You Don't Love This Man

by Dan Deweese

  “This will make us feel better,” Miranda said when she returned. “It cost three tokens, so it must be good.” She handed me a bright red cup. I took a drink and discovered the beer to be surprisingly cold. I watched her take a modest little sip, but respond with a smile. “Isn’t that good?” she said.

  If she wasn’t going to tell me, then what was there to talk about? I put my arm around her and pulled her next to me. “I wish we had more time,” I said.

  “Me too,” she said.

  We made our way farther along, toward a crowd of a dozen or so people gathered around a person who stood motionless before them, arms bent at the elbows and head canted at an odd, downward angle. The person was entirely covered—hat, sunglasses, face, and clothing—in metallic silver paint, and at first I took the angle of the performer’s gaze to be the result of having entertained a child, until I remembered children weren’t allowed in the festival. The man—if it was truly a man beneath that paint—ratcheted into motion then, twisting and raising his torso so that he was upright, then turning his head slowly in the direction of a young woman in shorts and a bikini top. She giggled nervously as the man raised his arms and brought his palms together and apart, miming applause. “Do you want a beer?” the woman asked loud enough for all of us to hear. When the robot responded with a slow, mechanized nod, she stepped forward and pressed her cup against his palm. His fingers curled with just enough force to make the cup buckle, a commitment to his role I noted with admiration. Then, through a series of agonizingly slow but transfixing movements, he lowered his neck, face forward, until his head extended from his body in a posture unnatural to any human beyond the confines of a yoga class. He raised his arm, adjusted his wrist to level the cup, and moved his hand toward his face, all through movements that seemed the product of gears rather than muscles. When he leveled the cup a last time and then brought it slowly and in a straight line to his lips, I knew, even before it happened, what the result would be. He brought the cup to his lips, tilted the bottom up—and never opened his mouth. Beer spilled from his lips, cascading to the pavement and rolling in a sudsy ribbon toward the curb. When the cup was empty, the man tilted his head in confusion, raising the cup to the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses to peer, baffled, within. Then, with a sudden and shockingly authentic mechanical convulsion, he flung his arm away from himself, releasing the cup so that it flew into the crowd. We gasped and laughed and cheered, and I noted the hint of a smile upon the robot’s silvered lips. Was it a part of the act, I wondered, or a break in character? I couldn’t tell—and then it was gone. He began to rotate his torso slowly in our direction, but I didn’t want to be the next person pulled into the act, so I led Miranda away. “You see,” she said. “This is fun.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “People should have fun. They should do what they want to do.”

  What was she talking about? Herself? Me? Somebody nearby was bellowing into a loudspeaker about a special offer, or a soon-to-start event, or maybe something else entirely—amplified into distortion, the speech was indecipherable. “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “Just walk,” she said. “I just want to walk.”

  We wandered further through the festival, and when she looked at me again, the leaves of a streetside maple cast fluttering shadows across her face. A few more steps took us beyond those, though, and she raised her face to the sun, basking in the light as if it had only now appeared.

  We came then to a long line of green bicycle racks filled with a chaos of frames, wheels, wires, and locks. A girl—she looked college-aged or recently graduated—stood there gripping the bar of the last bike rack to steady herself. Leaning forward, her eyes closed, she rested her head on her shoulder in an inebriated posture of either exhaustion or pain. There didn’t appear to be anyone with her, and when Miranda asked if she was all right, the girl did not, at first, react. Then slowly, without managing to turn or acknowledge us, she shook her head. “Can I get you something?” Miranda said. “Some water? Or maybe someone who works here who can help you?” The girl could only shake her head silently, it seemed—when she tried to straighten and step from the bike rack, she wobbled, and we saw her tear-streaked cheeks and rolling, un-focused eyes. She closed them, seeking relief, but no sooner had she done so than she began to tilt dangerously backward. Miranda grabbed her quickly by the arm and helped her to the curb, where the two of them sat together, side by side.

  I looked for a person of any authority in the area, but none was to be found. No one near the racks stood out as event staff, and neither did I see any police or security personnel. How a festival that centered on the consumption of alcohol could be almost entirely unsupervised was beyond me, but had there been a person in any official uniform there, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the person I did, a man distinct at first only because he wore khaki chinos and, like me, a button-down dress shirt. He was walking toward a long row of green portable toilets that lined the opposite side of the street, and something about him struck me as familiar. I was maybe forty feet away, and had only an instant in which to look before he stepped into the toilet and closed the door, but it was all I needed. I’m seeing things, I thought. That cannot be him.

  I had somehow finished my beer, and its presence in my empty stomach worked a dizzying effect in my head. I was standing in the sun, but I had stopped sweating, and my damp shirt felt cold against my body. Miranda was on the curb, rubbing the upset girl’s back and speaking quietly to her. The girl nodded in response, and then her lips curled into another sob. Miranda looked up at me. “I think we need to find someone for her,” she said.

