The snake was abuzz, calculating strike reach, brimming with venom and gushing new energy into his beleaguered body. He had to nail her now, before she got farther back, toward the bedroom.
"Ah, my favorite party favor." It was Price's voice, near the foyer.
Art tried to come around the dividing wall from the kitchen in a surprise move, but the fat prongs of a Viper stun baton caught him hard in the left tit. The hit was textbook, and Art began to dance.
***
Once, Art had a dream in which he knew he was going to die. In the dream, he booked a lot of flights and did a sort of tour around the country, dropping in and thanking people for things they had done. He wore a good suit and was extremely pleasant. Some of the people he contacted were people he had not seen for years; decades, even. Ex-lovers, old friends, colleagues, enough of them for him to develop a lead line in his head: Once, you did me a kindness, or once, I did you a wrong. Whether it was unearned or frivolous or just unthinking, I wanted to say I've never forgotten. And know that I've always been grateful; or know that I've always been sorry. Some were shaded with regret, like a woman to whom he had been unaccountably cruel, because someone better had come along. Others boiled down to things and events which, taken baldly, were essentially quite simple-a friend who had gone way out on a limb on his behalf, for no reason or recompense apart from being a friend, because that's what friends were really for (as he had explained, patiently, to Art), or another who stayed on call when Art's emotions threatened to spiral into despair. Behind Art, in the past, was a network of unrelated people who had unselfishly helped him to perceive little glimpses of light as he groped through the dark room of his life. In his travels back along his own timeline, he made sure to be pleasant and caring, and did not lumber his sometimes surprised targets with any of his own baggage. He needed to acknowledge them. He shook hands, clasped shoulders, dispensed hugs, and dwelt on his own kindnesses or transgressions only insofar as they related to evening the score with those on his list. He wanted to bring the chart of his existence back to double zero, true north; to "square the box," as they said in his trade, and bring all spiritual debts to the equilateral. Equations and formulae were a kind of poetry he could now appreciate, and arriving at this ethos had run up a karmic tab that he was determined to settle. He found the people from his past happy to see him, even if they had not thought of him in years. Most of them said, how sweet, or you didn't have to do that, or that was a long time ago, and I'm not that person anymore. By and large they were people who had otherwise become peripheral: A hotelier who had defied company policy to ensure his comfort. A lover who had loved him without any agenda whatsoever. A reviewer who had quietly championed his work. A waiter who always had a smile for him, and automatically whipped up his to-go coffee without a word of reminder. A woman who, quite against cliche, had lent her mobile phone and moral support to his car breakdown on a remote back road. People he did not know at all who had given up airline seats, or thrown in to help with an overload of boxes at some shipping dock, or fixed his persnickety computer with a bemused shake of the head and no charge. Art never forgot them, and needed them to know that. And with each person he saw, he felt a vast relief and release, cumulating to a buoyancy that lifted him to meet the universe. He felt the chains of the past drop away as old guilts were expunged and old debts repaid. In sum, he had not been as rotten a fucker as he thought himself daily. He maxed his plastic and murdered his accounts, and doled the money out freely, in person. He made time for those who had given him theirs. He returned love. And he did not elicit their sympathy, nor did he reveal anything about his impending demise.
And he suddenly realized what a grandiose, hollow gesture it all was. He was biasing the curve. He wanted all these people to note how swell he was after he had died. It was selfish and manipulative, naked in its intent. He had done everything in his life this way, and he hated it, but he could not stop.
Lorelle was not in the dream. Neither was Derek, or any of his new buddies from the party downbeach.
In the dream, Art kept on boarding the flights and making the whistle-stops. His people list was long and amorphous. He enjoyed the enclosed microcosm of travel. He kept going, because he realized that when he had finally made enough reparations, his plane would simply crash and that would be the end. Provided one could ever make enough reparations. no, she could even be touching me and there's no danger of getting zapped. It's called shock-back. Not like the movies. Voices. Everything was black.
