Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  “Sorry if I got you in trouble,” said Leila, and sniffled a little.

  Leo made a pish gesture. “You got me out of trouble. Anyway, I just need to convince Daisy that I’m done being crazy and that I’ll stay sober now. This one actually believes in me, though. So I have some ideas about how to convince her I’m serious. I think I’ll not go into the part about the online underground.”

  “It’s my family I’m doing this for, Leo,” she said. “You asked about my being in it for any other reason. That’s the only reason, really.”

  And when she said the word family, she started crying again, and he came and sat near her on the couch. He gave her his dish towel. It smelled a little grungy, but she found a clean corner of it to wipe her nose and eyes.

  She told him most of it then. About how she’d seen something in Burma, and the e-mail she sent out, and then the guys who started following her, and then the other guys who started following her, and then how her father had been arrested for something he could not have, would never have, done, and about the heart attack. And she told him about Ned from the university saying it was worse than she thought, and about Ding-Dong.com and Heathrow and Dublin and the white Ford and the Horse Market and Ikea. She left out the eye test, though. And she still didn’t tell him her name.

  He listened carefully to all of it.

  “Motherfuckers,” he said when she was finished.

  “I know, right?”

  “I’m going to figure out a way to help. You want some dinner? The fish is gross. It was in the freezer way too long, I think. But the rice is good.”

  “No. I gotta drive home.”

  “To LA?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lola, that’s, like, fifteen hours.”

  “I know.”

  “You can’t drive that now. You’re wrecked. Stay here. Leave in the morning.” He said it plainly.

  He was right. So they ate rice for dinner and she told him more about Burma and he told her about a bookstore he once owned. It seemed like he could talk all night, and though she liked him, she couldn’t keep away from thoughts of the nightmare waiting for her at home: Her father accused of child predation. Dressler’s syndrome. A fucking bed in the den, like for a dying man. How was she going to beat these evil fuckers? How was she going to save her dad?

  Before the light had even left the sky all the way, she said she had to go to bed.

  “Let’s both think on it, Lola,” he said to her as she climbed the stairs. “Maybe there’s some other way I can help you. There’s gotta be. I’d do anything to help you save your family.”

  She woke before dawn, packed quietly, and crept downstairs. In the kitchen, there was only the refrigerator hum and the daylight beginning to spread from the windows. She found a notepad by the phone.

  Leo—she wrote—you are fun and smart and kind, but you have your own problems right now. I mean, I have my own problems and they’re different from yours and I don’t see how we can help each other. Though we did try, didn’t we? That’s definitely something. Good luck with convincing your sister you’re okay now. I’d vouch for you. But that wouldn’t help, would it?

  She wanted to say more, but the thing about making a clean getaway was that you really had to commit, so she signed it: Thanks, L. PS: to keep us both safe, you shouldn’t try to contact me. She snuck out the back door and across the new blue dawn light of the backyard and into the alley behind.

  He had shifted the blackberry vines so that they nearly covered the car; she had to part brambly strands to open the driver-side door. But the car slipped easily out of its hiding place, and she crept out of the alley and quickly found the on-ramp for I-5, only blocks away.

  Chapter 19

  Brooklyn

  These dreams Mark was having, in the three days since he’d choppered away from Sine Wave 2.

  It was as if every night he clumped into a basement theater to watch a cycle of dark, allegorical one-acts, but he was the actor as well as the audience. Once he dreamed that he was sputtering up a dead-end street in a dying car and came to a brick wall on which was tagged—beautiful and sparkling, like on a New York City subway car before Giuliani—Who You Kiddin? Another dream had him as a human squirrel who realized too late that he was supposed to have been gathering nuts. Most every night there was one in which he was given some simple task that turned out to be totally beyond his abilities.

  Last night it had been a very realistically shot one in which sunglassed agents were walking up to his front door, which was made of papier-mâché.