  The nearest tables were manned only by people pouring beer, and there was a line at each of them. Who was there to speak to? I looked back to the toilet the man had entered, but the door remained closed, so I stood there waiting. I wanted to see what he was going to do—and I suppose I wanted to see what I would do about it. When I turned back to Miranda, the girl had leaned away from her, head to the side. Quietly and with almost no movement, she vomited into the gutter. Miranda continued to rub her back and tell her it was okay, that she would feel better soon, while at the same time I turned to see the door I had been watching open again, and the man within stepped into the sunlight. The sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled to above the elbow, and the shirt itself, in what I decided was an attempt to appear casual, remained untucked. The little pressureless faucets inside the portable toilets wouldn’t have been much help cleaning purple ink from his hands, if that’s what he’d had in mind, though it was also true that amid a crowd as tattooed, rubber-stamped, tanned, and sunburned as that one, probably no one would pay any attention to purple hands. The door of the toilet fell shut behind him with a hollow plastic thud as he hesitated, scanning his surroundings, and then walked in our direction. His hair was short and gray and his expression blank, save for his eyes, which looked as tired as they’d been in the photos I’d seen earlier in the day. When he reached the bike rack, he stopped no more than five feet from me. But his hands were clean.

  Our eyes met, and he nodded. “How’s it going?” he said politely. I hadn’t heard Mooncalf’s voice in twenty-five years—and even then, it hadn’t been more than a couple sentences.

  “Fine,” I said. “Yourself?”

  “I don’t know,” he said with a wry smile. “I may be finished for the day.”

  Amazing—he’d had a few! His light-banter tone, the way he leaned against the bike rack: he was going for casual, but I could tell that he, too, was steadying himself. “There’s only so long you can get away with it, out here in the heat,” I said. “A lot of people overdo it.”

  He offered only the same genial, almost goofy smile, which included an involuntary widening of his eyes that made him appear slightly dazed. All these years, I thought, and I catch you in an off moment. Was this a celebration? Or was it a professional strategy, the proper prescription for leavening the nerves and adrenaline after the event? And was he so
meticulous as to have planned it ahead, to know that a quick place to blend in while coming down would be among the raggedly drunk and freshly sunburned masses downtown?

  “They think they can have one more,” I said. “And then it’s even easier to say, Hell, why not another one? And before they know it, they’re in a bad place.”

  “That’s why I’m shutting it down,” he said. “All these drunk kids are gonna be hurting in the morning.”

  I tried, quickly, to imagine a timeline. He shoves the bag of cash under his suit jacket, or maybe in the back of the waistband, and heads into the neighborhood, moving quickly between the empty buildings on his way to wherever his car is parked. He makes sure he hasn’t been followed, then hops in, starts it up, and drives…home? Why not? The thing is over. The rest of his day is free.

  But Amber gave him a dye pack. It would be explosive enough to blow the jacket right off his body, or explode the seams of his pants, if not to inject ink right into his skin. It would have soaked his entire back and legs, and probably injured him, as well.

  This man next to me had a white shirt on. It was clean.

  “What about you?” he said. “Are you done, too? Or are you just getting here?”

  I believed it was him. The eyes, the hair, the voice—I believed it. And I thought, If you don’t rob me twenty-five years ago, then Sandra doesn’t see me as the wounded young man she can help. Even if Grant and Gina had still bothered to take me to Bristol’s, I would have had no story to tell and no celebrity to trade on. So would any of my life have happened? Could I have been someone else? Someone other than the guy at the bank?

  “Is there no one around?” It was Miranda’s voice. She was still there, comforting the girl.

  “I think it’s last call,” I told the man next to me. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “Because it’s true—I was thinking about getting one more. I guess they’re protecting us from ourselves, huh?” With that, he pushed himself from the bike rack and began to walk away. “You have a good evening, now,” he said, turning to look back at me one more time. And in that glance, and the tone of that last sentence, I thought I detected something. Had he recognized me?

  Maybe I just wanted him to. Because he didn’t alter his stride as he walked to the edge of the street, stepped onto a sidewalk next to a bordering fence, and made his way toward the nearest exit, half a block away. And I couldn’t help it: I followed. Slowly, and from a distance, but still—I watched him walk toward the exit at what seemed to me a calculatedly normal pace, was close enough to see him move past the staff members still taking money from latecomers entering the festival as he slipped through the opening in the fence and continued on, past the stragglers milling outside. There were points at which people passed between us, but I caught sight of him again each time, and watched him walk at a brisk pace down the side street, away from the festival. A larger group of festivalgoers stepped in front of me at that point, and by the time they moved past—by the time I jogged around them, actually—he was most of the way down the block, passing quickly beneath storefront awnings. Parked cars blocked my view, but I thought I saw him—or part of him—once more. And then he was gone.

