A Six-way Deal
‘Julian’. A white oxford and solid color tie, navy blazer fastened by three brass buttons, chin scraped clear of a week’s paltry stubble, wily curls clipped to half-inch potentilla — all of this as unnatural as wearing a fat suit to star in comedies or a grayer uniform to infiltrate enemy ranks. But, per the Boss, police leave the well-dressed alone — even as the city is twilit with crime and their walkies chatter, They’re more likely to ask after the quality of ‘Julian’s’ day than question his activities. He buzzes at the intercom of a high-rise, says this name he gives to clients, and Sal lets him in with a screech of outdated electronics and a yeehaw of enthusiasm.
Quote the Boss toward the end of that first brazen meeting: The upstart outlaw loses because of rigidity in the face of the world’s tides. You see, he gets mired in the insoluble q: ‘who am I?’ and once the I is incised, he must always ask ‘is this deed wrong?’ and, if so, then the ‘I’ cannot sustain. Every loss of nerve is an identity crisis in microcosm.
A nod to the old woman behind the desk, eyes Edwardian jellies of glaucoma, and a stroll to the elevator with the practiced step that says not only should he be here, but he is very late. The building mustily old, its doors framed in artisan woodwork, the walls interbellum plaster that would crumble to the touch like stale bread. Waiting for the door to fling open, the briefcase held swaying into his knees as though it carries vital paperwork or emergency tickets to another state for emergency business. The contents, actual: six vials of a potent hallucinogen, a banded handful of cash, and an inherited .22 revolver that is heavier than it looks. He wanted to carry the piece unloaded, but the Boss said a man should never pack a weapon unless he is willing to use it.
Up up up, with the chains wind-chiming together and the wubwubwub of floors passing on below him, the art deco ding of the doors. Destination: twelve-oh-nine. The hallways a hotel’s: antique tables set with fake flowers in brass vases, the carpet from a black-and-white era and bordered in brocade, lead-glass mirrors where he catches himself mid-stride — whether his mother would recognize him, his father (if alive) would fear him, whether Amber would let him in and talk with him awhile.
One knuckle tap on 1209 and it’s open on its chain and Sal says: “C’mon, get you in here.”
The door closes, opens and hangs there. Sal already back down the short hall into his living room — even at 6'3”, three hundred pounds of take-out and Johnny Walker, the man moves like a ghost. It’s hard to tell how old Sal is, the apartment always dark and blurry with smoke, but it seems he’s past the age where one can live alone and fry their brain nightly and not be hastening some lonely end. The first few deliveries, ‘Julian’ had been shaky with nerves and tics, the handle of the briefcase slick with sweat, but since day one of the gig, his nights have been spent in strangers’ rooms like this and the Boss taught him to project the image of a man who takes his time: deliberate, professional, ‘cool’. The anxiety never leaves him though, it runs under his skin like the warmth of his blood.
The whole thing started what seems like a long time ago, his memory of the years before it unreliable. His first day at university, after a summer of fruitless wandering through the Eastern Bloc — little romance, no poetry, just stomach ailments and bankruptcy — he showed up for his inaugural Chem lecture, major undeclared, and was out in the hallway taking deep breaths before the prof clicked through a slide. The flier above the drinking fountain said: “Experience Available: Revelatory, Exciting, Lucrative” captioned with a number that linked him eventually to the Boss. It had started out as all of those things, but after five years . . .
Sal has never mentioned where he gets the money, never a hint about jobs or women or a fat check earned by shattering his kneecap on a liable floor, he doesn’t even seem to be selling off the excess. Just five hundred dollars a month handed-over without hesitation for psychedelics so powerful the government won’t acknowledge them, and fifteen minutes of wandering conversation about things that happen outside his window or inside his computer. The Boss has disallowed ‘Julian’ from running Internet to his own apartment — too many tendrils and breadcrumbs and vectors of identity — and so Sal has become his favorite client (not “customer”, the Boss is very specific about this). Every month, ‘Julian’ peers into the vortex over Sal’s thick forearms and witnesses a second realm. Where the actual world is measured and deciphered, where everyone exists as they actually are or behind masks so elaborate they transcend all of that. It’s a place of paranoia and exposure and irrationality and ‘Julian’ has been so diverted that he couldn’t navigate it alone.
