Holy Water

by James P. Othmer

  ~ * ~

  This time the sex is different. More velocity and aggression. Less cuddling and tentative exploration. This time everything is physical and nothing is spoken. Whenever it feels as if he is taking charge, claiming more of the moment, she pushes him into a different place, and then another, her eyes fierce and distant, her body telling his what it’s doing right and wrong until he reasserts himself and the struggle becomes the thing, until the smashup of their conflicted spirits becomes everything. At times he is convinced that they’re fused as one, but then seconds later they are strangers off in separate, self-made worlds, grasping for the unattainable and running from the unavoidable.

  This time there is no joy, only the fatalistic thrum in the loins that comes from a shared sense of urgency and desperation, a ticking detonator clock, and the solitary knowledge of a thing that if revealed would destroy the spirit of the other.

  For Henry, the last proves too much. The secret. Not a lie, but an avoidance of the truth. When they started, it was the last thing on his mind, but as he goes along, it is all that he can think of.

  When she is done he rolls to the side and stares at the wall, sweat-covered and panting, playing out the part. She doesn’t ask him when he turns over to face her, but he can see the question in her eyes. Did you? He touches her face, pushes wet hair away from her eyes, and kisses her.

  Of course he didn’t.

  He couldn’t.

  He did what he swore he’d never do again.

  He faked. To cover up a secret.

  Only this time he doesn’t feel as if he’s gotten away with anything.

  ~ * ~

  Bullet Points

  “Pat won’t be joining us.”

  Henry smiles at Jules, who is Pat and Audrey’s same-sex-marriage counselor and personal assistant, and says, “I see. What about Audrey?”

  “Audrey should be here,” Jules explains. They are sitting at a table on the garden veranda at Ayurved Djong and Spa, sipping jasmine tea: Henry, Jules, and Maya. It is 10 minutes after their nine o’clock Pat and Audrey breakfast was to start and 110 minutes before the ceremony at the call center. “But,” Jules continues, “go ahead and order if we have a schedule. The way things have been going, I can’t guarantee anything.”

  Maya puts down her menu. “Will Pat be joining us at the call center, or the conference, or the hospitality cruise?”

  Jules laughs. “I. Have. No. Idea.” And then, changing her tone, sitting up and smiling brightly, “Well, well.” Maya and Henry turn. Pat is coming after all.

  Pat ignores Henry and Maya and speaks directly to Jules. “Where’s Fatso?”

  Jules looks down at her menu. “Audrey should be here. Won’t you join us?”

  Henry stands and introduces himself and Maya, but Pat, a tall, athletic, handsome woman, doesn’t acknowledge his extended hand or say a word. She gives them each a curt nod. He wonders if he’s already broken one of the rules of engagement regarding Pat and Audrey—thou shalt not shaketh the executive hand—but then remembers that it doesn’t matter because they no longer matter and he no longer gives a shit.

  “No,” Pat answers. “I will not be joining you. Just let me know when we’re leaving for whatever the fuck we’re doing here. I’ll be in the garden talking to my new best friend, Lacy.”

  A minute later Audrey materializes. Demure, contrite, apologetic, Audrey, looking considerably larger than she had in the creation myth video. Her face is swollen from crying. Her mascara is already smudged in a raccoon oval around her watery brown eyes. After an introduction that actually includes eye contact and the shaking of hands, she looks around and asks, “Where . . . where’s Pat?”

  Jules goes out of her way to look into Audrey’s eyes before saying, as if addressing a child, “Audrey, Pat won’t be joining us for breakfast this morning, okay?”

  Audrey nods and sits. From a basket in the center of the table she takes a banana walnut muffin, a blueberry scone. Jules looks at her plate disapprovingly, but Audrey doesn’t care. She takes a bite of the muffin and doesn’t stop to speak until it and the scone have disappeared. Maya attempts to take Audrey through the agenda for the day and the deck she and Henry have prepared, but when she sees how distracted Audrey is, she distills it to the three most salient bullet points:

  • Thank the prince or whatever dignitaries happen to be in attendance.

  • Tell the people of Galado how honored you are to have the Happy Mountain Springs brand represented in their beautiful country.

  • And talk about Happy Mountain Springs’ mission statement of providing pure water to the world before handing out the ceremonial check and the first LifeStraw.

  When Maya is finished, Audrey turns to Jules. “Did Pat say anything about me—about us—before she left?”

  Jules clears her throat and takes a breath. Henry glances at Maya and is relieved when his phone buzzes in his pants pocket. “Excuse me,” he says, rising, considering the incoming number. “I have to take this.”

  He answers as he rounds a corner, stopping next to a meditation fountain. “Tuhoe.”

  It’s the minister of future commerce. “I’m calling to inform you that because of pressing affairs of state, the prince will be unable to make it to your ceremony this morning.”

  “I understand. Does this have anything to do with the passing of the king?”

