“Two million dollars,” he said, eyeing the homeless person with peculiar interest. I pretended not to notice his unhealthy fixation.
“Excuse me?”
“If you had two million dollars, what’s the first thing that you’d do?”
“I’d probably invest it in something.”
“That’s the first thing that you’d do?” Alex tightened the diamond tip of his eyes. “Invest?”
“Two million dollars is nothing. It can get spent like that.” I snapped my fingers when pronouncing like that. “I do believe Elton John spent forty million pounds in just under two years’ time.”
“Okay, I can understand that. But me, I’d probably at least fly to Europe first. Do a little sightseeing before getting down to business.”
“A little vacation never hurt anybody.”
“Exactly, I’ve always wanted to see Amsterdam. Spend it on some girls.” The light turned green. Alex immediately sped onto Century Boulevard and cut left under the 405, towards the airport. “You know, spread the wealth a little. I hear the red light district is phenomenal.”
“So I take it Gracie’s not in this scenario.”
“Gracie’s not that innocent, you know. You’d be surprised. She just might join me. And besides, haven’t you ever wanted to live free like that?”
“I already live too dualistic a life for comfort.”
“But the real Mecca of you-know-what tourism…”
“Iceland,” I said.
“No, it’s Bangkok.”
“I was close.”
“There’s an estimated two million sex workers in Thailand alone, a good percentage of which are under the age of eighteen. Can you imagine that?”
“That’s a lot of jailbait boom-boom.” We passed the strip joint that had always welcomed travelers into LAX for as long as I could remember, with its XXX and LIVE NUDES sign that felt accentuated in the electric lit night. “They don’t call it Disneyland for pedophiles for nothing.”
“Sure, you only get one flavor of the month there, but if I ever make my fortune, that’s definitely where I’m going, Khao San Road. I’d probably live like a king for two million dollars.”
“Alex, you promised me that you wouldn’t be doing this anymore.”
“Hey, I’m just thinking out loud here. Don’t tell me you’re a fantasy free zone.”
“Listen, while we’re on the topic of thinking out loud and living out one’s fantasies, we need to talk about what really happened back there in San Francisco.”
“Your wife’s twin sister got married. I photographed as a second. It was my best work of the summer. What’s there to talk about?”
“The morning after the wedding you wrestled that homeless man to the ground. You beat him mercilessly, and probably would have killed him had I not stopped you.”
“Yeah, I’m not talking about that.”
“You said something to the effect that he supposedly murdered your father.”
“Supposedly?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. And I also said I’m not talking about it. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, and you picked a hell of a time to bring that asshole up.” His agitation intensified. “If you hadn’t let him go, none of this would have probably happened.” He paused, coincidently at the next stoplight, and intensified his breath, probably to organize his thoughts. “But that’s all in the past now.”
The light turned green and he sped on.
“What do you mean; none of this would have happened?”
He strained his face, keeping eerily quiet.
“Alex, what happened?”
“We’ll talk about it after the weekend is through, as soon as we’re on our flight back.”
“Promise?”
“You have my word.”
“What does Gracie’s father, Mancini, do for a living?”
“You’re full of all sorts of interesting questions today, aren’t you, Guantanamo?”
“It’s been bothering me. Isn't he a hoodlum or something?”
“You're persistent.” Alex groaned. “That's just a word people use to separate themselves from sinners. It keeps us feeling good about ourselves, closer to God, and self-righteous. We all have a little hoodlum in us.”
“You have a point, I guess.”
“And besides, when I signed on to work with you a couple of months ago, you said you didn’t want to know anything about my previous employment with the Mancini’s. And I stress previous. That part of my life is over.”
“Okay. What have you and Gracie been up to when you’re not on the road with me? Non-employment Mancini stuff; you know, just to pass the time.”
“That’s personal. But if you must know, we’ve been catching up with old friends. Kind of like you and that Broadway babe.”
“Her name is Leah.”
“I guess we all live dualistic lives.”
“Some more than others.”
“Look, can’t a man enjoy a late night drive down Century Boulevard with an old college friend?”
“I didn’t know you were in the romantic mood. Drive on.” I picked GQ Magazine back up and stared at Charlize Theron as we passed the first two terminals in LAX, and then the third terminal, and rounded the corner for the Tom Bradley International Terminal.
“Gracie visited me earlier tonight,” I finally said.
Alex’s face tightened into a fist.
I said: “She seemed upset.”
Alex stared at me. “What did you tell her?”
“I mostly listened to what she had to say. And then I advised her to talk with you about it.”
“But you didn’t tell her anything.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Bros before hoes,” he said.
“Gracie isn’t a slut, Alex.”
“You think I’m the Bohemian. But believe me, she can be wild when she wants to be. And she’s not the only one. Affairs run like a rabid dog in her family.”
“The Mancini family….”
“That’s the one.”
“Care to talk about them?”
“Nope, I care to live and stay alive.”
“Alex, what happened to us?”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’ve changed.”
