Although I made no attempt whatever to match him in the daylight, it seems that I easily outdrank him after dusk. Pretty well every time I went to Union Station to get the train back to New York I was awed by the sheer desperation of my (compound) hangover. My hands would shake so violently that I often simply threw away the cigarette I was trying to roll and went within to buy a pack of Marlboros…For a few hours, then (and no longer), I would emulate my friend in gangrenousness. But my struggle would pass – but so would his, I truly and steadfastly believed.
Now, here in Texas, the neutrons that weighed him down were about to be attacked: powered by 250 million electron volts, a high dose of protons would be fired into his body at two-thirds of the speed of light, well over 100,000 miles per second. The protons would neutralise the neutrons and the patient would…
Make a full recovery. Denial, rage, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Looking back, it sometimes seems to me that I got off at the first stop and at once found satisfactory lodgings in Denial – and stayed there till the early afternoon of the very last day. Blind Denial, which wouldn’t be at all out of character; but it proved to be slightly more complex than that.
Cadence, Trent, Brent, and the origins of the First World War
No word from anyone, so for an hour I strolled around among the billboards and parking lots of downtown Houston. And it had to be faced: I was an undocumented alien, like so many others down there, and very recently arrived. I was a stranger in a strange land.
As I was heading back into the hotel I paused in the forecourt for the usual ten-minute reason. Three discrete figures were warily converging at the taxi stand: a beautiful woman of about thirty, who was under four feet tall; a basketball player (a team of them had just checked in), inordinately long-limbed in navy-blue sweatshirt and sweatpants; and a man as four-cornered as a packing case, in a bouncer’s charcoal suit, smoking, and then stretching out a burnished toecap and wiggling his leg with the fluidity of a dancer as he crushed the butt under his sole.
It was six-thirty. Time, I thought, to see what the hell was going on in the Lone Star Saloon. I stepped forward and paused as a stretch limousine streamed slowly by.
‘Can I bum a cigarette?’ said a voice from the street.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But it’s loose tobacco. Here, I’ll roll one for you.’
‘Thanks. But don’t lick it,’ he stipulated. ‘Don’t lick it. I’ll lick it.’
In the Lone Star Saloon the lady said, ‘So tell! Come on. Tell about Trent!’
The guy behind the teak counter said, ‘I’m Trent. You mean Brent. That’s okay. People’re always mixing us up.’
‘So sorry, Trent. I meant Brent…I’m Cadence.’ And she offered her hand.
‘Cadence! An honour. Brent’s told me all about you.’
‘And Brent’s told me all about you.’
Trent finished polishing a wine glass and slipped it into its slot. ‘Brent? Well, Brent doesn’t want to get his hopes up too much. But the signs are it’s going to happen. You sense it, Cadence. You can sense when promotion’s in the air.’
‘Touch wood. So say!’
Cadence was a comfortably downy middle-aged blonde, softly swathed in fawn cashmere. She was one of those generous-hearted beings who, when staying in hotels and looking in on their cocktail lounges, develops a passionate interest in the welfare of certain members of the staff. Her interlocutor, Trent, cut a courtly figure in bow tie and ochre waistcoat. Two stools down from Cadence, and facing Trent, I sat slumped over a Coors Light; occasionally I stared without profit at my mobile phone…Swirling her rum–tonic in its ice, Cadence said, ‘Trent. Don’t keep me in suspenders! What’s it going to be with Brent?’
‘No one knows.’ Trent added coyly, ‘But possibly they’re thinking Under Chef?’
‘Under Chef?’ Cadence frowned. ‘Brent’s a bartender. Can he cook?’
‘Actually, Cadence, Under Chefs don’t do a lot of cooking. They play more of an organisational role. On the other hand, he could make Catering Sales Coordinator?’
‘Catering Sales Coordinator. Oh wow.’
I was back in the forecourt enjoying yet another fiery treat when my phone started to groan and throb. I was directed to a certain suite in ‘the Tower’.
These reintroductions to Christopher’s new world (always ominous and much previsualised): they usually began with the opening of a door. Usually the door opened inward or opened outward but this door split in two and opened sideways. And as I stepped from the elevator it was immediately clear that Christopher had moved on to another plane of distress. He was in the corridor that led to his rooms, reeling around on tiptoe as he struggled to contain it, to elongate himself and stay on top of it. A milky liquid burst upward from his mouth.
I embraced him (which these days I kept on reflexive ly doing). ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s just a little accident. Don’t worry.’
‘The thing – the thing insists on getting out of me,’ he said when he could.
‘It’s nothing, my dear. It’s nothing.’
The sharply targeted weapon of proton treatment would begin on Monday. Today was Saturday, and the doctors had continued with the blunt instrument of chemotherapy, whereby ‘you sit in a room with a set of other finalists’, as Christopher put it, ‘and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of
