The Donzerly Light

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  So what was he supposed to say to Jude now, if even he wasn’t sure of the memory trapped in his head? What? ‘Hey, Jude, did you see the change dancing like I did?’ Yeah, right. That would be a gooood idea. Good for some serious razzing at S&M come Monday.

  “Farmboy.”

  “Yeah?” Jay looked up. “No. Nothing.” He shook his head for emphasis. “It’s nothing.”

  Bunker and Steve, rapt with the sight of Christine Mellinger and wishful wonderings of just what a threesome with her and another chick would be like, weren’t catching any of what was happening behind their backs. Jude, though, was catching plenty from his friend’s suddenly detached demeanor. “Are you okay?”

  Jay nodded and swept a hand over his hair. “Yeah. I mean...yeah Fine. Fine.”

  “You sure? You were looking at the table like it was going to jump up and bite your face off.” Jude grinned wryly. “Not that that would be any great loss...”

  “Was I?” Jay asked distantly. He was staring at the coins again. All of them heads. Nine coins that had come up heads! What were the odds of that?

  “You’re doing it now,” Jude informed his friend. “Hey. Knock, knock. Farmboy, are you all there? Do you need to puke or something? ‘Cause puking can be good, man. Just go in the can and let it up. You’ll be good for a few more hours then.” Jay didn’t seem eager to take up the suggestion. Jude gave him a closer look. A closer, more concerned look. “Hey, seriously, are you okay?”

  Jay thought on that question, his eyes wafting up after a moment. “Either I’ve had way too much to drink...” Dancing coins, brother, dancing coins that all come up heads. “...or nowhere near enough.”

  “Well, which do you think it is?”

  Jay eyed his untouched seventh drink and the change arrayed between it and him. Nine coins. All heads. Toss in the throbbing beat, and the sweet booze, and the pretty girls, and his good friends. Too much, he thought. Maybe it was just too much. “Whichever it is, I don’t think here is the place to find out.”

  “Don’t be a pussy,” Jude chided, checking his watch, holding the slender timepiece close to his face for a moment to be sure of the numbers. “It’s only twelve thirty. C’mon.”

  Jay stood, using the table to steady himself. “Late enough for this night.”

  “You have big plans tomorrow, or something?” Jude asked, peeved.

  In fact, if his whiskey-numbed brain wasn’t mistaken, he did. They did. “Carrie wants to go out to Floral Park tomorrow and look at houses.”

  “Floral Park?” Jude cringed. “Grady, Long Island will be the death of you. If you start getting serious about a place out there, you’ll have a ring on your finger, two kids, a mortgage, and no time to make any serious green. You’ll be hawking mutuals by phone. Mark my word: if you want a green future, you need to be in the city. Close to the action. Near the Street.”

  Jay grinned. “She just wants to look, Jude.”

  “Right, like I just want to look at these babes here. Like Bunk and Steve just want to look at Miss Plastic Fantastic herself.” Jude chuckled knowingly. “To look is to want, my friend. And what’s the old saying? Be careful what you want, you just might get it.”

  “You’re so quotable when you’re drunk,” Jay said, then he tapped the birthday boy on the shoulder.

  Bunker tore his eyes from Christine Mellinger and turned toward his friend. “Where are you going?”

  “Home, buddy.” Jay planted a friendly slap on Bunker’s cheek. “Happy quarter century.”

  “You leaving?” Steve asked, having turned from the show as well.

  “I am,” Jay answered, stepping back from the table and pushing his chair in. For a moment he stood there, holding onto the chairback, letting his legs adjust to being used again. When they felt less like mush and more like flesh and bone he said, “Until Monday.”

  Jude took a drink of his GT and hefted his glass toward Jay. “Lightweight.”

  “Maybe so,” Jay mostly agreed, and gave the change what he thought was a last look. Soon he let go the chair and wobbled in place for a moment until his confidence peaked. “Aloha, gentlemen.”

