Falling Sideways (28 page)
Adam swigged his beer. It was almost empty, and the little bit remaining made him feel sad. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess not.”
Fetching two more bottles from the case on the floor, Jes asked, “So you don’t believe in accountability?” He opened the bottles by hooking the cap edges against each other and yanking. He passed one to Adam, dripping foam.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Adam said.
“Well, you ought to find out. Otherwise your life will have no foundation. And you know what happens when you have a life without a foundation? It runs along okay for a while until one day you look down and see there’s nothing beneath you and you fall. Like in the cartoons. Straight down into the sands of doom.”
“So do you believe in accountability?”
“I believe in inquiry. I believe in magic in a young girl’s pussy. I believe in beer. And I’m in the process of finding out about accountability.”
“How do you do that?”
“You crawl down your well, all the way to the bottom, and the descent is difficult. Maybe in the end I’ll join the Theosophists or the Rosicrucians. Or learn to sing the Ragnarokian rag. Tell me, Adam, do you believe in anything at all? Aside from pussy. I
know
you believe in pussy. And you’re taking instruction in beer.” Having said which, he tipped back the bottle and drained it.
“Yeah, gimme another lesson, willya?” Adam said, and followed suit, standing the second empty bottle beside the first. Jes passed him a new one, and he took a long swallow and sighed. Then for some reason he thought about his little sisters’ sweet twin faces and wished he were kinder to them, and he said, “I guess, well, I guess I do believe in kindness.”
“Are you kind?”
“Not kind enough.”
“You do have a kind face. The kind I’d like to push in.”
“Ha ha.”
“Do you read at all, or do you just fake it all the way?”
“I do read,” Adam said. “But I don’t know, I guess I have been faking it. I don’t really …” Suddenly a truth seemed to hit him full in the face, and he felt terror. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I don’t think I ever really understood anything I read. Not anything at all!”
Jes leaned across to him and squeezed his biceps. “Hey. Hey hey hey, take it easy on yourself, boy. Recognizing you don’t understand a fucking thing is a great step forward, believe me. There’s a Greek word for that moment.”
“Really? What is it?”
“Can’t remember.” He squeezed the biceps again and said, “Flex the muscle. Come on, show me what you got there.”
Adam flexed and Jes stretched his fingers around the bulge. In a fake foreign accent, his Jalâl voice, he said, “You are strong boy. Big. Strong!” Then, “We need some music.”
“And another
pivo
.”
“Mais oui, mon ami!”
Jes shuffled through his CDs, popped one on, and scaled the jewel case over to Adam. “Know that one?” he asked while he popped two more bottles from the case.
“
Highway 61 Revisited.
Dylan. Man, that guy’s got a weird voice.”
“Oh,
man
,” Jes said in a weepy tone. “
Listen.
To the man’s
words.
”
They leaned back against their respective sofa arms while Dylan blew his kazoo siren to an electric background and launched into his version of the story of God and Abraham and Isaac and Abraham’s capitulation to God’s demand that he cut the throat of his only son out on Highway 61 in the midst of American commerce and war, threatening violence if he did not.
“Now
that
,” said Jes, “is faith. Now that is faith. Right?”
“I guess.”
“
Wrong.
It’s fuckin’ fear, man. Kierkegaard in
Fear and Trembling,
he says, well, he writes it in the name of Johannes de Silentio—Johannes the Silent—he says that he cannot understand the Abraham story, and his conclusion—ironic, natch—is that he is stupid because everyone else understands it, but he can’t. What he’s saying, to my mind, is that the story is not based on faith but on good-old, bad-old, old-fashioned fucking shit-in-the-pants fear, and that’s what Dylan says, too. The world is corrupt. The Judeo-Christian God is corrupt. God is in cahoots with the world, which is a great highway of fucking commerce where you can sell anything—telephones that do not ring and forty red-white-and-blue shoestrings—and you can sacrifice your beloved fucking son rather than buck the system. Man, what father doesn’t sacrifice his fucking son,
son
? They’re scared shitless themselves, and they’re even more scared for their sons not being scared, because if their sons aren’t scared, then they have to admit that they themselves are scared. And scared of what? Scared of a God who demands that you sacrifice your fucking son?
