because I know they need something besides a trophy kill. I’ve become expert at discerning injury, emotional need. I see it everywhere. Where it’s absent, I run.”
“That bully is hardly vulnerable.”
“Maybe not physically vulnerable, to a man. But I could see that, if necessary, I could manipulate him. I wanted to know the answers too. You were acting like a crazy man.”
“Where did they take you?”
“To the Mandarin Hotel. I met Gils Simons. We called you, and then they gave me a room and my cell phone to call Timothy and whomever else I wanted. I think they must have drugged me. They told me I could go, but I fell asleep and I slept hard.”
“You gave me a pocketknife.”
“To use against Gils Simons. He, by contrast, has no emotional needs. He’s like a calculator, a computer, an adding machine with a toupee.”
“That’s a toupee?”
“Might as well be. The guy’s a mannequin.”
In spite of myself, I laugh, albeit lightly. My first half laugh of the new era.
“As near as I could tell,” Faith says, “they are excited to launch some new product. It’s some new toy or video game they’re testing here and they’re beginning to sell in China, with the blessing of the government there. Steven is the liaison to the Chinese. He takes that role very seriously. He thinks you’re ruining the launch or stealing the secrets or something like that. Are you?”
I shake my head no. I don’t really know the answer to her question.
I take a slow right onto Folsom. A block back, the Mercedes materializes. I lose sight of it around the corner and it doesn’t reappear as I head straight on Folsom past the clumps of day-workers gathered on the corners.
A few minutes later, I’ve arrived at Mission Day School.
Faith hustles to unbuckle her seat belt and open her door. “I’m going to figure out how to pay the tuition, if I have to go even further into debt. Timothy’s thriving here, in a relative sense. But I’ve got to get out from under this jerk.”
She stands at the door. She kneels down. She looks at me until I relent and meet her gaze. She blinks her brown eyes and I realize that, even though she senses her power to connect, physically and emotionally, she doesn’t know its depths. I want to make her smile. And she wants to say something. She opens her mouth, only a tad, then pauses, her perfect lips hung in space. Maybe she’s waiting for me. I’m waiting too. I’m waiting to say what I know I feel: give me a few weeks and then let’s get coffee and a doughnut and see what we can do about having an honest connection, the first I’ve had in nearly a year.
I have the feeling she wants the same thing.
“Goodbye, Faith.”
53
“Are you having a threesome with state-sponsored terrorists?”
This is the question that greets me when I get to the entrance to the office. Rather, it’s the question on the meticulously hand-painted sign in the window of Green Love, the politically correct and eco-friendly sex shop that never fails to remind me I’m not nearly the weirdest tenant in the building.
I can’t help but read a flyer in the window below the provocative question. It explains that some “mainstream sex lubricants” use petroleum-based oils that can “line the pockets of Middle East terror states that treat women as chattel.” The flyer goes on to urge the use of sex products “sold here” from certified fair-trade communities in Latin and Central America and also from local artisans.
If I ever get horny again, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be looking for lubricant made in someone’s bathtub in Sonoma County. But then, how could I ever look myself again in the mirror over the bed if I wasn’t making love, but terrorism?
I look over my shoulder and I see no sign of the bald buzzard or other lurkers. And a minute later, I’ve trudged up the stairs and see that the door to my office is ajar.
Almost without a pause, I push open the door. Inside, I see the one person who might pose the biggest threat. At least emotionally.
Samantha, my Witch, my sister-in-arms, sits cross-legged on the floor. Her head is back as if looking at the heavens but her eyes are closed and, even if they were open, the most exotic or mystical thing she could see is a water stain on our ceiling that looks vaguely like a tarantula eating a strand of spaghetti.
She’s in deep thought, or a trance, something I’ve learned not to interrupt. Not that I want to. Seeing the Witch means poking the wound I’ve just discovered.
I start to walk to the futon. I’m going to lie down on it and then get up again when I’m struck by any urge of any kind that seems more powerful than the urge to lie on the futon.
But, then, I’ve forgotten the lure of my mobile phone. En route to the futon, I remember that it-my iPhone-is dead for wont of a charge. I beeline to the desk to plug it in, genuinely rueful at the inescapable need to attend to my device. I find the power cord plugged into the wall behind my computer. I insert it into the device. I see the picture of Isaac on the desk. It’s the one I took with this self-same phone, the image I emailed to myself and printed out, wanting, perversely, to keep alive some memento of all the things I lost. Equally inexplicably, I kept tacking it to my wall, no doubt one of the many small missteps I made that allowed me to create a virtual reality, concussion enhanced, that left me believing that Isaac never died.
I pick up the photo.
I turn around. The Witch stares at me. With her hands folded in her lap, as in the shape of a cup, she looks like a statue you’d see in some comically peaceful Asian rock garden. Water should be flowing from her lips into her hand cup.
I take the picture and I lay it on the desk. Facedown.
This elicits no discernable reaction from Samantha. Maybe her eyes soften. Maybe I’m projecting. She tilts her head back and looks up in the direction of the water-stain tarantula, then closes her eyes.
My phone chirps, suddenly juiced, coming to life. On it, the clock reads 12:05. What day, though? Then the phone, as if reading my mind, beeps again. The calendar pops up, reminding me I’ve got an appointment in three hours. It’s the tax hearing.
I wonder if I’ll make it.
I plod to the futon. I plop down. I fall asleep. I don’t dream.
I feel warmth on my hand. I open my eyes. The Witch sandwiches my fingers between her palms, bringing me to life as if an anesthesiologist gently awakening a cardiac patient from a post-surgical haze.
“Your phone says you’ve got a meeting at three,” she says.
“What time is it?”
“Twenty minutes until your meeting.”
I sit up and prop my back against the wall.
“I’m glad you’ve stopped running.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
She cocks her head. I imagine she’s seeing all kinds of different Karmic colors swirling around me.
“What if I’m running to something, instead of away from something?”
“Are you?”
I stand up. I walk to my desk and I pick up my phone.
“Nathaniel, have you ever?”
“May I say something important?”
“Please.”
“I hope you and Bullseye aren’t using lubricants that support radical extremists.”
She laughs. “I saw that sign. Don’t worry. Our love oils are certified organic.”
Outside, I climb into my car and see a familiar face or, rather, two. Sandy Vello and boyfriend, Clyde. They sit across the street from my office in a pickup truck-Clyde’s, I presume. When I stare at them, they first pretend not to