  Steve and Bunker turned back toward the stage as Jay left the club, bobbing between table and reaching for the first wall near the exit. Jude watched him pause there for a moment near the coat check before he turned the corner and was gone, then he swung his chair around and focused his attention on a trio of Japanese nymphs closing in from the left on the turning stage. Steve and Bunker were back to their silent worship of the goddess of eleven once again.

  A few minutes passed before Bunker spoke. “Jude.”

  “What?”

  “How much?”

  “Are you asking about her?”

  “Yeah. How much would a guy have to make to be in the running?”

  “To lick her shoes, two hundred grand. To do what you want, half a mil.”

  Bunker shook his head. “That’s a bunch of green.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Bunk,” Jude began. “We’ll start a fund. Jay left his change, so we’ll seed the account with that. Call it the ‘Bunker Wants To Fuck Christine Mellinger’ fund. How’s that?”

  “You’re a generous motherfucker, Duffault,” Bunker commented.

  “No. Really.” Jude wanted to play the harassment out a little more, so he turned back to the table, and reached toward the center for the change but...

  ...it was gone. His face flushed briefly with anger, thinking that some penny ante thief had pocketed it while their backs were turned, but that accusatory thought faded quickly when he caught sight of Jay walking away for the second time in as many minutes. He must have come back after first leaving and, without letting on that he was there, taken the few coins he’d left. Why the fuck he’d bother with that, Jude hadn’t a clue, but there his friend was, once again strolling unsteadily toward the exit, his left hand grabbing empty chairs for balance and his right fisted around something.

  Three

  Heads

  It was three thirty in the morning, and he should have been in bed, sleeping off the night’s revelry, but instead Jay Grady sat at the small round table in his dining room, the din of the inside night surrounding him, thinking it best that he take stock of the previous few hours’ odd happenings.

  And some odd shit there had been.

  So his mind trolled backward through the wee hours of the morning, and his first thought was: what really had happened?

  Not quite sober yet, and deserted by the weaker of his wits after seeing what had come to pass on the table before him, Jay settled himself with a deep breath and took his time with the chronology.

  What was first? Okay, first. First was whatshername, the waitress; pretty little thing with a wiggle whose name escaped him at the moment. She had brought them their seventh round and put the change on the table. Jay kicked her back the paper, and that was when he saw the coins doing their thing. Dancing, spinning, rolling, all for an impossibly long time before plopping down with all nine of the suckers showing heads. Weird.

  Weird indeed. He could remember something that by all rights should have been dismissed as a hallucination, but right here and now he couldn’t tell a soul what the name of their very cute waitress was. And he’d asked her. He could recall asking her her name, and he knew she had answered, but he could not for the life of him remember what the hell it was. Cindy? Sara? Stacy? Yeah, weird and a half, he thought.

  Okay, so that was number one on the queer events hit parade. And number two?

  No problem there, Jay knew. Going back for the measly eighty seven cents whatshername had brought with the paper. He was...where? By BK’s front door, about to hand a couple bucks to the big round woman manning the coat check, when a strange, compelling certainty overwhelmed him. It was as if some transparent force had come up behind, cleared its throat with a mild ahem, and whispered covertly in his ear: Uh, sir, your change. Your change. I believe you are going to need your change.

  ‘Need’ the change
. He moved tens of millions of dollars every day the market was open with a few strokes on a keyboard. Real money. That kind of money was needed. Even coveted. But eighty seven cents? How could that be ‘needed’?

  How? Standing at the coat check with the fat lady staring at him, Jay had had no idea how those nine coins could be needed, but he was absolutely, positively, cut-his-pinky-finger-off-if-he-was-wrong certain that the change was needed, and that he was the one who needed the two quarters, two dimes, three nickels, and two pennies. Needed them like air to breathe.

  Mucho weird.

  So he had gone back to the table, gathered up the coins without a word to his buds, and slipped unsteadily away once again, this time getting his coat and briefcase and making it outside into a chilly mist. He’d hailed a taxi and half dozed as it took him home.

