The Oblivion Society

by Marcus Alexander Hart

  “Alright, you win,” Nick said. “I guess I’m on my own for this tour. I just thought you might like to get out of Stillwater for a while.”

  Vivian’s eyes flicked up over the top of her menu curiously.

  “What do you mean, ‘get out of Stillwater’?”

  “Oh, you know. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, wherever,” Nick said matter-of-factly. “The Fusion Fuel promo blitz is gonna hit all of the regular metro regions.”

  Vivian blinked. Then she blinked again.

  “Wait, wait,” she stammered. “Do you mean to tell me that they send you all around the country just to be obnoxious and peddle your quack remedies?”

  “Oh sure,” Nick shrugged. “My agency is the big time, baby. We only take national-level gigs. You didn’t honestly think that I just worked Stillwater, did you? None of us models are ever in Florida for more than a few days a year.” Vivian took a long, quiet sip of her daiquiri.

  “So,” she said casually, “tell me more about this agency of yours.”

  “I’ve never earned so much money for such easy work,” Bobby said coolly. “Do you want to just fork over the forty you now owe me, or shall we go for eighty?”

  “Okay, B, we’ve had our fun. What do you say I just buy the next round and we call it even,” Trent said amicably. “After all, let us not forget what the Bible says:

  ‘Money is the route to all evil.’”

  Bobby snorted.

  “Well, the Bible’s never seen my sister when the rent is due. Pay up, sucker.” The brown-nosing smile dropped from Trent’s face and was replaced with a combative scowl.

  “Whatever, homes. You been scammin’ all night,” he muttered, gesturing at Sunny. “Hey beautiful barmaid, you gonna let this punk straight-up rob your customers right under your fine little nose?”

  “Oh no, don’t drag me into this,” Sunny said defensively. “I have a strict policy of non-involvement in bar bets. You two work this out yourselves.”

  The conversation was interrupted by another chorus of frat-boy cheering as the bouncer pulled open the submarine’s hatch. A husky jock in a crushed cowboy hat stepped from the vessel, still fastening the oversized buckle of his belt. He strode aggressively into the swarm of his brothers, and they greeted him with a thunderous round of congratulatory slaps delivered to his thick back and arms.

  “Hey, Sunshine,” Trent said, gesturing to the sub. “What’s that thing all about?” Sunny stopped wiping down the bar and looked at the sub bitterly.

  “Some bars have a mechanical bull. Some bars have karaoke. This bar has a lawsuit waiting to happen,” she sighed. “The guy who owns the Martini picked up the Sawfish at auction when the Stillwater Oceanographic Institute lost its funding back in the ‘70s. Since then it’s gone from ‘deep sea’ to Deep Throat. ” When the crowd’s focus had long since left the darkened sub, a narrow co-ed stumbled from its door, rubbing a trickling nosebleed on her limp forearm.

  “So it’s like some kind of make-out room?” Trent asked.

  “Wow, nothing gets past you, eh Sherlock?” Bobby grumbled, sliding off his stool. “Okay, it’s been real. Time to cash out, big shot. My work here is done.” Trent put his hand on Bobby’s shoulder and pushed him back onto his stool.

  “Whoa whoa, hold up, homes,” he said. “What do you say we make one more friendly wager? Go for an even hundred bucks.”

  Bobby sighed.

  “You’re lucky I need the money,” he muttered. “Alright, whose number do you want this time, Valentino?”

  “Uh uh-when you play for the big bucks, it’s high stakes,” Trent said. “For the Benjamin, you have to get a girl into that sub.”

  “Oh, screw you!” Bobby spat. “If I wanted to sit in a puddle of frat-boy spooge, I’d go to a House of Pain concert.”

  “S’cool with me, bro. S’cool. I respect a man who knows his limits,” Trent gloated. “Scamming numbers is one thing, but there ain’t no way a butterball like you could get something sweet down on his meat.”

  Bobby glared at Trent as his freckly cheeks prickled into redness. He settled back on his stool and cracked his knuckles.

  “Alright, smart-ass, any girl in the bar. Pick one.”

  Trent’s lips slid away from his broad, square teeth. It seemed that the tide had finally turned in his favor. Finding a girl that wouldn’t spend seven minutes of heaven with Bobby wasn’t exactly a challenge, but he wanted to find the perfect foil. A girl so outrageously gorgeous that she would never touch a slob like Bobby in a million years. A second later he had made his selection.