  I approached one of the staff members sitting idly behind the ticket table, a young man whose face was hidden beneath a baseball hat and mirrored sunglasses. “I need some help,” I told him. “There’s a girl who’s sick, and we don’t see anyone with her.”

  “Here we go again,” he said, sighing. But he rose dutifully, and followed as I led the way. And when we made our way back to where Miranda and the girl had been sitting, there they were, in the exact same spot. Just waiting.

  WHY DID I EXPECT people would be there to meet us? The quaint childhood belief that your particular life is the main and only show never really goes away, I suppose. But not a soul noted our presence when Miranda and I stepped into the Sycora Park Suites. The fountain in the atrium ran at its relentless pace, the water cascading down through the tiers in a glossy white sheen of a piece with the light jazz playing on the lobby speakers and the ringing concussions created each time the lobby bartender set a rack of glassware on the bar. We encountered no one as we made our way around the atrium to where the elevator sat waiting for us, its glass panels glinting in the lobby lights like the facets of an oversized jewel. The door was open, and Miranda stepped in, but I hesitated. A hollow male laugh rang out from somewhere beyond or behind the front desk. I could leave her now, I thought. But Miranda said, “Come on. Take me up.” So I stepped in, the doors closed, and the entire scene went silent. The fountain churned as we rose above it, and people moved through the lobby, but they were just mute images now, falling away.

  “Is Mom angry?” Miranda asked. “Is the schedule ruined?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Most of the schedule didn’t involve you.”

  “I missed the photos, though.”

  “There aren’t wedding photos without a bride. They’ll get them afterward.”

  As the elevator continued its ascent, it filled with the bright natural light that filtered down through the hotel’s glass roof, and it was within that strange radiance that Miranda turned to me, looking surprised and a bit disappointed to discover that the world rolls forward just as easily in our absence as in our presence. “That’s probably better, anyway,” she said doubtfully.

  “Your entrance will be more dramatic,” I said.

  “I guess people like it that way.”

  The elevator chimed softly, and we stepped out and headed down the hall. To our right ran the long row of room doors, and to our left, the half wall one could peer over to look into the abyss. We were only steps from Sandra’s room when Miranda, as if remarking on nothing more than another of the day’s mundane tasks, said, “So I wrote you a note.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was thinking I might not give it to you,” she said. “But I guess I wrote it for a reason.” She pulled a folded envelope from her pocket and thrust it toward me.

  “When did you write this?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “This afternoon.”

  “Do I need to read it now?”

  “No. Tomorrow, maybe, or the day after. It’s not important.”

  She seemed unhappy with whatever was in the envelope, but we had reached the room by then. When Miranda knocked on the door, Sandra opened it immediately. She looked first at me, but without any recognition—as if she didn’t even know who I was. When her eyes flicked to Miranda, though, she gasped. “Get in here. Where have you been?” she said, taking her daughter by the arm. I heard the voices of others within, but I never saw them, because the door was already swinging shut. “I was taking care of something,” Miranda said, but by that point she, too, was only a voice. And with a metallic strike that echoed down the hall, the door closed, and I stood there alone.

  I recall holding the brass handrail in the elevator to steady myself as it carried me to the lobby. My legs felt weak, but I put one foot in front of the other as I stepped from the elevator and tried to remember what it was I needed to do next. My tuxedo was in my car, but heading out into the heat seemed impossible. Instead, I made my way to the middle of the lobby and sat on a park bench placed near the fountain, probably to further the atrium’s pleasure dome effect. Something was off—I had stopped sweating during the Brewfest, but now that I was in the air-conditioned lobby, I felt warm again. A trickle of moisture gathered along my hairline, and I thought I might be sick. I told myself that simply couldn’t happen in the hotel lobby on Miranda’s wedding day. Once seated, though, I felt I no longer had the ability to move at all, and intending to spend a moment gathering myself, I closed my eyes.

  The next thing I felt was a hand on my arm, gently shaking me. “Hey,” I heard Catherine say. “Are you okay? Wake up.”

  I didn’t know how long my eyes had been closed, but it seemed an effort to open them. I still felt as if I might be sick, and could n
ot, in that state, say anything. All I was able to do was smile weakly and nod.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Can you speak?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you going to pass out?”

  I managed, with great effort, to shrug.

  “You should lie down.”

  I felt that if I did that, I might never get up again, so I shook my head.

  “Stay here,” she said.

  I closed my eyes. When Catherine returned, it was with a glass of water in one hand and a plate with a sandwich and potato chips on it in the other. “Do you think you can eat?” she asked.

  I drank some water and tried a bite of the sandwich. My body had shut down for a few minutes, it seemed, and now was starting slowly up again.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked.

  “Everyone’s where they’re supposed to be,” I said, and took another bite from the sandwich. “This is good.”

  “You need it,” she said. “But now that some of the color is returning to your face, I should tell you that I have news. They found the dye pack.”