by Josh Cook
“Furthermore, we should wonder whether the Minister arriving in the boudoir at roughly the same time as the letter, with a letter of no importance in hand, was really just a coincidence. Coincidence exists, but accepting it transforms one from a detective to a cleric.”
Platitude sip all around.
“Though we can allow some coincidence in the timing, perhaps, for example, assuming the arrival of the King while the letter was being read is coincidental, it is far more likely that, in order to time his arrival with that of the letter, and to know the letter was, in fact, from the Queen’s extraordinary lover—”
“The Minister was actually the Queen’s lover!” Lola shouted.
“What? No. Of course not.”
“Lola takes a shot!” Max shouted.
“Goddamn it!” Lola cursed. She got the whiskey and three shot glasses from the kitchen. She poured and took her shot.
Trike continued, “—the Minister has a relationship with the Queen’s lover.”
Max and Lola twitched as if to speak, but, after making competitive eye contact, relaxed and leaned back into their seats. Trike looked back and forth between them.
“Ah, I get it,” he said, “you have to take a shot if you ask me a question. I must say, this is a vicious game. A vicious drinking game indeed. Almost punishes, or at least intoxicates, the pursuit of truth. I am a fan of vicious drinking games and intoxicating the pursuit of truth. And look, our dear friend Lola brought whiskey and shot glasses …” Trike trailed off, put his hands behind his head, and leaned back. Smirked.
“Oh no,” Lola said.
“Oh yes,” Trike said.
“Max, he’s not really going to do this to us,” Lola said.
Max observed Trike for a hot second. “He … is.”
“But I just did a shot. Wait. No. Fuck this. I can read this fucking story,” Lola started.
“You haven’t read it?” Trike asked, but Lola continued without responding.
“I can read it. I can figure this out. Knowing you, you’ve probably already fucking told us if we knew what to listen for. So, yeah, fuck it. I got this. Just. Later. Sober,” Lola concluded.
“You cool with this, Max?” Trike asked.
Max answered with a shrug. Undercover work taught comfort in uncertainty. And, all told, with the requisite effort, he’d get it too.
Trike stood up and poured three shots of whiskey.
“You’re pouring shots anyway,” Lola managed to say without forming a question in case the game was still active.
“A toast,” Trike said. “This is a celebration and we haven’t done a toast and since the glasses and the whiskey are here, I decided now is the best time for a toast. A toast to Edgar Allen Poe, for inventing and destroying the detective story.”
What could Max and Lola do? The shots were poured, and, after all, they were celebrating detection. They raised, toasted, clinked, drank, and slammed.
Trike had an extra shot, grabbed the second bottle of champagne from the kitchen, then settled into a relaxed posture on the couch. “Now, speaking of detecting brilliance, I would love to hear all about your adventure in the sewer.”
When the reward money comes through, you can tell stories about being completely wrong. Lola did the narrating with occasional interjections from Max, while the second bottle of champagne was finished.
Trike set the empty bottle on the floor and rolled it into the kitchen so it curled around the table and bumped into the recycling bin. When he looked up from his feat, Max and Lola were staring at him.
He steepled his fingers in front of his face and hummed a tune of concentration. “No. Not yet. We finish the champagne first. Then the profound revelation.”
He observed their faces. Neither desired additional champagne.
“Amendment. I will finish the final bottle of champagne, but would prefer to do so while playing my favorite drinking game.”
“What’s that?” Max asked.
Trike held up a one-moment finger. Went to the kitchen and returned with an open bottle of champagne. Sat back down on the couch.
He game-show-announcer boomed, “We shall play, Max Tells Us Some Crazy-Ass Shit that Happened in His Life.”
Lola clapped her hands. “This is my other favorite drinking game.”
Max held up questioning hands.
“The rules of the game are thus,” Trike explained, “you tell us some crazy-ass shit that happened in your life. We drink. The crazier the shit is, the more we drink.”
“The beauty of the game is its simplicity,” Lola said, getting up to get a beer. “You want one while I’m up, Max?”
Max nodded. What could he do? Not tell them some crazy-ass shit that happened in his life. Telling people is the consolation prize for crazy-ass shit happening in your life.
“Okay,” he said after Lola returned with beers. He shook his head and clapped his hands once. “I’ll tell you something crazy from my life.”
He leaned forward. Elbows on knees. Looked down at the coffee table in front of him.
“I was married once.”
Lola dropped her beer. Her reflexes, normally sharp enough to catch it, were hindered by Trike spraying an entire mouthful of champagne all over her.
“Really?” Max said as they recovered themselves. “Deep cover. Drug cartels. Organized crime. Rookie mistakes. Agent antics. Nothing. Being married. Spit-take.”
“The facts cannot be denied,” Trike said, wiping champagne off his lips.
Lola grabbed a towel and a new beer from the kitchen. She said as she wiped off, “Well, that was all FBI stuff and we always understood you as ‘Max the Former FBI Agent.’ ”
“Former FBI agents can’t get married?”
“Of course they can, but, I don’t know, I just. I never pictured you as a divorcé.”