But the laptop is put away, its glow replaced by the brighter light of six small monitors stacked in two rows on the coffee table. At the window, six small cameras arrayed the same.
“Bank auction, ‘Jules’,” Sal says, sinking into the bottomed-out couch and gesturing for ‘Julian’ to sit at the other end. “Only a hundred bucks for the little TVs and the cameras and all the cables. Good deal, if I say so myself.”
Each monitor has a precise zoom on the apartment windows of the next block, this building’s younger, wealthier, cousin. In the top left, 1A, a man ungaugable and blanket-wrapped eats with his hands and watches an unseen TV, his glasses two coins in the dimness. 1B beside it, a pajamed woman of thirty or so types on a laptop with a kettle steaming in the kitchen behind her. 1C, a smiling couple peek-a-boos with their toddler on the floor. The row below: 2A, a man reading harrumphed in his easy chair, the room dense with neatly ordered books, a retired cat obsolete on the arm-chair beside him. 2B, an older woman with a white crew-cut adjusts the dangle of her earrings in a mirror. But 2C: in the center of a shadowy room, an olive-drab cot sprinkled with red flower petals, candles in concentric circles on the floor.
“Same as last time?” ‘Julian’ says. The vials and cash strapped into a compartment in the briefcase lid. In the emulsive light of the monitors, the revolver a puddle of mercury shaped into a gun. The Boss has conditioned him to be free of description, to harbor blankness. Of the thousand adages that men in their business must keep at heart, one is that a person who is honest is not required by the trials of life to have a good memory, and another is the old time dealing wisdom that habits beget routines and routines beget laziness and laziness begets helicopters, SWAT teams. Yet, all he’s done at the Boss’s behest is lie and fill in the holes he’s just dug.
“Same as always.” Sal points at 2C. “The bottom right there is my favorite. This old codger brings a new girl in there three, four times a week. Always think about running out and bumping into them on their way home. Compliment would go far in that kind of deal.”
‘Julian’ slips a vial from the briefcase and looks at it. The drug isn’t for college kids looking to amplify their nights out, and it doesn’t breed junkies that clamor for it day and night — though Sal’s consistency had suggested to ‘Julian’ a narcotics officer, a suspicion that made the Boss proud. Despite the library of brain-fucking drugs on the market now, none of them match this greyish fluid that allows a well-practiced user to decide what he or she wishes to see, none are like programming your dreams and remembering every frame. It shows you things, ‘Julian’ has seen them. If you cannot tell it what you want, it will decide what you need from the things you’ve surrounded yourself with, the tracer fire and live ammo of your mind. It will make an epic of your five or ten or twenty minutes that seem sealed-off from time, or it will make a tragedy, an opera, a mockumentary that depicts you radiant or pathetic, a slapstick, a harrowing psychological roadtrip to find yourself at some cliff-face. The Boss: It’s what a blinded man must see in the depths of REM. At a precise dose, the euphoria is what a paint-huffing street urchin imagines as being rich. These statements true and false. Taking Black Magic, as Sal calls it, is verboten for ‘Julian’ — like telling the clients your real name, or fraternizing with them, or letting women get too close. That first evening, though, that first glory-skyed night the Boss offered him a taste so he understood the deal. He laughed and prayed stretched out on the Boss’s expensive floor. Seeing. Believing everything at once. And afterward, the Boss meticulous in telling him what lessons he should glean.
Sal slides over the money and opens the vial with a waft of mediciny palmetto. He smacks his lips and drops three fat drops into his rocks glass. This is how he takes it: a few drops in every cocktail, a cocktail every hour — a seamless rolling of one trip into the next. Sal is an expert user, but in the graceful way he lifts his glass for a quaff, ‘Julian’ sees he’s using the drug to simulate a life, to superimpose it over this one in which he hardly leaves.
In 2C, one of the flower petals gently seesaws on its spine in the draft.
“What happens to them?” ‘Julian’ says with a pervy tone he tries to swallow, the question itself virginal in their exchanges, but his curiosity potent as money. The Boss: Even an innocuous query could lead back circuitous to your actual identity, and on to mine.
“You ought to wait and see,” Sal says, sipping, the effects instantaneous as alcohol. “Plenty of Scotch if you’d like a bit.”