***
"It converts all your blood sugar into lactic acid in, like, a microsecond. You literally don't have any energy to make your muscles do anything, and the signals are all scrambled."
"How powerful is that thing?" Female voice, not Suzanne.
"Six hundred fifty thousand volts."
"Holy shit. That's Frankenstein time." Different female voice, still not Suzanne.
Price, talking: "Not really. It's kind of interesting. Voltage doesn't kill you. Amperage does. One amp will kill you. You take twenty-five thousand volts every time you shuffle your feet across a carpet and feel static."
"That blood sugar stuff doesn't make any sense. I mean, you don't knock someone out by lowering their blood sugar…" That was Suzanne, meaning Michelle-Price's lady-was probably one of the others. "Do you?"
"Sure you can, babe, if you max it out. What you do is dump all the energy into the muscles, at a pulse frequency that tells those muscles to do a shitload of work, all at once. The neuromuscular system is literally overwhelmed. Balance goes, muscle control goes, you get a car wreck's worth of confusion, disorientation, all without a bruise."
Flink. Someone lit a cigarette.
"What if he goes into cardiac arrest?"
Price again. "Can't happen."
The mystery female voice: "How come you don't have to haul your own generator around behind you?"
"Power source for this thing is a nine-volt battery."
"That's not for real." Michelle, now a 90 percent certainty.
"Absolutely. Nicad, pretty much like a wristwatch battery."
"Just another fabulous product of human development, right?" Michelle, definitely.
As definitive as the harsh slap to the cheek, jarring.
"Hey? You with us? Speak to me. Wake up. We're at your floor, ma'am. Strap-ons and linens. Hello? Come on, don't play this stupid game where you pretend to be asleep."
"People waking up from operations do that," said the third woman.
Price, impatient: "Oh, don't make me use the name anymore." Beat. "Okay… Art! Mail call!"
***
Art cracked his eyes open. Tear tracks ran back into his ears on both sides of his head, which felt stomped on. The wind screamed and moaned, making its haunted house noises, seemingly blowing right through his skull like a pitch pipe. Hot points of pain on his shins, his arms, his dog-bitten hand.
Suzanne snickered, ''You've got mail!"
Several of Art's kerosene-fed lanterns were grouped on the uprights of the coffee table. The glass top was sprinkled all over the floor in a billion shards, each winking back pinpoints of wavering light. The figure seated on the couch across from Art was a black-hole silhouette of a person; indistinguishable. Another figure crossed behind it, arms folded in contemplation, but with an unmistakable air of supervision or command. That would be Price.
"Can you do anything about these lights?"
Art's head was pointed toward one of the double banks of emergency floods, now fired, but ebbing. He tried to say: Those batteries have the half-life of a melting candy bar, but nothing came out.
"Ask her does she have a special radio in here, or something?" Art knew this voice, but could not place it, nor could he see past his own desire to squint back toward sleep.
No good. Storm killed everything. Even a ham key won't work.
His body knew he was sitting on his own sofa-one of the trio of them in the living room. The leather cushions sought to suck him in, to drown his b
ody pore by pore.
"You've got blood all over your shirt, Suze."
"That's okay-it's not mine.''
Art tried to push himself up but could not get his arms and legs to cooperate.
"You are currently enjoying the afterburn of a mild tranquilizer," said Price in a facetious tour-guide voice. "Your arms and legs will be like floppy toys for a while. It was either that or, you know, tie you up. The vomit you smell on your shirtfront is an unfortunate side effect. Once you puke, though, it's pretty mellow."
Art could see Price's face, leaning in closer, an Expressionist caricature of deep upthrown shadows, complexion etched by exposure to the elements outside. "You may notice the odd sensation of being naked. If you get feeling back in your extremities and don't tell us, well, it's like a psychological advantage. It was either that or tie you up in your own house. You're less likely to run around playing action heroine with your tits hanging out."
"Do we have to do this?" Michelle said. "I mean, do it this way? It's demeaning. It's not necessary." She was trying to damp-dry her hair with one of Art's towels.
