by Alex Shakar
He kept going after that, all the way east to the public housing by the river, then turned around and walked back. It was in no way unnatural, he posited, that he should walk back along the same route he’d taken. He’d pass her house just once more. Take a slower look, see if he could spot a cat, a bird, a painting, something that seemed like it might be hers.
OK, said Inner George. Now you’re stalking.
He was arguing the case with Inner George when Mira emerged from the front door, in jeans and a black nylon jacket.
After a second’s hesitation, he made the lamest choice possible: ducking behind a neighboring stoop, and praying, to any unseen powers in the vicinity, that if she would only turn west after coming down her stairs, and not east, to find him huddled among the garbage cans, he’d become a model citizen thenceforth, never to stalk his experimenters again.
She didn’t pass. She must have gone the other way. A minute later, when he dared peek out from his hiding place, he didn’t see her anywhere up the block. Venturing to the corner, he didn’t see her to the north or south, either. Less relieved than disappointed, and routed by his own colossal stupidity, he started wandering from bar to bar, determined to succeed, if at nothing else this evening, at getting as drunk as the remainder of his magic show earnings would allow.
This plan, at least, he was implementing flawlessly. Before long, like a new father whipping out baby pictures on the slightest pretext, he was showing off the Prayerizer to a gel-haired discount broker and his highheeled accountant date in a bar on Avenue A. Increasingly drunk pitches in increasingly squalid bars ensued, until, inevitably, he’d wound up here. As a fake-ID-wielding high school senior, he’d known it as the Horseshoe, because of the bar’s horseshoe shape, though every time he’d come back since, people were calling it something new. In the span of all those years, the neighborhood around it had grown fat and happy, park rioters routed, squatters squeezed from the buildings like pimple pus, whole streets renovated and sold off as the fine dining experience marched eastward. But the bar itself was an eddy in time, despite its continual name changes remaining the same murky dive it had been in 1986, when Hollywood had come calling and featured it in Crocodile Dundee. He’d been here maybe two dozen times total, feeling at first too young for the scene, and then suddenly too old. Only on one night had he felt just right here (he would have felt just right anywhere), the night nine years ago when George and he and Sam had raised their beers and said “Urth.”
The event had occurred below the TV set at the booth in back, currently occupied by a group of bearded twentysomethings in track jackets, their BlackBerrys on the tabletop setting beers and beards alike aglow. Overnight, it struck him, half the young men of the city were growing beards, out of some deep-seated urge to merge, perhaps, with the rifletoting Islamists now hopscotching across an obstacle course of truck tires on the evening news above them.
Without giving the action much thought, he took out his phone and, for the first time in many months, called Sam at home. Too late to call, he realized after the first ring—1:38 AM, by the glowing LCD watch on the drunk girl’s wrist wrapped around the drunk guy’s head—but in any event, he got an out-of-service message. Confused, he tried a couple more times, then called Sam’s cell.
“What’s up,” Sam said curtly, after the third ring.
“Samwise,” Fred shouted over a Nirvana song.
“Freddo,” Sam allowed, suspiciously, after a pause.
George had mirthfully bestowed these nicknames upon the two of them after their second afternoon journey to the multiplex, four-and-a-half years back. Never having particularly enjoyed the joke, he and Sam hadn’t used the names with each other until this moment. Fred wasn’t sure why he’d dredged them up now, other than that he was probably, drunkenly, trying to channel George, in hopes of summoning some of George’s entrepreneurial magic.
“You up?” Fred asked.
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“The office.”
“Your home phone’s out of service.”
Fred thought he’d missed Sam’s response in the noise. But it was just another considered pause.
“Home phones are obsolete,” Sam declared.
“They are?”
“Is everything OK?” Sam’s tone tended to get even more affectless when he fretted.
“I’m at a bar.”
“OK,” he said. “Sounds that way.”
“Come out and have a drink.”
Another silence. “Too busy,” Sam said.
“When’s the last time you went out for a drink?”
“FreshDirect delivers beer. You can come here.”
“No, man, it’s got to be here.”
Sam didn’t answer, just waited.
“For old times’ sake,” Fred went on. “For new times’ sake. I’m calling a meeting.”
“About what?”
“Our new company. Prayerizer. Dot com. Look it up on the Web.”
Fred spelled out the word. He wasn’t sure whether Sam had typed it in or not.
“Why settle for analog prayer, when digital prayer is here?” Fred added, hopeful.
“This is what you were doing all morning?”
Sam, Fred knew, had been under the impression that Fred had been prepping for the interview, and Fred supposed he hadn’t done much to disabuse his brother of the notion. He’d kept all the clip art on the side of the mainframe facing his desk, and had taken the picture from down near the floor, where no one could see.
“Come on, Sam. The Prayerizer. The Prayerizer. Say it with me. The Prayerizer.”
Nothing.
“I can’t hear you, bro.”
A few more seconds passed before he accepted the fact that Sam had hung up. Fred put away the phone, finished off his bourbon, and resumed watching the couple suck on the combined mass of their two tongues. He wasn’t as drunk as them. Or as young. Or as stupid. He envied them on every score.
