A flashbulb memory, sitting on the hot sand with his sisters at the Cape. The shore was a sheet of dark, ovoid stones, the water so cold that going in had been a heroic act. He was small, and Fil and Tracy had held his hands, and he’d entered the shallows between them, gingerly, and he’d stopped when the sharp cold bit into his thighs, he’d leaned back like a dog against its leash, and they’d let him go back to the beach while they waded deeper and deeper into the dark water. It had been in a bay. There had been no waves. The stones had warmed in the sun and the heat wobbled around him and he kept his legs on the towel. Where had their parents been? Fil and Tracy came back with hard skin—cold, rigid, and rough under his fingers. They’d lain flat on the stones and he smelled their wet towels steaming beneath them.
Because he couldn’t excise or beat to death the part of him that time-traveled, he had settled on this establishment, a hermetically sealed capsule buried during an earlier life. His memory went everywhere with him, that was the problem. In his wallet was a photograph he hadn’t looked at in three years. At first he’d thought when the memory had faded he might look at it. He imagined looking at it, holding it by its scalloped white edges, and though he didn’t weep anymore when he thought of it, the memory hadn’t faded a shade. Nope, it had done just the opposite, it had expanded, covering the landscape in every direction.
Could he stay here all night if he got his head straight? It was a good stool he was on, that’s what Bronson would say, a good stool, and the movie would be good, and that would get him through until dinnertime.
Be a man. A man with balls and a spine. Pull yourself together.
Hey, the counterman said, eyes fixed on John. He’d been trying to get John’s attention for some time. John turned away from the opening strains of The Pit and the Pendulum. The counterman stood up straight and hooked a thumb through his leather belt while with the other he stroked his stubbled cheek as though he’d just woken up.
You gunna order or what? the counterman said, pacing the words as if reading from a cue card.
Dr Pepper, John said, tipping his cup.
We got Mr. Pibb.
John looked back at him, down at the glass of Dr Pepper he’d been working on for the last hour. Some toast, he said.
Wheat white rye.
Rye, John said. Through the cutout, John saw Nikos palling around with the line cook.
The counterman called it, hojack whiskey down, and went back to smoothing his paper. He shook his head, whether at John or some indignity contained in the Post, it was hard to tell, and really there was no difference.
John pulled out his plastic pouch of Sir Walter Raleigh and his pipe, a bruyère so smooth it could have been poured from a pitcher, a richly figured barrel with a line as graceful as La Maja Desnuda’s hip. So he’d been told by the guy who’d sold it to him. One eye still on the movie, he folded a paper napkin several times until it was firm as a pool table bumper. He held it all together by pinning one corner to the counter with his thumb. Then he rapped the bowl of the pipe against the bumper, each whack dislodging a spray of carbonized tobacco.
Hey, buddy? the counterman said.
John continued unabated, his face an expression of most genuine perplexity, as if to comprehend this request would require that he speak a foreign tongue, and intended to antagonize so completely the counterman that there could be no other possible reaction than violence.
You wanna knock it off?
The pipe hovered by John’s ear. In the kitchen, a patty sizzled under the cook’s steak weight. John brought down his arm, cracking his pipe against the counter with an extra snap of the wrist.
And so it was. Three hundred pounds of Bronx-born fury lunged at John, who slid back off his stool, pipe and tobacco in hand, as if to avoid a spreading spill on the counter, one that in this case was swiping at him with a hairy arm while making sounds that, although unrecognizable as postlapsarian language, were nonetheless wholly comprehensible to everyone in the diner. Blood would be spilled. John recognized it, too, and while his assassin was still beached atop the counter, roaring, perhaps overdoing it, for what is rage but a release, and who doesn’t enjoy it just a little, John, gripping the pipe with his left hand, closed his right into a fist and crouched down, just out of reach. From there he slowly, with excruciating truculence, erected his middle finger, held it there like an exclamation point, still as the sun in the desert sky. The counterman made an epic swipe, a game-winning pitch that John evaded by scrambling backward over the salted floor, his left hand, holding the pipe, coming down hard behind him, and a sharp sting of pain shot up his arm as his knuckles smashed into the serrated surface of the salted floor, a stunning flash of agony. He instinctively retracted his hand and went tumbling sideways.
The counterman was having his own difficulties with gravity. The violence of his grab for John had unseated his considerable mass from the counter, and he was in a nosedive, but with his arm crossed over his chest, which meant he couldn’t break his fall, and his forehead hit the floor with a crack. His eyes blew open and he went silent. John, still scrambling, crashed into a table, its pedestal rivets groaning, managed to get a hand on his coat, then sprung
