3. Freak people out by performing hideously inappropriate PDA.
4. Piss Paqu off.
5. Pretend he’s actually her Sugar Daddy.
6. Piss “Go back to five,” Ben says. “You’re on to something there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on,” Ben says. “Paqu is turning off the tap, so you’re looking for a new… tap.”
“That’s deeply cynical, Ben.”
“Okay.”
“A poor little rich girl just wants some paternal love,” she says, “and you attribute her motivations to a crass gold-digging campaign instead of the profound search for identity that-”
“Do you even know where he is?”
“I know his name.”
67
She was looting (an absent) Paqu’s dresser drawers for cash and found something even better.
A vibrator.
What she would refer to as
Paqu’s Smartest Boyfriend
The Bestest Stepdad Ever.
Ubermann.
(With apologies to Chon’s beloved Nietzsche.)
BNI
(Batteries Not Included).
No first dates, no awkward conversations, no futile fumbling, no messy human relationships. Just fire that bad boy up, find a suitable fantasy, and
The big O or
Os, plural, if you do it right.
However
Right next to the rabbit, she found something else.
Her birth certificate with the
Name of the father she’d never met.
Paul Patterson.
Her father’s identity sitting next to a plastic phallus.
Three months in therapy right there.
68
“I mean, I could track him down, couldn’t I?” O asks Ben.
“Maybe,” Ben says, “but then what?”
He worries she has this fantasy-she’s going to meet her dad, he’s going to be great, they’re going to have this relationship.
“I don’t know, ask him questions.”
Ben knows that she already has the answers in her head-her father always wanted to be with her, Paqu is the Evil (Step) Mother who forced him away.
“Like why he left before you were born?” Ben asks. “Like if he loves you? What’s he going to say, O, that’s going to make your life any better?”
She has the obvious riposte.
What’s he going to say
To make my life any worse?
69
Dennis has a beautiful wife, two beautiful little daughters, and a beautiful if modest home in a nice suburb of San Diego where the neighbors grill steaks and salmon and invite each other over from across the fence. He goes to church on Sundays (one of those nice tame establishment churches that believes in God and Jesus but not so much that it’s inconvenient) and comes home and catches the afternoon football game or maybe goes for a walk with the family on the beach.
He has the sweet life and knows it.
Career going great.
You get (good) headlines for the guys who sign your annual reviews, you put them between a bunch of cameras and bales of marijuana, you let them pose beside mug shots of Mexican cartel figures (autopsy photos even better), your life plan is looking pretty solid.
It’s not cynical — this you must understand, you have to get this or none of it makes sense or has any meaning — Dennis does work that he loves and believes in, scrubbing the scourge of drugs from the American landscape.
He believes.
So where does it start?
You could say it starts that morning, as Dennis stands in front of the mirror shaving and feels that discomforting little tingle of undefined discontent. But maybe (the whole concept of “omniscient narration” is pretty fucked, anyway, right?) it doesn’t.
Maybe it starts the night before with the discussion of the granite countertops. They’re remodeling the kitchen and his wife really wants granite countertops, but when you look at the prices in the catalogs, it’s like, holy shit.
Maybe it starts because his work is the kind of thing he wants to talk about at home on Thursday Pizza Night, when Domino’s delivers and his oldest girl is already seriously into the Idol results show. When his wife asks the “How was your day” question he answers, “Fine,” and that’s it, and that wears him down, isolates him from the people he loves the most.
Maybe it’s the cumulative effect of that, or Maybe it’s a baby frozen blue in a dark gray dawn twentysomething years ago in a war that never seems to end.
70
Chon’s face appears on the screen.
Via the miracle of Skype.
Ben angles the lappie so O can see him, too.
She breaks into a huge grin.
“Chonny, Chonny, Chonny, Chonny boy!”
“Hi, guys.”
“How are you, bro?” Ben asks.
“Good. Yeah, fine. You?”