This latter offered always, though the answer has never changed. But tonight: the suspense of 2C a thread of anticipation at his crotch, Sal almost a friend, and his only schedule for the night going home to count money and shave off his share and gaze long into the LCD abyss. The Boss calls loneliness a weakness in resolve, and the desire to connect a flaw in the ego that neglects the network present between all things — thin solace on the many nights he watches the sun come up alone.
Even in the milky light of the room, Sal’s drink is the color of Amber.
“An ice cube or two, if you would,” Julian says. Sal makes ‘Julian’s’ drink from the table and wags the vial in a rubber-pencil illusion. “Some Black Magic? We can dip into mine.”
‘Julian’s’ phone vibrates in his pocket. Restricted. The Boss. He answers:
“Yes?”
And it is just The Boss breathing on the other end.
“Hello?”
The Boss clears his throat: “Son?”
“Yes?”
“The value of wisdom is its track record stretching out before you. My every thought is toward self-preservation, and thus my advice is to be heeded like the warning label on a bottle of pills.”
“Everything is going fine tonight.”
“And yet, you can derail everything we’ve built together in the time it takes for light to fill a room.”
‘Julian’ disconnects. Turns the thing off and stows it again in his pocket. It is enough to have that old man’s voice in his head, far too much for him to call in these moments. All his phone calls prophetic, somehow. All of them running in parallel with his own thoughts. And every single one, up till now, he’s obeyed.
“Everything all right?” Sal says.
“Bosses, you know? Never know when to cut a little slack.”
Sal rolls the vial toward him on the table. If debriefed by the man on the other end of that phone, or the law, or some after-life adjutant, ‘Julian’ would be at a loss. He adds one drop to his Scotch. Two. A third to match Sal.
“So, you’re probably wondering why I picked these windows,” Sal starts. He has yet to discuss his surveillance state with anyone, but this primer seems loosely scripted. ‘Julian’ sips a bit of drink — cold metal beneath the rheumy sap of the Scotch — and then downs half of it with a grimace.
“I needed some kind of organizing principle.” Sal finds his laptop, unfolds it on the coffee table. “I came across the Eight Stages of Psychosocial Development. Homeboy named Erickson.”
He adjusts the angle of the screen for ‘Julian’, but the first squeeze of the drug has already begun. The text bubbles and skitters indecipherable.
“Now the first few stages are babies, children, what have you. I only got six cameras, and less: I’m no pervert. So, I skipped ahead a few.” Sal scrolls, but ‘Julian’ watches the monitors — get your palsied grip around the flagellant tail of this thing or else your last sober thought will run roughshod. “And then I came to this one: age twenty-five to forty. Love versus Intimacy.”
1A and 1B. The man eating affectless and the woman gazing out the window with her mug of something, pausing to mull over whatever she’s building in that computer, the kitchen-light a thin golden rim on her shoulders.
“Will I share my life or live alone? Can I be loved? These are the questions we ask ourselves in this stage. He’s alone and lonely, craves love, confuses it with intimacy. And she’s on a whole ‘nother trip. Solid with being solo, right?”
Loneliness an unfortunate ingredient and the image that comes with it is her. Amber from the apartment directly below his, who he sometimes hears talking to her phone on her balcony laughing with a girlfriend or groaning endearingly about her lonesome life in the city. One day, he opened the basement Maytag to her bruise-colored panties clinging damp to the inside, spin cycle having spun them into a stretched wetness she’d left behind.
The Boss: Love is for those with a cleaving in their soul, to be trusted as much as anything that might fill it: booze or god or psychotherapy. Pack the space with the mortar of yourself and you will never want.
“So,” Sal goes on, a cigarette lit somehow. “Twenty-five to forty-five. How you cope here has everything to do with your passage through the previous stage. All of them nested, wound together. Before this is Identity versus Role Confusion, ages fourteen to twenty-four. You’ve got to nail that sucker down or else you end up being him. 1A. Who am I, is the question, what am I for? Thing is, I saw that dude in her place, 1B’s, last week. She fucked his lonely little brains out and went right back to the script. Don’t know what she does but it’s a solitary mission to be sure. She’s got her identity all framed-up in thick black lines.”
She wears thick black glasses when she’s not going out, Amber does, but this does not change her any more than the Boss’s voice scrambler turns him into another man. ‘Julian’’s disguise is a face and body strung over space emptying grain by grain like the top chamber of an hour-glass. There seems to be chintzy jazz issuing from the monitor at bottom right, though that can’t be.