“That’s it,” Trike said between gulps of champagne. “Lola nailed it. It’s not that I can’t imagine you getting married. I can’t imagine you getting divorced.”
Max sighed and leaned back in his chair. He cleared his throat and rolled his shoulders, getting into storyteller voice. “Okay, well, here’s the story.
“It was after a long undercover assignment, Operation Maelstrom, that I’ve already told you guys so much about, and I had a month off. The bureau will give undercover agents a sabbatical after a long assignment just to give them a chance to get their heads out of whatever world they were in. Because you become part of that world. You become the person you are pretending to be. And that person is usually a criminal.
“So I was on one of those sabbaticals, I had my salary, and really, nothing to do for a month, so I figured that was the best time to go to Vegas for a week. Not to do anything crazy, but just because a month off with some money is the best time to visit Vegas. So I did some gambling. Went to strip clubs. Camped out in the desert. Drove around in a rented convertible. You know, Vegas stuff, mixed with some general getting-your-head-together stuff.
“So it was my second-to-last night there and I was just about done with the whole Vegas thing. I had some drinks. I’d eaten good food. I’d only lost a couple hundred bucks gambling. I was gonna do one more light night at the blackjack table, drink some complimentary booze, and then have a relaxed day of walking around and then head out. I had some coins in my pocket when I got back to the hotel from the table and figured I should use them. Seemed wrong to go to my room with them in my pockets, so I sat down at a slot machine in the hotel lobby.
“And there just happened to be an attractive woman at the machine next to me. I don’t know how we got to talking, but we did. Someone came around with drinks, as they do in Vegas, and well, we chatted and flirted and drank and occasionally played the slots. What struck me was how natural it felt. How obvious. It was obvious I would be talking to her. I should be talking to her. It’s like we’d been friends since high school or something. So I got to my last coin and said, ‘This was fun. If I hit the jackpot, I’ll marry you tonight,’ and she said,
‘I would have settled for “I’ll bring my own condom,” but “I’ll marry you” is nice, too.’ ”
Max sipped and continued. “Well, you know what happened. I hit the jackpot and we were married by an Elvis impersonator named Steve that night. Jackpot paid for the ceremony and the celebration dinner. We were together for two years.”
Max took a long sip and settled back in his chair.
Lola asked, “How did it end?”
Max shrugged his shoulders. “She was perfect for the Max who wasn’t an FBI agent.”
“And for the Max who was?” Lola asked.
Max shrugged again. “A tour of an alternative.”
They sat there for a moment, quietly sipping through vague visions of alternatives.
Then Lola took a big swig of beer. “Almost makes me feel kinda left out,” she said.
“Of what?” Max asked.
“You two have you-themed drinking games. Another boys’ club.”
While Lola took a sulking sip, Max and Trike exchanged a smirk.
Trike said, “Hey, Lola, whatcha been up to in the toolshed?”
“Well, I’ve got a few things, but the one in my head now is a project I started when I found this old little black-and-white TV on the curb”—sip—“and then this whole image came together from a bunch of the other stuff I have in the shed, like that broken old typewriter I’ve been dying to use. So it’s a piece that’s going to be about the tension, both physical tension”—sip—“and philosophical tension”—sip—“between our abstract relationship with the digital information world and the physical infrastructure that powers the digital world.” Sip. “So it’s going to be that old typewriter, that old TV, and the old camera and radio that are also in the shed”—sip—“all connected into a single object by antennae that will rest on a platform. Below that platform, and I’m still sketching this out, will be either a whimsical”—sip—“or a sardonic”—sip—“representation of a coal …”
Lola noticed the two quick sips. She narrowed her eyes and glared at them.
She said, “Reappropriated content.”
Sip.
She said, “Cultural hegemony.”
Sip.
She said, “Banana split.”
“Does that count as a Warhol reference?” Trike asked Max.
“No,” Max replied.
Trike took a sip anyway.
Lola decided to make them take a shot. She scrolled through the key ideas guiding her art. Terms and phrases simultaneously reduced and elevated. She remembered the last few times she told them about her projects and realized that she fell into a myopia and didn’t notice much else while she was seeing and describing a project. It had to be one of three terms. Of those, one was the kind of idea where Trike and Max would feel obligated to castigate themselves.
She said, “Manifestations of patriarchy.”
Trike and Max both threw up their hands. What could they do? They had to take the shot. While they poured and drank, Lola thought about her art—all the money, all the hours and hours, all the effort—and briefly, drunkenly, timidly, nervously, wondered what she had to show for it. And then just as briefly, just as drunkenly, just as timidly, just as nervously, she wondered what anybody ever had to show for it.
Lola leaned forward and poured three more shots. Before Max or Trike could protest, she stood up with shot glass in hand and said, “To art.” Sure, they’d just taken a shot of whiskey, but what could Trike and Max do? Not toast art? “To art,” they toasted, taking their shots, and slamming their glasses down on the coffee table.
Arthur Conan Doyle was a man from the future who gambled on Super Bowls.
