Here came the tea, gurgling into the cups. Then a spoonful of honey, swirled into each.
“Did Frick put you up to it? Did he give you the order?” I said. “Did he say it was just in the spirit of the game? All part of lead-erboard culture in Sunshine City. Messing with a guy being part of the contest. Just a little gentle fucking with. Did you give Griegson a gentle fucking, SaBe? Once or twice. Maybe three times if you could stand it. Then listen to the phone ring and ring. Listen to Frick’s stroke-play nemesis losing his mind.”
She was stirring the honey while tears made their way down her cheeks to the corners of her wide mouth.
I took my phone out and dialled the number from Griegson’s palm and watched it ring in her shirt pocket. The ringer was off. But just over SaBe’s heart there was a flutter of iridescent green. Killing envy. World-destroying desire. All of it right there. Vibrating with soft urgency in the valley between her breasts.
Impossible land.
I never told Frick all that I knew. My old college friend hugged me again in the garage. And again out at the guard hut. I couldn’t say with any certainty that he’d arranged the book prank that gave Griegson the yips. I knew only that he probably had done so because he was very likely the only other person in camp with a bookshelf of his own, with a sense of what an unsettling dirge might be written using the final cadences from dozens of novels. Not a single word/ People with no soul/ No symbols where none intended . . .
What I knew with much greater certainty—call it 85%, good enough for me—was that when Griegson blew through the yips by switching left to right, he had Frick worried about local authority and leadership, faced with a guy who might pass him on the leaderboard twice, playing different ways. That sent Frick looking for new techniques. New black ops. New trickery and deceit.
As it was, unaware of all I knew, Frick was happy. Suicide it was. Suicide which was insurance-neutral and manageable from a morale perspective. Griegson drinking heavily. Griegson distressed. That story could play. So Griegson would rise to the pantheon and be praised, unite the community, calm the fears. And if Frick noticed me darting a glance backwards from time to time while I packed, he didn’t show it. My own secret hope dwindling. My own yearned-for moment of blinding unlikelihood: SaBe running up the road with a suitcase. SaBe running for freedom, running to me out of the seams of infinity.
Thumbs up from Frick. The security guard popped his fist down onto the button and the steel bolts hissed home. The road was clear. I glanced once more in the rearview mirror and hit the gas. I disappeared into a cloud of dust the instant I left the perimeter. And then I was driving and blinking back tears, anguish, God knows what. I missed the true passage of at least three hours there, reaching for reefers and tossing them unlit out the window. Spoiled even for smoke. And then I was two hundred miles north and I’d eaten the sandwiches I’d picked up at the canteen, and I was parked at a crossroads with no particular idea where I was. Mountains over there. Long expanses of burnt brown stretching west down towards the invisible sea. I was at a cinematic intersection. A road running precisely north-south under my wheels. Another crossing, stretching from the road rash of the western sky to the dark bruising of the east.
I got out. I paced. I made a tic-tac-toe grid with my shoe in the dust, right at the centre of the intersection. I stood in its various boxes, testing their feel. There was no real reason for doing this, that I could figure. But it allowed me time to vacate the present moment. So I found myself remembering SaBe instead, how tightly she had tried to hold me before I left, pinning my arms to my sides. Hoss idiotically resisting. I scuffed my shoes now in the silky dust and told myself that she would have dried her tears by now. Gone on to whatever Frick had in mind for her next. And perhaps that was Frick’s bed, perhaps not. SaBe would return, in either case, to being what she had always been at Sunshine City: the heart of human misery, the reminder of transcendent possibilities forever withheld.
