Telegraph Avenue

“I think I can fake it,” Nat said.

“Meantime, where the fuck is Archy?”

“I’ve been trying him, he doesn’t answer.”

“Try sending one of those text-message things.”

“What is that, I don’t know what that is.”

“I don’t, either. Ask Julie.”

“Aviva?” Audrey said, venturing closer in her tone toward accusatory.

“I have to get back to Rain,” Aviva said. “Go. Tell Gwen I’ll be there soon.”

“What if you get hung up, though?” Nat said. “They send in Lazar, I think she’s going to fucking bite his head off.”

“It’s a hospital,” Aviva said. “They can sew it back on.”

“I think I would have to say, ‘Mirror, Mirror’,” Julie said.

“The beard,” Gwen agreed vaguely as another contraction gathered out there in the gulf of pain on whose shore she was planted like a low-lying town, levees buckling under the advancing wave. She had put Julie’s hand against her stomach during the last one, let him feel the skin turn from upholstery to plate. “Spock with a beard.”

“The beard is, like, even more stylish nowadays than it was back then,” Julie said. “Goatees are in.”

She had instructed him to distract her, though he suspected that she didn’t mean it, that she was not capable of being distracted from her purpose today. The contractions took up all of Gwen’s attention. Each one became, as it arose, the object of intense study. But Julie was trying his best, even though, for his part, he was feeling, if anything, too distracted. Knowing he ought to be there, totally there, for Gwen, at least until his father got back or, better, until his mother showed up. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Titus, wondering where he was, where he might choose to run, if he was ever coming back. The elusive Titus, a cat burglar rappelling down the sheer wall of Julie’s life. Fugitive as a passing aspiration, one of those daydreams that you knew, even as you daydreamed it, would take more money, more luck, more coolness than you could ever hope to have.

“Keep talking Trek,” Gwen instructed him softly, holding herself still, her eyes closed, possibly keeping some kind of internal count, even though Julie, with his watch, was faithfully tracking the contractions’ frequency and duration on the back of an envelope he had found in her car. “It’s helping. Also I think it was more of a Van Dyck.”

“Okay,” Julie said, unsticking his legs from the vinyl seat of the LDR’s armchair. He turned around to face Gwen, holding her moist left hand in his right one. Gwen was lying on the bed in Archy’s old Xavier McDaniel T-shirt and a clean pair of leggings she had sent Julie into her house to retrieve on the way here. She had allowed herself to be hooked to the fetal monitor, but she refused to change into a gown as a way of proving her determination not to have this baby until Aviva was free and there was no need for the nurses to page Paul Lazar. “Also, the Captain’s Woman, on that one?”

“Oh, you like that.” The soft voice, studious, a librarian of pain running her finger down some endless index of burning. “Do you.”

“She’s, I don’t know. I guess she’s pretty kick-ass.”

Not saying that whenever he watched that episode, which he first remembered seeing with Gwen the night his parents went out to see Almost Famous, he liked to imagine that he was the Captain’s Woman, stalking the quarters of the evil Kirk with her bare midriff and her Tantalus Field, waiting for the captain to return to her arms, her lips, to the retro-future 1960s starship bed with the red sparkle-mesh bedsheets.

Forty-nine seconds went by in silence, and then she opened her eyes again. Julie wrote down the time and duration on the back of the envelope, which had been sent to Gwen by the law firm of Leopold, Valsalva & Rubin and which Gwen had not bothered to open. It bore a serious and, Julie would have thought, urgent aspect.

“Over,” she said, swallowing, licking her lips. A last little fizz of pain in her eyes. Julie could see it dying away, like Sally Kellerman in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” when the psionic fire went out of her.

“You okay?” he said.

“I am fine. If Lazar comes in here, I will not be fine. You will have to kill him.”

“I can do that.”

“You will have to be my Captain’s Woman, hit him with that Tantalus Field.”

“Dude is toast.”

She took hold of his hands in hers. “You are a good boy, Julius Jaffe,” she told him. “Your momma raised you right.”

“Thank you.”

“That must have been a weird, weird scene over there at that motel this morning.”

“It was insane. I don’t know what was happening. I don’t get what the deal is.”

“Who were the guys?”

“I don’t know, they work for, you know, Mr. Flowers, they have the suits, so they look kind of like Black Muslims, only with bling, and neckties, not bow ties.”

“Yes. Yeah.”

“I don’t know, it’s some kind of thing between him and Luther. Mr. Flowers and Luther. From back a long time ago, when Archy was little.”

“Archy didn’t tell you what it’s about?”

“No. He just said he would take care of it.”

Gwen bit her lower lip, not in pain, and shook her head once turning away from Julie. He was about to reassure her that Archy was coming, that he would come as soon as he heard that she had gone into labor. It occurred to him, however, that this might not be true. Julie had no idea what kind of situation Archy had walked into. The dudes from the funeral home went around armed and were probably dangerous, even if the big one, Bank, had proved surprisingly vulnerable to assault with a wooden katana.

“Titus, he’s the one ought to be in the emergency room,” Gwen said. “He was hurt, huh? I did the wrong thing, I should not have let him go. That was wrong. I don’t know where my head was. I guess I was feeling kind of crazy.”

“He had a bloody nose, but he was okay. He is pretty, like, tough.” Julie feeling a rush of gratitude toward Gwen for affording him an excuse to talk about Titus. “I think he lived in some pretty, you know, not so great places? Like where he was living here? Across the street from Mr. Jones.”

“I heard about that.”

“They treated him like shit.”

“Language, Julius.”

“It was a nightmare.”

“You like him, don’t you?”

“He’s my friend.”

Vulcan mind meld, Julie looking at her face could read her thought: Something you never really had before. “What did he ever say about me?”

“He… I don’t know. Probably he’s a little afraid of you. I know he, I mean, I could tell he was kind of, like, kind of excited about this.”

“The baby.”

“Yeah. His brother. He said you told him it was a boy.”

“It is. He is.”

“Yeah, he seemed excited. I bet if he knew you were going into labor, he wouldn’t have run away.”

“Huh,” Gwen said, and at first Julius took it for an expression of mild interest, Gwen registering a minor gain in information on a subject she formerly had known little about. Then the sound deepened and transformed and drew itself into a moan, huuuuuuuuh, and he saw that another contraction was coming on.

Julie heard the rattle of Gwen’s file in the rack outside. He stood up just as the door opened and a lean, pale