No
, man! I don’t buy it. It’s a vicious fucking cycle and a sham, and you need a good lawyer. Now Muhammad, he says that Abraham is one of the great prophets, and he says that we
do
not and we
can
not understand the greatness of God, we can only submit.
Allah Akhbar!
Allah is great, man is little. But what do we submit to? ’Cause God never speaks to us! God never tells anybody anything. God is the silent fucking sky, man. It is only the father of the son on earth who puts the knife to your neck. Look at the New Testament, too. God sacrifices His only son for the sins of man? He’s just like Abraham, man. He wants Abraham to kill his son. He lets His own son get tortured to death in agony by puny little ants He could snuff out with His little finger. I tell you, Adam, this is a problem that we got to deal with, this killing of sons.”
“But isn’t it, like, a symbol? Or a metaphor?”
“Am
I
a symbol? Are
you
a fucking metaphor? Men don’t even believe any of this stuff, but they’re conducting the pattern. Kill a son today. Feed him to the fuckin’ machine. ’Cause if we
don’t
do that, then the son is going to survive and look at us and say, ‘Uh, like, Dad, you’re a corpse, man. I think your dad cut your throat about two thousand years ago, so don’t shake your head or nothin’.’ ”
The case was empty, so Jes fetched cold bottles out of the fridge and popped them open. The green-glass bottle was cold against Adam’s palm, and the first swig burned coolly in his throat. He drank as he had seen Jes do, tipping the bottle back at his mouth so the beer made a swirling, sucking sound out the glass neck. He liked the sound and the feel of it in his mouth and the way it made him feel. The CD had ended, and they sat in silence.
Then Adam noticed that he had taken down a third of the bottle in one pull, and it occurred to him that this was already his fourth bottle—the empties stood in a row on the stained, chipped surface of the coffee table—and a sense of sadness invaded him.
“Damn,” he said. “These go so fast. Look, three pulls and the bottle’s empty.”
“That bottle’s not empty,” Jes said. “It’s more than half-full.” He flourished his hand before him. “In the sayings of Jalâl, fear of the thirst when well is full is the thirst you never quench.”
“You’re gonna end up a Muslim, Jes.”
“Worse things to be.”
Adam chuckled. “Jes the perker.”
“I hate that fuckin’ word, man. Don’t use it in my home, okay?”
“You use it yourself.”
“Only ironically.”
“Ironsick Jes,” Adam said, and started snuffling laughter.
“Man, you’re fucking wasted on four beers-sick.” He fished an Advokat out of the pack in the pocket of his flannel shirt and lit it with a stick match.
“You smoke fucking cigars-sick?” Adam liked this word game. He felt very clever for having invented it and flattered that Jes was playing along.
“My old man-sick got me hooked on the fuckers.” He held up one finger. “
One
fucking cigar-sick and I’m hooked-sick. Hey, man, we need some more mu-sick.” He hopped up and shuffled through the CD stack.
“I got to pissick,” Adam said.
“Well, don’t forget to flush-sick after you. And don’t pissick on the seat-sick, you prick-sick.”
“We’re fucking sick-sick, man!”
Giggling, Jes picked out a CD and slid it into the player. “Hey, man, more old-gold-sick.”
Bob Dylan came on singing “Black Diamond Bay.” Jes sang along, about going to “grabanotherbeer.” Adam stepped back out, trying to zip up. “Shit, my zip-sick is stuck.”
“Well, don’t get your prick-sick caught in it.”
The door opened, and Jytte stood there, panting. “Lock the door! Adam’s father’s on his way up!”
“Fuck him anyway,” Jes said, and glanced at Adam. “Fuck-sick him, right?”
Jytte’s face was flushed. “I
hate
him!”
“Don’t do him that honor,” said Jes, but Adam saw then she was crying. “What did he do to you!”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. “He
fired
me!”
“I’m gonna fight him!” Adam said. “The
fuck
! The bully
fuck
!”
“Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa,” Jes said, maneuvering Adam to the sofa. “You can’t fight your own father with your fly open.”
Jytte giggled, sniffling.
“Sit down here now—”
The bell rang and knuckles rapped the door at the same time.