“2C,” ‘Julian’ says. “What is that one?”
“Hold your horses,” Sal says. “In 1C, you’ve got your happy couple.”
1C, the tyke’s in soft, fuzzy PJs now. Mom and Dad taking him out into the hallway together to put him down to sleep. ‘Julian’ drinks the rest of the Amber. That’s what this concoction should be called.
“They figured it out in a very Freud-friendly way. Love, intimacy, bam. Bonus: the kid’s on some Initiative versus Guilt shit, right? Ages four to six. And his parents let him risk himself just enough. Going to be a confident, industrious little bastard.”
Amber goes to the gym at the corner a couple times a week, after work or school or between them, and carries her child-size gym bag in a hustle, black pants tight as paint. ‘Julian’ forgot that smells were part of the program, that the Black Magic can conjure the stench of rot, the warm capsule of baked bread, or this poultice of nylon and her elegant sweat the way the stairwell is when she comes back. Standing there on the landing, listening to the door open and shut behind her. Here it is. Phwoo.
“And check it,” Sal says, chewing a piece of ice. “Humans are so funny. Down below, 2A and B, you’re looking at Generativity versus Stagnation. Those two right there. Age forty-five to sixty-five give or take. Generativity. Thought at first that was fancy talk for being productive, but it’s not. Something to do with how you stand with respect to the next generation. ‘Will I contribute to society something of value or will I sulk,’ figuratively speaking — and it all depends, see, on whether you’ve mastered intimacy or you’ve found something holy in being alone — 1B, you follow?”
The old man of 2A reads disgruntled, as though looking for a tangent to hate in every ripping flip of the page, and 2B the crew-cut woman welcomes her handsome, grown-up son, a paper bag of groceries clutched to his chest.
“It’s too late to be productive — in a kind of averaging over your life — so here you grow either dissatisfied with how you’ve burned your particular candle, or you find some glee in what you’ve done.”
This the Boss’s age, and how he must disappear when he closes his eyes to sleep. Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free, he’d said, twice, and in each meant, it seemed, that he’d know the truth and in that he’d made ‘Julian’ live as though his every move was known.
“If there is a family, have you all found peace despite the obstacles, can you love the pieces of the world at your fingertips. Or have you stagnated to pond scum — like this joker in 2A with his books.”
The next wave of Amber laps up on the cortical shore. ‘Julian’’s apartment now on a seventh channel ghostly to the left of the grid. He watches himself come in, briefcase and blazer, unsealing the freezer and prying something from a box, into the microwave, waiting watching it spin, the cosmic rays slipping through his cells. And then this below: Amber sitting in solitude, her TV tuned to some secret channel activated by female pheromones. If he just went down and knocked and plied her with his awkward smile and kept at arms’ length while he asked what she was doing? While he held a bottle of wine secret behind his back or up on his counter-top and acted aloof like he’s seen a hundred men do and wind up interrupting their lonely lives for awhile. On TV this happens. He’s never found the disguise with which to do this.
“How old are you?” Ghost-Sal, ambient as the Old Testament God.
“I’m . . . I’m . . .twenty-four. Hours in a day.”
“And so who are you?
“I’m ‘Julian’, right?” he whispers. “I gather in a puddle beneath your intercom once a month. Which one of all this are you?”
The room nods solemnly with Sal’s head. ‘Julian’ drinks another without understanding what it means to want one.
“You won’t find old Sal in any of that. I stepped off the grid a long time ago. Hold on, here she comes. Good old Role Confusion.”
A door opens in 2C. Dainty statue feet, the veins and tendons like verses written on them. Shinbones glossy, knees the tiny belly of a well-fed child. And then underwear he knows. Panties the color of a week old bruise on pale skin. The waistband hollow over the two valleys of her pelvis. The navel a perfect size to sink a thumb into while palming the dish of her hip. Phwooo. Her ribs faint impressions beneath the cathedrals of her breasts. It’s Amber. A blindfold over her eyes, but that is her hair, her mouth and the indecisive tooth biting her lower lip. Saying hello at the mailboxes, he’d thought it almost flirtation. Passing her on the sidewalk unacknowledged she seemed to bite her lip in a deep, far-off focus.
“I know her.”
