toward them and people are yelling-“Chill, motherfuckers!”-just as I reach out to help, but the closest thing to me is one of Jamie’s pinwheeling arms, so I grab it-forgetting that you
match it gets boring and even a little embarrassing,
And here’s the thing: I have a pretty good idea what Chet means. (I picture him holding it sideways, like they do in rap videos.) Of course, even when you try to make the right move, another board teeters-two minutes ago I was a forty-six-year-old unemployed narc hanging out with potheads, waiting to go to Weedland; now I’m an unemployed narc-who has gotten into a fight with a guy
There are these lakes in Northern Idaho that are supposed to be bottomless; the Navy used to do submarine training there. They’d think they had found the bottom and then a submarine would find a deeper hole. Of course, the lakes weren’t bottomless. In fact, it turns out nothing is bottomless-except the trouble I get into.
But here’s the strange thing about the fight. Once it’s over, no one says a word about it. The party just goes back to its earlier rhythms-Larry goes back to killing zombies and Bea goes back to kissing people and the other kids go back to drinking bad beer and smoking good weed and throwing pizza crusts and Chet even finds his phone under the couch and then he and his buddy decide to leave-“Lame-ass party”-the door closing behind them-and I try to imagine a party with my friends-say, the old newspaper Christmas party in the company cafeteria-erupting in a fistfight and then just returning to normal five minutes later.
“Sorry about that,” Jamie says. A bruise is forming above his eye.
Jamie touches his eye. “You ever feel like you’re outgrowing your own fuckin’ life?”
There’s my writer.
Jamie looks at his hand, sees no blood, and shrugs. “Should we roll?”
Bea sees us leaving and asks if she can walk out with us. And while Jamie goes around collecting for the weed he’s about to buy, I step on to the cold porch with beautiful blond, blue-eyed Bea, who buttons her heavy overcoat, lights a filtered cigarette and blows slow death at me. “I hate that homoerotic testosterone crap,” she says in released smoke and steam. “They should just fuck and get it over with.”
We are a foot apart on this landing. I stare past her, over the railing of the apartment landing toward the lights of another apartment building just across the street-they are stacked in this part of town like egg cartons in a grocery store. These kids at this party were born in egg cartons, have spent their lives in egg cartons…and I’m fooling myself if I think it’s any different in my bigger egg carton.
“Hey. You okay?” Bea asks.
And that’s when I have an epiphany, a real, old-fashioned, religious-style epiphany. And my epiphany is this: there are no such things as epiphanies-no moments of revelation, no great reversals of motive and fortune. No stands, no redemptions, no October surprises; everything is inevitable because the world exists exactly as it always has in this moment: the Rahjiv who mops a spilled Slurpee in the tight aisle of a 7/11 is the same Rahjiv who peels back the hair on a cracked skull in a Mumbai ER; my senile old father holds his remote and my five-year-old hand as Lisa talks to her boyfriend in the same bed where she curls up behind me when
my mother dies (even as she tells me,
I was going to wait until after Weedland, but I might not see this girl again. So I reach over. Gently take her by the arm. “Listen to me, Bea. You have to get away from Dave…he’s killed people. Do you understand me? Dave’s not even his real name. It’s an alias. You have to get away from him. This is all coming apart.”
She stares at me as if I’m nuts; I stupidly show her my watch: “I got picked up by the police…” Still, I get that uncomprehending look from her-“I’m probably going to jail…but if I can keep anything bad from happening to you-I don’t know…”
“You ready, Slippers?” Jamie interrupts, comes out onto the landing.
“Yeah,” I say, and I let go of Bea’s arm.
And so Jamie and I start down the landing, on our way to Weedland. But I stop after a few steps and my eyes are drawn back up to the landing and that’s where I see her, watching me, mouth slightly open-a distant, implacable look in her blue eyes, not at all what I expected-not gratitude, but something else-as the world teeters.
CHAPTER 27
