Suddenly his dishevelment wasn’t very relaxing. I glanced back at Paul, who had risen from his chair and was standing on the first step that led out of the living room into the hallway. As our eyes met, his narrowed, and he moved his chin slightly to the left. He felt the same way.
“How do I know you’re really FBI?” I asked aloud.
“I am showing you my ID,” the man said patiently and moved the hand with the wallet a little bit from side to side.
“An ID is easily forged,” I parried, trying not to slur. I was bluffing, of course. I didn’t know the first thing about the degree of difficulty involved in the process of forging government-issued documents.
“I assure you mine is genuine.”
“I just came back from FBI,” I said. “I answered questions and had the impression we were quite done. Why didn’t they tell me an agent was coming to see me later?”
“I know you were there today, Mr. Whales. I read your statement. As to why they didn’t tell you I would be coming… they don’t know I’m here.”
“Why are you here?”
“I’d rather not discuss it through the door.” He put the wallet away, and as he did I glimpsed the handle of a gun in the under-arm holster. “I was the man you saw from the lawn in front of Dr. Young’s house.”
“Then how are you walking?”
“With a great deal of pain. If you let me in, I’ll gladly display the bruises on my back.”
“I don’t like bruises,” I said, unlocking the door and pulling it towards me. And not too crazy about men’s backs either. Suddenly remembering, as he walked with a nod past me, I added, “Oh, and I have a gun in my hand behind the door here. I don’t want you to be alarmed by it and shoot me or something.”
He stopped and turned around, staring, as I pushed the door forward, revealing the pistol. He must have smelled the fumes, because he didn’t seem entirely at ease.
“I appreciate you telling me,” he said imploringly, like a regular fed in a police drama. “Now if you just put it away…”
“Already done,” I assured him and, seizing the gun by the barrel, went to the living room and put it on the magazine/drinking table. I showed the fed my hands. He came down the steps, giving the room a quick once-over and the TV, which was playing a cartoon on mute, a frown. I motioned for him to sit down and dropped on the couch. Across the table, Paul nodded in greeting, having magically reappeared in the armchair.
“Special Agent Brome,” I hastened to introduce. “My friend Paul.”
He eyed Paul interestedly, I thought even amusedly for a moment, then sat down on the opposite side of the couch, clasped his hands together and turned to me.
“Bullets fired from my gun got stuck in Lloyd Freud’s chest,” he stated flatly.
“Would you like a drink?” I asked.
“No, thanks,” he said. “Actually, yes.”
Paul poured vodka in his own shot glass and went to the cupboard to get another one. The fed downed a drink like he was chasing something with it.
“I didn’t shoot him,” he said.
“I know.”
“What did I shoot, Mr. Whales?”
“An alien,” Paul replied in passing. The agent looked up at him briefly and frowned.
“I see you were more liberal interpreting the night’s events to your friend, than to the agents of the federal government,” he said.
“Are you here to hear me repeat the same version?”
“Half-hoping you’d try it at least.”
“Why not just forget the whole thing like it never happened?”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason you won’t be able to,” he said. “Because I, too, stopped taking pills.”
Even in the blur of alcoholic intoxication I suddenly saw he was right. I wondered how I had ever planned to really forget that night. Being with Iris might have worked to make me not think of it, but that wasn’t the same thing. It also dawned on me that the abovementioned alcoholic intoxication had very little in common with antidepressant intoxication and, from recent memory, even less with marijuana intoxication. I began to wonder how many different types of intoxication there were total and whether or not what we, the people, always considered the state of soberness was not simply another type of intoxication, which led me to the ponderous idea of death being, perhaps, the ultimate sobering, or, more optimistically, just a bad hangover, after which, with the help of sleep, shower and maybe coffee, the real sobering would follow. At this point I shook my head and awoke, so to speak, and found myself shocked most of all by the last phrase agent Brome had uttered.
“When?” I asked breathlessly.
“Some ten days ago. Almost lapsed today, after the trip to the local hospital.” He motioned for Paul to refill the glass.
“I don’t know what those things were,” I said as he dispatched another shot. “Someone told me they were angels.”
“There was more than one?”
“Two.”
“What happened to the other one?”
“Not sure. It got shot in the face… area… from a sawed-off shotgun.” He glanced at me with incredulity, but it was only a reflex. Understanding almost at once replaced it.
“And the one I shot? In other words, how did you get away?”
“That one got split in two by something. Then I don’t know. I passed out.”
“You fainted?”
“If you must call it that…”
“What happened next?”
“I became innocent.”
“Haven’t seen anything unusual since?”
“Not until you showed up on the door display.”
He studied me for a moment, nodded, leaned back in the couch, lifted his face up and groaned a long, tortured groan.
I stared at him in awe. It was such a simple, primal, sincere — hell, human — reaction to the matter presented that I immediately liked the fed. I felt like hugging him. Paul, meanwhile, refilled his shot. “Stoli” had just passed its midlife crisis and was booking a place in line for social security benefits.
Brome straightened, cleared his throat and adjusted his coat. He looked like an actor who caught himself in the middle of the very blooper he’d been coaching himself against for days. He glanced down at the glossy table surface, nodded to Paul without looking at him, and picked up his glass shotgun shell. Holding it steadily afloat he turned to me again, “Mr. Whales…”
“Just call me Luke.”
“Luke,” he agreed. “What the hell is going on?”
So I repeated my account, by the end of which the once — and always remembered that way — warlike “Stoli” was sent on its last journey down the recycling pipe.
We lounged in the now dark room, illuminated only by photons bombarding our faces from the TV screen. I was reminded of the college days again, and the absence of smoke, or at least the smell of smoke, in the room reminded me of Iris for some reason.
We were silent; Paul and I waited for Brome to speak his verdict. I was also pretty thirsty. Brome took his time, or it could have simply seemed that way to me, because aside from being thirsty I was pretty nearly floored. Finally I could wait no longer.
“So?” I asked him. “Do I have a chance for lived happily ever after?”
“Sure,” he replied, looking up at me out of the dark lake of his thoughts. I attempted a triumphant gaze in Paul’s direction, but found him asleep in his armchair. Brome wasn’t done talking, though. “There’s always a chance. I’m not sure how big of a chance you have, though.”
While I gaped, I heard a cackle coming from Paul’s direction. I spread my arms out.
“Seems quiet.”
“It does,” Brome conceded. “But I have a chapter of the story you haven’t heard yet. Dr. Young’s office has been trashed and left empty with some blood splattered on the floor in the back room.”