Lido said thoughtfully, “If they did.”
I did a double take. “What?”
“I’ve never been to the Regional Office.”
“What, never?” I turned off the sink tap and slowly wiped my hands on my cargo shorts. “But when they signed you?”
“My poppa put an X on the paper for me, and this hot older madam countersigned, and then she put me in her carriage and blew me, and then she blew my mind with all these special effects. ‘You belong to me, now,’ she said, and I said, ‘No shit.’”
“Not even for the Y2K Gala? We all had to go. We dressed up for it, too.”
Lido shrugged. “Guess I was in the recording studio. We had an album launch that New Year. What did I miss?”
“Never mind, it was a big fizzle. The Home Office traded us an ozone hole for no apocalypse ’til Y3K. Everybody stood around drinking champagne and claiming their side won.” Thinking about his contract story, I said, “Waidaminit, your dad signed the X?”
Baz rapped on the lab door and told us lunch had arrived.
Lido’s face lit up. “Pizza!” He tore off down the hall. Still such a kid.
I followed slowly. What kind of slipshod recruiter let an asset’s parent sign away his soul for him? Wouldn’t they understand the contract was invalid? Nobody, I concluded, was that dumb, not even those lazy-ass devils in the campaign department.
So if the Regional Office hadn’t recruited him, and I had to admit it seemed bloody unlikely that they’d had the resources even three hundred years ago, then who had?
We ate pizza. Then I spent most of the afternoon watching Lido dink around with the new charm for Chloe.
“Make it double strength,” I said.
“I don’t mess with the formula,” he muttered.
“Is it a formula or isn’t it? I thought this was magic.”
“It is magic. There is a formula. You have to get both the math and the emotion right, or it fucks up.”
“Teach me the formula,” I said, interested in spite of myself. I leaned over his shoulder, trying to decipher the scribbles he was making on a chalkboard the size of a personal pizza.
He shrank away from me. “Back off.” He sounded pretty cranky. I backed off.
“C’mon, I’m a mathematician. I can handle it.”
“You can’t handle the emotion,” Lido said. “That’s why we don’t let laymen work magic.”
“Laymen?” I snorted. “That’s a new word for us.”
“Not ‘lay men.’ Not fuckmeisters. Not sex demons. Laymen as in dopes who don’t have the patience or the emotional maturity to work magic,” he snapped.
He put down the chalk and pulled a sheet of paper over the little pile of trash that he had assembled on the bench—seed cases and colored sand and beer can pop-tops.
“If this fucks up,” he said, glaring at me over his beak of a nose, “and she ends up marrying Jeffrey Dahmer, it will be your fault.”
“Look, I can see not telling Kama or Veek, they’re not good at math. But I’m both magical and smart.”
“Magic isn’t about smart. Sadly.”
I put a hand on his arm. “You want a drink? You’re ice cold.”
Lido shivered. He snatched his arm away. “Back off, okay?” The words wrenched out of him.
“Okay, cheez. Backing off.” I retreated.
“I’ll take that drink,” he called.
“I’ll make Irish coffee,” I said and stomped off to the kitchen.
He joined me in the kitchen in a couple of minutes, his hands washed and a wary look in his eye.
I put a cup of Baz’s Jamaica Blue Mountain roast on the table and set the whipped cream can and the whisky next to the cup. “Now explain to me why mature is better than smart for making magic?”
He busied himself with the whisky and topped off his coffee with whipped cream. “Magic is easy.” He didn’t seem happy to be telling me this.
“You’re a show-off punk. Shit, Lido, I was your age before they nailed Christ to a railroad tie. Don’t fuck with me.”
He sent me an indecipherable look, raised the whipped cream can to his lips, and took a big shot. When that was down, he put the can on the table. “Magic is easy. Any dope can do it.”
“That’s a big secret?” I said, puzzled. “The biggest secret of all time?”
“Yes. It is. Magic doesn’t take brains. Anybody can do it. Everybody does it, in fact, every time they buy a lottery ticket, or pray real hard, or send off a resume, or shut their eyes and cringe when the softball comes flying at their head in gym class.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “Magic is, like, dribbly candles and goat skulls.”
“Thank hell the PR works,” Lido vowed. “You don’t need any of that stuff. You just have to want something really bad, and put emotion into it, and…focus. Pick something real, something you can picture or see or make with your hands or smell or something. That’s your rifle sight. Then you load up the gun, your body, with emotion, that’s your gunpowder, and then you put the bullet in, that’s your wish. ‘I wish that girl would look at me, I want to get this job, I hope that last drink hasn’t made me too drunk to drive.’ And you fire it off somehow. And then you forget about it.”
He paused to take another shot of canned whipped cream.
“That’s one of the tricks. Want something. Make your wish. Stop. But the problem is, it’s hard to let go. If you’re still yearning after you’ve sent off your magic spell, then you know it’s probably never going to happen.” He looked at me sorrowfully. “It sucks all the energy back out of the spell.”
I blinked. “This sounds too easy.”
“I know. It’s terrifying how easy. That’s why we don’t tell people about it.”
“We.”
