A flashbulb memory, sitting on the hot sand with his sisters at the Cape. The shore was a sheet of dark, ovoid stones, the water so cold that going in had been a heroic act. He was small, and Fil and Tracy had held his hands, and he’d entered the shallows between them, gingerly, and he’d stopped when the sharp cold bit into his thighs, he’d leaned back like a dog against its leash, and they’d let him go back to the beach while they waded deeper and deeper into the dark water. It had been in a bay. There had been no waves. The stones had warmed in the sun and the heat wobbled around him and he kept his legs on the towel. Where had their parents been? Fil and Tracy came back with hard skin—cold, rigid, and rough under his fingers. They’d lain flat on the stones and he smelled their wet towels steaming beneath them.
Because he couldn’t excise or beat to death the part of him that time-traveled, he had settled on this establishment, a hermetically sealed capsule buried during an earlier life. His memory went everywhere with him, that was the problem. In his wallet was a photograph he hadn’t looked at in three years. At first he’d thought when the memory had faded he might look at it. He imagined looking at it, holding it by its scalloped white edges, and though he didn’t weep anymore when he thought of it, the memory hadn’t faded a shade. Nope, it had done just the opposite, it had expanded, covering the landscape in every direction.
Could he stay here all night if he got his head straight? It was a good stool he was on, that’s what Bronson would say, a good stool, and the movie would be good, and that would get him through until dinnertime.
Be a man. A man with balls and a spine. Pull yourself together.
Hey, the counterman said, eyes fixed on John. He’d been trying to get John’s attention for some time. John turned away from the opening strains of The Pit and the Pendulum. The counterman stood up straight and hooked a thumb through his leather belt while with the other he stroked his stubbled cheek as though he’d just woken up.
You gunna order or what? the counterman said, pacing the words as if reading from a cue card.
Dr Pepper, John said, tipping his cup.
We got Mr. Pibb.
John looked back at him, down at the glass of Dr Pepper he’d been working on for the last hour. Some toast, he said.
Wheat white rye.
Rye, John said. Through the cutout, John saw Nikos palling around with the line cook.
The counterman called it, hojack whiskey down, and went back to smoothing his paper. He shook his head, whether at John or some indignity contained in the Post, it was hard to tell, and really there was no difference.
John pulled out his plastic pouch of Sir Walter Raleigh and his pipe, a bruyère so smooth it could have been poured from a pitcher, a richly figured barrel with a line as graceful as La Maja Desnuda’s hip. So he’d been told by the guy who’d sold it to him. One eye still on the movie, he folded a paper napkin several times until it was firm as a pool table bumper. He held it all together by pinning one corner to the counter with his thumb. Then he rapped the bowl of the pipe against the bumper, each whack dislodging a spray of carbonized tobacco.
Hey, buddy? the counterman said.
John continued unabated, his face an expression of most genuine perplexity, as if to comprehend this request would require that he speak a foreign tongue, and intended to antagonize so completely the counterman that there could be no other possible reaction than violence.
You wanna knock it off?
The pipe hovered by John’s ear. In the kitchen, a patty sizzled under the cook’s steak weight. John brought down his arm, cracking his pipe against the counter with an extra snap of the wrist.
And so it was. Three hundred pounds of Bronx-born fury lunged at John, who slid back off his stool, pipe and tobacco in hand, as if to avoid a spreading spill on the counter, one that in this case was swiping at him with a hairy arm while making sounds that, although unrecognizable as postlapsarian language, were nonetheless wholly comprehensible to everyone in the diner. Blood would be spilled. John recognized it, too, and while his assassin was still beached atop the counter, roaring, perhaps overdoing it, for what is rage but a release, and who doesn’t enjoy it just a little, John, gripping the pipe with his left hand, closed his right into a fist and crouched down, just out of reach. From there he slowly, with excruciating truculence, erected his middle finger, held it there like an exclamation point, still as the sun in the desert sky. The counterman made an epic swipe, a game-winning pitch that John evaded by scrambling backward over the salted floor, his left hand, holding the pipe, coming down hard behind him, and a sharp sting of pain shot up his arm as his knuckles smashed into the serrated surface of the salted floor, a stunning flash of agony. He instinctively retracted his hand and went tumbling sideways.
The counterman was having his own difficulties with gravity. The violence of his grab for John had unseated his considerable mass from the counter, and he was in a nosedive, but with his arm crossed over his chest, which meant he couldn’t break his fall, and his forehead hit the floor with a crack. His eyes blew open and he went silent. John, still scrambling, crashed into a table, its pedestal rivets groaning, managed to get a hand on his coat, then sprung to his feet and made for the door, shoulder down in case there were any heroes between him and escape.
Inverted, motionless, the counterman was wedged between two stools, breathing onto the filthy linoleum, his toes resting on the counter. A dim light glowed deep within the cave of his brain, a fire tended by two of his hairy ancestors whose shadows were thrown in monstrous relief onto the ceiling as the quartzite in the walls flickered. They were plotting against a third hairy ancestor, the one who stood outside the cave counting his chattel. Murder. The counterman needed to murder someone good, but who? Then, out candle, out, a blank.
For that moment after his brain got smacked silly against the forewall of his skull, there was quiet. He was not transported to happier days. No first kiss or Wonderwheel rides, no recollection of the hot tarmac at San Francisco International, where he smelled the salty bay and got down on his knees and kissed the concrete slab, unfreezing blood that had been frozen tight in his veins for the year he was stationed in Truong Lam. When he hit the floor, he remembered nothing; he became a rolling blankness, a deep, briny Arctic channel.
In the seconds following a sudden act of public violence, paralysis often strikes bystanders, and it was only to pay bravado its due that John had dropped his shoulder as he ran for the door. The waiters, in no hurry to put themselves in the path of trouble, couldn’t have backed up any faster if he’d been waving around a pistol. The owner, whose mushroomed girth prohibited him from a livelier reaction, swung his fleshy arm in John’s direction, clearing the checkout counter of the mint dish and check spike, a crack, tinkle, and clatter to accompany the shrieking of the door’s aluminum frame against the salty jamb as John charged onto the sidewalk in a spy’s karate crouch.
It was dark, the street clogged with cabs, exhaust, steam pumping out of manhole covers, pedestrians exhaling plumes of white. John zagged through the crowd to the curb and, keeping watch on the door, buttoned up his coat, clapped his hat on his head, and carefully wrapped up his neck. If he was meant to be killed by the savage counterman, he would perish with a warm neck. A cold body led to constricted cords, caused tension everywhere that threw off the tone and turned a vibrato into a warble. Even worse, obviously, was illness—a cold, an oozing sinus, congestion, god help him, bronchitis. Breath control vanished. The limbs became leaden, the diaphragm weak, the bellows clogged, the sound cut off at the tap. Singer muted.