I thought of Griegson: face up into the hills, then turning to his routine putt. Crosshairs tickling the back of his neck. I thought of my last moments in his cabana, packing my clothes. Perhaps it had been Griegson himself who leaned in close, in those dwindling seconds, and whispered the idea. Something stopped me short in front of the computer, caused me to lean over suddenly and type SaBe’s phone number into the password box on that file: Tally of Scores. And, with a harp-stroke of computer music, the file unfolded. It took a man of rare honour, I thought, to type his suicide note into the header of a spreadsheet showing detailed hole-by-hole scores over twenty-five years. I dropped into the chair in front of this data set, amazed. Winded by the size of my discovery. Griegson was no cheater. His handicap as a leftie had long been near zero, hovering as low as minus two for several recent years. Then it started to mysteriously rise. Plus 5, plus 15. When he switched and started shooting right (a particular column was annotated to this effect), his score shot even higher. Plus 20, plus 25. But then the tide had turned. Falling steadily, seeking zero. And getting there too. Bouncing along at the level it had been before.
Until Frick thought of SaBe and what she might do. And when SaBe got involved, then Griegson’s score bounced again as if off a magic floor. Shooting 75, shooting 80.
Griegson was no wuss. I read those ranks of scores and formed a solid affection for the man. He’d licked the book prank, after all. That took guts. But when SaBe collided with his scores—either by arriving in his life, or by her leaving, it hardly mattered—Griegson saw he’d run out of radical solutions. You could only shoot left or right. There was no third option. It was of a different order, this prank. Love itself, whether he felt it for SaBe or merely saw in her what he’d lost those years before, that was of a different order. So the trick worked quite a bit better than Frick in his nastiest mood would have hoped or imagined. They didn’t give the guy the yips. They gave him despair. And if, in choosing his way of surrendering to it, Griegson had tried to take the whole place down with him—tried to induce a crisis by which Frick and his little kingdom would collapse under the black hole weight of failed insurance policies—then it only proved to me that Griegson had a sense of humour too. Through the tears and exploded scores. Right to the end.
The suicide note itself was impressive. Griegson had been to school on last lines by this point, of course. But it was a good one even by the high literary standards of his library, I thought. Right there at the top of the spread, above the orderly columns of scores, six final words on the life from which he wanted freedom:
Last shot, a hole in One.
The fortune teller’s caravan arrived from the west. It had been coming for the past fifteen minutes, smudged out there long in advance of its arrival. I saw it. Then I heard it. Now it was here with its dangling and jangling crust of ancient, talismanic logos: hood ornaments and street signs, bottle caps and sports paraphernalia. Beer cans, tennis shoes, action figures. And pictures of once-known actors, athletes, singers, varnished to the fenders and the door panels. Icons of fame and obscurity.
He said: “Fortune?” Window down. Dirt-grey elbow sticking out through the beaded curtain he had hanging in the driver’s side window. His face round and gaunt at once. A fat man starving down. Everybody off somewhere else in search of work, bread, water.
I told him no thanks. But he pressed. He said: “I’ll give you a free read. You buy the fortune.”
I laughed and turned away. My new van was there. Just a few paces off. I could be in it and driving away in less than a minute. I said: “What free read?”
“Free read on how you lost the leg.”
I turned back to the man. What the hell. I nodded.
He said: “You were driving drunk.”
“No,” I said.
“Hey,” the fortune teller said, “I’m not finished.”
I rolled my eyes and waited.
“You were driving drunk in a car with a friend who was behind the wheel.”
There was some way they did this, picked up clues fr
om how you darted your eyes. I tried to keep my gaze steadily on him. But this was part of the trick too. You couldn’t.
He sensed he was on to something. He scratched his chin, then said: “Buddy drove off a bridge.”
“Wrong.”
“Embankment,” the guys said.
“Forget it, you’re wrong.”
“No wait,” the guy said. “This is strange. I’m seeing something like a bridge, but it just goes part way, then stops.”
