"I'll take it."
"Don't you want to see the rest?" Billy throws open a door. What was formerly a home office has been converted into an adult playroom/fantasy chamber, in the same way that a person might take a spare bedroom and make it into a gym. There's a harness — white, of course — mounted in the ceiling, a mattress on the floor, and a lot of pillows and extension cords — all white.
"Do I want to know?"
"The 'recipient' goes in there and she hangs, antigravity. I've heard it's great. Not my cup of tea, I only know what it is because I saw it once at a convention. The downside of this house," Billy says, closing the door, "no pool. Everyone wants a pool, even on the ocean; a pool, a panic room — way too Houdini for me. A life raft, that's what I would want in one of these places. By the by, I'm sure we can get them to take the thingy down; I just wanted you to know it was there."
"How much?"
"Twenty-five."
"Hundred?" Richard asks, even he knows enough to think that's a little low for a whole house on the ocean.
"Thousand."
"Fifteen. I'll pay fifteen thousand a month for three months, in cash, up front."
BILLY WHIPS OUT his cell phone, calls the mysterious owner, and turns away from Richard. "I have a qualified client interested in taking the house for three months — forty thousand for the three months, plus he'll pay five thousand to have the carpet cleaned and everything polished up." There is a pause. "Right away."
When he gets off, Richard asks, "How come you quoted him forty?"
"I've been doing this for twenty-seven years, I know how people think. If you say, 'He'll pay forty-five, but you have to spend five to fix it up,' they'll say no. If you say, 'Forty, and he'll pay an extra five to fix it up,' they'll say yes. Everyone wants to think they're getting a deal. Here's the complication. You can have it, but not until next week — he's promised it to someone for the next five days. And then I'll need a couple of days to get it cleaned up. Could you stay in a hotel if you had to?"
He can take a long weekend and go visit his brother in Boston. "Sold," he says. "Now tell me, whose is it?"
"You don't want to know."
"Yes, I do."
"Let's just say, you'd recognize the name; 'nuff said."
"I'm going to be living in some guy's house and I don't even get to know who it is?"
"You're not living in his house, you're living in a house he owns — it's very different. He's never spent a night here."
DRIVING BACK into town, he is dizzy with the vibrancy of life — or maybe it's his new diet or lack of a diet. He is about to pass out. A donut — that would fix him for the moment; he brought a few along, thinking he'd give them to Billy, but when he saw Billy thought, No donut.
He reaches into the bag, bites into one; raspberry jelly explodes onto his face. Using his tongue, his fingers, he attempts to lick himself clean while at the wheel, like an animal grooming, licking until he is not sticky anymore.
"ALWAYS HAPPY to see you," Lusardi's receptionist says when he steps into the office.
Richard hands her his parking ticket.
"My kind of man — validate in advance, that way you don't forget. How is the pain?"
"I don't know. I've been busy, got hit by a car, my house is about to fall into a sinkhole, and you know that horse they evacuated — I helped."
"So — it's a bit better?"
He pauses. "Not really; I think that's why I called."
Lusardi acts as though he's never seen him before — no hi, hello, good to see you again. "What brings you in?"
"The same," Richard says.
"Let's take a listen."
Richard takes off his shirt. "I don't know anything anymore. Is that normal? Is it normal to notice the enormity of everything and just go blank?" His shirt is off; he's covered in goose bumps. As Lusardi is listening to his heart, he's trying to remember how he ended up in L.A. He was still living with his wife when the company said they might need someone on the West Coast. Richard asked her if she thought he should go, and she said it was late and she didn't care, just as long as she could get some work done before she went to sleep.
He remembers her not having an opinion — was that a neutral or a negative? He remembers feeling like he had become invisible. He moved out two weeks later.
Lusardi is looking into his eyes with the light. Richard is thinking of how angry he was, and obviously still is, at his wife for letting him go so easily — and at himself for leaving without a fight.
"I dreamed I was falling in a black hole," he tells Lusardi.
"You know what happens in a black hole," Lusardi says as he's flipping through the chart. "You're pulled from both ends until finally you rip apart. How are your eating habits, good? Stick out your tongue."
Lusardi looks at his tongue. "Did you eat a jelly donut?"
"Yes, how do you know?"
"Your breath is sugary, your tongue is coated, and you've got some on your shirt."
"My diet has been way off. Usually it's good, but the last couple of days…"
Lusardi opens the chart again and flips through the pages. "We got your labs back, your PSA — prostate-specific antigen — was a little high. Minimally, I should do a rectal to see if I can feel anything."
Richard drops his pants. Lusardi slips on a glove and wiggles his finger up Richard's ass. "When men get prostate cancer at your age, it's usually worse than when they get it later. We all die with prostate cancer, did you know that? Strange but true. It's usually not the thing that kills us, but it's there. Do you ejaculate often? Are you sexually active?" he asks with his finger still up Richard's ass.
"Not much." Richard says.
"Try and ejaculate more often; there's some mythology out there that, the more you do, the less cancer you get, it keeps everything moving. I can't say there's any proof, but why not." He pulls his finger out. "I didn't feel anything. Do you have trouble getting an erection?"
"No, I don't have much trouble."
"Much trouble meaning occasional trouble? I could give you some Viagra."
"Much, meaning I haven't been in a situation where I would know. I have no feelings except the pain, which is why I am here. I'm dead — dead men don't ejaculate."
"Well, you wouldn't be in pain if you were a dead man. So perhaps the pain is a good sign in this case? In terms of the prostate, we can pursue it, or wait and repeat the test in six months." He smears his shitty finger on a cardboard colon-cancer card and then snaps the glove off, as though it's all in a day's work. "Is it still raining out? It was when I came in."
"No… not really."
"How much does it hurt?"
Richard shrugs.
"Pain management — that's what addicts do. We could just hook you up to a morphine pump and you could play the mother in Long Day's Journey."
Richard says nothing.
"It's delicate — this process of waking up, coming in from the cold — you can't do it overnight."
"Why not?"
"You'd die." Lusardi sits at his desk. "You don't know how to feel — or, more accurately, what to do with what you feel. When a person comes in from the cold, it's not like they immediately feel warm. If they've been out for a while, they come in and everything hurts, and the warmer they get the more pain they're in. It's excruciatingly painful. For, as much as you want to feel nothing, you feel everything, you feel too much to bear, like you'd explode, or go crazy, if you knew how much you felt."
"I'm numb," Richard says, flatly.
"You have some sensation."
"Yes, something like an insect bite, an itch or irritation, like poison ivy that won't quit. The other day, after all this happened, I called my ex-wife, my son, my parents, my brother. I talked to everyone, and I felt worse."