Would safe sex, Matt sometimes wondered, resemble this in a future age if AIDS remained an untreatable plague?
"Don't you ever take a day off?" the caller asked, though the Voice sounded pleased by the idea of Matt being eternally on call.
"Not over weekends, which is when you call most often."
"Do I? God, you got me there! I hadn't noticed. That's what I like about you, Brother John, always there, and you always remember things I forget."
"Not always. I may be accessible, but I'm not eternal, or omnipotent."
"Hey, you are to me, baby!"
Gambler maybe, Matt thought. The Voice thrummed with the gamester's high Matt had heard before.
"I'm here to help," Matt said firmly, "not to feed dependency fantasies. You don't need to know about me. You need to know about you. Have you contacted that psychiatrist in L.A. I referred you to?"
"Oh, thanks, yeah! I got my people trying to set up an appointment, but I'm on the road so much. And the impulse comes over me so ...sudden. Just when things are going great. Guess that's self-sabotage, huh?"
"Sounds like you've been reading some of the books I recommended."
"Oh, yeah. I can get in a little reading on the road. But I like talking best. That's what I do best."
"I believe you. That's why a hotline could become addictive, as addictive as your main problem."
"An addictive personality just keeps breaking out all over, like hives, huh?"
"Until you deal with the root of the addictions."
"Root is right!" His laugh was as compelling as his speaking voice. "Hey, almost called you
'Doc' then."
"I'm not. I'm not anybody. You've got to seek consistent, professional help."
"But now, right now? 'Cuz it's coming on again. That... itchy trigger finger, you might call it."
A laugh, man-to-man bawdy. "That sense of impending doom and delight. I'm gonna do something I'm gonna regret tonight, if you don't stop me."
"If you don't stop yourself. I'm an echo, a wailing wall. I reflect back what you need to hear, to see about yourself. Don't give me any credit. You're doing all the work."
"I'd like to meet you sometime." Spoken suddenly. "I mean, you sound like such a together guy. Even, you know? No highs, no lows. That's my business, all highs and all lows. Then I get so itchy... gotta release the tension. Then, I blow it. Can't anymore. Got a lot more to lose. A lot.
"Got a wife now. Me, a wife! God, she's a knockout. Body by va-va-va-voom. Every guy in the world would kill to be in my shoes. And we got a little baby. She still kept her figure, after, not gonna let that slide. The wife, not the baby. Never thought I'd go so crazy over anybody else, but that baby . . . Why do I still get those late-night gonna-do-something-baaad blues, Brother John? I'm gonna blow it all, the best time of my life, and I can't stop myself."
"Yes, you can! You said you have before."
"Yeah. You talked me out of it a couple of times. Only times I didn't do anything. You're the only one."
"Is that what you tell your wife?"
A long silence on the phone.
"You punch like Muhammad AH sometimes. Makes me wonder why I keep coming back for more."
"You don't have to. Just make and keep an appointment in L.A. I gave you three top names--"
"Names! My whole life is Names. Maybe that's why I do it. I find the Nameless ones. I follow
'em, introduce myself and it's so easy. It's done. Then I don't have to remember their names, or anything else about them. Like I've put 'em away somewhere, and I'm at peace. Until the next one."
"What about tonight? Isn't somebody with you? Your wife?"
"Working out of town."
"The baby ... ?"
"With the wife and nanny in Switzerland."
"Can't you look at their pictures?"
"Oh, man, photos don't do it. Not when I get the itch. Haven't you ever had to have something so bad, so fast, right now, that it's like you're on skis and you see the downhill run and you know you're gonna crash into a great big cedar, but, hell, the ride is everything."
This time Matt was silent.
"Well, haven't you? There must be something that gets you by the throat like that sometimes. A sport? A woman?"
"No," Matt said before remembering an imperative that he could hardly mention, even in this anonymous interchange: the compulsion he felt to find Cliff Effinger. But a mission to locate an abusive stepfather missing for years was hardly what the caller meant. He was talking about pleasurable addictions. Looking at a murdered body that had borne Effinger's I.D. in a morgue viewing room and being unable to say for sure that this was the demon who had haunted hi s boyhood ... seeing a presumed-dead man walking in Effinger's cocky lope across the Strip not long afterwards, these were not pleasurable sightings. His hunt for the truth, for Effinger dead or alive, wasn't an addiction. It was only an obsession. Wasn't it?
No, Matt concluded. Nothing pleasurable had ever driven him, only duty and guilt and anger. "No," he said.
"No! No babes. No ballgames. No fun. What the hell are you, man, a monk? That's what they call them, don't they? 'Brothers'?"
"Yes, they do, but no, I'm not a monk." Not quite.
"Yeah, I know. You're nobody. Believe it or not, sometimes I envy guys like you. Probably lived in the same place for ten, fifteen years. Wife and kid. Two cars, one dog. Maybe you mentally play the stock market now and again for kicks. Am I right?"
"No." Matt couldn't help sounding amused. "But it doesn't seem like a bad life. Why can't you settle for it?"
A sigh, dramatic enough for a nighttime TV soap opera. "Never thought I'd settle for the domestic routine, period. Lot of people-- women--were pissed when I did, like I'd betrayed them. Women are always taking things personally, aren't they?"
"So they should, especially when so many men class them into one big aggravating category."
"Hey, I like women! Boy, do I like women."
"That's not good enough, though, or you wouldn't be on the phone now."
"Yeah, you're right. I think I like 'em. I say I like 'em, but I guess I like to have had 'em better than I like 'em. They're never enough, and I don't buy that proving my manhood bull, either.
But there's a down, after. Maybe I didn't really like the one I was with enough to have screwed her, or maybe she didn't really like me, maybe she liked my Name, or some other little --or not so little--thing about me.
"It's like doing a big gig. You get up for it, the hoopla and the howling and the screaming and swooning. You perform your guts out, you get rave reviews and leave 'em laughing and applauding and whistling... and it's still not enough. Afterward, you're alone and you feel hollow.
You ever felt like that?"
"Everyone has."
"And then, it's really funny. They all loved you. Loved what you did. And you think, they were so easy. So you despise them for loving you, and yourself for not loving them. Then you end up hating everybody, even yourself. It's like you wish you could scrape yourself off yourself, you know? And shake that slimy skin on the floor and leave it there with the Victoria's Secret Miracle Bras and the stale perfume and your pricey silk underwear."
"You don't want to go through that again, and the guilt, now that you have someone to answer to."
"I don't answer to anybody."
"Except yourself."
"Yeah, except me."
"The self that wants to peel its skin off. You ever have thoughts, at times like that, of suicide?"
"Suicide, naw! That's ludicrous. I'm at the top of my game. I'm a winner."
The Voice kept silent for an unprecedented minute and more.
"I've drunk myself cold out, sometimes, afterward. Maybe that is a death wish. Maybe I oughta call that L.A. shrink, or all three." A laugh. "You scared the hell out of me this time. I think I'll make it. You're worth every penny."
"This is a free service."
"Not when I'm calling long-distance."