I got out of bed and called Iris.
Not because of the erection. I don’t know about you, but in my experience morning erections, especially when you wake up alone, rarely constitute the feeling of sexual arousal. First thing registering in my emphatic mind is usually a concern regarding the time my penis has had to strain against the binds of underwear standing in the way of its desire to recline on my stomach. After that I get up and walk to the bathroom, trying to figure out a way to urinate without getting into yoga position. Unsuccessfully. It was on my way to the john that I decided to call Iris. Not because of the hard-on. I just thought, “Whatta hell.”
Dialing the number I noted the time: 9.23 AM. It was only then that I realized it was the morning of the next day. My nap lasted about twenty hours.
“Hello?” a sleepy male voice said. My monitor slipped into a sunset-over-ocean wallpaper.
“Hi… Is Iris there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could you please check and call her to the phone if she is?”
“Yeah, why not. Iris! Are you home? Phone!”
I waited a few minutes. There was a noise like bones cracking, then her voice.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” I said. “It’s Luke. You want to have breakfast? With me?” There was the tiniest of pauses. Probably long enough for her to think, “Whatta hell.”
“Sure. I’m hungry. Where do you want to eat?”
“Well… With all the attention I’ve been getting lately, I thought to stay in.”
“Do you have food?”
“No. No, I don’t. And I can’t really cook. But I can order.”
“Chinese?”
“If that’s what you prefer.”
“Hunan shrimp.”
“Done. When should I pick you up?”
“Just give me the address.”
I did.
“See you in a few,” she said. “Oh, and get a side order of pot-stickers.”
“Anything to drink?”
“Water.”
“Got it.”
She disconnected. I took a shower, put on a new pair of boxers and went to the study. “Important! Call Paul!” was flashing on the monitor.
“That was important yesterday,” I said. “Today Iris is coming for breakfast. Call Paul Haugen.”
The telephone would not. Paul’s number was not in the memory. I knew I had dialed it manually only a few days earlier, remembering it somehow after all those years, but today I hadn’t a clue. Thankfully, I located Paul’s resume, of all things, in the old files somewhere in the dusty basement of my computer. I input the information into the phonebook, saved it and said again, “Call Paul.”
Several seconds later Paul’s cheeky face under a mess of blond hair appeared on the screen. Contact lenses: one black, one green. (His favorite book had always been “Master and Margarita.” He’d even claimed he could understand the humor.) Hadn’t changed a pimple. But Paul wasn’t home. The face was a recorded message.
“Hello, you. I am either not home or it’s my fuck-the-phone day. Leave a message and maybe I’ll call you back.”
I left him a message and hung up. Fuck the phone day, I thought. That reminded me that I didn’t have a cell phone. Immediately, I dialed Jimbo. Christie picked up.
“Luke! We’re so glad you’re all right!” She positively beamed with fakeness. She hated my guts and she knew that I knew it. But I could tell she was getting better at it. I offered her my most charming smile.
“Hi, baby. I missed you the most, you know. You look ravishing as always. Is Jim around?”
“Let me check.” She put me on a brief hold. That sunset filled the screen again. If the picture was made in the U. S., it has to be Pacific, I thought idly as I waited. Unless, of course, it was shot from the west coast of Florida. Or Cuba, which, for all intends and purposes counted as U.S., even if they still had their own government there. Christie returned. “Mr. Cornwell is ready for you, Luke. It was nice seeing you again.”
“I am going to come visit you in person soon, don’t you worry.”
“We can’t wait.” She patched me through, lipstick smile lingering on the display surface like Cheshire Cat’s.
Jimbo tried to be professionalism incarnate in his blue suit and red tie and platinum watch and cufflinks, but it’s kind of hard to do when it seems like you don’t have enough skin on your face. He began to recite a network memo he’d memorized for the occasion, but I cut him off.
“Jim,” I said. “I need a cell. I lost mine somewhere.”
“Of course, of course. I’ll have it delivered to you.” He typed something with one finger.
“So who’s been covering for me?”
“No one, really. The network brings a new random star for a guest appearance every day.”
“No shit. Anyone people would recognize?”
“You would be surprised how many half-faded has-beens are trying to cash in on the attention our show has been getting these last few days. The network is saving a bunch on paychecks. Some of these guys are willing to pay us just to host the show.”
“That’s why the network is ‘prepared to consider any vacation requests,’ huh? But what about the ratings?”
“Like I said, with your search going national, the ratings are off the scale no matter who’s in the armchair. They are so high the execs aren’t certain we could do any better even if you came back.”
“Hey, wait a minute. Is my job in question here? You know this buzz is going to die down in a week.”
“Oh, no, old sport. I agree. Now that you’re… you know…”
“What? Innocent?”
“No, but yes, to them. You know what I mean. They will definitely want you now, but…”
“But?”
“Speaking of cells, the execs want to first make sure your… medication trouble resolves.”
“Medication trouble? What the hell kind of business of theirs is it? And what cells have to do with it, anyway?”