“I know all of them. She’s . . . let me see . . . this one is the waitress at the diner downstairs. Mhmm. She winked at me once and bent over a little too far.”
“What does he do? To them? What is all of this?”
His question sends the monitors kaliedoscoping. The man in 1A sleeps through commercials and his momentary lover holds her uninspired head in her hands. The family is vulnerable to burglary in the porous and swallowed quiet. The old man, 2A, grins at something in those yellowed pages and 2B hugs her prodigal/profitable son as he ambles out the door, the sinew of her arm reedy around his shoulders. The Boss’s voice: In dissecting anything, it falls apart. Peel back the facade to find another one and another and eventually you come to a final inglorious layer the same as the first.
Sal’s apartment shrinks into its own shadow and the only world is the six monitors. ‘Julian’ blinks hard and every one now broadcasts and spies on lives he hasn’t got to yet. His face recognizable in six eerie windows, each one running years end-to-end. Focusing on 1A or 2B, on any of them, he can pause, rewind, scroll slow. He can zzzz ahead months in moments , replay a few frames again and again. He watches his own life, lucid as a movie, his mind multifarious now, running in parallels. Phwooo:
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|1A|He never talks to Amber and watches through his window, down down to the street, as she and some polo-shirted boyfriend load her boxes into the back of a rented van. He lets the curtain fall into place before they’ve turned the corner. Back to the couch to watch something again he’s seen a hundred times. He gains weight as frames slip by, bringing home that same briefcase growing scuffs and rubbing the day out of his face. A year of this and somehow a sloe-eyed woman rabid on Black Magic is there and gone, her goo an undiscovered country on the couch cushion and the refrigerator when he opens it a fetid soup of rotten spinach and broccoli and the trash piling into a tower of boxes dusted with cheese. He sits with the same inertia as Sal and in some moment missed in the panning through, the blazer is replaced by holey jeans and a faded t-shirt for a long, interrupted nap and then a blue uniform shirt bearing a tiny logo and a ballcap with the same. He is packing a lunch in a small cooler, arranging tools on the table. The room shrinks, collapses, expands to the corridor living room of a double-wide and for a time there is a wastrel in knee socks who yells, silent, fast-forwarded, as he hustles in and out the door. And then she is gone and there is staring. There is cheap beer cans gathering the corner in their cases. There is a small window in the kitchen through which streetlight blares unblinded as he conks out on the couch over and over again.
The Boss, dressed-down years from now, a mask of riddling panic he’s never worn, in the doorway with dusk-blacked trees behind him and the purple burn of sunset. They stand in the cramped kitchen leaning on counters, the Boss briefly staging something on the table with beer cans and a salt-shaker. A weary manila envelope laden with cash. And a night later, the trailer empty as a birdhouse, stumbling through the door with the .22 dangling from his hand, blood splotched on his shirt. Vacant stare into the TV, with a beer untouched on the floor and his face a chunk of soapstone abandoned halfway through the carving — before the soul could be added to the eyes, sympathy to the wrinkles of his mouth. |/1A|
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|1B| He’s seized the Boss’s path. Drinks solitary pours of something brown from a decanter and the apartment doubles in status, a static of moving boxes and piles. There are things the Boss has said in thick frames along a wall, and nights now coming home in varied suit-tie-shirt configurations to eat pureed vegetables from a chrome blender and other nights the table peopled with several laughing warm friends digging in and quaffing wine, even the Boss enjoying himself.
There are women sometimes on his couch or coming stark from screen left to stand in the refrigerator light, but they’re seldom the same reeling through three years, him mostly gone, and it is now a house cavernous and he enters way back there, his expression blurred by distance. The walls grow art, abstract, minimal, his knuckle a ring like a gilded wart. He sits languid and pensive sometimes on the couch, and will flinch into action offscreen, or pace at the edge talking to a phone. There is a woman, but she could be a live-in maid if it weren’t the few minutes he squeezes her at the door. And then it is empty for awhile. A Christmas tree in the far corner, dangling baubles that spin and catch the light in instances of green and red and gold. He tosses a match onto the tree and it flares and blackens the wall in a hand-shaped plume. He blots out the fire with an extinguisher and sits on the couch eating pizza with the tree still smoldering behind him.
