“Excuse me,” Jane says. “Will you play ‘Rock and Roll All Nite’ again? That’s one of my favorites.”
“Your taste in rock and roll is rock solid,” Ace says.
French Kiss strikes up the song again.
Bob pats his bib and says to Jane, “Good luck.”
Shame-cave
If one thing is utterly obvious to Coffen once he leaves his family for the night and goes back to DG, it is he has to stop lying to himself. What an oddly timed revelation earlier in French Kiss’s van, realizing consciously for the first time that he didn’t really support his wife. And that makes him wonder what else he doesn’t know. He’s still dosed on Scout’sHonor!® so he walks toward the bathroom to ogle his face in the mirror while he finds out about himself, one nosebleed at a time.
On his way there, however, he hears more Johnny Cash coming from LapLand. He opens the door and walks in. There the lifeguard sits, perched high in his chair, guarding an empty pool.
“Oh, fantastic, it’s the guy who thinks this is all a dream.”
“I now know this is real,” Coffen says.
“I’m pretty busy, so do you mind?”
“Will you play a game with me?”
“No thanks,” the lifeguard says.
“Is my nose bleeding?”
“Is that part of the game? Because I’m pretty sure I said that I didn’t want to play.”
“Is my nose bleeding?”
“You’re going to keep badgering me until I answer you, right?”
“Yes.”
“Your nose is not bleeding.”
“I love my wife and I believe in her,” Bob says.
“Okay.”
“Is my nose bleeding?”
“Nope.”
“I love my kids and I believe in them, too.”
Bob pauses, shrugs.
“Still no blood,” the lifeguard says.
“I love my job,” Bob says, not even needing to ask about his nose this time because he feels it rupture. The blood gushes and Coffen doesn’t even wipe it, lets it soak the front of his new suit. “I have to quit this job.”
“You and me both,” the lifeguard says. “You give me the creeps.”
“I’ve worked here for ten years.”
“You poor son of a bitch.”
“How do you make any big changes to your life once you have all these responsibilities?” Bob asks, although he’s turning to walk out without giving the lifeguard any time to answer.
Bob hadn’t expected any additional hours to work on Scroo Dat Pooch, but with an empty Sunday night, why not polish this turd to an incredible sheen? The code he writes makes the game look better, graphics getting downright good, and the better it looks — he reasons — the greater the opportunity for tomorrow morning’s status meeting to be an incredible unveiling, a self-sabotage of extraordinary measures.
“What time is it, Robert?” he says to himself.
“The plock strikes twelve, Robert.”
“Does it, Robert my boy?”
“Indeed, it does, Robert.”
Coffen codes away and his phone rings about an hour later. “Bob is me,” he says.
“Somebody gives you a gift of free tickets and you spit in his fucking face of generosity?” a voice says, slurring his words dramatically.
“Björn?”
“I turned your colleague into a rodent, Bob. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were antagonizing me by flaking on my show. I’m a big deal, man. I’m famous. I have over three thousand fans on Facebook. I’m a true miracle worker and you spit in the face of me and my show’s free tickets? Nobody treats me like I’m some walking colostomy bag and gets away with it. I mean, I have a statue of myself in my backyard.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Oh, sure, oh, yeah, my wife sought the solace she needed in the arms of another man and also two women she met in hotel bars because I failed to satisfy her sexually. But also she failed me in the realm of communication, right? I never knew that she wasn’t sexually satisfied or I would have done something about it. I am a sorcerer. I could have made her clit grow to the size of a pie tin. I could have pleased her in ways she’s never even pondered, but again, I didn’t know there was a problem. The point is that the communication broke down. And now, me and you, our communication is faltering. I give you free tickets. I excuse your kidnapping. I wipe the slate clean. And you can’t even live up to your end of the agreement and come to the show?”
“So you’re wasted,” Coffen says.
“I’m so drunk that it should be called something else. I’m ‘floff-mongered.’ Float that new bit of slang around and see if it catches on.”
“Where are you anyway?”
“I’m in my shame-cave.”
“Your what?”
“This place I go when I need to be alone with my self-sympathy,” he says. “When my floff-mongering is front and center.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Tonight’s show was a disaster. I had to flee the scene as a fugitive. I could have used a friendly face in the audience, Bob. Shit went terribly wrong. It was a new illusion. I made everybody’s chair fly about fifteen feet in the air. I told them to hold on tight. I told them there was no real danger. As long as they stayed steadied, they’d only be floating there, say, thirty seconds or so before I let them back down. But then one woman puked. Then another did. And that made them all wobbly and woozy and soon one fell off and then another and pretty soon everyone was falling from the sky and landing on the carpet in screaming heaps. I kept saying to them, ‘You are safe, but you are vulnerable. That’s the balancing act. That’s what the flying-chair metaphor represents.’ But it was too late. They were already starting to fall.”
“Did anyone get hurt?”
“Lots of them got hurt,” Björn says.
“And you left?”
“Hell yeah, I left. It was a bloodbath. I split out the fire exit once they all started plummeting.”
“I’m glad we weren’t there, or Jane and I would have fallen, too.”
“Or maybe it would have gone as expected had you been there to cheer me on, man. Even magicians need friends.”
“Are you blaming me?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“How does that make any sense?”
Bob hears a noise on Björn’s end of the phone that sounds like a can opening, then a desperate sip being taken: “In my mind’s eye,” Björn says, “the floating-chair illusion made perfect sense. Everyone would sit, perched high and mighty, and I’d give an inspiring speech about the travails of monogamy, learning to balance all the chaos and unpredictability of life. But once the first lady fell, it was a total shit show.”
“What did you think was going to happen?”
“I thought maybe two or three people would fall, total. Gotta crack a couple eggs to make an omelet, as the kids say. Now I need to get out of this town ASAP.”
“Not too ASAP,” Coffen says. “You have to turn Schumann back.”
“Oh, do I have to turn back your mousy associate?” he yells. “Is that what Björn has to do?”
“Can we meet first thing tomorrow — me, you, and Schumann? Please? Let’s talk about our options.”
“I haven’t totally decided whether I even want to turn him back. He kidnapped me. Let’s not forget that piece of the puzzle.”
“Well, that’s what we should talk about. Let me plead his case to you.”
“Fine, plead his case. Now I need to focus on my shame-cave. I need to sulk. Need to … Wait, what’s my new slang again?”