The word was. He had gained nothing, learned nothing, accomplished nothing. It was right that he should have to go back to counting shampoo bottles. That was his level. A man at the top of his game would have gotten what he came here to get.
He leaned for a moment against the polished green hood of a Mercedes Benz. He was startled by the sudden appearance of a man right in front of him, and instinctively catalogued his opponent’s weaknesses: What he saw was a man in middle age, looking paunchy and soft, glib but without the bite to back up the bark, speckles of gray in his hair, soft conciliatory body, a man who could be taken. This all registered in a moment, before he realized that he was looking at his own reflection. A mechanized voice ordered him to take three steps back, which he did, and walked rapidly away.
Stein had forgotten where he had parked his car and scoured Aisle D for twenty minutes before he found it in Aisle E. He opened his door and was practically driven to his knees by the rush of aroma that cascaded out. Goodpasture’s bud must have come out of its plastic bag when Stein had swept it under the seat, and the sun beating down on the roof for the last hour had turned the car into an oven. Passersby in the next row craned their heads in search of the source. A young boy asked his parents in a loud voice what that smell was. They pretended not to know, but his fifteen-year-old brother looked back at Stein and flashed him the peace sign.
It would mean an extra hour and twenty extra miles, but he had to go home first to air out the car and his clothing. He could not go to Angie’s school with the car smelling like this. He could just picture himself getting yanked out of the seat by Sergeant Henley, the 300-pound parking enforcement officer who stood guard at the gate of The Academy, and being dragged by the scruff of the neck to the principal’s office.
Weeks later, when he would relate this story and people asked him why didn’t he just throw the bud away, he had no better answer than to say he couldn’t. It was too beautiful.
Penelope Kim, Stein’s tall, slender, twenty-year-old Korean bisexual neighbor, was in the courtyard wearing her blue Spandex yoga togs, bent into her downward-facing dog when Stein arrived home and tried to hurry past her to his apartment.
“Stein!” She called through her legs. “I’ve been looking for you. I have to pick your brain.”
She sprang from her pose and bounded at his heels like a Doberman puppy. Penelope had been an Olympic diving champion at fifteen, and a Paris high-fashion model at sixteen, where under the name “Cambodia” she had posed nude for the famous calendar featuring old and new farm equipment. She had climbed K-2 and had her fortune told by the Dalai Lama. She had been declared clinically dead on two separate occasions, slept with the male and female costars of three major motion pictures and their sequels; and since all that was merely her life, the exotic protagonist of the screenplay she was writing was a middle-aged Jewish insurance investigator, who in her script she called Klein.
“So did you write your five pages today?” Stein asked her.
“No, today’s been a thinking day.”
“You write and think on different days?”
“They’re separate functions. I can’t explain it. I need to find out more about what you did at the factory,” Penelope said as she followed Stein into his apartment.
“It’s a warehouse.”
“I changed it to a factory. It’s more visual. I can’t explain it.” Watson was asleep in a shaft of sunlight on the living-room rug. He raised an eyelid, grumbled, and went back to sleep. “Maybe I’ll give Klein an old dog. Make the audience worry that he’ll die.”
“Klein or the dog?”
She giggled. “I hadn’t thought of that.” She grabbed a ballpoint off his desk and scribbled shorthand notes across the taut pliable skin of her forearm. “Stein, this place looks like a garage sale. Your feng shui is all for shit. I’m going to get my friend Fiona to do a complete energy rebalancing for you.” Stein looked distractedly from the hand-grouted coffee table to the overstuffed sofa to the fifties pole lamp. “I hate it when you ignore me,” Penelope pouted. “I’m too much of a narcissist to take the rejection.”
“I’m looking for a place to hide this.” He displayed the contents of the plastic wrapping that he had resealed.
“Stein, that’s marijuana!”
“I’m aware of that. And now, so is everyone else in the zip code.” He explored and rejected several hiding places-under the base of the pole lamp, in the pinball machine, his file cabinet- while giving her an offhand synopsis of the morning’s activities.
She looked at him with reverence. “Stein, you pretend to live this boring normal life, but you’re out making dope deals, betting horses. Reality so kicks fiction’s ass.”
“Ah!”
He strode triumphantly to the hall closet and tucked the packet in among the helter-skelter shelves of blankets and bed linens.
“No good,” said Penelope. “Not enough ventilation. It’ll stink up the house.”
“It won’t stink up the house.”
“I vote for the file cabinet.”
“It’s not a referendum.” Her chin and her eyes dropped. “I’m sorry. Penelope, I didn’t mean to snap at you.” As a penance he admitted, “I can’t hide it in my file cabinet. She snoops there.”
The phone rang. Stein let the machine pick up.
“I can’t believe you still use a landline. Even Klein has a pager.”
“You’d give Van Gogh a spray can.”
Mattingly’s voice came over the machine in a panic. Morty Greene had called in and quit his job. This was enough proof for Mattingly that the bottles had been stolen and he was going to swear out a warrant for Morty’s arrest. Stein grabbed the receiver, shouting “Do not!” He didn’t know why he would so adamantly defend Morty Greene. It probably had something to do with Edna and that whatever Mattingly thought was right, Stein wanted to be wrong.
Mattingly whispered into the phone. “Something new has come up.”
“Do not swear out any warrants. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
Penelope had unzipped her legging and was curled into the shape of Infinity writing rapidly down the inside of her left calf. “Stein you are so amazing. You flushed him out! How are you going to bust him?”
“Flushed who out? What are you talking about?”
“Morty Greene?”
“You sure you don’t want to change his name to something more visual?”
“Don’t condescend to me. I’m vulnerable.”
“Then don’t jump from one random thought to another and think it’s logic.”
She watched him resume his search for a proper hiding place.
“Do you know if the bottles have the Espe New Millennium logo embossed on them?” Penelope asked.
“What difference could that possibly make?”
“I know people who were paying three dollars apiece for the old New Radiance bottles. New Millennium’s would be worth a fortune.”
“Ah!” Stein dropped so abruptly to his knees that Penelope might have thought her insight had given him a stroke. He grasped the bottom shelf of the wall unit that housed his stereo equipment-his turntable, cassette tapes, and two hundred albums. “Give me a hand with this.”
“I can’t believe you still have vinyl,” she giggled. “The last living owner of a turntable.”
She grasped the sides of the unit, bent her body like a willow, and tugged mightily. The unit creaked toward her, away from the wall. Stein slithered into the space, reached down through the twistings of speaker wire and puffs of Jurassic dust motes. His hand found the mesh door of the unused air-conditioning duct. He opened the gate and reached in. His fingers rooted blindly in the space. He touched something cold and smooth and leaped back, pulling his hand out.
“What!” Penelope screamed.
“It felt like a termite queen.”
“You can’t have termites in a metal air duct. Let me in there.”
She changed places with him, pulled her long black hair back and pushed her lithe, slender body into the narrow space.
