by Drew Magary
“Well, not anymore!”
“Aren’t you gonna go back to school? Any school?”
“Ohhhh, maybe. I dunno. There’s a certain freedom in having everyone give up on you. I feel more productive than I’ve ever been. Plus I have to mind our burgeoning kebab empire.” Asmi shook her head in sorrow. “What? What’s wrong?”
“My dad put most of the money into a loan for storefront, and then a bunch of dickheads came and burned it down.”
“Ruffians!” Bamert cried, stomping his foot on the floor. “Who were these men?”
“They all had the Conquistador logo on their shirts,” Anna told him.
“Ahhhh,” said Bamert. He took a large handful of tortilla chips, pulverized them over his bowl of chili, and engulfed a heaping spoonful of the mashup. “Conquistadors. Such proud boys. Real group of winners there. What was that principle they believed in? Accelerated Darwinism?”
Anna had done her homework on Conquistadors, scrolling through their endless subdomain in the few quiet moments when Druskin wasn’t smacking her upside the head. Indeed, they believed teleportation was a gift from God and a ticket back to the age of colonial rule. K15 himself had written a very long, boring post about Accelerated Darwinism, which theorized that porting made conflict easier than ever before. This was posited as a welcome development because whoever asserted their “rightful dominion” in this Great Port War would become the prevailing species indefinitely thereafter. It was not hard to sort out which group of people K15 preferred assert themselves.
Bamert took a cigar from his robe pocket and jammed it in his greasy mouth.
“Don’t do that,” Anna told him.
“What?”
“Smoke that. It’s disgusting.”
“Excuse me, you are in my home. Furthermore, you are in the great Commonwealth of Virginuhhh, which has no regulations against smoking tobacco indoors, nor any other regulations of any kind!”
“Will you stop being on for five goddamn seconds?”
He slumped in his chair and put the cigar back in his pocket, the drooly end of it seeping through the fine satin. A delivery boy ported into the hall, carrying a sack of groceries.
“Did someone order a grocery delivery?”
“I did,” said Bamert. “Just put it in the kitchen.”
The boy did as instructed and walked with his paper bag down the hall. Bamert raised his Solo cup to the girls before knocking back a huge swig.
“Bamert,” said Anna. “You have to stop drinking.”
“I can’t, Anna Huff. It’s such a fantastic sickness. It’s everything to me, always. People call addiction a battle but I don’t recall this ever being much of a battle. When I chase this particular dragon, I always catch it. Now what other friend is as reliable?”
“I am.”
“You shouldn’t be. You’re free from my bullshit now, don’t you know that? Tell me you didn’t enjoy a nice quiet month at Druskin without me. I would have.” He stood up and tended to the fire, mindlessly stirring the big hefty cauldron. Then he turned around and looked at Asmi. His eyes held nothing but dark thoughts.
“Your friend really is beautiful,” he said to Anna.
“Thank you,” said Asmi. She was being polite. The whole room had grown uncomfortable.
“I couldn’t say such things to you on campus, Asmi. But seeing you now ignites something within me.” He stirred the pot more vigorously, gripping the handle until his hand could nearly bend the wood. “I feel besotted. Is that the British term for it?”
“Stop that,” Anna said. “This isn’t you.”
“I told you I would disappoint you,” said Bamert. “I told you that the first night we met. The night you fell in love with Lara Kirsch.”
“What?” Asmi said.
“Bamert.”
“What? You said yourself that you hate secrets. Allow these truths to be my Christmas gift to you. You had the hots for your old roommate. I have the hots for your new roommate. There. Liberation. Tell me you don’t feel better about everything.”
“This was a mistake,” Anna told him. “You’re drunk and you need help.”
“I don’t need help I need LOVE, god dammit!”
He threw the wooden spoon into the fireplace. It banged against the grate and sent embers flying onto the floor, coming into dangerous contact with the booze stains in the carpet fibers. Anna and Asmi took a step back as Bamert sank to his knees and fell to the carpet. He was crying: a sick, wet, drunken lump convulsing on the rug.