“So, what if I told you that the Prayerizer could pray for anything you want once a day, absolutely free?”
They peeled themselves from each other to face him again. There was a symmetry to their faces—the childlike pudginess of their cheeks, the redness of their eyes.
“What if I told you it would pray for you twenty trillion times a day?” Fred said.
The girl gazed at him with a kind of infantile and, he was forced to admit, utterly asexual fascination. The guy began seeking her lips again, the back of his head eclipsing her from view.
The eclipse was total. Fred surveyed the solar flares of their buckling jaws.
“That’s twenty million million,” he added.
He turned back to his nearly empty drink to find Mira Egghart watching him from behind the bar. He’d already nodded a casual hello before starting with shock.
“Did I hear you say something about praying?” she asked.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to answer this. He wasn’t sure he was capable of answering, had he wanted to. He was too busy struggling with the fact that she was standing in front of him. Not that it was really much of a coincidence—he’d practically followed her here. The place was at the corner of her block, the very corner on which he’d stood wondering which way she’d gone. She must have been working the other side of the bar, behind the shelves of bottles in the middle, when he’d come in.
“Were you just preaching to them or something?” Her hair was in loose braids, falling to either side of her neck, one lifting, the other falling as she cocked her head.
“No, no. Simply … harassing.”
But she’d already snatched the flyer from the bartop and was examining the picture of the blue supercomputer with a dubious squint.
“It used to predict hemlines,” he said, feeling a little lost for the big, hapless thing. “Now it prays.”
Her eyeliner was thicker, her lipstick darker, her frame seemingly slighter in the white T-shirt across which her arms were folded. She seemed so differen
tly put together than she did in the NYU building that if she weren’t speaking to him now, he might have taken her for her own estranged identical twin.
He plucked the flyer back and shoved it into the briefcase, hoping for a moment she might be noticing its similarity to hers, might be seeing in it a sign they were brought together for a reason, and that this might throw her off the scent of any suspicions she might be having about his own role in bringing them together here. But if she saw it at all, it didn’t mean a thing to her. Feeling encumbered by the weight of it, he slid it down between his ankles.
“So are you actually a bartender?” he asked. “Or is this another part of your study of brain-altering methodologies?”
“What are you drinking?” she replied. “I’ll keep studying you.”
He ordered a bourbon, not altogether sure how he felt about his experimenter slinging drinks on the side. Still observing him, the way an entomologist might a rare species of beetle, she reached back for a bottle and filled his glass. He wanted to stare her down, but this was the first time he’d seen her in short sleeves, and his attention was diverted by a tattoo on her pale forearm, of what appeared to be a hand clutching it—clutching her forearm. The inked-on hand was finely detailed with creases and veins, its fingers twisting around the outer side, the thumb curling around the inner, and where a wrist would have been attached to the end of the hand was simply left a blank, irregular oval. The image was more than a little spooky—it was hard to imagine someone having something like that etched upon themselves, at least voluntarily—and by the time he might have summoned up the courage to ask her about it, she’d already turned away to take care of a kid with ear discs and eyebrow rings and enough acne to suggest his ID was as fake as Fred’s had been once upon a time.
“I had more out-of-body experiences,” Fred told her when she’d turned back to him, deciding she probably got enough inquiries from drunk guys about her tattoo.
“Where?” She leaned closer to hear him over the noise, her hands on the bar. “What were you doing?”
“Walking by an ice cream truck.” It seemed preferable to spare himself the ordeal of explaining the magic shows. “Then helping my father with something.”
He’d had no further episodes since then, unless he were to count his wishful weightless feeling during the Reiki session, or the odd virtual echo of the disembodiment, floating over his shut-eyed avatar when the playtest crashed. He supposed, not without regret, that except for an occasional flying sensation when he closed his eyes, the aftereffects had passed.
Mira looked pensive. Eying the bourbon she’d just gotten him, half of which was already gone, she asked, “Were you drinking?”
“No.”
“Do you drink a lot generally?”
“No.”
“Never before the sessions?”
“Of course not. Why?”
She hesitated before answering. “I thought alcohol might factor into the … intensity of your experiences.”
“Intensity?” he asked. “Are the other people in the study different from me?”
“No, it’s just that everyone has their own level of responsiveness. I’m sorry.” She seemed annoyed at herself. “We shouldn’t be talking about this. We actually shouldn’t be talking at all.”
He would have been more crestfallen than he would have cared to admit to himself, were it not for the fact that she kept standing there, looking at him with an interest, which, even if purely clinical, felt better than nothing.
“You can tell me anything,” he assured her. “I won’t remember it in the morning.”
“Is that true?” she said, again the diagnostician. “Do you tend to black out a lot?”
“Just a joke. I’ll remember every word.”
“Oh,” she said. They looked at each other. She seemed as uncertain as he was about how to take his last remark.
“Don’t you think that shirt’s a little mean-spirited?” he said.