"What the hell do you want?" Art managed. His tongue was framed in stomach bile.
"Well, our own little shindig got compromised, so we thought we'd bring the party to you. You don't mind, right?"
"Make yourself at home."
Price grinned, but it was a pasted-on expression; inappropriate, like the malevolent upturn on the mouth of a puff adder. "Most of our guests you already know. That's Michelle."
Michelle had a cut on her forehead. She kept trying to maneuver the towel around it. "Sorry about all this," she said.
"You already know Suzanne, ah, intimately, as they say."
Suzanne toasted him with a bottle of Dixie Double Hex from his own fridge.
"Bachelorette Number Three, that's Dina, the one who looks like that waterlogged pussycat from the Pepe Le Pew cartoons."
"Price," she said. "I don't see why we have to stay here. Why not do what Michelle says, leave well enough alone." Dina had been the one lighting the cigarette, with a Zippo, from the sound.
"Please shut the fuck up, Dina. You recall Dina, right, Art? You met her in the middle of one of her daily nervous breakdowns."
Art could not see her, but the lazy tracer arc of her cigarette coal told him she was near the kitchen, chain-smoking the night away.
"God, Dina, why don't you just get on your knees, stick your tongue as far out as it'll go, and see if you can find the asshole by touch… and get all that stress out of your system?" Suzanne's voice, from the hallway. "You need to relax."
"Fuck you," Dina returned.
"Ladies, ladies," said Price. "Please save it. Everybody gets to fuck anybody they want, so retract the damned claws, because it's boring. That's all the place settings. I'm afraid we're a couple of guys short of a perfectly balanced porn film."
"What happened to…" Art lost track. "Everybody?"
Price snorted. "Got lost in the storm, like nearly everybody else-at least, everybody that didn't get killed in your house."
"Guys came to evacuate them." Getting the words out was a labor.
"Hey, I am not responsible for what adults decide to do on their own," said Price. "The earlybirds chickened out to Half Moon Bay, like that was any safer. You were right about the windows in that dump. Boom, crash, panic, all gone. Last time I saw-hey, whatser-name, Shinya?" Price turned back to consult Michelle, who nodded. "Little Shinya was headed for the group grope in the cabana; then the cabana blew away. I guess somewhere on the beach there's little clots of naked frozen people, still stuck together like dogs on the lawn. Get the hose."
Suzanne laughed, short, sharp, not a pleasant sound.
"You remember Solomon, the mad surfer? Apparently he disappeared into a monster wave. Can't you just see him, eating his own board while the big whitecap eats him? Duuuuuuude!"
To Art, they were still little more than talking heads, floating like errant moons in the lamp flicker and sickly backlight of the floods, which were dying prematurely and inexplicably. Some glitch; some faulty connection or short circuit was draining the batteries.
"Let's see, who else? Luther's fate, you know about. I'll miss that guy. Bryan 's car is still outside-parts of it, anyway-and you should probably fill me in on what happened to that macho dick. I presume he paid for whatever he bought."
"Luther got him." Art found it difficult to clear his throat.
"That's poetic, I guess. Now, Malcolm, our aspiring novelist, he took an interesting turn. He fomented a mini-grass-roots movement to find his inner Neanderthal. Back to nature. You may recall him as the, uh, corpse in your foyer? You hit him with your Jeep?"
"He attacked me."
"Oh, poor baby. Self-defense, and all that, right?"
"She ran over Malcolm?" said Suzanne. "I missed that part."
"Civilized murderers always have the best excuses," said Price. "Malcolm's dead, either way. Exposure would've nailed him. But he lived long enough for his buddies to drag him back to base, where he told some interesting stories about you, roaming around in the middle of a storm. Not quite the modest tale of a quiet architect, is it? You seem to have undergone a few dramatic character shifts of your own."
"They were all high."
"Yep, and from the looks of it, his impromptu tribe came after you, looking for payback, which just happened to be Luther's big wet-dream fantasy come to life. Combat flashbacks, and all that. So did Luther take them all out, or did you help? I really need to know."
