by Frank Sibila
“Of course you haven’t.” She took another miniscule sip. “But you were not saying that even before you sat down. If all you wanted to do was not say something, you didn’t have to talk to me in the first place. What else did you interrupt the last day of my marriage to not say?”
Frank found himself floundering. There was solid land on the horizon, and he knew exactly what to do once he got there, but until then the water was way over his head, and treacherous rip currents were tugging him farther beneath the waves. Then he said, “Did you know that George ran into serious trouble in Vegas?”
“I thought he might.”
“Keith has admitted to knowing about it. He also said that it wasn’t his idea. Was it yours? Did you give Keith’s friend her special instructions?”
“Of course I did,” Mrs. Yorick said. “I wasn’t going to have anything to do with Keith until he demonstrated that George could be tempted. But once he did, I was so mad I took advantage. I specified that she not do anything permanent. Just embarrassing. Leave him in a position so mortifying that it would teach him a lesson. Except that I expected George to throw himself on my mercy and apologize for what he’d done. I would have forgiven him if he had. I didn’t think that he’d call you.”
Frank floundered again, but Destinii swooped in and saved him. She inquired, “Mrs. Yorick, do you love your husband?”
Beth stared at her. “What the hell do you care? Aren’t you on the other side?”
“Our side may be a little harder to define than you think. There are circumstances we can’t talk about. Do you love your husband?”
Beth Yorick considered that for a long time. “My husband,” she said at long last, “has a lifetime supply of only four jokes, none of which he tells well and all of which he can’t remember ever telling me before. He snores like a fire alarm. He doesn’t know the difference between a golden retriever and a German shepherd, even with the color there to clue him in. He loves movies, but needs them explained to him, because he can’t keep the characters straight. He eats cold SpaghettiOs®. He has the worst singing voice you’ve ever heard, and can’t remember lyrics on top of that, but still insists on filling our car trips with the collected works of Creedence Clearwater Revival. He’s never less than fifteen minutes late and has only remembered our anniversary twice in the last five years. He actually owns a pair of green pants and has not yet recognized that every time he puts them on, I end up spilling the juice in his lap so he has to get changed before heading out to work. Don’t even get me started on his taste in ties; it’s like a fresh biblical plague. He doesn’t say no; he says nopers. Instead of yes, it’s yepperoonie. He even has an annoying way to say maybe. He sings it. He’s not half bad at harmonica but has been threatening to take up other instruments. He—”
Destinii translated for Frank’s benefit. “She loves him.” Then, to Beth Yorick: “And Keith Custer?”
Beth Yorick was still reeling from the momentum of a rant arrested just as it was getting good. “What about him? What’s he got to do with this?”
“Is it true love?”
Mrs. Yorick stared at her for a full five seconds before the first of the noises escaped her mouth. They were not happy noises. They were not sobs, either, but only a madman would have mistaken them for laughter.
“It’s not true love,” Destinii translated. “Not with Keith. It’s not even honest lust. It’s just saying yes to a convenient invitation that came along at just the right time for an angry woman who knew her husband wanted to betray her.”
Beth Yorick regained control of herself. “Yeah. Keith Custer. That’s a good one.”
“You don’t even like him,” Frank said.
“Of course not! Have you even seen the man? Or even spoken to him for five minutes? And again, why the hell would you care? You still haven’t told me what you want.”
A waitress started to walk over. Destinii warned her away with a gesture and confirmed the warning with a second one when the waitress pointed to herself in confusion. Then Destinii turned to Frank, allowing him his moment.
He took a deep breath, holding it for several seconds out of the vain hope that the right words would arrive on wings of angels. That didn’t happen, and so he ended up expelling everything in one giant sigh that left him a little breathless as he launched into the closest approximation, the very best words he could find. “Mrs. Yorick. I’m not a marriage counselor. I don’t know what brought your relationship to this moment, and I don’t have the magic solution to fix it even if it was up to me to help you. But I need you to understand this much. However angry you may be at George, however much you think it’s over between you two … you’re still going to need to wait a few days to see how this plays out.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”
“Why?—Be forewarned. If you even think of saying you’d have to kill me, I’m out of here.”
He grinned despite himself. “I wasn’t going to.”
“Then why? Is it privileged?”
“Something like that.”
“Can you give me even the slightest clue?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Yorick. I will not and cannot reduce this situation to a sudoku. But there are special circumstances. You might be cashing in your stock before it pays off.”
“I’m supposed to trust you. A guy who lies for a living.”
And then, all of a sudden, after all the fumfuh-ing confusion, all the awkward maneuvering in this the most awkward of conversations, there it was: the gleaming path from here to Oz, shining so bright that only a blind man could have failed to take it. “Yes. And it’s because I lie for a living that you need to trust me.”
“In what alternate universe does that make sense?”
