Her eyes studied me over her cheap rhinestone glasses, and she knew I was up to something. But as she was forming a question, I turned away.
On the train to concourse C, I noticed people wearing identify-me lapel pins — Christian crosses, Rotary Club pins, and different-colored ribbons signifying some cause — and the tram let me out on C, and I took the escalator up and stopped in a bookstore, searched the “New Arrivals” display until I found The Universe Is a Pair of Pants on the lower shelf and bought a copy and a pack of Marlboros and stuck them in my bag.
Midway down the concourse to the smoking lounge, I started encountering the smoke smell and the red-eyed people with the general gray complexion of addicts. I’m sorry to have to report that smokers in general show poorer personal hygiene than other people.
Outside the smoking lounge, I leaned to see into the glass room, the fishbowl of cancer, where my cousin — really my half brother — sat on a bench with a cigarette. He wore his black jacket and priest’s collar, and that valise between his feet, and he uncomfortably listened to a middle-aged man in a goatee smiling and talking animatedly.
I hadn’t seen Dubourg in over a month, but he looked older to me, and more like Van Raye than he ever had, though these features were handsome on Dubourg, perhaps the right amount of DNA from his biological French mother. We looked nothing alike. On one of my first visits to Florida, two of the aunts had put Dubourg and me back to back, made us slowly turn as though we were in a police lineup, looking for a resemblance, but there was very little. Elizabeth always claimed the Indian genes stomped all others.
I’d gone to his ordination in New Orleans on the last official day of spring for that year, and in the heat of the cathedral he vowed poverty, celibacy, and obedience, and he had pissed off someone because ultimately he was not given the assignment of a parish priest, but he was made a courier for the church, having to tote around that black valise now protected between his knees, the contents of which he was not even privileged to.
I watched through the glass, saw his hand absently touch the valise as the stranger talked. This man spoke excitedly, cigarette between his fingers. Dubourg’s brow wrinkled with concern.
The man finally looked at his watch and stabbed his butt out. They stood and shook hands. The man grabbed the long handle of his suitcase and left.
Dubourg began writing in a notebook and I went and sat in the seat directly in front of him and waited for him to notice me.
He finished what he was writing and stubbed out the cigarette, turned his head sideways to see the words. He lifted his head and blinked at me sitting across from him. His heavy glasses had slid down his nose.
A smile eased onto his face, and he shook his head, smiling, closed his book. “How long have you been here?” He stood and held his arms open to me. His long brown hair and beard made him look like the velvet portraits of Jesus in truck stops. He took me in a hug, and I felt the familiar strength of his arms. He gave me hardy thunks on my back.
When he looked at me again, I saw he had a crusty white remnant on his mustache from a recent swig from an antacid bottle. I pointed to my lip to let him know, and he wiped it away.
“Got a smoke?” I asked.
He bent to perform a reassuring touch to the valise, then turned to a woman and asked politely while making the international sign to bum a smoke. The woman said, “Certainly, Father,” and he got two, Dubourg lighting mine, and we went around and sat in the row of black vinyl chairs that faced out of the fishbowl of cancer and watched the rest of the world walk by.
I felt the rush of nicotine. I only wanted a cigarette when I was around him, and I had toured all smoking lounges in major American airports because of Dubourg and his assignment, that black valise that he had to keep moving for the church.
“Jesus, when’s the last time you slept?” I said.
Instead of answering, he straightened his posture, and he filled me in on the cousins he’d talked to lately — Holly, Good John, Curt, Benita, Bad John, and Cecil, and updated me on the recent births and babies and children I’d forgotten about. He snuck an antacid tablet into his mouth, then he pulled a thin package of wet wipes out of his duffle. He offered me one, and he rubbed his on the back of his neck and under his ears.
He had been a great athlete in Wakulla County, had gone to a private college in West Virginia on a baseball scholarship.
I blew smoke from the side of my mouth.
“What’s so big that’s going on with Charles?” he asked, flicking his ash casually as if this wasn’t what he was aching to know.
I wasn’t ready to talk about Charles. Van Raye’s limited contact with Dubourg — all meetings happened through me — heightened Dubourg’s fascination with the man. I said, “You know all that stuff I said about the hacker sending me messages, you know, like cloaked messages to find Elizabeth’s violin?”
He nodded.
“Somebody’s fucking with me.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
I handed him the phone so he could see the texts from the hacker.
He said, “You don’t really think there’s one place that all the lost luggage in the world ends up, do you?”
“No,” I said. “I was a little tipsy last night. I took a sleeping pill. I kind of don’t remember having that conversation with you.”
He looked at my phone.
I tried to keep my hands from shaking, kept bringing the cigarette to my mouth sooner than I normally would. I said, “I will admit that how much he knows about me is a little scary.”
He tilted his head to read the phone through the bottom of his glasses. He scrolled with his index finger. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”
He handed the phone back to me. It was on the menu of all my texts, mostly from him and Ursula, but there was no text conversation from the blocked number. I kept thumbing back and forth from the text page as if it would magically reappear.
“You’re shitting me,” I said. “It was right here!”
I sat back and looked around the smoking lounge. “I’m going insane.” I rebooted the phone, the technical move of the truly desperate.
Dubourg asked another man for a cigarette.
“My God, you think I’m crazy. . ” I shook my head. “It doesn’t make sense. Could a hacker erase the conversation on my phone?”
“I don’t think so. Change all your passwords right away.”
“Oh, great advice, thank you. Do you think I haven’t done that?”
“I’m trying to help.”
“I know, but I’m telling you something is going on.”
I turned the screen back on as if it would magically reappear.
I asked him, “Ever heard the phrase ‘I am what I am’? It sounds like it’s from the Bible. I know I’ve heard it.”
“No. That’s Popeye. But ‘I am that I am,’ that’s Exodus, when the burning bush starts talking. Moses asked the voice to identify itself, God said, ‘Yahweh,’ or, ‘I am that I am.’ It varies among texts, but there you go, basically speaking. You don’t think it’s God texting you, do you?” I waited for him to crack a smile but he didn’t.
“Seriously?” I said. “You’re asking me if God is talking to me?”
He didn’t change his studious, serious expression. He said, “There are plenty of ways God talks to you.”
“Du, through my cell phone?”
“The manifestation of His words might be a hallucination that your phone is doing this.”
“You’re not helping. You can’t understand how unbelievable this is. Forget God. It’s not God.”
He slouched and said, “You don’t really think God would direct you to your mama’s violin, do you? Doesn’t quite work like that.”