by Josh Cook
“With that crazy-boss-friend-not-your-boyfriend thing you’ve got with Trike, I don’t even know. And why doesn’t he kick in for your electricity? I mean, I know he’s not made of money, and the police stipend isn’t much, but at least he’s not paying rent.”
“I didn’t tell him my power was getting turned off.”
“I thought he caught you with the bike generator.”
“He did.”
“So you lied to him?”
“Sure. By omission.”
Janice scrunched up her eyes and glared at Lola until Lola reacted.
“What?” Lola said.
“I thought Trike could always tell when someone was lying, even by omission,” Janice said.
“Well, yeah, he can, but I’ve been watching him sniff out lies for years, so I know his techniques.”
“So how do you do it?” Janice asked.
“Well, first of all, it’s a lot easier over the phone because he can’t observe your body language. I don’t think I’d bother trying in person.”
“Okay.”
“And then it’s all about how natural your tone is. I’ve read stuff and seen stuff that talks about how you really need to believe the lie in order to make it work, but really, all you have to do is keep your tone within a natural range for the situation, which is really hard to do on purpose. Which means, it helps to be in a situation where your tone is naturally not going to be natural.”
“Like if you’ve been pedaling a bike generator for, like, an hour, or whatever.”
“Exactly,” Lola agreed. “And then it helps to load a bunch of empty phrases into it, you know, conversational spaces and that kind of thing, especially in the intro, and then I try to change the subject as soon as possible.”
“Right.”
“And honestly,” Lola continued, “he’s inclined to believe me. I could tell him my great uncle was a purple elephant and if he thought it was important to me to believe me, he’d believe me.”
“Which makes things easier.”
“It does,” Lola said. “Want a coffee before I drop you off?”
“No, I’m good. Why are you taking your car, by the way? You avoid driving like the plague with an infection.”
“Three reasons. My car is the least likely to be under surveillance. It has, by far, the best gas mileage. And, most important, it’s not Trike’s car.”
“Oh, that’s right. Jesus Christ, Trike’s car. I think I blacked it out.”
“I know what you mean.”
Lola pulled up in front of Janice’s apartment building.
“Let me know if you can’t find a dress,” Janice said. “I’ve got a couple of things. They’d be short on you, but showing a little leg never hurt anybody.”
“Thanks, but I should be able to find something, even if I have to fix it up. Besides, I need to conceal a weapon.”
“I’ll conceal your weapon. Nudge, nudge. Anyway, if you need to, you can totally stay at my place for a bit. I think The Wretched Roommate would get annoyed if you moved into the living room, but a few days should be fine.”
“Thanks, but I should be able to work things out. Maybe I’ll throw a blackout party. That might be fun.”
“Well, I’m good for a box of wine if you do,” Janice said.
“Thanks.”
They exchanged a quick goodbye hug over the stick shift, a few final words, and Janice was on her way.
Lola drove to the office and picked up Trike and Max.
They had the basics figured out after a few blocks of trying to appear like they were just driving around. Max would arrive first and alone. He would do a sweep of the area and text a code to them if anything looked dangerous. He would also send coded texts if he believed he’d identified the kidnappers. Trike and Lola would show up an hour later.
“So, then it’s wait around to see if someone makes a move for me?” Lola asked.
“Pretty much. We should act exactly like we would normally act at such an event,” Trike confirmed.
“Awkward, anxious, and out-of-place?”
“Like the kid who forgot to do his sit-ups at the summer’s first pool party,” Trike confirmed.
“What do I do … once you’re there?” Max asked.
“Surveillance routes around the Ball. Send us a coded text if anything concerns you. The armory has a balcony, so it might behoove you to grab a bird’s-eye every now and then.”
They spent the next forty minutes working through their contingency plans, all of them imagining possible occurrences and their responses to those occurrences. What to do, where to meet, who to call. Next they established their text-message code. Then they finalized their inventory for the night: phones, cash on hand, weapons, first aid.
“Anybody I know going to be there?” Lola asked after they finalized the necessities.
Trike remembered the guest list. “People you know of, but no one you’d greet.”
“Fantastic,” Lola said dryly.
“And … the crisis moment?” Max asked.
“Evidence suggests they will eschew violence. The only time they tried anything the henchman maced himself, so we can expect a low level of competency. At best, they’ll point a gun at you and instruct you to come along quietly. Most likely you’ll practically have to kidnap yourself. As long as that is the case, you go with them. If things look dangerous in any way, dispatch with your attackers in whatever manner you see fit. Whatever happens, we learn something.”
“What about after I’m kidnapped?” Lola asked, taking a turn she’s sure she would have taken if she weren’t thinking about what turns to take.
Trike sighed. He looked out the window.
“Just sit around like Dupin in the daytime. Joyce will send a message, and I don’t want to have any expectations. I need to be perfectly open. If it gets dangerous, get out.”
“Then I guess that’s the plan,” Lola said.
They drove in silence. After two minutes, Lola began taking turns with purpose. Another minute later, they pulled into a grocery store parking lot.
“What are we doing here?” Trike asked.