  Mark had returned from London to find that his general contractor—a suave Quebecois named Maurice who had a two-year waiting list—had made zero progress on the loft. Maurice had somehow sensed the dwindlement of Mark’s available funds and gone on to greener pastures. So Mark camped out in his gutted one-bedroom with its plywood subfloors and electrical wire curling from junction boxes.

  When he’d gutted the place, it had never occurred to him that he might lack the funds to put it back together again. He thought seventy-five grand and nine months were totally reasonable figures.

  Blown and blown. What an idiot. He’d spent twice that. He’d paid Maurice for materials that never materialized, for subcontractors who never got paid. He still owed ten grand to the Croatian for stonework in the bathroom. He seemed like a very nice guy, the Croatian. But the last time he came to ask Mark for his money, he’d brought his son, who was six foot eight and just stood there in the doorway the whole time.

  It had been a perfectly good apartment too before Mark had torn it apart. But back then he’d wanted steam showers and wine cellars and pocket doors. Now he’d settle for floors and plumbing fixtures and five thousand dollars’ worth of Ikea whatever.

  Lying there clammily on furniture blankets, Mark decided to run through his options. Again.

  Option one was to take Straw’s job and become SineCo’s storyteller-in-chief. Advise Straw while he and a faceless consortium “secured” all the information in the world. Abet the crime and provide cover for it. Continue to plug and evangelize the Node but now also be a “pioneer” of the new socialverse, SineLife.

  Say yes, and his money troubles would vanish. Poof. And Straw definitely implied that if Mark became SineCo’s SIC, the Blinc book—or at least its looming deadline—would also vanish. When Straw had pressed him for a firm decision as he left Sine Wave 2, Mark had tried to buy a few weeks by reminding Straw that he had to “finish that thing for Marjorie.” He had to shout these words. They were standing near the helipad at the bow. “Don’t worry about that, Mark. I’ll talk to her,” shouted Straw. And then his last words to Mark: “You know, Mark, that I assured the principals that you would take the job. That’s why we let you come aboard before your commission.”

  Maybe he even should take this job, morally speaking. So that he might influence it for the good. Seemed unlikely, but still.

  Option two: Don’t take Straw’s job. Disappoint and piss off his Croesus-rich patron. Finish—well, start and finish—the book he owed Blinc in two weeks, its deadline twice extended. The book would be crap, most likely. His shtick would be laid bare. He would run out of money, owe still more; he would have to find a real job again. This last part might be difficult, as he had few skills and had pretty much told his last employer to eat shit, and anyone interviewing him for a job would probably be unable to resist saying, Wait, aren’t you the guy who wrote that book about how you would never have to work again?

  Who was he kidding? It was like being between a rock and a feather bed. Unless he personally had to drown puppies or whatever, this was a job he was likely to take.

  But just in case some new information arrived in time to stop him from taking Straw’s job, in case he did indeed have to deliver the Blinc book, Mark was working on it as hard as he ever had.

  “I am a writer,” he said aloud to himself, and he rose from the dingy pallet, wandered past his six-burner French cast-iron stove—marooned and plasti
c-enshrouded in the middle of the living room—and went into his bathroom, the floor gritty with mortar spatter.

  There were moments—high and drunk moments, let’s be clear—in which he saw that there might be a third way. The book was so late now that maybe they would have to publish whatever he submitted. A great work could be hidden in that inane title. It was conceivable that he could write something very, very good in a couple of weeks, his reaching mind told him. Didn’t Jack Kerouac or whoever just put a scroll of paper in his typewriter?

  It would have to be good enough to make up for the crap that already bore his name. But if it was good enough, maybe he’d be allowed to write more. Not for Blinc, obviously, but for a real publisher. He knew he didn’t need as much money as Straw had offered him. There was the slim relief in this, in finding a limit to his own greed.

  He filled the coffeemaker from the bathroom tap, then called the deli around the corner and ordered an egg and bacon sandwich. He did his sit-ups and push-ups, proudly, on the dirty floor.