  This is met with several seconds of silence, then: “I do not know what you are alluding to, Mister Tuhoe.”

  As Henry thinks of what to say next, he notices Pat out of the corner of his eye, stroking Lacy’s thigh on a granite bench on the other side of the fountain. “Okay, then, will anyone from the palace be attending today?” Henry asks.

  “This I cannot confirm. But the king hopes that you and your colleagues will still be able to attend the conference-opening hospitality cruise this evening.”

  “You mean the prince.”

  “Yes, of course. The prince.”

  After hanging up, Henry walks away from the fountain. He tries not to pay attention to Pat and Lacy, who are snickering at him, while he attempts to make sense of what is going on: The prince will not be attending the ceremony for the opening of a call center for a company that is soon to die, if not already dead, during which an equally doomed humanitarian effort will be launched and celebrated. Afterward, he is to take the leaders of his possibly defunct company on a river cruise to kick off a business conference for a nation on the verge of collapse, hosted by the prince, who refuses to acknowledge his father’s death. He leans against a whitewashed wall and closes his eyes. Then he makes a flurry of calls: to Meredith, Madden, Giffler. When he finishes his last message, he sees a text note from Sirajh. He has cashed the check. So at least there’s that, he thinks, a year’s worth of LifeStraws for a few thousand people.

  Maya is alone at the table when he gets back. At the other end of the terrace, Jules is standing with her hands on Audrey’s trembling shoulders, trying without success to console her. Placing his hands on the back of Maya’s chair, he says, “What happened? You made her cry?”

  “Not funny. Apparently Pat is something of a bullying slut. Audrey, the poor thing, is a mess.”

  Henry looks at Jules and Audrey, then down at Maya.

  “What?” Maya says.

  He motions for her to get up and follow him. They stop near a bench in a meditation garden. Neither sits.

  “Okay,” she demands, squaring off in front of him. “What?”

  First, for no apparent reason other than that he thinks it might be best to ease her into it, he tells her about the call he just received from the palace. No one will be attending. Okay, she nods, unfortunate, but under the circumstances that makes sense. Next he decides to tell her about his most recent message, the one about the check from Sirajh. “This is significant,” he says.

  Maya tilts her head to the side. She’s not following.

  “Cashing the check,” he explains, “completes the transaction, and at the very lea
st we have three thousand LifeStraws.”

  “O-kaaay . . . Was there a concern that this might happen? That Happy Mountain Springs would renege?”

  “Well,” he says, “originally, no. But now the problem isn’t so much about Happy Mountain Springs reneging. It’s whether they’ll continue to exist by, say, eleven this morning.”

  Maya looks left and right, then closes the gap between them until their chests touch. Her eyes—to Henry, they look like the eyes of a person he’s never met. “I want you to tell me everything,” she whispers, but with a fierce, threatening edge. And he does.

  “And you knew this when?”

  “Yesterday ... I was. . .”

  “You knew during our drive, you knew last night?”

  “I’m trying to fix it.”

  She smacks him. “Fix what? I believed in you, and in your ridiculous company, and you . . . and they . . . betrayed me.”

  “They betrayed all of us, Maya.”

  “But you chose not to tell me. Rather than being honest, you chose to hide it. My brother is right. I shouldn’t have trusted any of you. You’re all liars. There’s only one way to fix this.”

  He puts his hands on the outside of her shoulders, but she wriggles free, pushes him away, and rushes toward the lobby.

  He doesn’t follow her, doesn’t move as he watches her round a corner and disappear. Even if you caught up to her, he thinks, what could you possibly say?

  As he picks up his phone to check for messages, he hears footsteps on the stone floor. When he looks up, he sees Jules, Audrey, Pat, and Lacy gathered where Maya just stood. “Whenever you’re ready,” Jules says, “we’re good to go. Isn’t that right, ladies?”

  ~ * ~

  Make-Believe Water

  He executes the lie without assistance.

  He delivers the opening remarks. He reads the note of congratulations from the prince (which is met, not surprisingly, with silence). There is a tense moment during the demonstration inside the call center when Pat stops Mahesh and the operators mid-fake-call performance, but it passes when she enthusiastically applauds them and holds up Mahesh’s hand as if he has just won a prizefight.

  Outside, Pat and Audrey, once introduced, perform their face-of-the-company functions with grace and professionalism. Audrey, despite the ongoing turmoil in her personal life, is quite eloquent and seems to have absorbed enough of Maya’s preparatory bullet points to sound informed and sincere. For her part, Pat is all smiles and unbridled, sustainability-based energy as she addresses the gathering. She even throws in a bonus Galadonian toast, some kind of good-luck prayer that someone—Lacy?—must have shared with her, before handing out the surfboard-sized check, before calling the children from Maya’s old village onstage to give them their very own LifeStraws while the corporate videographer gets every second of it.