“You do know about the new law enforcement agency, right? So the mention of cells was sort of a joke.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“The ‘Rexes.’ They already got a nickname for them. The Rx-cops. Have your kidnapper tortured you with TV cold turkey? They just gave it a go, but these folks are already working like they’ve been doing it for years. Like they’ve been lying in wait.”
“I think I am more confused now that you explained it to me.”
“It’s like the police that are going to be investigating all crimes committed or allegedly committed… how should I put it… under the lack of influence of drugs?” He chuckled amiably and his third chin trembled. “Rx-cops.”
I just stared. My brain was working double time, but this was turning out to be a tougher nut to crack than some of old Dr. Young’s musings. The prescription police?
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. How did they manage to get it through the Parliament?” Jimbo would have puckered his face if he could; I heard it in his voice.
“Get it through the Parliament?” he echoed absently. “How should I know? What’s the normal way? I guess they got the majority of the votes, or something.” Which, of course, was the repetition or my question rephrased, but he didn’t see it, and I was pretty sure he had no better answer for me, so I let it go.
“Right,” I said. “But what does it have to do with me? The news said I was innocent, right? So it must be true. I didn’t commit anything under the lack of influence.”
He lowered his voice and brought his face closer. “Luke, old sport, you dodged the draft.”
Oh yeah, there was that. To be honest, I had completely forgotten about my unpatriotic ways. I nodded and he leaned back in his chair, satisfied.
“Allegedly dodged the draft,” I corrected him feebly. He raised both hands in the sign of victorious surrender.
“And by the way,” I added. “I thought you were taking care of that mistake
n draft notice.”
“We could have done something before… But now that—”
“I see.” I knew what he meant. The execs didn’t want to mess with the new law enforcement agency. Nor they wanted to mess with me until the case of “avoiding the draft under the lack of influence of antidepressant medication” got resolved. I needed a real lawyer. I needed Larry.
I hung up on Jimbo, promising much to his chagrin to stop by and say hi to everybody.
I spent some time in thought there at the desk in my boxers. Larry could wait. In light of recent events that Rex-cop business sounded positively silly. Iris was coming, and I still hadn’t ordered the food. So I called Jeffrey and took care of that. I also described Iris to him.
Food arrived in twenty minutes. A Chinese (I presumed) lady, who looked like she was in her late thirties, which meant she must have been over fifty, delivered a plastic bag full of white paper buckets and packages of condiments to my door. The containers reminded me of my college days. Back then we ate Chinese takeout from a closet-size place on Church around five times a week. In over a decade that had passed since, the containers and packages of soy sauce and sweet and sour sauce remained exactly the same. It must have been the last thing untouched by progress.
I paid cash and took the food to the living room, despite the TV. I was going to switch to the cartoons, but remembering what Jimbo had told me, kept the news on. Sure enough, in less than a minute the shapely, pouty Vitalina confirmed Jimbo’s report. I, meanwhile, tore the plastic bag and arranged the containers in tallest-to-shortest order on the magazine table. Then I placed the red, yellow and brown packages in a circle around them and a set of plastic silverware on a napkin on either side. Pleased, I sat back in the sofa and gave myself over to Vitalina and a certain Frank Polokakis, “our political analyst from the Capitol Hill.”
Iris showed up some fifteen minutes later. The fervent Polokakis was just about to analyze me into a spitting episode. I had to wipe the saliva from the corner of my mouth, before Iris thought I was drooling. And I could have been drooling just as well.
She wore the same black cashmere jacket, but under it were a tight-fitting red wool v-neck sweater and a short loose red skirt. Calf-high black leather boots finished the ensemble.
“Hi, Luke,” she said as I, with my mouth open, turned sideways, motioning for her to proceed to the living room. She handed me the jacket.
“You look…” I started — she turned to me, face mischievously expectant — and failed to finish.
“Thanks.” She smiled and went to the living room. I stared first at her back then after her, until I heard “Are we going to eat or play Trivial Pursuit?”
Hurriedly, I stuffed the coat in the closet.
“That’s not a game,” I replied when I caught up. “That’s a table for two. You want wine, or really just water?”
“Wine is fine, if it’s red.”
“It’s red.” I went to the rack and slid out a bottle of Pinot and two glasses.
“I see you’re watching the…”
“Have you heard about it?”
“Yeah, last night. You realize, of course, that in five years at the most, not taking a pill as prescribed will itself be a crime.”
“Probably sooner, seeing how quickly they started.”
She nodded. I poured the wine. She picked up her glass and turned towards me. I raised my own glass.
“Have they come visit you yet?”
“Who?”
“The Rexes.”
“Why would…?” I sighed. “No, but I think they will pretty soon. My bosses seem to think so, anyway.”
“Vacation, then?”
“Or medical leave.”
“Well, you get paid for doing nothing.”
“But less than I got paid for doing nothing before.”
She smiled, took a sip and started opening the containers.