Lola parked the car and turned it off.
“My grocery shopping,” she said, unbuckling her seat belt.
“That I deduced. But why are you doing it now?”
“Since I was going to be driving anyway, I figured I’d get this chore out of the way. Multitask on gas and all that.”
“It must be exhausting,” Trike said.
Lola sighed. She knew what was coming. “What must be exhausting, Trike?”
“Being that righteously conscientious. How do you have any energy left over to be smugly self-satisfied?”
“They’re part of my emotional triathlon.”
Trike sighed. Walking into it, he asked, “What’s the third part?”
“Dealing with arrogant pricks who think their unique talent absolves them from any responsibility to interpersonal decency. It’s more of an art than a craft.”
“Well, throw me a kickback from whatever prize money you win from those things.”
“Will do.”
“Before we go in,” Max said, “an executive summary. I arrive early … case the joint. You two arrive an hour later. Act as normally as you two … loonies can. Lola assesses the danger level of the attempted kidnapping and concedes or does not. We return to the office … wait for the message.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Lola said.
“Then that’s it until the Ball,” Trike said, “so I guess we can relax for a few days, if any of us knows how to relax.”
“Fantastic,” Lola said, while she opened the door. “I can sit around watching a hundred fifty thousand dollars vanish. You guys coming in?”
“Ah-ha,” Trike shouted while unbuckling his seat belt. “An additional ulterior motive. Not only are you doing your groceries, you are dragooning our assistance in completing said groceries. Ulteriority compounding. I must protest this flagrant misuse of the agency’s precious time on your dome
stic errands.”
“Or, you could sit in the car alone. We’ll crack the window for you.”
As if Trike were ever going to willingly shorten his time with Lola. He didn’t even demand to push the cart.
TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART
“This is the third-worst bar I’ve ever been in,” Lola said under her breath as she sat down across from Trike later that night.
“You keep your bar lists that far?”
“No. But using absolutes like ‘worst’ and ‘best’ with you leads to boring conversations.”
“Words have definitions for a reason.”
“Yeah, the same reason platypodes have poison spikes on their elbows.”
Hazlitt’s had a horseshoe bar with the texture of an old skateboard ramp. The bartender was shaped like a curtain draped over a train track. The chairs were mismatched. The tables uneven. Tears in the red patent leather of every booth. A miasma of stale sweat, old beer, and wet newspaper. The waitress was the anthropomorphization of a couch left in the rain overnight. The drinkers drank because bodies demanded a certain level of activity for a certain length of time. The floor was mopped six months ago. To get rid of the evidence.
“Trike, the table is sticky.”
“It’s a bar.”
“And the floor is sticky,” Lola said, picking a foot up.
“It’s a cheap dive bar.”
“The outside of the front door was sticky.”
“It’s the cheapest, divest, grossest, filthiest aborted approximation of a public house, which was created in the second God stopped to tie his shoes, and I get tested for everything from AIDS to zoster when I drive by on the way to the supermarket, but it’s the only place in the area that does karaoke every night of the week.”
The waitress grumbled at them. They ordered beers.
“Wait,” Lola said, “what did you say?”
“It’s the cheapest, divest, gro—”
“The important fact. In what you said.”
Trike signed. Did not make eye contact. “They have karaoke every night.”
On the stage, a tall thin figure of indeterminate gender with junkie arms leaking from a ratty commemorative March of Dimes event T-shirt, greasy brown hair hanging in tentacles to the clavicle, a nose stuck on its face like a poorly jointed dresser drawer, swayed to the train-track rhythm of and sang “Folsom Prison Blues.” Soprano.
“A very special part of me just died, Trike,” Lola said, trying to cover her ears with her shoulders.
“Yeah, that’ll happen here.”
“Then let’s just finish our beers and go. I know you’re weird about bars and stuff, but this place just makes me want to take a shower.”
“We can’t.”
“Why not? Did a quarantine just drop?”
“I haven’t done my song yet.”
Lola stared at Trike. And stared at Trike. “I’m sorry. I think I just had a stroke. Did you say we can’t leave because you haven’t done your song?”
“Lola,” Trike said. Took a sip of beer. Looked up at the ceiling. “Let me come clean. Depending on my emotional state, I come here and sing a karaoke song every month or so. There. It’s out. I’ve said it. I come to this place because it has karaoke every night of the week, so I never have to worry about changing my schedule. As an added bonus, there’s no chance anybody who knows me, or has read about me in the paper, or is literate, will ever be here. There. Is that so shocking?”
“You know, I guess, now that I think about it, not really.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about that.”
“Yeah. I mean, I never pictured you as a singer, but still, why not?”
“Well, it is karaoke.”
“But why wouldn’t the great Trike Augustine also be a singer? Probably just another thing for you,” Lola said, gently throwing a hand in the air.
The host called out, “Horn-Rims.”
Lola jumped at the name and looked frantically around the room until she noticed Trike getting up. He took another sip of beer, raised his eyebrows, and headed for the stage.