“Look, you’re the fortune teller. Can you see the past and future or not? No. No you can’t. Everybody knows you can’t. So why don’t you just admit it? You’re a fraud. You don’t know anything. You make these statements like you’re so sure of something but it’s all just a crock. And you leave people thinking that you’ve told them something serious about themselves and it just screws people up. Unlucky at love. Bullshit. She liked me, all right? Only here I am driving around in the goddamn sticks in a van I’m all proud of and she’s having a hot tub right now. Okay? Sipping champagne. So why don’t you just leave people the hell alone? Why don’t you get a real job? Because it wasn’t a bridge, you moron. It was the off-ramp on the 580 in Berkeley that had the bridge decks removed for maintenance after the Castle Rock quake, a detail Frick’s fucking onboard navigation system had not yet been updated to notice. You get me? So sure we were drinking, but the computer is supposed to tell you not to take that exit. That would be reasonable. If the world were reasonable. Which it isn’t. So we drove off into the thin air. Is this all making sense to you? A car trying to fly but not having wings so we end up crashing in a gravel pit and Frick walking away. Me not walking away, for reasons you have obviously already noticed.”
The sun was setting. I stood in the failing light, sweating with rage.
“Hey man, sorry about that,” the fortune teller said.
“All right,” I said. “So, as you can see, I’m not interested in hearing your thoughts on the future.”
“Freebie,” the guy said. “No hard feelings.”
“Piss off,” I said.
“It’s short. It’s really short. Not a prediction, so much, as a statement of relevant fact.”
I looked at the guy through the beads. He had a not-unfriendly glint in his eye. He wasn’t messing with me. He just thought I was funny. And at that moment, I had to admit I could see his point.
My shoulders rounded down. I exhaled. I went into my pocket and pulled out some bills, gave them to him. No, no. Take them. We all gotta eat. “Okay, give it to me,” I said.
“You ready?”
“Don’t start messing with me now.”
“You’re sure you’re ready?”
“I’m in the van in ten seconds you don’t start talking,” I told him.
“All right,” he said. “Here goes.”
I heard a very faint rumble, very far behind me.
“Someone is following you,” the man said.
Then he stuck a hand out the window, and I shook it. And he drove off slowly. The caravan shrinking down and dwindling and fading with the light, then disappearing from view.
I turned and looked south. Back down the road in the direction I had come. Back towards Sunshine City. Towards Frick. Towards the corpse Griegson left behind.
Towards SaBe.
Definitely somebody there. I had that certainty. Somebody approaching. On the horizon, right where the white sky fused in its furious heat to the cowering earth, right in that seam of infinity.
LOVERS
MARK ANTHONY JARMAN
THE DECEMBER ASTRONAUTS
(or Moon-base Horse Code)
The distance I felt came not from country or people;
it came from within me.
I am as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.
JAMES WELCH, Winter in the Blood
I WAS LOST in the stars, but not lost, my tiny craft one of many on a loop prescribed by others, two astronauts far out in a silk-road universe of burning gas and red streaks, and one of us dead.
Then the land comes up at us, the speed of the land rushing up like film and our Flight Centre men at serious blinking screens. Our valves open or don’t open, the hull holds, the centre holds, little I can do. The dead man is not worried. I will not worry anymore, I renounce worry (yeah, that will last about three seconds). The angle of re-entry looks weird to my eye. I had to haul his corpse back inside for re-entry so he wouldn’t burn up.
In the city below me traffic is backing up into the arterial avenues. They want to see us return, to fly down like a hawk with the talons out.
“Units require assistance. All units.”
We are three orbits late because of the clouds and high wind. They want to be there if there is a memorable crash, our pretty shell splitting on the tarmac into several chemical flash fires engraved on their home movies.
We were so far up there above the moon’s roads, my capsule’s burnt skin held in rivers and jet streams that route our long-awaited re-entry. Up there we drive green channels riven in the clouds, ride stormscud and kerosene colours in the sky, then we ease our wavering selves down, down to this outer borough, down to rumpled family rooms and black yawning garages, down to the spanking new suburb unboxed in the onion fields.
I’m a traveller, an addict. I descend from the clouds to look for work, I was up there with the long-distance snowstorms. It’s hard to believe I’m here again, hard to believe Ava became so uncaring while I was gone from the colony.
Ava’s messages are still there. “This message will be deleted in two days.” I press 9 to save it yet again. I save her messages every ten days, my private archives, my time capsule, a minute of her lovely voice.