We drank wine and ate shrimp and rice and scallops with sand in them, and watched the news. Aside from the Parliament’s latest tremendous display of support, there was a man who opened fire at an office in Atlanta, shooting five coworkers dead and wounding three, twenty inches of snow in Rome, tension along the Chinese-Indian border, a fire on the West Side that killed four people including two children, a small plane crashed two miles from a suburban airport, a late tropical storm brewing in the Caribbean, something about a bubble under Yellowstone that was long overdue, clouds in Chicago, with chances of rain, snow, hale and sunshine, a town of Hajim, liberated by our troops in the Middle East with minimal casualties, Bird Flu confirmed in Oslo, the Support-The-Troops holiday celebrations attracting the biggest number of patriots yet across the United States, including a dozen of top-listed pop-divas touring together through the military bases and camps, President would fly on official business to Vatican in two days or as soon as the airport is cleared of snow, and, at some point, there was a modest, presumably final note regarding yours truly. Of course, yours truly also starred in a couple of commercials, a healthy dose of which provided much needed breaks between the stories.
Despite that digital assault on sanity, I managed to keep up my upbeat attitude with the help of frequent glances at Iris’s legs. Iris appeared completely immune to the crap being poured into the living room through the 80-inch-wide window and proceeded to eat and giggle and point and shake her head, as though she was watching a comedy. She even made fun of my hair in the BOACC ad. As I conceded, with a mockingly hurt grimace, that my hair indeed looked like Gary Cody’s in “Born Free,” I wondered excitedly if she was nervous.
I knew I was. Like a homeless beagle in Seoul. Not at all fitting a man of my experience and, shall we say, mileage.
After breakfast we took our wine and I, nervously, offered to give her a tour of the place, strategically placing the bedroom to be the last waypoint of the itinerary. We looked out on the lake from the balcony, walked cautiously by the kitchen, visited the study and the fake Munch, the skill of whose forger she vigorously complimented, then finally, after I almost shoved her in and out of the bathroom, we reached the boudoir.
“This is it,” I said with a grand round gesture and leaned on the doorframe to try and appear nonchalant. The trouble was, I didn’t know what else to say or do. I opened my mouth and closed it. Opened it again, and this time she saw me closing it. I was pretty sure by then my face was becoming the color of the wine we’d drunk. For once, Iris dispelled my embarrassment instead of causing it.
She grinned and came close and said my silliness was cute. Then she rose to her tiptoes and kissed me. Off went the orange blanket, settling like a parachute over our clothes landing on the floor.
Later we lay in bed and neither of us was nervous anymore. We looked out of the window at the steel clouds pierced by sunbeams that looked like traces of God’s arrows. I placed my hand on her lower back.
“Iris?”
“Hmm?”
“Who are you, Iris?”
“I am a time traveler from the past.”
“From the past?”
“The past is the easiest to be a time traveler from.”
“Not really. If they invented a time machine in the past, how come we don’t have it now?”
“You don’t know a thing about what we do and do not have.”
“Maybe you have a point there. But if I was a time traveler, I would be from the future.”
“The future?”
“Well, there are really two choices. You can’t very well be a time traveler from the present.”
“Sure you can.”
She lifted her head and stared down at me; her hair, coal-black, a mess around her Asiatic-shaped, aquamarine eyes.
“I can’t believe you’d rather be from the future, though. You have a chance to use a time machine and you use it to travel to the past?”
“What’s wrong with the past?”
“It already happened. You would waste a chance of a lifetime to see something that’s already happened?”
> I looked out of the window again. The clouds have regrouped, united and patched up the wounds. Maybe even forgotten about them already. Maybe I could get there before a certain thing happened. Leaving the thought a thought I have suddenly located another reason, not a fake one, but a more conversational truth it seemed to me.
“I am just not too sure about the future, you know?”
She didn’t answer. I squinted at her. She was looking back, smiling. Such and innocent, girlie smile she had.
“You think he’s right,” I stated accusingly.
“I don’t think he’s lying.”
“He might be crazy.”
“Wouldn’t necessarily make him wrong.”
“But it doesn’t make sense.”
“Wouldn’t necessarily make it wrong.”
“Can’t we talk about time machines instead?”
“We are.”
“A time traveler from present, you mean?” She just grinned, pushed away and got out of bed.
“Good thing you showed me the bathroom,” she dropped casually over her shoulder. I snickered.
“What do you suggest I do?” I called after her. I heard the water running, and the bathroom door closed. Falling back onto the pillow, I closed my eyes and imagined her there, naked, in front of the mirror wall, splashing freezing water over her face. Her hair got stuck to her cheeks; her lips moved soundlessly, but I read the single word they constructed easily.
“Survive.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Iris went home soon after the shower, declining my offer to move in, but giggling as she did. As I closed the door behind her and stood in the hallway, I suddenly grinned, warm despite being stark naked. Warm and at home I felt, for the first time in at least four months, but likely in a lot longer. Four months of lonely dread and four days of horror had been dispelled by just three hours spent with her. Those hours did more to make me believe that I could, in fact, go back to my normal life, than all the news coverage in the world. They also made me believe it was possible to anticipate something beautiful after making love rather than before it. I could have sworn even Jennifer never roused such feelings in me.
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