At the end, he shook his head. How’d you manage to get yourself in such a mess. You really are a little kid, this is crazy.
I was tired of my yoga classes. I was tired of a lot of things. I didn’t pay attention.
She helped him apply his bandage properly.
So now what do we do, he asked. Tell me how you plan to put out the fire. What have you got in mind.
I don’t know. But who’s gonna help me if you don’t.
He went to open the curtains and shutters. It was bright daylight outside now. He stood for a few moments in front of the window. The dentist was walking his dog.
Noticing Dan, he signaled that his hedges were waiting and mimed a guy brushing his teeth. As he put on his gloves on his porch, he called out, by the end of the week, Dan, you think you can do that.
Dan nodded and shut the window with a grimace. He turned to Nath.
I’ll start by having a word with him, he said. That’s what you want, right.
He knows I’m married and don’t want to see him anymore. He couldn’t give a flying fuck. He showed up with his horrible mutt. And what about tomorrow.
He’ll pound on my door and Richard will answer and what happens then. Richard’s a bundle of nerves at the moment. What’s the matter with him.
Dan shrugged. I think he gets panic attacks. He doesn’t talk about it. I hardly saw him last night. I hung out with Ralph.
It was like he’d been bitten by a rabid dog, when he came home. I went straight to bed.
That’s the best thing to do, with him. No sense trying to talk about it when he’s like that. Maybe I should take him to the country for a few days so he can chill out. I could take him camping, the weather’s warming up. It’d do us good, him and me. It always gets us back on our feet. Every time.
As soon as she’d left, he stripped off his clothes, which he tossed in the laundry basket, and pulled on a pair of shorts. Then he sat on his rowing machine to conquer the twelve miles he planned to supplement with a few rounds at the punching bag and some planks, after which he could finally take a shower, give himself a once-over with the loofah mitt.
Somewhere, and despite the challenges facing him, he was glad about the part he’d have to play to get Richard and Nath out of the mess they’d each gotten themselves into. At least he felt useful again, at least he felt he could do that. Safeguarding Richard’s life during all those years when they’d slaved to get by was the only thing that kept him going, a sufficient, redemptive reason that gave meaning to his own life, and it was good to play this part again, to feel his spirit merging with his body.
The clock chimed ten. He had plenty of time to go see Ralph before checking in at the bowling alley. For a second, he’d been surprised to notice his bed wasn’t slept in. It was as if everything was trying to take on a strange coloration, like that night in Chechnya when the colors turned phosphorescent—he’d told Richard he was having hallucinations, was going crazy, and then at dawn it had all dissipated, he’d simply had a bad case of the runs. He cast a last glance at the living room, where he had shaken and plumped up the cushions, everything in order. He washed his hands before going out and took the car rather than his bike so as not to tempt Ralph.
Clock’s ticking, the latter declared in the middle of a haircut, the regulation three centimeters. That’s why I’m sprucing myself up. Say hi to Gisele.
They hugged. He liked Gisele well enough, but she was almost always in a white smock and carried a vague odor of hospital around her. Ralph thought so too, but he felt a morbid desire for her that excited him way beyond reason.
How are you feeling, he asked, rubbing a hand over the silky rug that covered his skull.
Fine.
I’ve got some Red Bull in the fridge.
Dan stretched, cracked his knuckles. I’ll have to remember to share my music with him, he sighed. So he can have something to listen to. It should calm him down when he wakes up. I’m thinking the complete Johnny Cash. On missions, that’s all he listened to. And Metallica.
Good thing it’s not winter. He’d’ve frozen his ass off out there.
No, spring is perfect. I hope we’ll have rain, for the growing season, but later is better. I checked the forecast for the next two weeks on WeatherPro, we should be okay.
Those things are a scam.
It’s not a scam. I get radar images in real time. You gotta live in the present.
Yeah. Anyway, we’re ready.
I’ll call you.
We’ll be around.
At noon, as Dan wasn’t hungry, he went straight to work, spraying deodorant in the shoes, wiping down the pins, removing oil stains from the bowling balls and treating them with ball cleaner. There was a tightness in his gut. Despite previous experience, there was no getting around it: this was the unpleasant phase, when the mind, in a fit of sheer lucidity, spun full throttle and gave you heartburn. He thought about Richard, everything they’d been through together, and his heartburn only grew worse. He swallowed a tablet to neutralize his proton pump.
Then came the phase of painful stupefaction that left you completely disoriented, wandering, like being caught outdoors on a stormy night. He looked at the time. He got to his feet with a grimace, took off his overalls, dressed, and went up to Brigitte’s office to tell her he was going home because of a bad stomach flu. She was wearing a flowered blouse, with rouge on her cheeks and filed nails. She didn’t give him a hard time. Don’t forget to wash your hands often, she advised.
The third phase was triggered as he was heading toward his car, blinded by the dazzling sun, assailed by the smell of waffles. In Iraq, he had taken a bullet in the calf but kept running like crazy for several hundred yards. That was phase number three. The one that galvanized, obliterated everything. The one where you no longer felt anything at all, where thinking stopped, where nothing else mattered, where you jumped calmly out of the trenches, fuse windward, under a torrent of machine-gun fire.