“No one in this house understands me,” he said softly. “Love comes from people wanting to understand you, and no one in my family has ever bothered to try. I wish I was anyone but who I am.”
Anna approached him cautiously and put her hand on his back. He reached around and gripped her gently with own soot-covered paw. Then he looked up, nascent tears bulging from the bottom of his eyelids.
“I’m so sorry. To you both. It seems the only comfort I’m capable of offering comes from Edgar’s liquor cabinet.”
“It’s all right,” Anna said. “I mean, it’s not all right. You’re always so damn dramatic.”
“That I am.”
“Well it’s no way to run a kebab business, you shit,” Asmi said.
He snorted out a laugh. That was how a good breakdown always went for Bamert: a long wash of despair and sobbing until one sharp puncture of a laugh reset everything. Those were always the best laughs. Earned laughs.
“Oh, so that’s it?” Bamert asked them, sitting up on his heels. “We’re right back to shit-giving mode?”
“You’re lucky we are,” said Asmi. “You boys. All you have to do is be sweet once and people will forgive you for anything.”
“I fear I’ve ruined what little rapport I had managed to establish between us, fair Asmi.”
“You haven’t. But you’re not lean. And I fancy my boys lean. Not skinny, but lean.”
“I shall endeavor to fit that description one day.”
“You wanted love, right Bamert?” Anna asked him.
“I do,” he said.
“Then here it is: Get it together. Stop drinking. Go back to school.”
“Which one?” he asked Anna.
“What am I, your guidance counselor?”
“I know that’s a rhetorical question, but the answer is yes, at least in an unofficial capacity.” He crawled over to the banquette and dragged himself onto its cold, studded leather. “Look man, you guys are gonna head back to Druskin and then I’ll be alone again. Edgar, bless his heart, never really taught me how to cope with that. He just left me here. May as well have chucked me in a river and told me to swim.”
“Don’t go on with the self-pity again,” Asmi said. “You made yourself a good friend at Druskin, right?”
“The best.” Bamert said, holding his cup up to toast Anna.
“Well then, I doubt you’re as hopeless as you prattle on about.”
“Maybe not.”
“I’ll be your friend too, you know, if you tell me more about Anna fancying Lara Kirsch.”
“No no, I think maybe I’ve embarrassed her enough today.”
They both looked at Anna and expected her to spit out a morbid laugh, but she didn’t. She was staring at the cauldron in the fireplace, watching it bubble and hiss. It was exhausting, carrying all this. Even in the most relaxing times—joyously tossing gutter balls in an empty bowling alley, sleeping close with her mom on a wonderfully chilly Christmas Eve, eating tamales on a pristine, radiant coast—she felt weighted down by all the dark things. Soon she would have to go back to Druskin and pretend to be a normal student, all while watching Dean Vick saunter around the quad a free man and knowing that the two most powerful people on the planet could snuff her out any time they felt like it. This was what Emilia Kirsch demanded she do, and now she was falling in line. The fucking worst. Does everyone else carry this much shit with them everywhere they go? How do they exist? Is everyone who walks around looking normal all
day really just a flaming wreck like you?
“Are you okay?” Asmi asked.
“Bamert’s right,” Anna told her. “I’ll feel better if I tell you everything.” So she did. She told them about Vick’s basement, the night Sarah died, the bartender in Vietnam, Jason Kirsch, K15, and the night out on the dock with Lara and Emilia. She emptied out her mind in full.
“This is villainy,” Bamert said of Vick. “Pure villainy.”
“You’re putting me on about Jason Kirsch, right?” asked Asmi.
Anna shook her head.
“You got any proof of this?”
“Um…” That um again.
“Well, you need bloody proof!” Asmi shouted.
“For what?” Anna asked her.
“To bring him down! To bring them all down!”
“Someone might have proof.”
“Who?”
“It’s a long story.”
Asmi put her hands on her hips. “Who? Spill it, dickhead.”
“Lara might have it,” Anna confessed.
“LARA?” the other two cried.
“She was gonna go through the confidential records and find Jason’s porting history.”