  “I choose the prettiest girl in Stillwater, Florida,” he announced, “our gracious host, Sunflower.”

  Sunny looked up from her work with a raised eyebrow.

  “Pick someone else,” she ordered. “I wouldn’t get in that filthy sub to save my life.”

  “Ha! That’s what I thought!” Trent gloated. “Ain’t no way something so fine as you would go down on something so foul as him. Cha-ching! Pay up, dawg.”

  “I think you misunderstood me,” Sunny corrected. “As I said before, I do not get involved in bar bets. It’s got nothing to do with Bobby. Everyone knows I love Bobby.”

  With that she leaned over the bar, took Bobby’s head in her flawless hands, and kissed him on the forehead. Bobby rocked back on his stool with a dreamy smile pushing out the corners of his goatee. He knew that the kiss was only meant to infuriate Trent, but the fact that it had obviously worked made it almost as sweet as if it had been sincere. At this point Bobby realized that all of the money that he had won from Trent would be going directly toward Sunny’s tip.

  “Alright, seriously now,” he said. “You lost fair and square this time. Can I have my money now?”

  “It ain’t like that,” Trent argued. “The naughty nurse rendered that transaction officially null and void. No harm, no foul, yo. The T gets a do-over.” Bobby sighed.

  “Oh, just get it over with already.”

  Trent turned back to the barroom and profiled the few remaining beauties with extreme scrutiny. He picked apart every shapely young girl in the room, trying to find whatever tiny loopholes they might open up for his unscrupulous competitor to latch on to and exploit. This was now about more than just money. Trent needed to find the girl who would not only ensure his victory but publicly humiliate Bobby as Bobby had been humiliating him ever since he walked through that bamboo doorway.

  And then in that same doorway she appeared. A pair of bony legs wrapped in torn fishnets stumbled into the bar, balancing atop them a severely drunk, savage-looking girl. One hand clutched what looked like a forty-ounce malt liquor in a wet paper bag, the other an unfiltered cigarette, belching out black fumes like a ‘73 Plymouth Duster.

  “Right there,” Trent said, throwing out a finger. “There’s your girlfriend, B. Go get her.”

  Bobby glanced at the menacing newcomer expressionlessly.

  “Forget it,” he said. “A hundred bucks isn’t worth it.”

  “Bullshit,” Trent said. “You just don’t have the goods.” Bobby looked the girl up and down.

  “A hundred bucks?” he confirmed.

  “Yep.”

  “To get her in the sub.”

  “Right.”

  “And you’ve got the money?”

  “Right here,” Trent said, patting the squarish bulge in his back pocket. Bobby downed the remaining half of his beer in one go.

  “Alright,” he said, wiping his mouth on his forearm. “You’re on.” He creaked off his barstool and met his mark halfway across the planked floor. The girl took a drag from her cigarette and blasted dual jets of smoke from of her tiny, pierced nose, giving her the look of a demon straight from the pits of Hell. Her fierce eyes stared down Bobby’s approaching form with a glare of burning menace. But it’s hard to intimidate somebody after he’s seen you bagging his groceries.

  “Hey, Scary Sherri,” Bobby said calmly. “You look more like a corpse tonight than usual.”

 
; “Pissh off, Gray. I’m schelebrating,” Sherri slurred through an almost visible haze of alcohol. “If you like your teshticles where they are, I suggesht you step out from between me andza booze.”

  She threw a small white pill into the back of her throat and washed it down with a nip from her bottle.

  “Look, this is going to sound strange, but I promise my intentions are pure,” Bobby said, holding up his right hand. “There’s fifty bucks in it for you if you’ll just sit in the sub with me for five minutes. No sex.”

  Sherri paused. She rolled her eyes skyward and tapped on her lips.

  “Hmmmm, innsheresting offer,” she said, “but I think I’m going to go with ‘Fuck you!’ ”

  She resumed stomping unsteadily toward the bar.

  “Fair enough, fair enough,” Bobby said, quickly blocking her path. “But what if I told you that this simple task would not only earn you fifty bucks but would also completely humiliate that smarmy Swingers- lookin’ asshole at the bar?” Sherri glanced over Bobby’s shoulder.

