there any way to be a hero in plain old life, parking lot/box store/multiplex life? Sam didn’t know. He needed to try and be more thoughtful. There might be a touch of heroism in that. To give another person the benefit of the doubt was about as difficult an everyday task as anyone faced.

Maybe next time, he could be a tad more circumspect before jumping on an incapacitated man’s balls.