“Thanks?”
He was right to be wary of a compliment from Sophie. “You looked good for a giant sellout.”
“I’m not a sellout. None of that was a lie. It saved our lives. Just because I don’t want to talk about it doesn’t make it untrue.”
“I know that part is true, and I don’t need you to talk about it, but ‘My Pilot makes me the best me I can be.’ Do you actually believe that?”
He paused, then shrugged again. “That’s their new slogan, that’s all.”
“If you say so.” Her voice carried a note of triumph.
By the eighth inning’s end, everyone except Val looked bored and ready to leave.
“Time to go?”
They were all on their feet before her; they’d been waiting for her to call it. Behind the stands, others were streaming from the stadium as well, as happened in a lopsided game. Several people stopped David to shake his hand, though nobody was as rude as the guy who had sat behind them. A few asked if they could pose for pictures with him, and one young woman asked if he would give her his card so she could figure out whether or not she wanted a Pilot.
“I don’t have a card yet. I just started at the company.”
“How about your phone number, then?” Her friends all giggled, and he blushed.
They were clearly all going to have to adjust to living with a celebrity.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
DAVID
Being home was like being home was like being home was like being on a movie set dressed to look like home. The house still the same cozy familiar mostly still the same. The moms still the same cozy familiar if maybe a little different something changed in them or maybe in him David could never tell whether something else was different and he was the different in the sameness.
He knew he was different yes of course how could he not be the things he couldn’t unsee were part of him. He knew he couldn’t talk about those things with anyone here couldn’t help the way he tensed the way he sweated the way he didn’t notice his teeth clenching until his jaw ached afterward and he noticed in the unclenching. He could describe the location of every fly on every wall in a room full of flies but he didn’t notice his body’s reactions until he counterreacted to them.
Milo was the only person who understood. He felt bad bothering Milo when Milo and Karina were still getting reacquainted, but when he texted Milo always answered, and he wouldn’t admit to anyone how deeply he appreciated that fact.
After the baseball game, after he realized Balkenhol was plastering his face everywhere—billboards, TV, Internet ads, seriously, he didn’t even know why, it wasn’t like they were hurting, it seemed like everyone had a Pilot now—it got even harder for him to walk out the door. He knew he got looks, that his own suspicion marked him as suspicious, and he mostly confined himself to his commute.
The exception was when Milo asked him to get a drink, because it was one thing to text him, another to ask him to hang out, that was maybe too much, and then Milo would know he wasn’t handling himself that well, that he needed something he wasn’t finding, that despite the ads, the posters, the smiling, confident persona, he was falling apart. When Milo finally said want to grab a drink, he said yes, name the place, I’ll be there, wherever there is, is right now good, yes, cool, see you then.
Milo arrived in a tiny electric coupe just as David reached the bar.
“Karina’s,” he said, waving at the car. He wore a button-down shirt and suit pants, but no jacket, and he had let his hair grow a few inches. He’d been home four months longer than David.
They sat at a table by the bar’s far end, near the kitchen. In threes: the scent of fry-grease, the sizzle of the grill, the cooks’ quick Spanish. Its own triplet: the bartender’s rhythm of hand-washed glasses scrubbed, sterilized, flipped to air-dry. David noticed he and Milo both rotated their chairs out from the table, so they had their backs to the wall. They turned their heads to talk to each other, cradled ice-cold bottles, their eyes moving to the doors, to the glass blocks that let in light instead of windows, to the two other customers. The floor was carpeted in thin dirty maroon-worn-to-black except an eight-by-eight square laminated dance floor and a DJ booth. Behind the DJ booth, an emergency exit they could duck out if danger came through the front door. A window air conditioner made a valiant and vocal attempt to cool the space. Even with that, compared to most places, it was practically a sensory-deprivation scenario. He wondered if Milo had chosen it for that reason, if Milo, too, craved the relative quiet, the confined spaces.
“I was hoping you would say it gets easier,” David said.
Milo cocked his head. “What gets easier?”
“This. All of it.”
“You were hoping you’d stop casing the exits? You’ve only been home a few weeks. Give it time.”
David swigged his lager. “You’ve been here six months and you’re still doing it.”
Milo shrugged. Laughter from the bartender, news on one television and baseball on the other, the scrape of a chair. Milo understood David better than anybody did. Even when he thought he’d had enough of the noise, he wondered if he’d feel worse if he was no longer able to notice everything.
That was the problem with multiple attentions; he could never put anything fully away. There was an unspoken fourth and fifth and sixth and twentieth thing in every three he listed: the way the words on the bartender’s black shirt stretched and distorted over her breasts, the guy tapping his foot on the brass rail, the soda gun’s hiss, the boy who blew up in front of him, the IED he