  “Cheshire cat with sideburns?”

  “That’s the guy.”

  Sherri blinked and took a long, hard swig out of her forty-ounce.

  From across the bar, Trent’s stomach plunged into his empty wallet as he saw Sherri take Bobby by the hand and lead him down the boardwalk to the submarine. He turned back to the bar and looked at Sunny with desperation.

  “How? How did he? How could he?”

  Sunny looked at Sherri and Bobby climbing into the sub and shrugged.

  “You know what they say,” she mused. “Nobody can ignore a natural redhead.” Vivian raised her fingers and drew in an expectant breath, but before she could push it through her vocal cords yet another waiter had swept past her table without so much as a curious glance. He slid a silver tray of exotic coffees onto a neighboring table to the delight of a sexy young Latina with a high giggle and a low décolletage. Vivian dropped her extended hand on the green tablecloth next to a fishbowl containing nothing but a shallow pink froth and a nibbled strawberry stem. Her heavy head seemed to wobble across her shoulders, and she propped it up on her elbow.

  “Did you see that? That’s the fifth waiter who’s totally ignored me,” she muttered drunkenly. “How many waiters does Charo need over there? At this rate we’ll starve before we even place an order.”

  Nick laughed.

  “You can’t give up that easy,” he said. “If you want to be a promotional model, you’re going to have to learn to get people’s attention.”

  “By doing what?” Vivian said. “Wearing a low-cut dress and giggling vapidly? I’d rather starve.”

  Nick waved a dismissive hand.

  “You’re looking at it all wrong,” he said. “You just see a girl busting out of her dress over there. I see a girl using what she’s got to command every waiter in this restaurant. I’ll totally bet she’s not even getting charged for that coffee. I’m telling you, Vivian, if you ever want to succeed you’ve got to learn to use your assets.”

  “I do use my assets,” Vivian snapped. “The assets I choose to use are right here.” She tapped her index finger on her cranium.

  “Well, in a perfect world that might actually get you somewhere,” Nick said comfortingly. “But in reality, you’d get a lot farther in life if you just got yourself a low-cut dress and a push-up bra.”

  Vivian’s eyes went narrow with disgust.

  “Spoken like a true model,” she smirked. “How can you even suggest that physical beauty is more important than intellect?”

  “I guess there’s a time and a place for everything,” Nick said flatly. “But if brains are really more important than looks, then how come Miss Teen South America over there has five waiters and you have a big round zero? I’m tellin’ ya, Vivian, you just need to find the self-confidence to use your sweet little body to your advantage for once. Smarts are all fine and good, but there’s no way in a million years that you’re going to out-flash a girl with assets like hers using nothing but your big brain.” A fire blazed in Vivian’s eyes.

  “You want flash?” she snarled. “Just watch me, pretty boy.” She leaned over to the giggling Latina’s extravagant coffee set and gestured at the sugar and creamer.

  “May I?” she asked.

  The girl gave an affronted nod as if Vivian was a vagrant who had just climbed out of the sewer and asked for her underpants. Vivian leaned back over to her own table and tore open five purloined packets of non-dairy creamer, pouring them into her slender palm.

  “So what, you’re just going to start begging for food?” Nick laughed. “That’s the best plan your big brain can come up with?”

  Without warning, Vivian drew in a lungful of air and blew the powder through the table candle’s flame, producing an enormous flash of fire. All the waiters in the room dropped what they were doing with a clatter and stared in terror at the scorched air. Even the spicy Latina stopped her giggling to pay homage to what had, if only for a second, eclipsed her as the hottest thing in the room.

  “Whoa! That was intense! ” Nick gasped. “What did you put in that?!”

  “Just science,” Vivian explained. “The entire surface area of each suspended granule is exposed to oxygen, so it burns quickly and spreads the fire to its neighbors at an exponential rate.” She smiled. “I’d like to see you out-flash that with a Wonderbra.”

  Nick’s gaping mouth twisted into a delighted smile.

  “So you do have a wild side, Vivian Gray!”

  Before Vivian could reply, the maitre’d rushed across the room, surrounded by a gaggle of pointing, whispering waiters. He stepped up to the table and cleared his throat.