And then it is a prison cell. And a prison cell. And a prison cell. His arms shroud with nefarious tattoos and his skull seems to shrink under the burden of a beard and time. As fast as ‘Julian’ can forward through it, he cannot find the moment when he walks free. |/1B|
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|1C| That must be Amber on the couch next to him. Difficult to tell. She looks wiped, in a t-shirt, but sitting right beside him like she’s finally relaxed after a long week. His apartment spotless for the moment. She coils her hair around a finger and lets it slide off and says something that gets them up into the kitchen popping popcorn hilariously on the stove and when it is shook and buttered and there’s more wine in their glasses, she touches her heart like sign-language and spreads what she’s gathered there over the bowl.
‘Julian’s’ stupid grin as they reclaim the couch and blanket so they can stretch out their legs and keep their torsos together like moths to light. Freeze the frame when he leans in to press his buttered lips to her neck. Watch three times her squealing smile.
Sometimes soon after, she is there in the morning. Mostly not. And then he stops wearing the blazer and she is there most mornings, sometimes dressed for life herself and sometimes eating cereal in his too long shirt and bare legs crossed as he hustles out the door, stopping to kiss her gropingly, checking the contents of his briefcase to be sure, and it now serving as a case for actual briefs of some kind, paper in folders. They study together at the table, eat dinner there, array friends around it drinking, and sometimes she is bent over it and he is raising up on his straining toes. Then the table is in another kitchen in a new flat that is theirs on the walls and the bookshelves. And many nights her reading, taking notes, and he clacking away at his laptop, stealing glances, cracking small jokes, stopping to eat something tentacular with chopsticks out of carry-out boxes.
Flashing forward to see how this all goes wrong, he is in a tuxedo, covering his face as she slips by trailing girlfriends in a dress pearlescent and fantastical.
A lot of time in front of the computer, leaned forward taking notes, learning something in there, creating something. When she goes out, with folders of papers corrected in the nights before, he has a guy over and they work on something excitedly pacing the kitchen. They’ve allied their fates in some venture, it seems, and when she returns they’re so happy to see each other that they hang on and mumble and wrestle a bit on the carpet. Then she’s pregnant, her stomach swelling and him rubbing it, having dinner ready when she gets home, his long day on video-chat, at the computer, and stressed sometimes, and sometimes late at night.
Champagne is drank with the partner, his wife, Amber abstaining and snapping photos, so big she could crack like an egg. Frames later, rushing her out with a shoulder-bag and a hand around her waist. The first time in a panic — the place then pasteled and strewn and patrolled by a gem-like little human — and the second time leaving for the hospital with the grace of those heading to church. |/1C|
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|2A| Sitting in a facsimile of the apartment he left behind years ago. In clothes too big and moth-eaten, his face pale and anxious without the beard. Life after being caged for decades. No one to receive him, though there is still money hidden offscreen. A glimpse of a big-legged woman in a long coat stuffing some of it into her cleavage and slamming the door behind her as though shearing the apartment off the face of the earth. An aeon of flipping the channel, doorway conversations with people who look like children next to him, living the empty routine he solidified in prison, his hair grown out now in cobwebby grey, his mouth a little open just sitting there and waiting.
For a time there is a woman with a great deal of hair. He is wading into his fifties. Slumping in all his postures. There are instances when he seems settled here in the vague squalor and listlessness, a few times even happy pouring wine with this woman brimming with nervous energy. She is soon gone and he weeps at that same table. Gone and back with a security guard uniform, gone and back in a grease-stained apron.