“Unbelievable,” Lola thought as Trike took his position in front of the lyrics screen. “Bringing me here, as if I’d be all like, ‘Oh, Trike, you can sing? Well, then, ring me, Justice of the Peace me, and get me to the church on time.’ ”
“Total Eclipse of the Heart” started. Lola smirked.
Trike started to sing. Lola’s eyes widened. Her mouth dropped in shock. Trike’s performance was the unquestionable, unequivocal, absolute worst song Lola had ever heard.
It invaded moments of conception and turned impending musicians into impending accountants.
Lola downed her beer.
It dimmed pigments in the world’s great paintings.
Lola downed Trike’s beer.
Jim Steinman woke with a sharp pain in his abdomen.
Lola ordered two shots of whiskey.
In courtrooms, barrooms, and living rooms, confident judges forgot how to operate the idea of right and wrong.
Lola took the two shots of whiskey.
After four and a half minutes, “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” as interpreted by Trike Augustine, ended.
Birds returned to calling what they did singing.
Trike sat down. He didn’t complain about his missing beer or mention the two empty shot glasses.
“Trike,” Lola said with a hint of exhaustion, “why do you do that?”
Trike shrugged. “A man can’t enjoy karaoke?”
“No. Well. Yes. But. I mean. You enjoy that?”
Trike shrugged again. “Enjoy is not the right word.”
“What is the right word?”
Trike sighed. His face went slack for three minutes and forty-three seconds. “Occasionally, aspects of my being challenge the mechanism of metaphor,” he said.
“Fucking hell,” Lola said.
“Think about why you’re supposed to reboot your computer every now and then. There’s nothing wrong with it. There are no malfunctions. There are no viruses. There are no errors. All the programs and systems are functioning as they should, but as they have functioned as they should, data has broken away, sifted through gaps, and fragmented. Turbulence has emerged. Drag has developed. Friction has arrived. A tipping point in the inherent accumulation of entropy has been reached and performance suffers. What happens in my brain sometimes is absolutely nothing like that, yet that phenomenon is the closest I have come to describing what sometimes happens in my brain.”
“Fucking hell,” Lola said.
“Obviously, no matter how much booze you throw into it, you can’t just reboot your brain. Trust me. But somehow, being a terrible karaoke singer, of that terrible karaoke song, in this terrible, just terrible bar, is the closest method I’ve found to ‘rebooting’ my brain. And yes, I performed many experiments before discovering this successful technique. No, I will not tell you the contents of those experiments. That list would be long, boring, and wrenching of organs that should only be wrenched by EMTs in triage.”
Trike flagged down the waitress and handed her a twenty for the drinks. Then he stood up.
“Come on,” he said, “I want to pick up a six-pack on the way home. At least I know that beer will have passed some kind of federal or state regulations to get from the brewer to my gullet.”
“Want me to go in for you, so you don’t have to stare at the wall of cigarette temptation while you pay?”
“Lola, that would be perfect.”
THE ONE WORD KNOWN TO ALL MEN AND IT’S NOT “BACON”
“The only reason you’re not dead is because you’re Lola,” Trike said from his bed in his dark bedroom, as Lola walked through the hallway.
“You’re not a kill-first kind of guy. You would have subdued me,” Lola said, pushing open the bedroom door against a pile of dirty clothes on the floor.
“In my rage at being woken at such an offensive hour, you could have been maimed in the subduing process.”
�
�Ah yes, the eternal injustice of every now and again getting up only five hours later than just about everybody else in the world gets up five days a week.”
“Through a long and thorough process of trial and error, I have established that I achieve the most restful sleep between eleven on the clock ante-meridian and two on the clock post-meridian. What everybody else does is their problem.”
Lola pushed her way in far enough to reach the light switch. She flipped it. No light.
“Ha!” Trike shouted from the bed. “Foiled again. That lightbulb burned out three days ago. You are powerless now. Powerless, I say!”
Trike covered himself completely with his blanket.
“I finished Ulysses this morning,” Lola said.
Trike lifted a corner of the blanket. Just enough to expose one eye.
“Prove it,” he said.
“How am I going to prove it?”
“Quote something.”
“Trike, I just finished it, for the first time, this morning. I don’t remember quotes like you do. No one does.”
“Okay. A different verification strategy. Did it flow?”
“Yes. And there’s this whole big description of the Dublin water system with the name of the reservoir and the pressure and the gallons pumped and all that.”
“Okay. Verification acquired. What did you think?”
“I think I’m not going to have a conversation with a one-eyed blanket.”
“Is that a euphemism?”
“Yes. It’s Ukrainian for quit being a dipshit.”
“Lovely language, Ukrainian. If you really got Ulysses you could have a conversation about it in any context, be it mundane or spectacular.”
“You’re just being a dick.”
“So it’s a mundane context.”
Lola breathed in and out deeply and slowly through her nose. She’d had many similar conversations with Trike over the years, and most of the time there was nothing she could do about it. He knew more about more than just about anybody on the planet and didn’t give a fuck about the shit that most people gave a substantial fuck about. But this time, Lola was prepared.
“I know the word,” she said.
“What word?”
“The one word known to all men.”