Coattail Karma

by Verlin Darrow

  “It’s an inheritance? Is that what you’re saying?” I embraced this idea; it warded off the less palatable alternatives.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not about money,” Paul offered. “Maybe you’re the next king of France—or make that Nepal. I do know that it’s something profoundly important to impressive people. And I hope you appreciate what I’m doing here. I haven’t broken the rules for anyone else.”

  “Impressive?” I was stalling again. As a kid, I’d yearned for amazing birth parents to show up and claim me, but this wasn’t something I wanted to resurrect without a damned good reason. I focused on his breaking his own rules. Why was he doing it? I had no idea.

  “They’re balanced people,” he told me. “Kind people that I admire and respect. I’ve had limited contact, but these women are some of the most evolved souls I’ve ever met.” His blue eyes reflected exactly what he’d said. He really was a beautiful guy. If I were gay, he’d have been my type, which was probably a form of self-loathing since his ethnicity was pretty much the opposite of mine.

  It was women? This surprised me for some reason. Maybe I’m a sexist too. “What are the group’s initials?” I asked, ready to jump out of my head back into the conversation.

  “RGP.”

  “Hmm. Really Good People? Royal Group Promoters?” I could think of several scatological possibilities as well.

  “It might not even be in English,” Paul offered.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I know they’re conducting interviews in at least a dozen other countries,” he told me, leaning forward again.

  The forward and back thing we were both doing was disconcerting. I held myself still, which for some reason was a major effort.

  “At first,” he continued, “we were only using photographs to find people. Now there’s so much more to it—it’s a big operation.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’m intrigued. Go ahead and ask the rest of your questions.” I felt my gut relax. Apparently, some part of me wanted to get on with this.

  “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Blue.” I didn’t think. I just answered.

  “Which do you like better—water buffaloes or parrots?”

  “Water buffaloes.”

  “Do your hands ever tingle for no reason?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you crave for life to be other than it is?”

  “All the time, but I’m working on it.” I was almost in a trance now—only answering questions.

  “Dogs or cats?”

  “Dogs.” I gestured at a few of the photographs on my walls. I felt more present for a few seconds while Paul perused the photos. Then we were back into it.

  “Are you allergic to anything?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Mangoes?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else?”

  “Grapes. And various pollen.”

  “What about alcohol?”

  “What about it?” I asked back.

  “I mean, do you drink?”

  “Rarely. On special occasions.”

  “Are you a vegetarian?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Do you dream in color?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever had a dream that a man who looked like you but was older told you something important?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it about being patient?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else was it about?”

  “Courage.”

  For the last stretch, the rapid-fire interrogation had kept me focused on my answers, but I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the surreal quality of the experience. How could anyone know about my allergy to mangoes, let alone a dream I’d had? What the hell was going on? This was way beyond the scope of a private investigator. Was Paul working for psychics?

  A part of me was dying to get answers instead of providing them, but if I let my curiosity sidetrack whatever Paul’s protocol was, I probably wouldn’t find out.

  “I’m going to show you some objects now,” Paul said. He was in teacher mode, modulating his voice and speaking more slowly. Maybe he taught when he wasn’t roaming the planet looking for allergic dreamers.

  He reached into the black backpack at his feet and pulled out a red velvet sack. It looked like it ought to hold a two-hundred-dollar bottle of brandy. “I want you to pick your favorite item from each grouping,” he said as he untied the bag’s drawstring.

  “Favorite?” I had no idea what he meant. How could I have a favorite if I’d never seen the things before?

  “They’ll be three objects at a time. You decide what ‘favorite’ means. Just point to the one you pick. Don’t describe it or explain anything.”

  Paul flipped over his white tablet and adeptly lined up a pebble, a piece of bone, and a fragment of pottery on the back of it.

  I wasn’t thinking again—just responding. I pointed to the bone. I don’t know why.

  The next grouping was another bone fragment, a threadbare shred of brown fabric, and a triangular metal shard.

  “I don’t like any of those,” I told him. The words fell out of me. While maintaining a rigid posture—no more leaning—I nonetheless scooted my chair back a couple of feet. Perhaps my body knew something I didn’t about whether I should be in the room with this man.

  There were two more groupings of similar nondescript items. In each of these, I picked one without employing any conscious criteria.

  Finally, Paul repacked his collection and spoke. “Well, it’s not up to me. But I think you’re the guy.”

  “So you know what stuff I was supposed to pick?” I asked, eager to get answers. So far, the only thing that had occurred to me was that I might be the next Dalai Lama, even though I wasn’t a little kid. I’d watched three-year-olds in movies select things from past lives. Sometimes they were white kids instead of Tibetans, which pissed me off. I was only Asian on the outside, but still…

  “No. I have no idea,” he told me. “It’s the way you picked, and your answers to the other questions. You had a lot of yeses to very specific questions. Either you’re a great liar, or there’s a match here.” He smiled. Clearly, he was rooting for the latter.

  “So what happens next?” I asked, a bit scared of what I might hear. Whatever part of me had shut down to answer Paul’s questions was coming back online. My hands shook, and my throat was tight.