"They tried to get in." Art's fingertips were tingling, as though he had slept on them wrong.
"That house between yours and mine? It caught fire. Burned on the inside, then blew away on the outside. There's nothing left but the foundation and a lot of garbage. I think Malcolm and his neo-hunter-gatherers tried to barbecue some animal in the living room and it kind of went haywire."
"Tobias was one of those morons," said Dina, practically without moving her lips. She had moved closer to the circle of light. Art could see her hair drenched and plastered to her scalp by strong rain. Water was probably still running down her neck. That meant Art had not been unconscious for long.
Tobias was the MIA boyfriend of Shinya, the Asian girl Art now remembered. He could have been any one of the tribal contingent. The vandals had all been indistinguishable apart from the patterns on their fake animal skins.
"Maybe ole Tobias stuck that fireman's ax in the front door," said Price. "Actualizing his fantasy of being a get-it-done kind of guy. At least that's more interesting than his usual boring rant about spiking stocks on the internet. Jesus-most of these dudes watch too many guy movies, don't you think, dear?"
"They weren't in their right mind," said Art. "You gave them that drug."
Price was never less than cagey. "Now wait just a minute. I didn't force anybody to ingest anything. What you saw was all free will in flower."
"You didn't tell them what would happen."
"Hey, I'm not a mystic seer, okay? Someone wants to plug down mystery drugs at my party, they're responsible for their own actions."
"But you supplied the mystery drugs."
"True. But so what?"
What Art wanted to do was sleep for a week. What he did not want to do was play semantic Ping-Pong with Price, who might not get to his point before next New Year's. "I saw what your pills did to that guy Bryan. And Suzanne. And Dina. And even Luther. You're responsible for all this."
Price's voice went flat, into the threat register Art recalled from the party. "Reconsider the burdens of responsibility, before you start flinging accusations around."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Price returned his gaze directly, eye to eye. "I mean, I want to know what kind of chemical cocktail you're on. I'd love to try it."
"I was minding my own business."
Price sat closer to Art and squeezed his bare knee, though Art could not yet feel anything down there. "You know why I doled out my
free party mix? Because, my new friend, I wanted to see what all those losers would do. Just like I wanted to see what you would do, given a bit of shake-up."
"I don't even know you," said Art. His brain sloshed in his head and a wave of nausea nearly brought more vomit. The dimly lit room in front of him was oozing in and out of focus.
"What-hell, you don't even know you. You think this was easy, all of us girding our loins and calling you air, pretending you're some widowed rich guy in his super-house, hermited in with his dog and his gun collection, boom-boom-boom every fucking day on the beach, no human contact except with ole Rocko at the Toot 'N Moo. Like a lab rat just begging for a tumor shot. I couldn't resist you."
This was really beginning to pain Art's consciousness. "Price… I don't understand any of this.''
Suzanne handed Price a Dixie Double Hex. Price took a long swig and smacked his lips. "Okay, let's try another angle: I've been in that house down the beach for, say, a month. House between-Spilsbury's-is all boarded up for the off-season, nobody home. But here's this person, this presence, you in all your wonderfulness, next to the jetty. We're your closest human contact, and we never see you, not even once by chance. You don't even stop by to make neighborly introductions, borrow a cup of whatever. That's cool; privacy is a precious thing. But now I'm curious. So I surveilled you out. Watched you do target practice, watched you walk your dog. It gave me an excuse to get all camouflaged and stealth around on the beach. Your routine is completely locked, man, and I began to wonder what you were up to, what you were about. So Michelle and I waited until you went to get supplies at the store, and came a little closer. First thing we see is a house crammed to the rafters with security, more than a goddamn bank. So I took a look at your mail, which comes like clockwork every Thursday. You scoop it up when you toddle out of your fortress to dump the trash, so I had a window of about an hour between the time the mail got to the box, versus when it got to you. Your bank statements indicate that you are comfortably well-off, but not rich; in fact, you're looking for some new gig. But it turns out your happy hubby didn't die. He left you."
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