“What the devil makes you think she’ll do fuck all for you after the way she fucked you over on that dock?” Asmi asked.
“Nothing,” Anna said. “She keeps texting me but I haven’t answered back. Something about Ciaran Stokes.”
“Fuck Ciaran Stokes. He’s a raw cunt, that one!”
Bamert stood up. He was about to ride a new wave. “If I may, I think you’re being too harsh on Anna here, Asmi.”
“I’m telling her what she needs to hear.”
“People always use that excuse to justify being uncouth. And you’re not the uncouth sort. You’re too lovely for such things, are you not?”
“Careful, boy,” Asmi warned him.
“Do I look reckless right now?”
“Quite.”
“I promise you that my focus is on Anna here, who has all the bravery of a great mother elephant.”
Wrong metaphor to use there, Bamert.
“Lara claims she has proof,” Bamert continued. “And Anna still loves her.”
“No I don’t,” Anna protested.
“Oh, please. Here is something you don’t need to hear but will want to: the Kirsches have forced you into timidity. They want you to be common and polite and incurious. But that’s not you, Anna Huff. Anna Huff, you are a rude woman, are you not?”
“I mean, I dunno if I can beat Asmi in that department,” said Anna.
“I’m not talking about huffing glue and saying dickhead this and dickhead that, although I find all of that impossibly charming. I’m talking about a rudeness of the soul. I’m talking about a soul that demands truth, no matter whom it may discomfit. That’s you. And you won’t find that truth if you capitulate and become yet another Druskin goody-goody. There is the unfortunate possibility that Lara Kirsch is more Big Bad Wolf than Red Riding Hood, but she’s offered you the only decent lead you’ve got, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“If she’s baiting you, what’s the worst thing that happens? She breaks a heart that’s already been broken and, she leaves you to mope around Druskin for another year and a half. How far away is that from your present condition?”
“Not very.”
“Not very. But if she’s pure and true, then you’ll get your proof and you’ll have crossed love’s finish line all in one shot! Hope is in love, don’t you see? They can’t be separated. Why not take a chance?”
“Sarah. That’s why. This isn’t what she wanted.”
“She wanted peace for you. Did you not just tell us that? Where is your peace now? Is this the life Sarah Huff would want for her sister?”
Anna wasn’t convinced. At least, not outwardly. “Look, even if I had proof, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. What is proof anymore? They could just deny it and everyone would believe them anyway. All I want is to not know the things I know anymore.”
Asmi turned to Bamert and held her hand out. “Give me that cigar.”
“May I ask what you intend to do with it?” Bamert asked.
“Smoke it, you stupid git.”
He fished the cigar out of his pocket and tossed it over. Asmi rolled the stogie between her fingers before walking over to the fireplace and re-lighting it in the flame, then oh-so-casually took a big puff. A steak dinner puff. It was as natural to her as it would be to an oil baron. She grabbed a bottle of brandy off a nearby coffee table. Bamert’s heart grew at the sight of it.
“This is a nice bottle,” Asmi told them.
“I need everyone sober, please,” said Anna. “For once in this goddamn life.”
“I can’t drink,” Asmi told Anna. “Diabetic, remember?”
“Oh, right. You just huff glue solvents.”
“Exactly. But if I could drink, I’d fancy this brandy. They stabbed my dad, Anna. Six inches to left and he’d be as good as dead. I don’t like these Conquistadors. I don’t like the Kirsches. Maybe they invented porting but they can piss off. I don’t like any fucking bullies. And I don’t accept that we’re too young and inconsequential to do anything about it. D’you understand?”
“Yeah,” said Anna.
“Good. Then there’s work to do. I’ll drink to that in spirit.”
“Hell fucking yeah!” Bamert screamed. “Steal their secrets and then steal the girl, Anna. A stolen girl is sweeter than any other.”
Just then, they heard a loud portclap from down the hall.
“Say,” Bamert asked the girls, “was that the delivery boy? Why’d he take so long?”