“He can’t see you from the door. Let me do this,” Jes said, and opened the door a slit, stood with one shoulder to the jamb, the other behind the edge of the door. Adam watched his back.
If he lays a hand on Jes!
He heard his father’s voice.
“I’d like to talk to Adam.”
“
Who?
You mean like the father of sin?”
The voice was cool, almost friendly, but Adam knew the tone only too well as he heard his father say briskly, “That’s okay. I need to have a word with my son.
Now.
His mother is sick.”
“She is
not
!” Jytte shouted from inside.
“Mmmm. May I … come in?” Adam’s father said.
“No, you may not,” said Jes. “So I’ll just say good night, good luck, and good-bye. Hurry up, please, it’s time.” And he shut the door, spinning the dead bolt. “Now I know why there was a lock on that door all this time,” he said, facing the others.
The doorbell rang immediately and knuckles rapped the door. There was an authority to the knock that twisted in Adam’s stomach.
Three knocks, a pause, three knocks again, a pause.
Adam whispered, “Did he recognize you?”
“Don’t think so.”
“But he’d see your name on the bell.”
“You haven’t noticed the name on the bell? How unobservant of you.” He flourished his hand. “Permit me to antrodoos mysalf. HVT6. Fifth look-alike to President Saddam Hussein. High value target 6 only. Relative safe-ety. Now, let us cerebrate cereblate and dance to mu-sick!”
Incredulous, Kampman glared at the battered slab of wood not three inches from his face. He balled his fist, about to hammer it again. Then he noticed the words printed aslant across it: SUCCES SUCKS. Clever Dick hanging his pictures where his nails were. Slowly he relaxed his hand. He glanced at the doorbell for a name and smirked: “HVT6.” Snot puppy with that T-shirt, FUCK IT. He had almost smacked the boy’s face, he almost regretted
not
having done so, but he was also painfully aware of his strategic miscalculation the weekend before when he had used force on Adam. The art was to win without employing force, to will things into place. Somehow he had to get Adam out of that apartment without force. He was aware that it had also been a miscalculation to say that Adam’s mother was sick. That could be checked by a simple phone call, exposing his own desperation.
Well, he wasn’t desperate, but he
was
determined, and he
would
have Adam home again and back in school before any real damage had been done, and he would see to it that the boy’s bank account was tied up out of his reach for a long time to come. Adam would
not
be allowed to ruin his life or to spend more money on that little tart, and this foolishness would be toppled by the weight of its own stupidity.
He swung the BMW out of its place on Kors Street and edged it up onto Blågårds Place, pulled in alongside the low wall at one end of the little park. From there, he could see the door of the apartment building while he let his mind work, considering his next step.
The girl was the key to it. When she was out of the way and Adam’s funds were blocked, the boy would return. He would have no other option. Time to get the Tank lawyers moving to lock up those bonds before the boy’s birthday. No, get someone else. Keep this private. He had three months in which to get that done, a little less than three, but even that was too long. He wanted the boy back on track within three days.
His cell phone vibrated in his shirt pocket. Karen. “Have you found him, Martin?”
“I know where he is, but he doesn’t want to come out. Exactly as I suspected, he’s with that girl.”
There was a silence. “Does he have money?”
“Unfortunately, he emptied his savings account. Seventeen thousand crowns. The girl is out after the gold,” he said, and held his breath, then added, “She is definitely a gold digger.”
There was another silence. Then: “Something is missing,” Karen said. “You don’t suppose Adam—”
“Missing? What?”
“My gold bracelet. You don’t—”
Kampman watched his face in the rearview mirror. He was smiling. “Your gold … Do you know what that cost?”
“—suppose Adam would take—”
“Adam? I just told you he has seventeen thousand crowns in his pocket. No, why would he take a bracelet? Are you
sure
it’s missing?” In the mirror he watched the performance of his face as he spoke, remembered a transactional dynamics course he had taken years ago, “Do You Know What Your Face Is Doing While the Rest of You Is Negotiating?”
“I
always
put it in the box in the back of the top bureau drawer.”
“We
have
a safe.”
“I know, but I wear the bracelet almost every day, and it’s such a bother pulling away the chest of drawers to get to the safe.”