“I’ve made a business out of lying. I’m famous for it. Which means that if I were interested in lying to you, I wouldn’t have all that much trouble making something up. I’d be spinning a line of bullshit so transcendent that you could cover it with whipped cream and sell it in diners from here to Albuquerque. I’d provide you with documentation and incidental witnesses and leave you with your suspicions intact but no loose threads to tug on. I’d be as creative and complicated as I felt like being, and I wouldn’t have to worry about somebody else’s ability to carry the ball, because there are no other clumsier liars here to give the game away. It would just be me, taking it wherever I needed it to be. But you’ll notice that I’m not doing anything like that in this particular case. I’m not making anything up. I’m not asking you to believe anything, and I’m not backing up my story with one iota of documentation, either verifiable or forged. I’m offering you a lame, half-assed, vague assurance from a complete stranger you already know to be untrustworthy telling you with no small degree of desperation that you need to believe him and wait until you know the whole story. Let me ask you this. If there weren’t something to this, don’t you think I’d do better?”
She stared at him for the longest time, her gaze frank and unblinking, taking him apart all the way down to the cellular level. “So your bullshit is that if I see through your bullshit it must not be bullshit.”
“Yes.”
“That’s pretty spectacular bullshit.”
“And thus,” he said fearlessly, “not bullshit. Yes.”
She sat silently for several additional seconds, weighing that.
And then, coming to a decision, she grabbed her handbag and left the booth without giving Keith or Destinii so much as an over-the-shoulder glance.
Destinii was bleak. “That went well.”
Frank, on the other hand, felt something in that moment. Telepathy would have been overstating the case. But there had been a moment of perfect communication, of his brain wired into Mrs. Yorick’s, his spirit plugged into hers and hers striding knee-deep in the muck she would perceive as his. For that instant they
had been Siamese twins, joined at the medulla. It was not the two-hearts-beating-as-one nonsense that country songs and bad Broadway musicals teach audiences to accept as the definition of true love, and that Frank had never felt even when he’d been in love. It was something deeper, rarer, something he might never have known had he not already experienced a taste of it during the time he’d spent with Monica Custer: the truly cosmic connection between the Bullshitter and She Who Would Not Be Bullshitted. It was glorious, and it gave him a feeling of certainty that would sustain him in the challenging days ahead. He said, “Yes, it did.”
Destinii, whose talents at bullshit were second only to his, had not shared the moment of connection, and so she said, “What? Were we just present at the same conversation? Didn’t you just see that look on her face? You lost, boss. She’s going right back to Keith Custer to reenact every single position in the Kama Sutra.”
Frank was beatific. His face seemed to shine as if illuminated by a shaft of light from Heaven. “No, she’s not. It went well. Wait for it, and you’ll see.”
Destinii was still concocting a reply when the bar interior lightened almost imperceptibly. Frank’s back was to the door, a position as unwise for men who have offended women as it has historically been for mobsters eating pasta dinners in Little Italy. But he did not have to turn around to know that the sudden incursion of daylight was the door of the bar swinging open to admit a furious, red-faced Beth Yorick. Nor did he need to go through the actual experience to know what was happening entire seconds before she reached the booth, grabbed her wine glass, and tossed the drink in his face. The actual moment of being christened today’s designated bastard was just confirmation that everything he’d already sensed was true. He didn’t react at all, not even to the gasps and applause of the handful of other bar patrons, as she stormed back out the door and into the late-afternoon pedestrian traffic.
He dabbed at his dripping face with a paper napkin.
Destinii, who had watched the entire exchange with the dispassion of a primate researcher studying the social interaction of gibbons, could only blink three or four times before the obvious conclusion occurred to her as well. “Daaaaaaannnnng. You’re right. It went well.”
“Told ya,” said Frank.
TEN
ABOUT FIFTY YEARS AGO, a man named Vernon Jasper had a great dream.
Lots of people have great dreams. Some want to paint frescoes on cathedral ceilings. Others want to write the definitive study of the monarch butterfly’s migration patterns. Still others wish to be the first to stand on the summits of previously inaccessible mountains, with not too many of their native guides buried in avalanches on the way up and bragging rights they can enjoy once their skin recovers from the frostbite and their brains from the oxygen starvation. These dreams drive them, define them, render them titans who suffer and strive and every once in a while get their names written in the history books.
Vern Jasper was a special case. He was not a very smart man, nor was he a very brave or articulate one. He had a face like a basset hound and a speaking style that produced less than ten words a minute, most of which were separated by umms. While he lived, most of his neighbors considered him a mumbling inbred idiot, and they were not too far off. When he died, they would not have been surprised to wander into that strange fenced-in area in his backyard and find, for instance, the remains of fifty missing hitchhikers. Instead they found a peculiar monument, the remnants of Vern Jasper’s own personal lifelong dedication to greatness.
Vern Jasper had spent the decades of his life building a furnished three-room house out of rubber bands. He had braided them together, tightened them until they achieved a consistency close to that of wood planking, and then layered them into four walls, a roof, a sofa, and something that resembled a TVset that would have achieved orbit had it ever been dropped from a height. He’d even managed the impossible, creating a sloped roof and a chimney that somehow managed to stand up by itself, even after scientists and architects declared that there was no way a real house built of this material could possibly achieve this feat without serious revisions to the laws of gravity. The first people to inspect Vern’s creation after he went facedown in the local office supplies store (where he was rumored to have spent many, many tens of thousands of dollars on his chosen building supply over the years) inevitably called experts, who examined the structure, took measurements, performed various arcane calculations, and ultimately announced to a trembling world that Vern would have had to spend upward of five hours a day for most of his adult life just to build it, its furnishings, and the additional rubber-band furnishings that were the only artifacts of Vernon’s own house.