They walked out of the parlor. There was black smoke rolling toward them from the kitchen, as methodical and deliberate as the living dead. They could hear the flames rumbling behind the great black veil: growing hungrier as they munched the drywall and cabinets. Then they heard a horrifying squeal as the ceiling of the kitchen caved in and drove the smoke into a frenzied rush.
“We gotta go,” Anna said. She and Asmi ran, praying they knew the way to the front doors. But Bamert quickly ducked back into the parlor to retrieve his PortPhone as the smoke surged past the opening. The two girls had their phones out ready to port, but they already had put some distance between themselves and the smoke that had overcome Bamert and smothered him in choking black ash.
They busted open the double doors and ran out into the frosted gardens. The spreading fire lit up every window, making the house look like some horrible, thirty-eyed demon beast arising from its slumber. The flames gushed out of the roof. Every second waiting for Bamert felt like its own wormhole: a manipulation of spacetime that froze the body whole and kept it suspended in a nether-dimension.
Finally, Bamert threw open the doors and waltzed down the stone steps, his phone in one hand and his precious drink in the other. He was coughing and hacking, black spittle hanging from his nose and beard. He walked right past a shell-shocked Asmi and Anna, then sat down in the snow, breathing heavily and watching the estate burn. He took out his phone, casual as could be.
“Wait,” said Asmi. “I can’t be seen by the police. I’m not legal right now”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Bamert. He made a voice call. “This is J. Paul Bamert. I’m at 2200 Old Georgetown Pike and the house is on fire. Yeah, I bet you can’t.” He hung up and slowly sipped from the Solo cup as his tar-soaked coughs died down.
“Ladies,” he told them. “Edgar is not going to be happy with me.”
DRUSKIN/DC/NEW YORK
The first thing Anna did when she got back to school was knock vigorously on Mrs. Ludwig’s door. Mrs. Ludwig peeked out. “Mustang Sally” was playing on a loop again. Her Christmas tree was still up. There was a cat sitting, comfortably, in the center of it. It didn’t even seem to notice the ornaments and tinsel hanging alongside it.
“Yes?” she asked Anna. She was peering over her glasses at her. Mrs. Ludwig always wo
re those owl-frame glasses but never seemed to look through them.
“I’d love another ride in the Cobra,” Anna said.
“Now? In January? It’s freezing out there, schatz.”
“All the more invigorating.”
Mrs. Ludwig sighed. “Let me get my coat.”
One hour later, Anna sauntered out of Ludwig’s apartment with a fake anklet and a rapid-fire heartbeat. The cat whose identity she stole this time was ELMER. She committed the black spot just under the left side of his whiskers to memory. Then, stomach still rumbling, she sprinted up the stairwell to barf into the toilet.
Asmi saw Anna rush into the bathroom and held Anna’s hair for her as she emptied out her insides, using the SHIT MEMOIRS as a kneepad. When Anna was finished and wiped away the last traces of bile from her mouth, Asmi grabbed the notebook and flipped through the freshest pages.
“It says I’m a bitch in here!” Asmi cried.
“It says everyone is a bitch in there,” Anna said.
“Well who’s the bitch who wrote it? If it’s that Junebug, I’ll show her how bad a bitch I am.”
“Jubilee.”
“Who cares. Dreadful name. Did you enjoy the ride, dearie?”
“In parts.”
“I’d nick a car like that. It’s fantastic.”
Early in the week, Anna dutifully tended to her usual campus routine. Classes. Diving. Cramming sessions all night. When she was able to steal a bit of sleep at night, she curled into a ball and imagined Sandy behind her, gently holding her and picking at her ears. Anna had grown fond of sleeping against the dorm room wall. There were so many goddamn walls in the world now—walls around houses and clubs and businesses and crummy ShareSpaces—but Anna’s wall was one of the few good ones. It never judged her. It kept her safe and secure. Sandy was a superior bedmate, but this wall made for a fine substitute cuddle buddy.
On her Druskin-issued electronics, Anna unfollowed everyone she knew, communicating with the outside world solely through a dummy, old school email account she had created with her VPN. When she saw Vick walking around the quad, she stared straight ahead, neither seeking eye contact nor avoiding it. If he looked, he looked. Whatever.