She glanced down at her chest—a photo of George W. Bush beside that of a chimp, their lips curled into matching cretinous sneers. She looked back up at Fred, her eyes chilling a bit. “Not really.”
“It’s not the chimp’s fault he looks like that guy.”
A cautious flicker of a smile.
“So seriously, Mira. Why are you bartending here? Don’t graduate students make a living wage in New York?”
“Funny.”
“Can’t your husband float you for a while?”
For a moment, she looked too shocked to reply. “My what?”
The sharpness of her tone stopped him for a moment.
“Craig Egghart,” he said at last. “Your husband.”
She blinked, looking away. “My father.”
“Right. Father.”
Shaking her head, she laughed a little, a soundless huff in the din. “I didn’t realize how old I looked.”
“No, no, not at all,” Fred said, hands up. “It’s just … how authoritative you are. It’s a compliment.”
She rolled her eyes.
In his sudden euphoria, he was about to ask her why she still lived with her father, but realized just in time he wasn’t supposed to know this.
“You’ve been doing your homework on us, I see,” she said.
“Just trying to have faith without ignorance.”
The smile flickered again, a bit broader.
“So can’t your father float you for a while?” he asked.
“He has been floating me for a while,” she replied.
The admission opened up something, if not a oneness, then at least a closeness. He wanted to ask her more about her situation, compare notes about being in their thirties and broke and living with their parents. Before he could figure out a way to pursue the subject, though, she changed it:
“So how’s your brother?”
The mere mention ignited the usual sick panic, the fear that George was at this moment choking on a coughed-up bit of scar tissue, or struggling to wake up and wondering why no one was helping him. Fred worried no one had turned George’s head—only Fred knew how stiff and sore his brother’s neck must get, because his own did too, when propped on a pillow for too long. He’d missed a night with George, drunk away what little money he had left for George’s care.
For fuck’s sake, Freddo, Inner George exclaimed, don’t turn to drunken mush on her bar.
Fred shrugged. “Still getting his beauty sleep.”
“And what about your sleep?” she said with a slow nod. “How are those dreams?”
This morning he’d dreamt he was eating the inside of his mouth, not just chewing it, but really eating. It was some kind of wasting disease, the action of his molars, a continual self-feeding frenzy. Unless his twin could be found to give him a transfusion, there was nothing that could be done, a doctor was telling a team of residents as they stood over Fred’s bed in some strange, high-ceilinged soundstage of a hospital. This mention of his twin was the closest Fred had come in the last six months to actually dreaming of George himself. George used to figure in his dreams all the time. Now he wouldn’t even show up to save Fred from eating himself alive. The doctor and the residents left the room. By the time they returned, Fred understood, there’d be nothing left of him but a drool-covered white tuxedo and a pair of jaws.
The dream seemed funny to him now, and he told it almost like a joke. Yet far from laughing, Mira regarded him with a look so empathetic he almost started heading mushward again; then felt a twinge of bitterness. He didn’t want to be an object of pity. He stuck to the jokey tone, delivering, with a stiff smile, the closest thing the story had to a punch line: that he’d torn himself awake to find his jaws clenched so tightly they ached.
“Sleep bruxism,” she said.
He stared at her. “That has a name too?”
“That’s one fucked-up dream, hombre,” said some drunk guy in a porkpie hat. “Hey pretty lady, can I get a Jack and Coke?”
Fred waited while she took care of h
im.
“So what factors give some people stronger experiences than others?” Fred asked, when the guy was gone. If he was doomed to remain a guinea pig in her mind, he thought, he could at least savor being an extraordinary one.
She seemed to find the abstract phrasing acceptable. “We don’t know for sure. Part of it is probably that my father used his own brain signals to make the initial maps, so it’s a bit of a toss-up who’s wired up like he is. Hypnotic suggestibility also seems to be a factor. And generally, there seems to be a correlation between major life upheavals and experiences people describe as ‘spiritual.’”
“Meaning that there’s a divine reason for our suffering?”
Her mouth opened. She seemed to want to reply. She seemed to want to say yes, or at least maybe. But she said nothing, simply looked at him. “Or meaning suffering makes us more vulnerable to lapses in reason,” he surmised.
To his surprise, she matched his miserable smile with one of her own.
“LAST CALL!” came the shout of the other bartender from behind the wall of bottles. From the peripheral tables and booths, gangly youths rose like zombies from a cemetery, closing in. His time with her was probably up.
“So what’s it like, Mira?”
“What’s what like?”
“This faith without ignorance you preach.”
At first she didn’t say anything. “It’s a conversation for another time.”
“How about tomorrow? We could meet for coffee.”
He regretted it immediately. She seemed flustered for a second. But only a second.
“Fred, I’ll see you for your appointment on Monday.” One hundred percent professional again, braids and tattoo notwithstanding. “And you shouldn’t come here again. It’s not appropriate for us to have this kind of contact, OK?”
She waited, looking stern. He could think of nothing to do other than nod.
“Enjoy the weekend,” she said. “Keep listening to the CD.”
She walked off, disappearing around the bar. He felt a hand on his shoulder.