“Loved your last transmission,” Ava said in September. “It made me laugh! And I loved the pictures you sent! I can’t wait to see you.”
But then the change in October, the October revolution. We are changelings locked in a kingdom of aftershave ads and good shepherds, lambs and lions and the Longhorn Steakpit’s idea of a salad bar.
Her messages were so very affectionate, and we’d lasted so long, so long, but in the end our messages were not enough. Our words were not enough. A week of silence and then a new message. I knew it.
“Some bad news,” as Ava termed it. She’d met someone else, she’d had a lot to drink, one thing led to another. And I was so close. Only a few days more. But she couldn’t wait for me. So long.
In the Coconut Grove bar in the afternoon I’m feeling all right. I’m good at clarity and appreciation, but I’m slightly out of time. Time slows and I lurk in it, I can alter it. Do you know that feeling? I drink and carefully move my head to study my world. Venetian blinds layering tiny tendrils of soft light on us, the purple tennis court on TV, an AC running low, the lack of real sky. It all seems okay, it all seems significant, it all seems deliberate and poised for some event. But only to me, only I know this mood, this valiant expectation, this expedition into the early realms of alcohol.
Perhaps I am not quite right, but I savour the strange interlude. I’m a lonely satellite in space, a craft drifting alone, drinking alone. In this room the music is fine, the hops have bite—the perfect bar moment.
Then the bartender cranks up the volume on Sports TV and snaps to his phone, “The girl who cut my hair butchered it. I didn’t have the heart to tell her, You suck.”
And that’s the end of my spell, the end of that little mission to Mars. And I was so enjoying it.
“Hey dog, you flew with that dead guy, didn’t you? And then your girl dumped you. She’s hot. Bummer, man.” I wait until the bartender goes to the washroom to work on his hair and I exit without paying.
Maybe not the smartest idea, but I call Ava in Spain. She left me, but she’s the only one who will know what I mean.
“What do you want from me? Why are you talking like this?” Her slight laugh.
Apparently I have some anger to work out.
Turquoise mountains at the end of the street remind me of
Tucson or Utah. The mountains of the moon. I kill time walking. Funny to be on foot once more. The sun and earth—what are they to me? I still orbit Ava, but she’s not there, no there there, so to what furious solar system do I now pledge my allegiance? I still orbit her blue-eyed summer-kitchen memories and the cordwood and pulpwood childhood in the north.
Need to change that orbit, need orbit decay.
In the building where she used to live they now deal ounces and eight-balls. I was gone, Ava’s gone, the moon has changed.
Not sure I like the messages I’m picking up re the new frontier. No one foresaw this, crystal and crank smuggled into the colony, dealers and Albanian stick-up crews and crummy walkups, the adamantine miners working the face under Dwarf Fortress, all the single males earning big bucks in the catacombs and mineral mines, but with nowhere to go, the shortage of places to live, the exorbitant cost of milk, the new gang unit brought in, dead bodies on the corner with splayed hands and wrists smeared red with their own blood, and bouncers at the door working hard at that Russian look. With the economy in the toilet the Minister of Finance is studying the feasibility of holding Christmas four times a year instead of two.
At the reception for me and some other space cowboys the party crackers lie like ashes on my tongue. The fruit salad fallen from soldered tins; taste the fruits of duty. My long periods of radio silence and now the noise of crowds and halls of ice cubes.
My brother-in-law Horse the detective is at the reception with a woman he says has just moved to the moon from Babylon to escape the war. Delia looks nervous, as if still in a war zone. Her family made her leave her home, smuggled her over the border, they feared for her life if she stayed. Forget this place, they said of the only home she’s known, it doesn’t exist anymore.
“How do you like it here so far?”
Delia says, “People are very nice to me, but it’s not what I thought.” She shrugs. “All my life I wanted to see the moon, stared up at it. But I miss my home, my family, my car, my brothers, the path to the river.”
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