“Magicians.”
“Someday you’re going to tell me how you got to be a magician.”
“Very slowly, that’s how. And by exercising a whole lot of self-control. And by knowing myself well enough to know when not to use magic.”
“When not to.”
“That’s the other big secret. When to stop wishing is important, but you also need to ask yourself, When do I start in the first place? Like you and Chloe. You need me to make this charm, because you can’t do it yourself.”
“Excuse me, you-wet-behind-the-ears punk,” I began.
He raised his voice. “Because you want her. Your wanting her gets in the way of your needing to do the victims’ compensation magic. If you made that charm on your own, you’d end up grafted to her pussy for the rest of her life.”
“Just you shut up about her pussy,” I snapped.
“See? Chivalry. You don’t want me talking about her pussy. And you handed me a pinch of her pubes five days ago. You want her.”
“So?” I said defensively. “She’s female. I’m a sex demon. Is there a problem here?”
He blinked a moment. I could see him slowing the gears down for dumbo Archie. I gritted my teeth, but I waited.
He said, “You know you ought to do this charm to get a decent guy for her. But you don’t really want that to happen. You want her for yourself. That is gonna fuck up your spell. If you try to do it yourself, you’ll mess up and tangle your personal feelings into it somehow, because your emotion is not perfectly aligned with your plan.”
He saw me glazing over and waved his hand irritably. “Never mind. The point is, you need somebody else to make it, somebody who isn’t emotionally invested.” He flicked a glance at me and then flicked it away. He reached for the whipped cream again.
“How can you say it’s so easy? Don’t people, like, figure that out?”
He handed me the can. “People don’t have self-control. Hardest thing to learn in life.” He looked at me pityingly.
I nearly squirted him in the eye with the whipped cream. “Look, junior, when I want to be condescended to, I’ll go to Baz. You can just shut the fuck up about self-control.”
“Okay.” He took the can back, hit it ag
ain, then added some to his coffee. Then he shoved the can across the table to me. “Suck you.”
I glanced at the can, then at Lido, and he turned bright red. Then he got up and walked out of the kitchen, leaving his Irish coffee cooling in the mug. At the door he turned. “Get me some more Chloe pubes tonight, and I’ll have this thing ready in the morning.”
Flake, I thought.
Then I thought about getting more of Chloe’s pubes tonight and him accusing me of wanting her more than I wanted to get her a decent guy.
Well, he had me there.
I remembered that I hadn’t asked him about his contract with the Regional Office.
I made myself some more Irish coffee and brought my cup and his cup and the whisky bottle and the whipped cream back to the lab.
As I opened the door, I heard him chanting.
By the time I closed it, he was staring at a candle flame.
I thought about his crack about self-control and held still, waiting. In a minute or so he laid his palm down flat on the flame and snuffed it.
I entered all the way and put the coffee on the bench. “Whatcha thinking about?”
He took the coffee and drank, leaving a whipped cream mustache. “Thinking about my first madam.”
“The one who took your contract?”
He nodded. “Started to teach me magic, too.” He glanced over at the dead candle, then looked at his hands. “She treated me really well. Better than my family did, really. I was fifteen.”
“You were fifteen when you signed up? That’s brutal.”
“Wasn’t bad at all. I come from this teeny village way the fuck outside Pecz, up in the hills. We starved eight months of the year, and the other four we ate beets. Man, I got sick of beets. I can’t look at one to this day. Every four years or so, the assholes from the big town—that would be a place with eight hundred people, not just thirty people—would come up into the hills and burn out somebody’s cottage, beat him to death, or crucify him, or just burn his house down around him with him inside. Then every forty or fifty years, Cossacks would come across the mountains from the other direction and burn the whole town down and take everything. And every fucking winter we starved. Joyless. You couldn’t even get decently drunk. Know what beet beer tastes like?”
“Sounds disgusting.”
“Got that right. My dad was a harness maker. We had two horses in the whole village, but the people from the big town would buy from him sometimes, and everybody had to have shoes in the winter.”
“I get it.”
“And I sucked at harness making. Just another dreamy, dumb, clumsy fifteen-year-old. My dad beat me, but nothing extra. It just sucked, you know? I was the fifth kid in the family and not the brightest. Finally we had a really bad winter. We were down to eating the uncured hides. I mean seriously, you don’t know how disgusting that was. And that spring, Dad took me into Pecz to get me a real job. With somebody far, far away, who wouldn’t send me back for seven years or so.”
I thought about my cushy teenage years, loafing around my dad’s suburban villa outside Athens and sneaking off into the vineyards to get high or drink with my friends, complaining about school and having to change clothes at suppertime. I kept my big fat Greek mouth shut.
Lido looked bleak. He was starting to sweat.
“What’s got into you, buddy?” I said to interrupt his thoughts. I glanced at the dead candle. “What’s that? Not part of the charm, is it?”
“Just a concentration aid.” He looked at me, and I felt a tingle. I see that across the bar sometimes, that look.
“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” I said.
“I want to.” He must have seen my expression, because his skinny, beaky face transformed. He broke into a grin, reached across, and punched me on the arm. “Relax. I’m not good at this truth business. Just getting my feet wet, okay?”