One long night he scrubs meticulous. This room, the kitchen’s every surface, the grout lines with a toothbrush. He dispenses several garbage bags, vacuums, folds laundry with precision, all of this vacant-eyed, thinking in another space or time. And then he sits, the apartment as clean as its yellowed wallpaper and ragged furniture will allow, looking at the revolver, his grandfather’s ancient .22. Checking its cylinders, hefting it, practicing his draw. He puts in one round, places the artifact up to his temple, and grits his teeth staring back through the lens. |/2A|
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|2B| A country house somewhere his grandfather would have cherished living. A tree-staked slope out the window that is theirs. A world that may not exist by then. Green walls and well-made furniture and muted bulbs shaded with intricate glass. Pictures of things drawn heartfully, small photographs difficult to discern. She ages like cloth and shrinks as much as he expands, Amber or this woman just like her,their kids adorable and then gawky and then handsome, both the boy and the girl like perfected clones of their parents. Through high school and shipped off to college and there are nights the boy comes home late, arguing with him at the door. And a few times the girl tries to leave dressed inappropriate, comes home once scratched and bleeding from the scalp. But they are happy times. ‘Julian’ still working but lazier about it now. Straggles and lollygags and looks satisfied about it. Zooming through an airy decade with them growing softer around the edges and still eating together amused at the table. She retires, he does too, more or less. They’re gone. Out of the door with suitcases, and back haggard and grinning and plopping down home-sweet-home. Many times. And then a young man is there toting a couple small children and they bobble gravity-defying toys on the Turkish rug. In the kitchen, Amber is making beautiful steam in a cauldron and he sneaks around to goose her behind, and hug her, and slurp a taste-test from a wooden spoon. He’s standing before a stoked fire place with his son clapping a hand on his shoulder. Laughing. Amber in delight with the grandchildren squealing up at her, chasing each other through the legs of that very same table they once studied and made love on god knows how long it possibly could have been ago.
Older, older, older. Traveling less, and then not at all, though their house now intricate with African masks and small diverse sculptures and a four-foot hookah with a swirl of glass in its belly. He slows. Lies on the couch reading and canes around the kitchen looking for snacks. He drinks soups and slurries. He coughs and clutches his chest and Amber sits beside, helps him to the bathroom or out to the car. Amber his crutch one day to bed, and it’s all she can do to hold on.
Through the big picture window, their gentle slope, black suits and dresses in their dozens, and Amber, frail now and veiled, dabbing at her face with a tissue, flanked by her son and her daughter, and beside them their preteen children crying in their first suits and most maudlin dresses. A robed man reading from a touchscreen. The partner, frazzled and grey as stone, stands to speak and the mourners look up at him nodding. The casket, burled wood and golden-railed, droops slowly into the ground, a pink headstone with his name engraved unashamed and a wide ache of years survived and an epitaph unreadable but long. Flowers leaned against it, then withered, then replaced. Her name chiseled in beside his, the final year crisp and clean on the granite.|/2B|
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|2C| He is the Boss. The same suits — out-dated, color-less. Sitting unhunched at a table, jawing a procrustean truism into the phone for some other ‘Julian’. This side of the conversation he’s never seen, the eye-rolling, the itching at his nose. And maybe the Boss does this too: hangs up, gestures over the phone in benediction or superstition, and sits looking into his hands as though uncertain what they’ve done.
He eats meals alone, hurriedly, forking with spite. Lunging away from the table to take a call or make one. Some kind of lackey comes in, is kept at arms’-length and taken to a room stage-left. A stalwart veteran of this same game eats dinner with him and they both laugh to conceal their suspicions. For a birthday, he’s surprised in his own home by several employees and a colleague in suit anachronistic and bright, and the five of them sit around trying to drink too much and when the stripper-cop arrives, ‘Julian’ doesn’t even flinch. He watches holograms hovering above the floor, three dimensional news and courtroom procedural and pornography. He reads books and meditates, poorly, restlessly, always pacing to a window to look at the yachts or the golf course or the bay. He has a dog that shits on the floor and licks his face and cannot be kept out of his lap. At some point it is gone. He comes home once with a handcuff dangling from his wrist and a face bruised down to the bone. Pressing a pack of ice to his eye and glaring with the other.
He lives now in a house on the beach. The ocean out there through the window corrugated with the rolling tide. There is a spritely, foreign woman with him, but much of his time is sitting at the counter talking on the phone. She is gone. A wild party stumbles upon the house all young-skinned and collegiate waking up in piles and a bikini top tied around his head for a hat. And after, he sits alone just outside the door watching the ocean. The house collected into boxes like a tree coiling back into its seed.
A beige chamber and a cot and flower petals red as some eviscerated chunk of his heart and the man crouching unsteadily to light these pools of wax looks like he needs to scream into a pillow, deserves to scream into wood-chips. He mumbles something, and shakes his head at it because it whatever he’s uttered is another lie for the mill. A farce. There is no value left in saying things which are true.
Waiting. Waiting in a stance he could lose if touched by a feather, breathed on by a draft. He’s out the door and moments later tentative feet and then underwear and pelvis and finally a woman blind-folded that could be Amber if this were not decades upon decades too late.