  “As you may or may not be aware,” he said sternly, “the Port Manatee fire codes expressly forbid pyrotechnic displays in places of business.”

  “Sorry, I was just trying to get your attention,” Vivian grinned. “We’re ready to order.”

  “The Banyan Terrace does not oblige take-out orders,” the maitre’d replied tersely.

  “Oh, we’re not leaving now,” Nick smiled.

  “Yes,” the maitre’d said, “I’m afraid that you are.” The watertight door of the Sawfish slammed closed with a harsh, rattling clank, blotting out the sound of the fake klaxons and whooping fratties outside and leaving Bobby and Sherri in a dark, stale silence. Although the vessel was the size of a short bus on the outside, the thick steel walls shrank the cabin down to a volume roughly equivalent to that of a Ford Festiva. A half-burnt-out string of white Christmas lights provided a light wash of illumination over a squalid, beer-poster-plastered chamber containing nothing but a graffiti-tagged wooden bench bolted to the back wall. Sherri dropped heavily onto the seat and took a heavy drag of her cigarette, making the hot, claustrophobic interior of the sub that much more oppressive.

  “Judging from the condition of the floor,” Bobby observed, “it looks like this thing has seen more ‘spit’ than ‘swallow.’”

  Without a word, Sherri wrenched her feet from the sticky floor and pulled her skinny legs onto the bench, pressing her knees against her hollow chest and leaning her narrow back against the sealed entry hatch. Bobby plopped down on the other end of the bench, making a conscious effort not to accidentally make contact with Sherri’s combat-boot-clad toes. They sat for a moment in awkward silence before Sherri finally spoke.

  “You owe me a schhitload of drinks as soon as we geddoutta here.”

  “You got it, Sherri. Anything you want.”

  “Absinthe.”

  “The closest you’re going to get to absinthe around here is a piña colada.” Sherri blinked her massive eyes.

  “I hate this fucking town.”

  She popped another pair of white pills into her mouth and drowned them in malt liquor.

  “What’s the matter?” Bobby asked. “Got a headache?”

  “I don’t get headaches,” Sherri said, “I give headaches. Ish Special K. I scored it offa shum guy over at the Gator Club.”

  B
obby looked at her skeptically.

  “Isn’t Special K a liquid?”

  “Yeah, when ish raw. You gotta evaporate it into powder.”

  Bobby nodded.

  “Okay. Sure. Those are pills. ”

  Sherri fumbled another pill between her numbed fingers.

  “The dealer saysh he presshes the powder into capsules.”

  Bobby squinted.

  “Even if that was possible, which it isn’t, you would have taken enough by now to kill a rhino.”

  Sherri scowled.

  “Who are you, McGruff the fucking crime dog? Shudda fuck up.” She threw the pill at Bobby. It bounced off his belly and landed in his lap. He held it up the to the light for investigation and then burst out laughing.

  “What’sh so funny?”

  “You might want to see your dealer about a refund on these. I think you’ve been ripped off.”

  “Tell me about it. This schhit is weak. I’ve taken like, twenty of theesh bitches and I’m not even gettin’ a buzz-I just feel like …”

  “A natural woman?”

  “Huh?”

  Bobby held the pill in front of Sherri’s empty eyes.

  “These aren’t Special K. They’re those estrogen pills for old ladies. I’ve seen the commercial on TV. Don’t treat menopause like a lady … ”

  “Bullschhit.”

  “Look, the name is printed right on there. Menoplay. ”

  “Aw fuck me, ” Sherri moaned, squinting at the pill. “That asshole told me it was hard-ass street talk! ‘Me no play.’ You know, like it’s hardcore shit that doesn’t fuck around.”

  “Me no play?!” Bobby laughed. “Who’s your dealer? Tickle Me Elmo?” Erik sat behind the counter, thumbing ticklishly through a dog-eared 1968 copy of Criswell Predicts Your Future From Now to the Year 2000!

  “Oh Criswell, you loon,” he smiled, “none of these predictions were even close. ” He glanced up from his book to see Debbie squeezing and hugging the Batty Koda doll that Harry had failed to steal earlier. What had formerly been a mint-condition collectible now hung from her arms in a limp and mangled heap. Erik sighed a resigned sigh as he approached her.