by David Shafer
Mark looked at the crossword in the paper, but it was a grueling Friday puzzle, and his eyesight was kind of swimming from lack of nicotine and too much coffee. He ordered a glass of tomato juice from the steward, and then said, as if it were the first time the idea had ever occurred to him, “On second thought, why don’t you make that a Bloody Mary.” He moved from the crossword to the Jumble. He made sure that no one had a sight line on what he was doing. The Jumble was for precocious children and retirees.
“What the lazy aphorist needed to finish the job” was the motto over the little illustration of a man sitting stumped at a desk, huge books piled on either side of him. The cartoonist had managed to convey the fact that the man was a blocked writer; something desperate about the eyes. The answer was a three-word phrase: one letter, four letters, three letters.
With the Jumble, you unscramble jumbled words and take the circled letters from the unscrambled words and use those letters to construct the phrase that answers the riddle in the motto above the picture. The trick was to kind of blur your eyes when you first looked at the jumbled word you were trying to decipher. You had to sneak up on the letters; notice them before you read the word; you had to remember how words looked before you could read.
KWHCA.
Whack. Just like that. Mark carefully inked the letters into the little boxes and extracted the C, the K, and the W, which had ended up within circles.
It was like Step Three: Notice Everything Anew. Though, come to think of it, it was also a bit like Step Five: Stay Open to the Possibilities. Yeah, the steps did kind of run together, like those of a bad dancer.
SMAHUB. This one resisted Mark’s eye-blurring trick. Bumhas? No, not a word. Shambu?
A beautiful girl walked into the lounge. She went to the little concierge desk, not looking entitled enough. The woman at the desk examined her ticket, a trace of disdain apparent in her manner. The girl had a rolling suitcase and was dressed like she had come from somewhere hot. She was maybe five foot four. The fittings and furniture in the lounge, which were king-size, made her look like a waif. She made straight for the bar. Parked her rolly suitcase, mounted a bar stool.
Mabshu? Oh, come on, this was ridiculous. He was a public intellectual, for Chrissake. He moved on. VARESH. Ravesh! No. Sharve? No. Shaver. Ha, yes. Shaver. Mark took the circled letters of the word shaver—S and A—and scribbled them at the bottom of the page. His Bloody Mary arrived, and Mark sipped, sipped, and then drained it. He tried to casually place the empty glass outside his little zone of executive kerfuffle.
It was after his second drink that he decided to start fetching his own Bloody Marys from the bar. That steward was a little too on the ball for his liking. Plus, the girl at the bar had not turned around. Mark strode up to the bar and ordered another drink. He placed himself near the girl, but not too near. “You can skip the celery stick,” he told the barman, who was Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan or something. “The celery stick is a bit much, don’t you think?” He addressed this to the girl, who had apparently barely registered his presence beside her.
“Hmm?” she said, and she met his gaze briefly. Where could she be from? Even just the hmm told him she spoke American, but she was something other than white. “Yeah, a bit much,” she said. She returned to the notebook she was reading and writing in.
Fine, then. It was while returning to his perch that he noticed an older woman walking toward the back of the lounge with a pack of cigarettes.
What was this? Could there be…? Yes, there was a smoking lounge attached to this lounge. The rich world was still surprising him. You could smoke…inside an airport. He put his drink down by his seat and ambled pointedly toward what turned out to be a negative-pressure conservatory-type thing labeled, romantically, Fumoir. Would wonders never cease? The problem now was that he had no tobacco. There was only one other lounger in the fumoir, the woman whom he had followed in. He bummed a smoke from her and lifted two extra from the back of the pack. She was Israeli. Mark heard all about her granddaughter in New York while he sucked the life out of a slender cigarette. The low drone of the extractor system made the lady hard to hear. Plus her accent didn’t help. And it was a smoking room, the fancy name notwithstanding, and smelled like it; no amount of expensive up-dressing could disguise that.