  Now that he was back in Brooklyn, he had access to the weed he liked. Clean, hydroponic, fairly traded. He got good and stoned and got down to work.

  After an hour, he had to get stoned again and take a brisk walk around his incredible city. He was trying to skip his record, open his heart, see through time. Or possibly he was trying to shirk work, hide from the truth, and find in the gabble of his stupid, teeming brain some way out of his current bind.

  He wound up in Prospect Park in front of a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln. Mark didn’t like it at all. In this rendering, Lincoln was too richly robed—he was wearing a cloak, for Chrissake; the man was born in a log cabin—and pointing like a know-it-all to a bronze Emancipation Proclamation in his bronze hand.

  Mark had a thing for Abraham Lincoln. Always had, since his dad had taken him to the Lincoln Memorial when he was a boy. Probably the same year he left. Look. See how he wants to get out of that chair? said Mark’s dad, leaning close to his son. See how his attention is focused on the thing that he had to do? That was a man charged with a great and difficult task. And even at twelve, in a beloved windbreaker, shorts, and tube socks pulled up high and tight, holding a huge eraser from the White House gift shop, Mark understood that his father, whose mother’s people were Louisiana from early times, was saying something important. So he had listened closely and he came away with the hope that one day he would be charged with a great task.

  But Mark’s dad’s great and difficult task, apparently, was to abandon his wife and son, to go off and be gay somewhere. So why should Mark honor anything the man said?

  When they came back from DC, Mark couldn’t stop talking about the Reflecting Pool and White House tour and, especially, the Lincoln Memorial. His mom was annoyed. They probably didn’t have the money to be taking vacations, even Amtrak ones. That was probably it. And one night, before she clicked the light off, she said, You know, Mark, sometimes we have to do the right thing even when nobody’s looking. Everybody’s got to help. There’s lots and lots of great people—and women too, remember, not just men—who don’t get statues, who live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

  Somehow that bedtime speech found footing in the coral of his little-boy brain, and in college, when Mark got to the end of Middlemarch, he really thought for a minute that George Eliot had somehow cribbed from his mom, but then he realized that it was just her sneaking the literary canon into his head, the way she liked to do. His charm was his dad’s, but if he was smart, it was because of her. She would not want him anywhere near this SineCo shit, he thought as he wandered stoned through the park on a Tuesday at noon.

  There had to be another way. Straw wanted him to catch people in a net. Being a hack was one thing; being a criminal propagandist quite another. For his mom. For his mom, he had to say no to the job.

  But the money. The money his mom might need.

  Maybe, for his mom, he had to say yes to the job.

  Two years ago, when he’d first come into what seemed at the time like totally bankable fame, when he had been certain that the universe was telling him, Here, Mark, you can take care of your mother, who took such good care of you, he had made certain promises to her: a less toxic house, with a little yard; a car that didn’t break down; a real doctor whenever she needed one.

  But unless some rich gigs were forthcoming or some new source of income came into play, next month he should really tell her to give back the car, because that was money that should be put toward her health insurance. (Toward! It cost two grand a month to be on hold with these people.) The insurance was called Healthy Choices, which made it sound like a cereal, but it should have been called Abstract Obligations—he couldn’t understand a word of the literature they sent him, even though Don’t worry, Ma, just have them send that stuff to me was what he’d said to her a year ago.

  Health insurance trumped car right now, definitely. Her brain might be going coralline, according to some of the very initial tests they run on you if you can’t remember how to drive to the tire dealership at which you’ve worked for fifteen years, and if your home appliances start to menace and stump you, and if your bridge partner dumps you (and if you have a fully paid up Healthy Choices Gold Shield plan). And who knew how much money he’d need if it turned out she was slipping down the banks of Make Sense into the River Dementia?