She lays down and the cot stills her trembling arms and that smile on her face might be genuine or some defense against the world. The blindfold wrapped tight around her eyes without a wrinkle or a bunch and his clothes already gone, stripped to boxers the sheen of a beetle-casing and his body a wracked distortion. He lies down next to her and her mouth Os a hesitation. |/2C|
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The monitors shunk back to their former selves and ‘Julian’s’ arm is being lifted like Sal, coming now into focus, is testing him for death.
“‘Julian’? Yo, you still with me? ‘Jules’? You missing all this?”
The monitors all dark windows except 2C. The woman there much older than Amber, her thighs bruised and pocked, her hips crude angles and her eyes gooped with blue make-up. He, the Boss, standing in the doorway watching her dress with a cigarette like an insect trapped in his fingers.
“That’s not my name,” he says to Sal.
“What’re you talking about?”
The Boss is saying something to her, one of these things he’s said to ‘Julian’ and who knows how many others. About how there is no past and no future, and so our actions cannot be judged. All we can do is submit to the fate opportuned us.
“You have an alright trip?” Sal is saying. “For a minute there I thought you’d slipped right through.”
He stands up, the briefcase on the glass like something that has fallen from the sky.
“This thing you’ve got here . . . this is dangerous, Sal.”
“The cameras? Oh, hell . . .I’m just messing around. It’ll get boring after awhile.”
“That’s not exactly what I mean.”
He looks around the room, dark and blurry as when he walked in, but now it’s as though the apartment does not exist yet in full. The woman in 2C reaches out of frame and withdraws a long rain-coat from an unseen hook. The Boss sits on the cot, flower petals smashed flat, the candles guttering and some of them out. She doesn’t look at him as she leaves. From the back, the Boss a heap of liver-spotting flesh. Downy white hair on his shoulders, his joints bulgy like he’s been pieced together of bones that do not quite fit. ‘Julian’ unsnaps the briefcase and takes out the .22.
“You know, I’ve never even fired this thing,” he says. “Never even plonked some old beer-cans on a fence-rail.”
He cocks the hammer with his thumb and aims at the video-Boss in monitor 2C. Sal chuckles and doesn’t believe he’ll do it. He doesn’t either. He wills the shot, thinks himself from now over into then and the gun pops with a puff of smoke, metal shavings tinking on the coffee table. A misfire. “Whoa,” Sal is saying, over and over again. ‘Julian’ looks at the gun as though it is some clever puzzle he’s nearly solved.
“It’s alright. It didn’t go off.”
“Jesus.”
He puts the .22 back in the briefcase.
“You’re crazy, man,” Sal says. “What is your real name? You don’t have to worry. I don’t talk to anybody.”
“I suppose it could be anything I want it to be.”
Sal mixes himself another drink with a shaky hand.
“Well . . .you let me know what you’ve decided the next time you roll through, huh?”
“You won’t see me again,” he says, taking out the five remaining vials of Black Magic. “Unless we run into each other in the street. You think that could happen, that you’d recognize me?”
“I don’t know.”
He holds out the vials to Sal in a sloppy quiver. The gesture misunderstood until he takes Sal’s hand and smacks the tubes against his palm.
“For me?”
“If you’re sure you want it.”
“Thanks, Jules,” Sal says, lining up the vials on the table. “It was good knowing you.”
He takes the bundle of cash from the briefcase and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket. This enough to live on for months, altogether a year or more in the money he’s shoeboxed. Enough to rewind a few of these years he’s added up.
“Knowing someone is knowing their hidden self, there are other words for this.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what my Boss would say. Doesn’t quite make sense, does it?”
In 2C, the Boss head in hands and the nape of his neck pointed as a saddle-horn. Ripping off the Boss had seemed an irrevocable sin, looking back maybe he was only biding his time for the right moment.
“You’re right. Good to know you, my friend. I’ll let myself out.”
He walks to the door, and in the foyer he hesitates, jostles the briefcase, turns back with a question for Sal, already raising a libertine glass of Amber.
“Hey, Sal?”
“What’s up?”
“What do you know about wine?”
“Well, let’s see . . .” Sal says, opening a new tab on his computer.
“You know what? Nevermind. I’ll figure it out.”
Sal shrugs and he turns back. Opens the door. Walks out into the hallway like a hotel’s, past the mirrors without looking, the elevator clanging up to meet him.