In the silent outside beyond the frosted glass of the fumoir, the sun made a shimmer of things, and little trains of luggage carts snaked down painted-on tarmac-avenues. The tires on planes: Were they little or big? They looked amusingly diminutive beneath the planes but massive next to the jumpsuited men who serviced them. Maybe the sixth or seventh step could be something like Keep It in Perspective. Or better yet: Choose Your Perspective.
He returned to his spot in the lounge. Shoot, he had left the Jumble faceup on his papers. Actually, he’d left all his stuff unguarded. Is that just one of the things you can do when you are among the first class? He hoped so. But, no, there must still be a type of thief who operates within the wealth-saddled set, lifting merch from his hosts and fellow travelers: the cigarette case from the end table, the Rolex from the gym locker, the Vicodin from the medicine cabinet. He should be more careful. Step Nine: Watch Your Fucking Back.
He returned to the Jumble. LAVNI. He squinched up his eyes. Nothing.
The girl at the bar was still rabbiting away in her notebook. It was strange that she had been so cool to his opening. Not strange because he was all that or anything. But who doesn’t have time for a little interaction? Sheesh. Vilan? No. Laniv? No. Nilav? No. Anvil? Wait, was anvil a word? Yes, that thing you just hammer away on. Ha—three words expertly unjumbled. But anvil yielded only an A, which he scribbled down next to the other letters he had netted. What would a lazy aphorist need? And what the fuck was shambu? Hubasm?
His phone chirruped at him. It was a message from Nils. Meeting location changed. Await instructions.
Well, excuse me, he thought. A different kind of waiting, when you don’t know how long you’ll be waiting. He closed his eyes, just to rest, not to sleep. As if providing a living caution against public sleeping, an overweight man snored at random intervals in the corner, drool like beetle silk strung between his slack lower lip and the fist-size knot of his iridescent purple tie.
Maybe busham was a kind of plant, or a unit of measurement. Hadn’t he heard something like that? Like, twelve bushams to a furlong or something? He stood up and neatened his piles of papers and put on his jacket and buckled his valise and put it in his seat. He ate a breath mint. He walked to the bar.
“Make me another one of these, would you?” he said to the barman. Then, turning to the girl, he said, “Have you ever heard of the word busham?”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Busham. B-u-s-h-a-m? Is that a word? Like a measure of something?”
“I think you mean bushel,” she said. She might be younger than him, but she was worn already around the eyes, or maybe just recently underslept. She was ragged but beautiful in the way that hair-gel ads were always trying to sell raggedness as beautiful.
“Ah. Yes. Bushel.” Mark bit his lower lip.
The girl returned to her notebook, but then seemed to reconsider. “Why do you ask?” she said. Whether this was out of patronizing politeness or genuine interest, Mark could not tell. He could work with either, for now.
“Oh, it’s just this thing I have to copyedit. And I think there’s a misprint.”
“It sounds like ambush, but swapped around,” she said.
Well, hell: ambush. “Yeah, ambush,” he said. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
The barman had stuck a stalk of celery in Mark’s drink. “Oh, it’s fine like that,” Mark said, but not before the man had flung the celery stalk in the bar sink so that it suddenly seemed as if Mark was saying that the barman needn’t make the whole drink all over again; as if he, Mark, were forgiving the celery contagion. He realized this made him look like an asshole, so he was especially grateful upon receipt of hi
s drink and made a stupid mmm-mmm sound when he put the drink to his lips, standing there at the bar. That made him look like a real douchebag, so he left a ten-pound note on the bar and retreated.
Okay, so ambush gave up its A and its H. So he had C, K, S, A, A, A, and H.
Well, the first word was obviously just A, the article. Give one A to each of the remaining two words. A wash cak? A cash kaw?