  Where and whence weird happening number three, the topper of them all, occurred.

  The funny thing about it was (funny in a mostly humorless sort of way, thinking back upon it now), by the time he’d made it up the three flights of stairs to his and Carrie’s apartment and gotten his key into the first lock on the second try, he had pretty much decided that what was happening was, well, he was shit faced. Royally and completely plowed. The booze was making him see things like dancing coins, feel things like the need to have said dancing coins, and forget things like whatshername’s name—Kelly? Janie? Mary? In other words, the booze was doing what booze did when consumed in mass quantities.

  The booze. It was the booze. A perfectly logical answer. A good answer.

  But five steps into his apartment, Jay had become pretty sure that as good as it was, it was likely the wrong answer. A very, very wrong answer.

  One step in and his briefcase was on the floor by the door and his keys were on the narrow counter that sat gut high and separated the compact kitchen from the living room. Two steps, and his right arm was out of his overcoat. Three, and the left was out as well and with a toss the charcoal colored garment sailed a short distance and landed limply over the back of the sofa. Four steps, and Jay’s right hand went into his pant’s pocket as he came into the cramped dining room off the kitchen. It came out again on step five and reached out over the dining room table, opening to let the change that had accumulated that day—after lunch, and dinner, and drinks at BK’s—drain from his grip. It rained down upon the second-hand table’s slightly marred surface, bouncing with a sound that was half sharply metallic, half dully wooden.

  And all too finite. Sound that should have lingered died far too quickly.

  And so, before he could take another step toward his and Carrie’s bedroom at the back of the apartment, before he could get his suit jacket off and his tie unknotted, before he could let the night’s strangeness fade with a sleep that would end with a waking hangover and a train ride out to Long Island, before any of those things had a chance to happen Jay looked toward the table where there should have been coins spinning and rolling (maybe not for as long as some hours before, but still some motion), where there should have been sound, some sound, and when he saw what was there he could move no more. What he saw was something he should not be seeing. Could not be seeing. Must not be seeing.

  But two and a half hours later he was still seeing it. When first laying eyes upon the sight, it had shaken him. He’d steadied himself by grabbing one of the two dining room chairs. Then, a rubbery warmth still afflicting his knees, he’d lowered himself into it. And there he had sat, dawn just a few hours away now. Sat and stared at what he had to admit he was truly seeing.

  Almost at the center of the table, laying in a misty bolt of white neon light filtering in through the thin fabric of the living room curtains, were maybe two dozen coins. Jay wasn’t sure exactly how many. He didn’t care. There were only nine that mattered, and they laid prominent in a clear patch surrounded by the rest, like palm trees sprouting in a bald spot in a conifer forest. The outer coins lay in random groups, some heads, some tails. Chance had dealt them their position of rest. But the nine coins—and Jay did examine these and saw that there were two quarters, two dimes, three nickels, and two pennies—that lay in the center could not be what they were by chance. Not again. Not heads again!

  But heads they were. Heads they had been on the table at Buffalo Kabuki’s, and heads they were here in a tiny apartment in the Village. Heads these nine coins had been all the hours that Jay Grady had stared at them, slowly sobering to a point where the probabilities involved in what he was witnessing became ever clearer.

  Actually, the improbabilities. Sure, it was mathematically possible, but unlikely in almost immeasurable ways. Which, he had to admit (despite the daunting math involved), meant it still could happen. Once, even twice like it had. But...

  One eyebrow arched severely as the thought completed itself: But not three. No way three times.

  Once—amazing luck. Twice—luck so far beyond amazing that it could make your head spin...or make you sit at a table and stare at the offending coins for hour after hour. But thrice? Thrice and Jay figured that the planets will have lined up, or that Armageddon would be just a wink away. Right. Might as well be. The odds would be about the same for the biblical end of mankind, if not better.