The natural fallout of all of this was the verdict that old Vern had been even crazier than anybody had ever thought he was. As one neighbor put it, his head was full of nothing but broken bottles. But it was a special brand of crazy that had everybody living within a hundred miles piling into their cars and joining the pilgrimage just to see the damned thing. By the end of a week, the mayor of Vern’s town had ordered his police chief to post a twenty-four-hour guard to stop the parade of curiosity-seekers from walking off with Vern’s rubber-band kitchen table or his rubber-band bedroom set or his rubber-band ottoman. By the end of another week, Vern’s estate, such as it was, had been billed for the cost of all this protection and the house passed into the hands of the municipality, which originally considered tearing it down but then saw the commercial promise inherent in an artifact left behind by somebody whose mind had, you should only forgive the expression, snapped.
They bought the land and put up a gift shop and a parking lot and a fence tall enough to hide sight of the remarkable artifact from uninvested eyes. They printed up postcards and T-shirts and built snow globes and hired tour guides and informed the travel guides. In short, Vernon’s house joined the world’s biggest ball of string and the world’s biggest office chair and the hotel shaped like an elephant and the giant shoe and the three-story thumbtack and the thimble big enough for a family of twelve as popular American tourist attractions, the sort that entire families drive hundreds of miles to pay admission to see, only to then drive hundreds of miles away wondering why. It never became a major must-see, never made anybody rich. In fact, it became a little run-down as word got out that Vernon’s great accomplishment could not avoid its ultimate status as depressing letdown, but it remained in business, collecting just enough in admissions over the course of a given year to keep it open as long as nobody ever wasted money doing something like renovating the restrooms.
Perhaps predictably, George Yorick loved it.
Early in the morning, one day after the woman who’d tracked him and Felicia to the diner assumed control of his journey’s speed and trajectory, he stood before Vern’s monument, beaming enthusiasm from every orifice, snapping shot after shot from the disposable camera he’d purchased from the gift shop on the way in. “Do you believe this?” he kept saying. “I mean, can you honestly believe this?”
Felicia, standing next to him in cutoff jeans, ankle-strap wedges, big brown sunglasses, and a pink T-shirt bearing the word VIXEN in spangles, kept tilting her head from one side to the other, squinting as if expecting a hidden Magic Eye image to appear and render the sight at least nominally comprehensible. “It’s a first all right.”
“It’s like most great accomplishments,” Yorick said. “You look at most of the great structures of our time, from the Panama Canal and Golden Gate Bridge to the Petronas Towers, and you find that they were surrounded by naysayers: the sadly limited, imagination-starved people who have always stood in the way of the innovators since the beginning of time. There have always been people saying no, it can’t be done. Or no, it shouldn’t be done. And a guy like this Vern Jasper, he stands right up and places his hands on his hips and says, well then, we’ll just see about that. It’s inspiring, in a way.”
Felicia raised her sunglasses. “What way is that?
”
Anastasia, who flanked Yorick on the other side, was dressed in full-length jeans that were bought with multiple parallel gashes along both thighs, evidently designed to foster the impression that she’d either spent the morning hip-deep in a grain thresher or just won a life-or-death battle against Wolverine of the X-Men. Her blouse bore no spangled message like VIXEN but managed to get the message across nonverbally. She tossed a single popcorn kernel in between her lips and said, “Naaaaah, I know what he’s saying. I just have trouble believing that it fits your thesis.”
“Why’s that?” (This from Yorick, who stood between these two striking women in a Hawaiian shirt and knee-length shorts that advertised the unfortunate geography of his knees. He was a pretty intense tourist attraction all by himself, having caused more than one neck to pop on this extended visit as onlookers unfortunate enough to capture him in their line of vision were drawn, irrevocably, to the mystery of what he was doing with the two striking women.)
Anastasia popped another kernel into her mouth. “Nobody knew the poor crazy son of a bitch was doing anything. They didn’t discover this shit until after he died. Nobody ever told him he was nuts or that it was impossible or that he really needed to get himself some shock treatment. They just found out what he was up to after the fact, said whoa, and started charging admission.”
Yorick was crestfallen. “Well, it’s still pretty impressive.”
“Definitely worth what I’m being paid to see it,” Felicia agreed.
George Urich, who had just caught the end of the conversation after returning from the gift shop with a Dr Pepper, took a deep sip and remarked, as he’d been remarking all along, “You know, I still don’t understand any of this.”
Monica Custer, who had begged off the glories of Vern Jasper’s masterwork so she could stay in the car and converse with her allegedly mysterious boss, hated her wig. It itched. She didn’t see how it fooled anybody but assumed that as long as there existed people capable of being fooled, it was her lot to drive through the desert wearing a mop on her head.