  “I’ll submit these results, and then I guess you’ll hear from the RGP people if I’m right. If not, some other lucky guy gets to be king of wherever—or whatever the hell else is going on,” he said with mild bitterness.

  “I gather you’re sick of this gig?” I asked. If I focused on Paul’s experience, I wouldn’t have to endure mine.

  He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Absolutely. I’ve been thrown out of offices all over the West. And I’m down to just a few names. It’s been a long haul.” The fatigue on his face reflected his words.

  “I’m sorry, but are you ready for the proverbial ‘I see we’re out of time’? Because we are,” I told him.

  “Gee, I was just starting to sound like a client, too.”

  “It’s a shame. I’ll tell you what. I won’t charge you for the session we didn’t have.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and it felt right.

  By now we were both standing, ready to shake hands. I hesitated, remembering the disturbing static spark when we’d first shook, and Paul spoke.

  “Different carpet, different result, I’m thinking.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  We shook, and this time it was completely ordinary.

  I watched from my second-story window as Paul departed the building and strode in the direction of the bay. The watching-from-the-window trick was a ritual that helped me shift mental gears before my next session, which in this case was an extremely anxious woman with terminal cancer.

  A
moment later, the Samoan man from the waiting room left the building and also turned right on the sidewalk. He was even more imposing standing up—about six foot six inches tall and as wide as two men. When Paul paused just short of the next street corner to help a woman untangle her Chihuahua’s leash, the Samoan halted as well. Suddenly, he was very interested in the tree beside him.

  Paul was being followed.

  Chapter Two

  The rest of the afternoon was filled with a series of clients and their problems. They paid me to listen and respond, so I did, which gave me very little chance to assimilate or process the hour with Paul. I couldn’t warn him about being followed, either. There’d been no receptionist to request contact information, and I’d never gotten around to asking him for any myself.

  As soon as I’d walked my last client to the door, I flopped back down in my chair and called my best friend Chris. I was unnaturally exhausted, as though I’d run a 10K with an ex alongside me, belittling me with every step.

  “I need to talk something over,” I said. “Are you around?”

  “Sure. Come on down. But stop and get a pizza.”

  “If you order one, I’ll pay the delivery guy,” I said. “I really need to deal with this right away.” I found myself twirling a lock of my straight black hair, which was a regressive coping strategy that I’d been mocked for in middle school.

  “Whoa. Are you pregnant?”

  “Maybe. In a broader sense.”

  I hung up on him and headed over on my bicycle. Unless I was traveling out of town, I preferred to stay on two wheels—my stealth bomber of a bike—a carbon-fiber frame with full Campy that I’d spray-painted black to make it look less theft-worthy. Unfortunately, the paint job also made it look as though it had already been stolen and repainted, so I met quite a few police officers while I was out and about.

  On the bridge across the San Lorenzo River, I almost ran over an unleashed corgi. Then an elderly pickup truck nearly took me out at the next corner. Both near accidents were my fault. I tried to pay better attention as I pedaled over to my friend’s house.

  Chris lived in the Seabright neighborhood near Castle Beach, where everyone should’ve bought a place ten years ago. Especially me. He perched on the railing of his front porch, holding a beer bottle in one hand and Karma’s leash in the other. He lived in a modern one-story house he’d had built on the site of a 1940s beach cottage. Then, dissatisfied with the look of it, he’d added an old-fashioned, wooden front porch. Karma was a rowdy Border collie who loved to herd me—on my bike—into the bushes alongside the porch. I was grateful that for once Chris was acting as though he were a responsible dog owner. Which he wasn’t.

  “Come on in,” he said. “I ordered the pizza, and I even decided to bankroll it since you’re so troubled and all. Of course, I got it with weasel heads and human body parts, but you can always pick those off.”

  I smiled wanly, marched by him into his funky living room, and sat on the purple upholstered couch his grandmother had left him. Every piece of furniture in the house was mismatched to every other piece, as well as to the house itself. Chris and Karma followed.

  She jumped up next to me and laid her head on my lap. This tended to be endearing at first and then increasingly uncomfortable as my crotch roasted underneath her thick fur. It was clear that Karma didn’t always consider the effects of her actions on others. (I don’t mean this in the philosophical sense of the word karma. I know now that Fate always stays focused on consequences while it’s busy kicking free will’s ass).

  Chris disappeared into a giant black recliner and swigged his beer. Weather permitting, he wore the most hideous Hawaiian shirts he could find. Since he was overweight, his torso served as an expansive canvas. At the moment, he sported a green and orange pattern of hula girls and, inexplicably, tractors.

  “You like my new shirt?” he asked.

  “Of course not. What kind of question is that?”

  He was only a bit taller than I, as opposed to pretty much everyone else over the age of thirteen. Apart from being short, we had little else in common physically. Where I’m slim, brownish, and somewhat androgynous-looking, Chris was round, very dark-skinned—East African parents—and bearded. His bushy beard ought to have rendered him somewhat hip, but it didn’t. He just looked like an African nerd with a big black beard and an unfortunate acquaintanceship with a passive-aggressive shirt salesperson.