  Okay, so maybe this day, the brisk walk had led not to writing but rather to more of the morose and desperate outlook and hours of aimless walking and a few more terrible minutes at the typewriter and a few gorgeous minutes (those immediately following the five o’clock whistle and the untwisting of the gin cap) that he spent at his window looking at New York Harbor and Lower Manhattan, imagining how it would be when his stupid self-help book turned out to actually be a work of truth and power, of forgiveness and rebirth. Old friends would get back in touch; they’d say, I always knew you had it in you, Mark. His home would become a salon, with smart and worldly people who cared about ideas and distant struggles and good food and him.

  And the stupid little fantasy buoyed him, and he found that a glorious evening waited outside. He walked east, the sun throwing his shadow long. His neighborhood was teeming with prosperous liberals and the harmless homeless, and he steered himself into a restaurant to find food and to douse again—with Thai beer, it turned out to be that night—the worry and fear that had stolen another day.

  The next day, Blinc’s office called. Not with a reprieve on the book (I’m sorry to inform you that Marjorie Blinc was mauled to death by her vizslas was what he’d secretly hoped to hear when he answered), but at least with a paying gig, the very next day. An overnight to Chicago, at Conch’s expense, to lead a morning seminar for…it wasn’t clear to him for whom. But anyway, it would be a break from the writing, and he’d probably get ten grand for it. That’s what he’d gotten last month for a similar-sounding gig. That would keep a few hounds from the door. He could hold off the Croatian with the threatening son, keep his mom’s car lease a few more months, find an electrician to bring his apartment into compliance, and the rest would go toward the worst of the credit cards.

  Mark hadn’t actually spoken to Blinc since that unfortunate dinner in East London. She was conveying her displeasure and impatience with him by communicating only via underlings. Her chief assistant called him with the news of the Chicago trip, but it was a lesser assistant who waited until the next morning to send through the itinerary-and-engagement-specifics letter.

  It could hardly be worse. He was to be on a “moderated panel” in a bookstore. It wasn’t clear even that he was the headliner. And then the really bad news: the whole thing was considered a promotional event, to which he was obligated by contract. There would be no honorarium. Hotel, airfare, and probably some fucking bagels. That was it.

  The bookstore wasn’t even in Chicago. It turned out be in a suburb the name of which Mark did not recognize. Transport from airport to hotel was by shuttle van. The hotel belonged t
o a sub-brand of a better hotel and was only a few steps above the kind in which they shove the flight-bumped. It had a lot of frosted glass; the lobby plants needed dusting; in the elevators and even in Mark’s chill, dank room, there was an abundance of cheap advertising for local attractions and services—sky-diving, a cheese museum, a steakhouse called El Primo.

  The next morning was worse. Mark shared the courtesy van with one of his co-panelists, a handsome weatherman whose first book had been holding in the middle of the lists for a month now. The weatherman pressed a copy on Mark immediately. Sunmakers: How Effective Leaders Use Bright Ideas to Get Through Dark Times. It had generous margins. The shuttle van rolled through exurb after exurb.

  “I really loved Bringing the Inside Out,” said the weatherman. “You working on anything?”

  Mark nodded and breathed out in a way that was supposed to convey he was so hard at work lately that he barely had time to answer the question.

  When they came to the right exurb and arrived at the system of parking lots that served the mall that housed the bookstore, Mark and the weatherman were met by a teenager and brought to a dingy break room. There were bisected croissants and small pucks of cream cheese on a plastic tray by the door; the water bottles were off-brand and room temp. There were two other co-panelists already waiting: a Quit Your Job and Start Your Own Business guy and a Make Your Fortune Through Distressed Properties guy. Only the weatherman seemed not to realize that this was a dog of a gig. A techie with a greasy ponytail fitted Mark and the others with lavalier mikes. Twenty minutes ticked by before the teenager came back and led them into the MegaBooks! proper—as big as a hangar—to a dais beside Blender’s, the in-house café.

  There were easily two hundred people in folding chairs before the dais, plus maybe another fifty standing, plus some spillover from the Blender’s crowd.