CLOCKWORK
Dan sat at the kitchen table, hands between his knees, not reacting. Richard was preparing a thermos of coffee and insulting him profusely, but Dan wasn’t listening. He was staring into space, and Richard took his silence and lowered head for contrition—which did nothing to lessen the rage and contempt Dan inspired in him. The words fucking asshole recurred often in Richard’s full-frontal litany.
Outside, daylight waned in the camellias.
Got anything to say for yourself, you fucking asshole, Richard was badgering him just as the back door nearly flew off its hinges and two hulking brutes came crashing in, throwing themselves on Richard in a single motion and tackling him to the ground while Dan jumped up, knocking over his chair, and dove into the fray to immobilize Richard, who bellowed and struggled like a man possessed.
Gisele leaned over him and said calm down, Richard, you’re among friends, before slapping a wide strip of adhesive tape over his mouth and jabbing a syringe into his thigh. The image that flitted across Dan’s mind at that instant was of a calf being branded with a red-hot iron, minus the smoke.
It won’t take long, said Gisele as she turned toward Ralph in the doorway and gave him a thumbs-up that everything had gone swimmingly, while the other two trussed Richard up like a sausage and he went slack. When his eyes closed, they carted him off in the van waiting near the yard. Gisele took the wheel. Dusk was falling and Dan had heard enough to feel a vague melancholy the rest of the trip.
You’re doing it for his own good, said Ralph, gripping his wheelchair on the sharp turns. Don’t forget that.
Dan shook his head. The game was far from over. They arrived at the shack in late afternoon, after the two brothers. The sky was turning orange over the woods and gilded the small lake where the cousin’s dad had drowned.
They carried Richard inside gently—or as gently as the two young guys were able—while Dan pissed against a tree in
the warm air. You could already hear an owl.
Before leaving, he took a moment to make sure everything was okay. They had spread a blanket over Richard; the two hulks were playing jacks. He congratulated them on how smoothly the operation had gone and they bumped fists, linked fingers. Tell him I’ll be back tomorrow night. If he gets too rowdy, throw a bucket of water on him. They bumped fists again.
Gisele had made him a bag of sandwiches. She’d added some California dates, trail mix, and protein bars for the return trip.
She’s amazing, she thinks of everything, Ralph said in delight as he accompanied Dan to his car. I dream about having legs and carrying her on my back.
Now that’s serious.
Ralph handed him the keys. They’ve filled her up, checked the oil and tires, and loaded the trunk with bottled water. Those boys know what they’re doing.
They hugged briefly. Ralph had lost his legs, but he still had a pair of arms that were solid as oak.
Half an hour later, Dan was back in town.
He wasn’t sure what to expect. You could never really know. He imagined facing foulmouthed louts who’d give him the fish-eye and a hard time. Among that crowd, you had to get up pretty early to find guys who were more suspicious and less accommodating.
But that’s not how it played out. Jacky, the guy with the Alfa, was about to plunge his little nephew in a bathtub full of ice and Dan told him it wouldn’t do any good.
There were also two young women, one of whom was trying to reach a doctor and the other was chewing gum. Jacky was holding the red, trembling baby in his arms and was about to lose his shit.
Give him sugar water, Dan barked. Don’t let him get too uncovered and keep his room aired out.
The three of them seemed so clueless that they followed his orders without question, in a frenzy.
I’m filling in for Richard, Dan announced.
All things considered, Jacky wasn’t such a mean bastard, and this new, bewildering situation had left him so unsettled that he ended up agreeing to the solution Dan proposed. But on one condition, since it wasn’t like the parties exactly trusted one another, and that was that Dan take along Julia, the girl with the chewing gum, to keep an eye on him.
At which Jacky had given the girl a questioning look.
She’d answered that it was all the same to her, and Dan, looking at her, had concluded that pretty much everything was all the same to her, or else it was just her manner.
When they were ready to leave, the baby seemed to have fallen asleep and its mother gave a weak smile.
Pain in the ass, that narcolepsy business, Jacky groused.
He smashed into a tree a few months ago, said Dan. It’s like I was trying to tell you, Richard has a serious handicap. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Of course, Churchill was narcoleptic and it didn’t slow him down, back when he was young. But he didn’t drive.
The night was black and the stars shining when they left town. Dan hit the gas. If he was to get there by dawn, no time to drag their heels.
You can floor it, Julia said. I’m not a nervous passenger.
So much the better. He turned on his radar detector—a gift from Richard, pale quirk of fate—and burned asphalt while Julia dug into a pastrami sandwich. Though Dan hadn’t protested, he’d resented having a passenger foisted on him, preferring his solitude. But his opinion was starting to change. Having company could help him avoid boredom, stay alert.
Don’t take it personally, but I don’t like talking much, she said.
Did I say anything, he answered.
Stop when you can. I have to pee.