  I loved Chris. Women had come and gone in my life, but Chris had always been there. His perspective on my relationship failures was helpful, too: “It’s a personnel issue, Sid. You can’t waltz with a badger. Pick someone normal, for God’s sake.”

  “So?” he said. “What’s up?”

  “I had a very weird session today.”

  “I thought you couldn’t talk about your work,” Chris said as he raised his beer bottle to his lips. He always drank Mexican beer, since he’d turned twenty-one while on an epic road trip in Baja.

  “I can’t. That was part of it. He wasn’t a client, it turns out.”

  I told Chris what had happened, including as many details as I remembered. I could tell he was taking mental notes. Blessed with a brilliant mind and an almost photographic memory, he’d earned bushels of money designing tech devices, but he also employed these traits to generate a running smart-ass commentary. For me, as his audience, funny usually trumped annoying. At the moment, I hoped I could evoke his serious side.

  When I’d finished, he asked a few questions. “Do you believe this Paul guy?”

  “Yes.” I hadn’t realized this until I answered. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to me that he may have been lying.

  “Could you picture the Samoan dude playing on the offensive line for the Packers?” Chris liked to envision people doing things.

  “That would be about right,” I said, stroking Karma’s head. If a dog was within range, I always petted it. It seemed like the least I could do after all they did for us.

  “Any long-term effects from the handshake spark?” he asked, tilting his head in a dog-like way.

  “No, I don’t think so.” I suddenly felt even more exhausted. It was seven thirty by now, which certainly didn’t explain it.

  “Do you think this is about your birth parents?” he asked next. “I do. Maybe your mom was in a goddess cult or something. That would explain the evolved women and all the hocus-pocus.”

  “What about the little objects?” I asked, sinking deeper into the sofa’s cushions.

  “They could be sacred dealies that only a cool guy would know about—like what they do to find the next Dalai Lama,” he said.

  “Yeah, I thought of that too. So you think I might somehow know which item was special and which was just ordinary crud?” I wished I had a drink too. Chris hadn’t offered me a beer or one of the black cherry sodas he kept in his fridge for me because he knew I’d just go get one if I wanted it. I was more tired than thirsty, though, and I would’ve had to displace Karma.

  “Exactly,” Chris said.

  “That sounds pretty far-fetched. I mean, we have to go way past logic to consider something like that. What do you make of Paul being followed?” Karma decided to reposition herself at this point. My lap was grateful. Now she lay with her head away from me, trying to tempt me into scratching her just above her butt.

  Chris frowned. “It’s alarming. Nice people don’t follow one another. And I think it indicates there’s real money in this. You don’t hire humongous people to follow other people if you haven’t got deep pockets.”

  “Let’s get to the really weird part,” I said, leaning forward. “What’s up with someone knowing my dream?” A flash of fear surged in my gut and my forehead tightened, which Chris noticed, narrowing his eyes and nodding.

  “Ask me if I ever had a dream like that,” Chris said, softening his tone.

  “Have you?”

  “No. Really ask me, I mean.”

  “Fine. Have you ever dreamt that an older version of you tol
d you stuff?” Here was annoying Chris. He was never too far away, even when the rest of him was trying to help.

  “Yes. I’ll bet a lot of people have. But most of them probably don’t remember.”

  “We do…because?”

  “You’re a therapist. I’m me. Enough said.” He tilted his head back and finished his beer. “This is my least alarming theory, bro. Why not go for it?”

  “I’m trying, believe me. But this guy Paul knew—well, his iPad knew—that the dream was about patience,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay. That’s weird.”

  “Any ideas? How is that possible?”

  “Let me think a minute,” Chris said.

  A knock on the door announced the pizza delivery. I struggled to my feet, answered the door, and paid with the wad of bills that Chris tossed to me. Then I had to wait another fifteen minutes while Chris scarfed down the pizza. He never talked while he ate. Food was a priority for him—a passion. Karma begged continuously until Chris gave her the last piece.

  “That’s why she begs,” I said. “Because it works.”

  “So? I like begging. It’s cute.” He shrugged.

  “Fine. Why don’t we get back to your theories?”

  “Sure.” Chris flicked pizza crust crumbs from his shirt. “Here’s one. Do you know the racetrack tout scam?”

  “I don’t even know what a tout is. Why would you?”

  “I considered a career as a con man when I was fifteen. It seemed like it might be a viable alternative to a real job. So anyway, a tout purports to be an expert at picking horses, and he sells a tout sheet to clueless bettors.”

  “That sounds like a doomed scam,” I said, shaking my head. “Once his horses don’t win, he loses his customers. And if he really did know the winners, he’d just bet on them himself, right?”

  “I haven’t told you the scam yet,” Chris said. “That’s just the standard tout deal. Now suppose there was a race with ten horses running and the tout gives out ten different sheets, each with a different winner.”

  “One guy gets a winner and thinks the tout knows something, right?” I nodded and felt pleased with myself for the first time all day.