by Owen King
“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.
4.
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 ove
rwhelmed.”
“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.
5.
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.
Could that really have been Brooks? It had been. He knew it. Sam hoped someone had brought the man to a hospital. Sam hadn’t meant to hurt him.
What made Sam uneasy, what made him run the jagged nail of his right thumb up and down between his teeth, was the possibility that, conversely, Brooks had very much intended to hurt Sam. Rick Savini’s Sting was rusty, but it could kill. How many weeks had Brooks been following him, lurking around, gathering his courage, waiting for the right voice in his head to tell him the moment to finish Sam off?
“I wanted to see Quel Beau Parleur again,” said Booth from behind him.
“Funny meeting you here.” Sam had observed his father’s reflection in the window, approaching from the opposite side of the theater lobby, cape flicking around his heels. He turned. “Where’s Mina?”
“She claimed she had homework. Though I do not like to accuse your sister of gainsaying, my suspicion is that her true intention was to talk on the phone with the young gay man she’s in love with.” Booth inquired as to the whereabouts of his son’s friends. Sam said he didn’t know. They’d taken some drugs and the rental car and abandoned him.
“I’m sorry that we laughed. I know you saw us.” His father placed a light hand on his shoulder. “I’m suddenly always sorry, aren’t I?”
“Ah, forget it. It was funny. The movie’s funny. It just is. Why should everyone else laugh and not you?” Sam dug up a handful of popcorn.
“Because I am your father.”
“You have my permission.”
If Tess was right and he didn’t have to feel shitty about everything, it followed that neither did anyone else, not even Booth. Also, it was exhausting, being pissed off all the time. He’d felt that way before Tess said anything; he just hadn’t wanted to admit it. He offered the popcorn bucket.
Booth sat down and helped himself. They chewed. Booth used the tail of his cape to dab around his mouth.
“What if I don’t want permission to laugh about that?” asked Booth.
Sam rolled his head around. “Shit, Booth. I don’t know. I guess that’s your problem.”
His father grunted.
A few kids were horsing around in the parking lot, kicking trash, surfing the hoods of cars. Out of sight, an engine hacked, wheezed, wheezed some more, finally turned over. The two men continued to lower the level on the popcorn in the bucket.
“You know that movie The Pit?”
“Yes. I saw it. Las Vegas falls into a big damn hole. I enjoyed it very much.”
“Do you think I’d be able to survive? If I were there? If I lived through the initial fall, I mean.”
“With all the militia and end-times cultists and gas fires and unstable structures and so on? You’re no fighter, Samuel. You’d need protection. You’d need a skill to barter. Do you have any abilities that would help start a new civilization?”
“Mina taught me to a knit a little bit once.”
Booth shook his head in grave apology. No one would need knitwear after the apocalypse, not in Las Vegas.
“My head would end up mounted on the hood of some warlord’s all-terrain vehicle, wouldn’t it?”
“If it’s any consolation, I’m certain I’d suffer some variation of the same fate. Men like us aren’t built for post-apocalyptic adventures. If there was anyone who would have performed well under such conditions, it was your mother. Your mother was not merely intelligent, she was cunnin
g. She was also tough. I think she would have fared well in a post-apocalypse. If we could stick with her, we might manage to survive.”
The thought of Allie in the apocalypse, directing them through their paces, ordering them to boil water and board the doors, amused Sam. He had an idea it would have amused her, too. “I like that, Booth.”
A mall cop car pulled up, and the juvenile delinquents scattered. There was only a little popcorn left in the bucket.
“Your girl’s lovely. Is Tess her name? She seems to have a fine head on her shoulders, too.”
“Tess. Yeah. I’m not sure what she sees in me.”
“A thought to keep in mind: just as it is a mistake to count on the generosity of a woman, it is also a mistake to underestimate her capacity for pity.”
“Okay,” said Sam.
They finished the popcorn. The parking lot was broad and dark.
Booth cleared his throat. “Should we go in and get our seats?” He hated to miss the previews.
■ ■ ■
A bony, dark-eyed middle-aged man trots up the walk of his apartment building, carelessly swinging a bouquet of roses. A few petals drift onto the ground unnoticed as he goes. The camera lingers long enough to show passersby, how their shoes flatten and tear the petals.
(In the foyer of the building, a pensioner greets him, and we learn that the man’s name is Marcel. “Written any good books lately?” asks the pensioner, leaning over a battered walker and grinning a spittle-flecked grin. More information is gleaned: the man we are following is a writer.
“Keep bothering me and I’ll take your walker, old man, and give it to my wife for her art,” says Marcel.
The pensioner waves a hairy hand: bah!)
Marcel enters his apartment and discovers a note tucked in the frame of the hallway mirror. As he unfolds and reads the missive, as his face falls, our view inches wider, revealing the pale square on the opposite wall where a painting used to hang. His fiancée has left him.