Oh, how he sometimes despised himself. In his seminars, he was always warning against self-pity, which everyone knows was this terrible character flaw, with its overtones of mope and sob and gripe. But what about straight-up self-despising, like, with good reason? Aren’t you supposed to be appalled at yourself sometimes? He meant not just the confusion over the drink order just then, or the midday drinking, or the being stumped by a juvenile word game when he was under binding contract to deliver a book within weeks. He meant his general dishonesty, the part of him that always had to calculate his approach angle to any situation. Presumably, everyone did this some of the time. You can’t just blob around, all id, like a clothed baby. You had to game it. But he had gotten to the point where it was all game. How much better waking life must be for people who did not operate this way. Here was the self-pity part, he supposed, because it seemed to him that he had an invisible handicap, and if buses could kneel for wheelchairs, the world should be able to accommodate him somehow.
That girl looked like his ex, but more exotic. He had half a mind to go back and try to talk to her again. Like his ex, she had a palpable prickliness about her, but that was the kind of wall he liked breaching.
His ex. Thinking about her now made him feel shitty. He’d really messed that one up. What if you got only one chance at something like that? What if you made enough poor choices that your life was going to suck no matter what? What then, self-help guy? Five minutes of thoughts like that began to have a worrying cardiac effect—like the muscles of his heart were snapping; like his blood was becoming thinner. Surely, that was not happening? When you had anxiety attacks, the first rule was Tell No One About Them. Or at least, if you did, describe them in such a way that others were left with the impression that the condition was the result of your being a very sensitive and intelligent person. What you did not want to do was make the complaint so that the solution—do not smoke, do not drink—was plain.
The second rule—or the first, really—was Don’t Forget to Breathe, which Mark now saw could really be Steps One through Ten.
What was going on in his upper chest? If he cardiac-arrested right now, would that ace steward zip over and defibrillate him? A couple of minutes of controlled breathing while looking out the window at the beautiful planes, and he became less aware of his splashing heart. There was a 747 parked—parked?—outside. The swannish head of that plane is so graceful, he thought. Mark let himself sink into the leather of the seat, apologized to his body, made it certain promises.
He did not need another drink. Actually, ice water was the way forward. He returned to the bar.
This time, she spoke to him.
“How’s the edit?” she asked. She had a nice smile.
Step Seven: Put Yourself Forward. “Well, you know, I wasn’t really copyediting anything. I was doing the Jumble. You know what the Jumble is?”
“No.”
He showed her the folded page, which had gotten crinkly and shroudish from his efforts with it.
“That thing? I thought that was a cartoon.”
“Well, it is, kind of. But you have to solve it.” The barman had approached them and Mark asked for a glass of water. “I didn’t want to tell you that before because it’s not a very high-minded game, the Jumble. That’s probably pretty stupid, huh? To lie to a stranger about something like that.”
“I don’t know that it’s stupid to lie,” she said. “It seems weirder to cop to the lie.”
Mark smiled and nodded in a touché kind of way. Then he said: “Well, will you help me solve the Jumble?”
She smiled and said sure. He sat next to her and was pleasantly aware of her proximity. He thought at first she smelled like peanuts, but then he realized that that was the little dish of peanuts on the bar. She made short work of the Jumble answer: A Hack Saw.
He didn’t like it. “What’s he supposed to do with a saw? Saw those books in half?”
“No. Saw, like a saying—you know, an aphorism. A hack saw would be, like, a poorly made aphorism.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Mark said petulantly, “but there’s supposed to be more of a…a linkage between the picture and the answer to the riddle thing. Like the guy should need the other kind of saw, a wood saw. Or it should have been, ‘What the lazy carpenter aphorist needed to finish the job.’ I think that’s unfair.”
She laughed at him and said, “Well, it’s way down on the list of unfairnesses, you have to admit.”
Fuck, another zinger. He liked her. See, he was not a vain idiot; he didn’t mind being made fun of. “I’m Mark,” he said, and when he asked her name, she said, “Leila, no, I mean Lola,” which was really very suspicious. She was a choreographer. Where was she traveling?
“You know, I’d rather not talk about it,” she said. “What about you? What do you do?”