  So go for three. The suggestion to self came quite logically. Find out. Line up Jupiter and Mars and Venus and all the others, right in a row. A neat, celestial row. Line ‘em up. And pull the plug on humanity, too, while you’re at it. So, yeah, go for three. Go for it. Do it. Easy to do it, easy to find out. Easy to know.

  Okay, Jay thought. Okay.

  But was it? something small inside of him wondered. Small but vital. Was it easy? Would it be okay?

  There was one way to know. Just one.

  Without further rumination, Jay reached out toward the change and with a few swats swept all but the nine coins that mattered off the table, sending them to the floor with a clatter. He listened as the noise settled. Listened and eyed what remained on the table.

  Nine coins. Two quarters, two dimes, three nickels, two pennies. Eighty seven cents.

  And that one way to know.

  He put his hand over the coins and gathered them into his fist. Felt their coolness. Squeezed them as his hand came up a bit and hovered over the table.

  Hovered. Wondering These coins that I need, what will it mean if...if...

  It was time to find out.

  He opened his hand and let the coins fall. All nine hit at virtually the same instant. Some spun where they had landed, some wobbled and whirled, and one of the quarters rolled at a steep angle on its edge, turning ever tighter circles until it finally lost steam and fell to one side, coming up heads.

  The other coins stilled as well. Jay scanned them.

  Then scanned them again.

  And once more to confirm that he was seeing the impossible. And he was. All were heads. Again.

  Three times...

  “This is nuts,” Jay said and stood abruptly, fast enough to send the chair screeching back from his legs. “Way out fucking nuts!”

  “I see you, Jay.”

  The voice, soft and unfamiliar, startled him. He spun toward it and was surprised to see Carrie.

  “What’s going on?” she asked groggily, clearing her throat as she stood where the hall met the kitchen, her arms drawn tight across her chest. She was wearing her night-shirt, the short one with the giant picture of a baby chick on the front, and white panties that glowed like a triangle of full-moon snow high between her pale legs.

  “It’s you,” he said, letting out a calming breath.

  “Who’d you expect?”

  “It didn’t sound like—never mind. What are you doing up?”

  “Something woke me. I heard something.”

  “It was me.” Jay said with embarrassed quickness. “I...I dropped some change and then I bumped into the chair trying to pick it up.”

  “Oh,” she half said, half grunted, one hand coming up to knuckle the sleep from her eyes. She looked to him, one half-open eye
the best she could manage. “What time is it?”

  He checked his watch. “After three.”

  “Jeez, you guys did it up late tonight. You just get in?”

  “It was Bunker’s birthday,” he said, sliding right by her question. To reply in the affirmative would be to lie, and he did not want to do that. Not to Carrie. And to answer truthfully he’d have to explain what he’d been doing out here for the last few hours, and from that she would want to hear more, and then he would have to share what he’d seen on the table at BK’s, and in the end it would sound ten times as crazy to her as it did to him, and he could hardly believe it still. “The big two-five.”

  “Mmm,” she grunted fully now. “Was Judith there?”

  Jay managed a look that scolded, if only mildly. “Jude was there.”

  She nodded with disapproval. “The titty bar again?”

  “Yes.”

  Well, she was the one who had told him it was okay to go the first time Rude Jude had squired the boys that way, and Jay had asked her before agreeing to go. Asked her if it would bother her, and of course she had told him that it was all right with her, and he had then assured her that it was the drinks, and the drinks only, and that the women were just...decorations on the place. And, well, if she’d been any kind of feminist, she suspected that that characterization would have offended more than soothed, but in the end she told him that he had just one thing to remember about the ‘decorations’—that he could look, but that he had better not even think of touching. So, she really couldn’t rag on him for going this night, or for staying late, which ‘the boys’ always seemed to do, though not this late before, but she could needle her mad just a bit. Needle jealously.

  “Did you have fun?” she asked, needling just that little bit in the suggestive way she asked.