  As the children put their mouths to the plastic tubes, inhaling make-believe water as celebratory music blasts through speakers stacked alongside the stage, Henry looks among them for Maya’s nephew, but he is nowhere to be found.

  ~ * ~

  The whole thing takes about thirty minutes. Because few dignitaries of note are present, there isn’t a lot of glad-handing afterward. As refreshments are served, Pat checks her wristwatch and pretends to sip a glass of root tea while Audrey sneaks off to check her messages under the shade of a juniper tree. First her mouth drops open, then she gasps. Drawing the device closer to her eyes to make sure she got it right, she says, loud enough for Henry and Jules and several employees to hear, “Oh. My. God!”

  Meredith had the announcement timed almost to the minute, Henry thinks, as he watches the founders of Happy Mountain Springs briefly reunite to stare at a two-by-three-inch LED screen that is telling them that their company no longer exists, that the goodwill program they just flew halfway around the world to launch technically never happened. Not that either of them gives a shit about goodwill at this point.

  Audrey seems to be looking for some kind of sentimental gesture from Pat, hands ready to rise to accept a hug. But Pat’s only response is to begin to laugh. Henry hears her say, “What does it matter to us? We got our money. If anything, it gets us out of having to do this phony back-slappy bullshit.”

  “But,” Audrey implores, laying her fingers on Pat’s wrist, “what about our . . .our legacy?”

  Pat shakes free and laughs at Audrey. “Our legacy?” She puts her arm around Lacy and squeezes her close. “If by ‘our legacy’ you mean our names being friggin’ conjoined as if we were one, as if we were the thing that marketing made us and others expected from us, well, that, finally, thankfully, is over.”

  Audrey stares at her soon-to-be ex-wife and business partner. She wobbles, then tips back in a sort of premeditated faint into the arms of Jules, who seems to have been on the receiving end of this more than once. This only makes Pat laugh more.

  “Come on,” Pat says, pulling Lacy toward the car. “Let’s go have some water-free fun.”

  ~ * ~

  Terminated

  While checking for messages from Maya or Madden, he sees that he’s been fired.

  “Because of the closing of Happy Mountain Springs Water Company,” begins the note from a person he’s never met, someone in, for some reason, Toledo, Ohio, “your position has been terminated.” Not outsourced or reassigned or transferred. Fired. He reads this in the lot outside the call center as Pat drives away in a limo with Lacy and Audrey sits on a bench sobbing while Jules pats her trembling back.

  “What now, boss?” It’s Mahesh. As soon as he gets to a computer, he’ll find out too. Henry reaches into his pocket and pulls out his corporate credit card. He hands over the card and two hundred American dollars. “Nothing left to do here, Mahesh. Your next assignment is to take everyone into town for celebratory food and drinks.”

  Mahesh grabs the card and cash and wraps his arms around Henry. “You’re coming, right?”

  “I’ve got some stuff to do, Mahesh, but keep me posted and I’ll try to stop by.” He turns to leave, only to bump into Shug. “Can you get me out of here?”

  Shug shrugs.

  ~ * ~

  “Technically,” Henry says, “you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.” They are driving toward the capital, the palace, the Shangri-La Zone.

  Shug answers, “I know.”

  “The call center, the whole company, just blew up.”

  “I said I know.”

  Henry looks out the window. Of course he knows. Everyone knows everything except me. And the little I do know, the little I keep to myself, I get in trouble for not sharing in a timely fashion.

  “So where to?”

  This is a good question. USAVille? Corporate HQ in Manhattan? The about-to-be-foreclosed-on suburban McMansion? On the one hand he has no home or job or really anything beyond a laptop and two suitcases filled with clothes he never wants to wear again. Uniforms of conformity. Two modest suits and a depressing assortment of khaki slacks and polo shirts, representing a phrase he has come to detest, to think of as an oxymoron, an impossibility: business casual.

  On the other hand he has six months’ severance pay, a valid U.S. passport, and nothing to stop him from going anywhere.

  Except the will to do it.

  He’s not sure what’s worse, being paralyzed by the lifestyle you’ve chosen or by the freedom to start over.

  “How did you already know?”

  “This is a small country. You know this. You are a person of interest. Connected to the prince.”

  “Completely by accident.”

  “And a friend of a controversial businessman.”

  “Madden?” Henry laughs. First the boys from Meat Night were his supposed friends, and now Madden.

  “He has many enemies.”

  “He’s also responsible for securing that truckload of LifeStraws. And maybe something more.”

  Shug nods. “Hmmmm.”

  Perhaps, Henry thinks, he’s finally found something Shug w
asn’t aware of. “The funny thing is,” he says, “there’s really nothing about me worth bothering to know.”

  Shug doesn’t answer, and Henry interprets the silence as an indictment of his attempt at self-pity.

  Near the entrance to USAVille, Shug glances across the front seat. Without looking back, Henry shakes his head, waves him on. “I’ve got my documents. Maybe I should just go straight to the airport.”