I grunted. If I wasn’t basically a slacker and a natural-born voyeur, I wouldn’t be a bartender. But it felt a little weird, listening to Lido unveil his past. Hairs started to prickle on the back of my neck.
“I said she was a good madam. She really was decent to us. We had a specialty, providing for priests and nuns. Pecz had a ton of little monasteries and nunneries, and they were all so horny, we were always busy. Madam never let us get hurt. We ate like kings. I had more clothes than I knew what to do with. When she saw that I was halfway bright, Madam started teaching me magic. Nothing fancy, just little things. Mostly self-defense stuff. Crowd management, people pleasing, helping someone drop off to sleep. Easy stuff. I liked it there. I only ran away once, and I came right back.”
He looked up, and I thought, Here it comes.
“I brought money and presents back to my village. But my village wasn’t there any more. Burned to the ground, sowed with salt. Row of skulls on poles around the well, headless bodies rotting down in the well, and big crosses burned on the ground. Somebody had come in and killed everyone.”
My dim bulb lit up, finally. “You’re Jewish.”
He breathed in so deep, I thought he would rise up out of his seat and float to the ceiling. “Yup.” The shadow began to clear off his face.
So that was the secret he’d been sitting on since he moved in with us.
Big so what, I thought.
But I’d been alive too long to say it out loud. I’d been around when Trajan massacred the Roman Jews in 116 AD. Well, I’d been on Cyprus, getting hammered at the wine festival, but I’d been around. Alive. Sort of awake.
I frowned at a sudden thought. “You realize what that means?”
Lido glanced up at me, the whites of his eyes showing. His shoulders shivered. His teeth were chattering in his head. He seemed to be pretending that wasn’t happening, so I made no comment.
Instead I said, “Your contract. It’s invalid.”
“My—oh, with Madam.” He shrugged. “C’mon, Arch, you know the Regional Office isn’t a prison. It’s a haven for geeks and freaks like me.”
I looked at him, really looked, for the first time in probably forty years. He’d covered himself with ink. Tattoos ran all down his arms onto his hands, up his neck, over the sides of his scalp. His stiff shock of brown hair was Mohawked and then buzz cut across the top. With that honker of a nose and the hair and tattoos and his big bright eyes, he looked like a parrot gone bad, gothed to his pierced eyebrows.
And for the first time, I realized he looked in disguise.
“You’ve kept that secret a long time.”
“Every soul I grew up with was in that well. Their eyes had rotted out of their exposed skulls, which were picked clean by crows and maggots.”
I winced. “Gotcha.”
“I learned my lesson that day. Keep quiet. Forever. I don’t tell anybody the truth. That I’m…Jewish.” He looked at me a little confusedly, as if realizing he’d just told me.
So I digested that. “So now? Whence the impulse for truthiness?”
Sweat ran down his temples. “I don’t know.” He made a shrug like a twitch. “Suicidal impulse.” He was watching me more openly now. I let my honest, nonjudgmental bartender face shine on him like mirrored moonlight. He’d see what he wanted to see there. Everyone does.
But Lido looked at me as if he could see straight through me. That plus the suicidal impulse remark made me nervous.
“Is that it, then? You done?” I realized that didn’t sound super supportive, so I softened it by reaching the whisky over and dolloping in his coffee. “Or is there more?”
He shrugged more easily. “I guess—I think it’s time I remembered I’m a Jew.”
I hadn’t a clue what to say.
He got up abruptly and ran down the hall. I heard him vomiting in the toilet.
I was in a tizzy all afternoon. Archie’s coming tonight!
I cleaned my apartment. I did the laundry. I even vacuumed off all the wicker furniture and turned the cushions over. When I caught myself trying to vac the venetian blinds I stopped myself and
sat down.
Breathe, Chloe. He’s coming over. Yes, it’s a big deal. But if you make too big a deal out of it, you’ll not only freak him out, you’ll set yourself up for failure.
That was not a happy thought. I did not want to fail with Archie. I wanted to win.
So how would somebody who is going to win act?
She would draw on her strengths.
Which are? I asked myself.
Food. I’d leaped up and was madly scrolling through Martha Stewart’s website, frantically jotting a grocery list for a five-course feast, when I caught myself again.
Too elaborate a meal would freak Archie just as surely as a spotless apartment with doilies on every surface.
I sat back and thought. What did Archie like? He liked cleavage and short skirts and basketball and Irish whisky and fancy stuffed olives.
Wait a minute. I realized something more important. If I was gonna win, I’d have to think about what I liked.
Pick something we both like.
No-brainer there. Chocolate.
I got up and checked my fridge. Yup. As usual, I had everything on hand already. While I was dithering about this, I got a call from Archie. “I’m hung up at the bar. Don’t know if I can make it.”
Fire blazed through my body, and acid disappointment burned my heart.
“Okeydoke. Later, then,” I said breathlessly and hung up fast, so I wouldn’t scream into the phone like a raging baboon.
That old familiar brushed-off-and-dumped feeling ate its way through me.
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