“Gino.”
Vargas rolls Whit’s window the rest of the way down. “Go home, Gino,” he calls across Whit.
Gino stops and smirks at them. “Who’s Gino?” he asks. “My name’s Melvin.”
“Whatever the fuck your name is,” Vargas says, “you should go home.”
“Thanks, Mom. I mean ma’am. I mean officer.”
Vargas chuckles. If Whit knows him at all, he’s about to kneel on the kid’s back and cite him for something stupid and hard to dodge: urinating on a public building; graffiti; indecent exposure. Vargas is a turtle, but he can be a snapping turtle. But his voice shifts into a sincere register Whit hasn’t even heard him use to talk about his own kids.
“Trust me, kid. You want to be at home tonight.”
The kid is suspicious of his tone, but he shrugs and says he will, before starting up a slower stroll in the same direction. Vargas gets rolling again, and Whit watches the kid shrink away in his side mirror. Who cares? Donuts and coffee are only a few blocks away. Fuck the cliché. It’s two hours to sunrise, and Whit has been up since 5 p.m. yesterday. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Vargas makes a pudding of his coffee again. Whit puts in a hint of milk and about five grains of sugar. Vargas: a jelly donut and a maple bar. Whit: an apple fritter. Whit’s almost disappointed he won’t be around long enough to see Vargas develop the insulin routine he’s going to need in a few years. Whit’s been looking at schools nearby, and in a fifty-mile radius he’s got two reach schools, four safety schools, and a few in between, but he’s starting to see the virtue in distant kingdoms: Northwestern in foggy Chicago, Tulane in dirty New Orleans, Notre Dame tucked away in the corn.
“The question I’m keeping myself sane with,” Vargas says, “is ‘does it matter?’ Does it affect the situation in Egypt or Hong Kong? Does it drop more people into poverty? Does it sadden the nation?”
“Does it need to?”
“If you zoom out a little, three isn’t that much.”
“Jesus.”
“From a cosmic perspective.”
“Jesus fucking christ.”
Whit sits in silence. But this logic is viral. He feels it wiggling like a worm in his brain. It’s not rare to see a hundred or more violent deaths a year. Three in a week barely registers as an outlier. It is true: no one will be upset but a few stray family members. A part of Whit’s mind is telescoping out like a rising shot in a film, showing him a broader scope of land outside of which this quake won’t even register. For just a moment he wants to pull out his gun and put two into Vargas’s chest as he sits on that cheap plastic bench licking jelly off his lower lip. Unwilled, he imagines himself doing it.
Is it possible to go crazy in the span of five hours?
Whit closes his eyes, and again, he sees himself doing it: stand, draw, bang, bang.
He rises and bursts through the door of the donut shop into the bracing air. It takes him a moment to decipher what he sees: a statue five feet away from the open window of the squad car, letting loose an upward arc of urine through the open passenger window. Of course it’s no statue, though he stands remarkably still, with his hips arched forward like those cupids, and the stream has an impressive constancy. It’s Gino. It’s Melvin. Who knows what it says on his social security card?
Never afterward does he remember covering the fifteen feet between the shop door and the parking lot. Never afterward does he remember the tackle. It all happens like those rare, glorious moments he used to have on the wrestling mat, when his body moved perfectly without the brain’s approval—and suddenly he’s there: Gino’s on his back, and Whit’s elbow presses into his cheek, pinning his head to the ground, and Whit’s gun is in his hand, the muzzle against Gino’s temple. He’ll always remember it as someone else, someone with a voice the twin of his own, saying: “You little shit. Don’t you know what tonight is?” What he will remember, always, is looking into Gino’s eyes, waiting for the fear, needing to see the fear, but seeing none. He will remember Gino staring up at him with empty, empty eyes, and the realization, like being born, that the kid knew exactly what tonight was. That he’d always known what tonight was. That he’d known his whole life.
THE TOP OF FRESNO
Sunsets from Apogee were not particularly impressive. The coastal range was so far west and so gentle, and so much smog hung in the intervening distance, that you couldn’t see the mountains. The sun, rather than truly setting, seemed to just get blurry and dim and then fade away. Nor was the view after dark any more exciting. None of the other towers in town were as tall as the old Fresno Bank Building, atop which our restaurant, perched like a kitsch flying saucer, slowly rotated. Several of the other skyscrapers were abandoned, and only the hospital was fully lit in the nighttime. The streetlights uptown were too distant and regular to be inspiring. The poorer neighborhoods nearby reminded us of their plight through their dimness. So when Iris called me at ten thirty on my Saturday off to let me know the rotator gears were filling the restaurant with the smell of raw tires and she’d had to shut the motor off, I didn’t jump out of bed.
She launched into her updates as soon as I picked up the phone, so I was able to act like her call had woken me up. “You need me to come fix it tonight?”
“For these old hats? I’ve been dosing out so much free sherry they think we’re still spinning.”
“I’ll check it out in the morning.”
It wasn’t too much to worry about, she said: the Bulldogs were playing, and it had been quiet for a Saturday. The customers didn’t mind, or didn’t let on. Most of the people there were boosters, like her, and in a place with as few boosters as Fresno that meant they were all her friends. None were there for the novelty of a changing view. The motive common among them was pity, either for her or for themselves. I’d gone in for payroll paperwork that afternoon and knew the slender blue dress she was wearing. I could picture her, pulling out a chair from a two-top in the unoccupied side of the dining room, using one hand to hold her phone to her ear and the other to pick up a thin vase and smell the mums. This time of night, especially with something the matter, she’d have a port glass or a champagne flute, but she would be sipping slowly. She drank enough to make her regrets feel poetic, and no more.
“Is that your bed you’re sleeping in, Nick? Dee called in sick tonight.”
Dee was one of the waitstaff. I was tempted to tell Iris I kept my dick out of the restaurant, but that had a charge I didn’t want to add to the conversation. I mumbled instead that it was my bed, and Dee had probably called in because of her boyfriend’s gig at Tokyo Garden. I visualized receiving dental anesthesia, trying to get more sleep in my voice, though I knew it would do nothing to rush her off the phone. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to talk to her. I wasn’t sure if she was flirting, wasn’t sure if I wanted her to be. “Not sure” was something of a mantra for me at the time, a blank check I refused to fill in.
“Frank there?” I asked, hoping the invocation of her husband would sober the chat.
“Football game. The sedative effects of warm Coors.”
I let a silence hang, considering a fake snore.
“It’s a clear night,” she said. “I’m not sure why. If you lean against the windows and look up, you can see the constellations.”
“Good thing this happened after dark. Send smoke out the top of the building before sunset and you’ll have pictures all over the web.”
“The gators.” This is what she called the Fresno residents who loved to disparage the city. It sounded more mature than haters.