Trike observed the impatience radiating from Max and Lola and considered the drinking-game-diminished contents of the champagne bottle. He stood up, holding the bottle by the neck in one hand, made a sweeping gesture with the other like a magician whipping a cloth off the now-empty box, brought the bottle to his mouth, and guzzled what champagne remained. He took a deep, sigh-sharp breath, as if there were a thirst that guzzling champagne could slake. He set the empty bottle on its side on the coffee table, spun it, and said, “Lola and Max. Hold in your respective minds an image of Paris and an image of the cabin, respectively. Are you holding your image?”
They nodded.
Then, bottle still spinning, Trike sat down and explained, with as much precision as possible, the events of Joyce’s disappearance. “On the night in question, long after The Butler left for the day, most likely around three or four a.m., Joyce poured between one-point-nine and two-point-three pints of blood on the carpet in the study, walked out the front door of his mansion in clean shoes, and, making sure he had not been seen and would not be seen, crossed the empty street and walked into the little white house.”
Torn with mediocre vehemence and discarded with a dash of contemptuous frustration, seventeen letters and their envelopes filled the trash can in Trike’s office. Torn and discarded after Trike had read each with his unique species of meticulousness and discovered that they correlated to every day the case went unsolved after the announcement of the anonymous eroding reward. Each letter, replete with sophisticated Ulysses references, artfully composed insults to Trike’s skills as a detective and a man (including the—likely accurate—assertion that no woman or man would ever love him) and formulaic assertions of Joyce’s own villainous brilliance, was a mocking reminder of just how much money Trike’s inability to see the little white house cost him. Earlier, leaving the office for the last time before the month in Paris, Trike had bumped into his mailman, who handed Trike the stack of letters, while explaining that he (the mailman) had been on a cruise with his wife for three weeks—including the relevant seventeen days of the case—that he felt bad for those staying in neighboring cabins if Trike knew what he meant (Trike did), and that the replacement mail carrier could not compensate for the reasonable error made at the post office when the “3” in the street address number written, along with the rest of the text, in a baroque calligraphy, was mistaken for a “5,” and that he apologized for any inconvenience caused by the mixup. Staring at the torn and discarded letters in the trash, one of the greatest brains ever born in a human skull did not know whether to laugh or cry.
“Contingency divides our lives from the events of literature and storytelling. The division is not caused by the hero never getting shot. It’s caused by the hero never having hay fever.”
COSMOPOLITANISM AND JUSTICE
Two elderly men in white jackets and gray chinos sat in one of the red vinyl booths doing crossword puzzles. A nuclear family sat in another booth, the parents fretting over how the menu options interacted with their new diets, the kids racing and crashing, complete with a cappella sound effects, toy cars across the Formica table. A pile of old newspapers cluttered the other end of the bar.
Max put his coffee down. Poured a quarter-cup of ketchup on his hamburger. Ketchup dripped over the sides onto his hands when he picked it up and took a bite.
“You want some burger with that ketchup?”
“Just pass me a napkin.”
The napkin was passed.
“You know, Max, I’d expect more from a guy who usually displays such cosmopolitan taste.”
Max chuckled.
“Ketchup is the world’s most cosmopolitan condiment … scientifically proven.” Max gestured with his elbow at his companion’s order. “Like you can talk. You ever order anything else here?”
“Nope.”
“No … curiosity?”
“Max, the Reubens here taste like Justice.”
“Justice?”
“Capital ‘J’ blindfold, skirts, and scales Justice.”
Max shook his head.
The parents shushed the kids as the waitress came over to take their order. One of the old men set his crossword puzzle on the table and vigorously solved a clue. Matilda started organizing the mess of papers.
“So Trike’s gonna be gone a whole month, huh?” Horn-Rims aske
d.
“Yep.”
“Sure he can’t make it two?”
“In a week, he’ll be solving crimes in the paper. In two, calling me to see if there’s anything urgent. In three, turning art forgers over to the Parisian police.”
“How does it suck us in, Max? How does it take over our lives?”
“Your question … is in the wrong direction.”
“How’s that?”
Max set his hamburger down and wiped his hands clean. Cleared his throat. “The job doesn’t suck us in; we seek out all-consuming jobs. We gravitate toward them. We need them. Police, Bureau, PI, none of it can be done successfully any other way. If you don’t give everything to it, you fail. So the only people who end up doing it are those looking to give their entire selves to something.”
“And Trike’s got whatever it is?” Horn-Rims asked.
“Maybe more than even we could understand.”
“Well, he’s still a fucking asshole,” Horn-Rims said.
“He does not show police much respect, but, respect might … work differently for him.”
“How convenient.”
“He takes a lot more than he gives.”
“I guess I’ll accept that as a consolation prize.”
One of the race cars slipped from the driver’s grasp and plastically clattered to the floor.
“Motherfucker solves cases, though,” Horn-Rims concluded.
“He does, HR. He does.”
They took a couple of bites from their sandwiches, a couple of sips of coffee, ate a couple of fries.
Horn-Rims said, “I always wanted to ask you something, and I never remember until it’s too late. Or there’s just more important shit to talk about. When his face goes slack, you know, and all the muscles relax, you know what I’m talking about.”