He halted on the shoulder. There was very little traffic. It was still early to be stretching his legs, but he felt like a breather and took a few steps in the dark. He had learned that when everything was going too well, be careful. They were still a long way from bowling a strike. The first pins were down and out. There were others. From The Art of War, he had retained that the true problem solver does so before the problems occur, and clearly this wasn’t his case. He heard her urinating in the bushes. He sent a text to Ralph to let him know everything was copacetic.
While she was pulling her pants back up, he saw a camper that he’d zipped past a good while before.
Annoyed, he gave two or three horn blasts that ripped through the night.
Terrific, she snickered as she came back. Great way not to attract attention.
He peeled off without answering; they didn’t say a word for another fifteen minutes and Dan concentrated on his driving, flying along the road. His thoughts didn’t take him very far. Traffic intensified as they approached a large urban area and he had to slalom among the sleepers and the barely awake, passing RVs and trucks, taking the endless ring road that forced him into a ten-mile detour: the clowns who’d designed this layout deserved to be flayed alive.
By the time they finally got out of the suburbs bathing in the splendor of HPS lights and were back under the black sky, the remaining trickle of nocturnal travelers having faded into the landscape, Julia had eaten all of Gisele’s sandwiches.
He pulled his hand from the empty paper bag he’d just explored thoroughly and shot her a look. She had put on her headphones. Now and then she sang along in a loud voice to music he couldn’t hear.
He stopped at a service station. I thought we were in a hurry, she said when he retook his seat next to her with a bag of provisions. He looked at his watch. He unfolded a map on his knees and bit into a ham and cheese sandwich while checking the route. He was about to say something when he started chewing air, then had trouble swallowing. He felt a kind of plaster cast glued to his palate that he couldn’t dislodge. He had to stick in his fingers and spit the amalgamation into a paper napkin.
That was gross, she said.
He got back on the road, drinking water from a plastic bottle.
He drove fast, cold, lighting the lanes with his repeated high-beam signals.
What do you do, for a living.
Temp work, she answered.
They sped through plains, over rivers and streams, climbed hills and cliffs. He regularly had to activate the wipers because of the insects and moths that splattered against their windshield.
She snorted. Who are you fooling that you’re doing this for free. Are you fucking kidding me.
What about you. What do you do it for.
She became lost for a moment in contemplating the emptiness, then suddenly shrugged. Who knows. I don’t have any long-term plans. I’m here, but I could just as easily be somewhere else. What diff.
He nodded gently.
Richard and I grew up together, we were never apart, he said, looking pensive. We’ve been through it all. Yeah, I wouldn’t do this for anybody else, I wouldn’t touch a scene like this with a ten-foot pole, if not for him. I don’t want any trouble.
By the way, I’m a dyke. Just letting you know.
You can be whatever you want, doesn’t matter to me.
I’m in a shitty relationship at the moment. Don’t hold it against me. I want to give myself time to figure shit out, but I never can. My parents cut me off—cool of them, don’t you think.
Try to get some sleep, he said.
He lifted his foot as they approached a radar gun, distractedly fingering the back of his neck.
It would be good if we could stop for a minute, she said, avoiding his gaze.
They had barely gone halfway. It wasn’t as if she’d drunk a lot; she must have had a bladder like a bird’s or acute cystitis. He took advantage to stretch his legs again. The farther north they went, the chillier the night became, but it was invigorating, made the blood circulate. He had two messages, one from Marlene asking where he’d disappeared to and one from Ralph about Richard, who had woken up, who they still weren’t ready to untie, and who, he added, was busting their eardrums and their balls.
He shut his phone when Julia returned, shivering loudly.
Then, as she became curious and started to press, he finally showed her a photo of the gang of them together and she pointed at Marlene, asking if that was his girlfriend, and he shook his head.
No, of course not, what makes you say that.
They way she’s looking at you.
He scoffed. Ha ha, that’s a good one, but no, sorry, I don’t have a girlfriend. And lucky for her. I’m a prime example of the guy who’s impossible to live with. I’m really a poisoned present. I don’t like going out and I get up three times a night.
Seeing that she kept silent, he peeled back onto the road.
It was one in the morning and they whipped through the darkness that was only slightly pierced by the wan light of the dashboard.
No way. Your father was a banker. I don’t believe you.
It made her laugh, that banker business—it made a lot of people laugh, and yet it was the truth.
Yeah, except the asshole got wiped out in the crash and had a heart attack. That’s why I’m not rich. He only left us the house, that’s where I live now, my mother’s in hospice and it’s okay.
He shut up when he noticed she’d fallen asleep.
I’m not sleeping, she said. I’m pretending to be asleep.
But it’s not exactly toasty, can you turn up the heat.
Yeah, but you’d be better off sleeping for real, we still have a ways to go.
He filled up the tank again. He liked his car, but it guzzled, especially when driven flat out.
He woke Julia when they made the swap, at seven sharp.
The guy was on time. Dawn was just breaking, forming iridescent patterns in the fuel puddles on the surface of a ditch where they drained the boats. They decanted the bags without a word, just a nod on either side, and that was that.
Dan was amazed. From the start, the whole thing had gone like clockwork, not a single hitch, no nasty surprises. It was as if a good fairy had taken an interest. On the return trip, he drove for two hours and pulled over to take a nap.
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