“The whole thing sucks. And it still doesn’t make any sense. What did she want if she didn’t believe in the Third Way?”
For a moment he looked angry again, then the expression settled into something sadder and more resigned. “Maybe she did, at least to begin with. Fuck, who knows, B—I can’t spend any more time on the whys and why-nots.” He shook his head as the food arrived. “So what next?”
“You mean what are we going to do to protect ourselves?” I paused with a whole sausage impaled on my fork like a harpooned pilot whale. “I wish I knew. I mean, I have a couple of ideas I wanted to bounce off you.”
“Oh, yeah, you are definitely the idea man.” The remark sounded a bit strained. “Go ahead.”
So I told him what was in my head, or at least part of it, as well as some of the ideas I was considering. He listened, asking questions from time to time, and made a few suggestions that made me look at some of the problems from different angles. It was pretty much what I hoped for, and it’s one of the things about Sam that I’ve always valued: he didn’t take things for granted. If you said, “I’ve got a plan that will make us rich,” he’d probably ask you, “Do we really want to be rich?” And he’d be right to ask—that was something you needed to know before you started.
After about half an hour and three or four cups of coffee each, we had a few preliminary ideas scraped together into something that, while not yet deserving the name “plan” or even “desperate stopgap measure,” at least gave me a starting point and a foundation for more thinking. I paid the bill while Sam used the restroom, then we walked outside. The wind had stiffened a bit and the skies were cloudy. Christmas decorations swung on the wires overhead like hardy winter blossoms.
“How do I get to Kainos?” I asked.
“Depends,” he said. “How much notice can you give me?”
“Who knows? Maybe none. I may have Heaven and Hell both on my backside when the moment comes. I sure don’t want to have to leave a note and arrange a rendezvous like this time.”
“Well, I could just stand there for days and days, waiting for you to be ready.”
That had been more than just grumpy. “What’s up with you?”
“Nothing. Bad week.” He scowled. “Look, I’ll get back to you on how you can cross over. I have a few things to do while I’m on this side. I’ll call you before I go.”
“Every phone I have is tapped, Sam.”
“Then I’ll be sure to keep it top-secret and hush-hush. I’ll think of something, don’t worry.” He turned and started in the opposite direction from Mike’s Corner Pocket, which was a relief. From his weird mood, I’d been afraid he might have been falling off the wagon, or thinking about it. “Oh, and thanks for breakfast,” he called back over his shoulder.
• • •
The landline rang a little before two in the morning. I’d fallen asleep on the couch, so it took me a minute to get myself oriented. Oxana was watching some movie on television, her suitcase packed and sitting on the carpet beside her, as it had been for hours. She was still pissed at me and had hardly said a word all evening. She was obviously not going to answer the phone.
I crawled toward the desk and picked it up. At first all I could hear was a lot of dull roaring, like I was holding a big seashell to my ear. Then I heard someone’s voice, although it wasn’t talking to me.
“Sam?” I asked.
“Yeah?”
“What’s up? Where are you?”
Something was definitely weird, but it took me a moment to figure out it wasn’t the connection. “Just been thinkin’,” he said.
“I can hardly hear you. Did you say ‘thinking’?”
“And I wanted to say something.” There was a long pause. “Tell you something.”
My heart was icing up. I knew this Sam. I hadn’t spoken to him in a long time, but I definitely recognized him. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. Fine, fine. With some friends. Say hello, friends.” Somebody laughed in the background, and somebody else shouted something I couldn’t hear. Country-western music was playing far back there somewhere.
Oh, shit, not now, was my primary thought. It was pretty clear that Sam had fallen off the wagon, and fallen hard.
“Do you want me to come pick you up?” I asked. “You need a ride?”
“Fuck no! A ride? I got wings, man. Magical angel wings, remember? No, I just called to tell you something, man. Because, you know, I was thinking today that I needed to tell you. About some shit, some important shit. And I wanted to, I really wanted to. But then I kept thinking, why should I tell that motherfucker anything when he sold me out?”
Ice. Ice in my chest so cold it burned. “Sam, I didn’t—”
“Get fucked, Bobby. Do you think I don’t know anything? You don’t think I have any friends expect . . . no, except you? No friends except you? So I wouldn’t know you totally sold me out?”
“I didn’t intend to actually do it, Sam. You have to believe that. I had to offer them something so they’d let me go. Shit, they were just about to pass judgement on me!”
“Yeah, oh, yeah. I get it. Completely. You weren’t really going to do it. That’s why you didn’t even tell me.” For a moment his voice threatened to break. “Didn’t even tell me . . .”
“Sam, I would have, but we got talking about all that other stuff—”
“And you know, I said I’d get back to you about how to get to my place? When they come for your lying ass? And so I’m getting back at you.” He laughed like something badly broken. “No, getting back to you, sorry. Sorry. So when you need to come along to my place, when you really need to . . . you just take a flying fuck at the moon, okay? Okay? That’ll do it, baby, that’ll . . . do it.”
Then there was nothing on the other end of the phone at all. No people talking and laughing, no country-western music, and no Sam.
thirty-nine:
narwhals and empanadas
I COULDN’T GET back to sleep, of course. I lay on top of the blankets on the couch for about three hours, feeling like a couple of unpleasant animals were fighting to the death inside my stomach. At some point Oxana had given up on television and sloped off to the bedroom, but I hadn’t even noticed.
Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up, poured myself a drink (with full awareness of the irony) and called the only number I had for Sam. His message was the same: Sam, growling in his best Robert Mitchum voice: “Go ahead. Arouse my interest.”
“Look, man, I’m not even sure you’re going to hear this,” I said to his voicemail. “I hope you’re in a motel somewhere, and that you made some sleeping arrangements before you started your evening’s adventure.
“First off, don’t be a fucking idiot. Whatever you think of me, it’s not worth what you just did to yourself. But it’s done, so now you have to start over, that’s all. You fell off the wagon before. Remember that thing with the kids who died in a fire? Man, I thought you were going to drink another body to death in a single week that time. Didn’t help them, though, and it didn’t help you. And you puked all over my only suit. Three different times.
“And here’s another thing. Don’t bullshit yourself. You’re angry at me because I wasn’t a very good friend, and you’re right, but not because you really believe I was going to turn you over to the Big Happiness Machine. Because if you think I was going to hand over the guy who let himself burn to death to show me not to be afraid—you still remember that, don’t you? Even with a nasty-ass hangover and a gut full of angry feelings, you remember that, right? If you think that I was really going to do that to you, that’s some kind of weird self-hatred trip. And okay, yes, a lot of this was my fault. I was scared to say anything because it does look bad and it made me shitty even pretending. It does look like I was going to sell you out. I was embarrassed. But I never thought you’d actually believe it. I didn’t say anything because it felt to me like I hadn’t stuck up for you in front of our bosses. Ex-bosses, I guess.