“I’m a consultant,” he said. “I have a meeting with a big client today, but I don’t know whether it’s canceled or what. I’ve been here for hours. I’m just supposed to wait to find out if the meeting’s off or been rescheduled. What’s the longest you think someone’s waited in an airport lounge?”
“You can’t just go home? Have them call you when they know where you’re going?”
“Go home? No. No way. Too big a client.”
They both just sat there for a few beats. Strangers at a bar.
“Do you have any cards?” she asked him.
“Business cards?” He patted his pockets in that too-elaborate way that cheap people do to convey their wallet-lessness.
“No. Playing cards. Maybe they have cards here.”
Did he have playing cards? Usually at least two decks. Sometimes a Svengali deck or a forcing deck. He went back to his corner and dug in his valise. He pocketed a forcing deck and returned to the bar waving a legit one.
He let her choose the game. She liked a simple nine-card kind of rummy he hadn’t played in years. She said she’d played it with her dad when she was young.
He let her win a couple of hands to suss out her game play, baited some discards to see whether she favored the knock or the hoard. She was a decent player; handled her cards with little fuss and displayed no obvious tell when he threw her a card she was after.
“I hope you don’t consult on card games,” she said to him, her pretty sloe eyes twinkling. So he ordered a beer and took the next three hands.
The man asleep in the corner was listing now and harrumphing pachydermishly at regular intervals.
After Mark had beaten her soundly a third time, he noticed that Lola’s or Leila’s eyes had gone from twinkly to annoyed.
“Want to play something else?” he asked her.
“No. It’s your deal,” she said. “I’m going to use the bathroom.” She took her shoulder bag with her. Which might mean that he hadn’t cleared sociopath yet. But her little rolly suitcase was still beneath her stool.
Mark took a card from the forcing deck in his pocket, a deck composed entirely of jacks of spades; he wrote his name and his New York mobile number across the face of the jack and slipped the card, jack out, behind the little plastic window on the top of her suitcase, the place meant to frame an ID. Once she was rolling that suitcase around again, the jack would be hard to miss.
When she came back from the bathroom, he taught her Conquian, a Mexican game from which rummy games are descended.
“Okay. You actually know a lot about cards,” she said. “Were you hustling me?”
He had always liked the term hustler, with its confused connotations of hard work and underhandedness. “I think that would require money bets,” he said. An
swer and don’t answer.
“Do you know any tricks?”
“I do not like the term,” he said archly.
She smiled at that. “Come on. Show me what you got.”
What should he give her? The Dunbury Delusion? The Chicago Opener? Or something showier, like a cascade control? The real trick he had already accomplished. That’s how it always is.
He started his patter. “I mean, the thing with cards is, they all have these incredible stories behind them, you know? The numbers, the characters. Like the seven of clubs. You wouldn’t want to be alone with a seven of clubs.”
She gave him a yeah, right face, but he widened his eyes and rocked his chin slightly. “I’m serious, Lola,” he said. “You don’t wanna fuck with a seven of clubs. Excuse my language.”
“Excused.”
He riffed and riffled and shuffled and shenaniganned. He was still using the legit deck, so he let her hold and handle the cards. She was obviously confirming that these were the same cards she had just played with.
“Nines and sevens have a certain thing going on, a kind of charge,” he said. “If I were a mathematician, I maybe could say why. I’m not, so I can’t. But it’s definitely there.” He flipped a seven of diamonds and then a nine of spades rapidly out of a spread deck; not an illusion at all, just a demonstration of digital finesse. “Strangely, when suited, they seem not to like each other.” He drew a nine of diamonds and held it near the seven on the bar, then popped it so it jumped from his hand. As it tried to sail off the bar, he snatched it out of the air with his other hand. Her mouth actually opened a bit; a tiny misalignment of her two front teeth caught his eye.
“How about you?” he asked her. “You have any relationship with a particular card?”
“You serious?”
He mm-hmmed.
“No. I’m not really into numerology. I think that sort of thing’s rather vicious, actually.”
“You mean superstitions do harm and should not be indulged?”