“Speak for yourself.” Alex wedged his BMW convertible between two buses at the international curb, shifted gears to park, walked around to the trunk, retrieved a single carry-on bag, and then tossed me the keys. Aristotle set his steady gaze on a yapping Pomeranian that a Middle-Eastern couple was carrying. “I’m exactly the man I’ve always been. You’ve done all the changing.”
“I thought you were flying to Boston.”
“I said we’d talk about it later.”
“From where, Dubai?”
Alex didn’t answer me. He slung the carry-on bag over his shoulder and turned towards the terminal, stopping only to lay a hand on my shoulder.
“I really do appreciate the favor, Joshua.”
“Alex, where did you place that Craigslist ad, in Singapore? And where's your camera bag? You can’t photograph an entire wedding with a handbag.”
My old college buddy smirked. “I’ll send you a postcard.”
He turned and slipped into the international terminal. I must have been unusually slow, perhaps it was the alcohol, but it was about that time, watching the double-sliding doors clamp its teeth around Alex Parker and swallow him whole, that I had the feeling, for whatever reason, I might never see my old college buddy again.
4
I ONLY MADE IT AS FAR as Sepulveda Boulevard (it merged with the Pacific Coast Highway), drove through In-N-Out on the on corner of West 92nd, ordered a double-double with grilled onions, animal style, fries and a coke, and then swooped in on a curbside opening at the tiny park across the street where I could watch the planes lumber in over my head. My parallel parking, by the way, was immaculate. If parallel parking were an Olympic Sport I could h
ave carried the Americans to gold in Sydney, Greece, and that summer in Beijing.
“You know what I want?” I said to Aristotle, pausing only to hug a bite out of my double-double, and then while I was at it, some fries, not forgetting a drink from my coke. “I want to feel normal again.”
Aristotle just looked at me with that long nose of his and curtain drapes for ears as I reached into the bag and retrieved another handful of fries.
“I don’t even recall wanting to feel normal until I woke up one morning and couldn’t find a sense of normalcy anywhere in my life, if that makes any sense.”
I savored several fries as the thought of what constituted normalcy and how far I’d run away from it saturated into Aristotle’s doggy mind. If it made any sense, he didn't let me know. A massive commercial jet, American Airlines, what might have been a Boeing 777 or a 757 or a 767, I couldn’t tell them apart if Al Qaeda held a rusty saw to my neck, growled overhead and screeched its tires across the runway. I sipped on my coke, just to let the thought marinate a little longer.
“But here’s the thing. The more I want to feel normal, and the more I extend my hand for so-called normal people to take it, the more I realize this very notion we call normal is a myth. It doesn’t exist.”
If I made a good point, and it was tantalizing, Aristotle didn’t return commentary except to say he wanted my meat and cheese patty, dripping with a dressing that harkened to thousand-island, and he wanted it now. And while we were discussing ransom terms, he’d take the entire bag of fries. In the end I gave one to him, which he swallowed like a duck and then narrowed those eyes all the way down that long nose of his until I fed him another, and then another, and then another, until the bag was empty of everything but grease, which he also demanded.
“I guess our only hope is to find that messy center where we feel most at home in our lives.”
Aristotle stared at me.
I said: “My thoughts exactly.”
5
SLEEP WAS NOT A COMMODITY that night. Nightmares plagued me, and I'm pretty sure the double-double, soda, and fries from In-N-Out had nothing to do with it. My involvement in the events of September Eleventh, however, probably did. I knew where I was immediately because I had been there before; a day that I'd never since revisited in waking hours. But dreams are rarely voluntary like that. It was a department store, Frank McCormick, which was situated directly across the street from the North and South Towers on the corner of Church and Cortland. Several mannequins were sprawled out across the floor, limbs bent in broken and asphyxiated poses or altogether missing, and they were covered in the crushed bones of pulverized concrete. I was too. The lights were out. Broken windows abounded, and the apocalyptic cloud of ash still hadn't settled yet.
I heard a voice; a female's voice.
“Once more around the block, honey,” it said.
But there was nobody there, except for the mannequins. And as everyone knows, a mannequin cannot open its mouth to speak. So I stepped over one of them. Blood covered my fingers and arm, and I was almost certain the back of my head was the source of it, where the palm of my hand regularly wandered. Wait, the voice. There it was again!
Once more around the block, honey.
I turned around to face the store entrance. It couldn't have been more than mere minutes since the North Tower had fallen (I'd somehow slipped past the picket fence of cops and firefighters, blazing lights and ambulances and wandered in here, dazed and confused), and chaos was evident everywhere. Outside people were still running through the streets. I'd attracted the attention of a firefighter, who was presently screaming at me. His mouth moved silently, and I never was much of a lip reader.
Something grabbed hold of my ankle.
It was a mannequin; a woman mannequin, flawlessly pale skin, amber lips and jet-black hair, looking so very human (now that I got a better look at her). Or maybe she was human, or something of that nature, because her eyes bulged open.
“Once more around the block, honey,” she said.
And that's when I awoke.
6
A LOT OF PEOPLE MAY NOT know this, but the World Trade Center had its very own zip code. New York City, 10048. I had only been there once before several years earlier, in the North Tower, and refused to return ever since. I didn't want to look on its heap of ashy metal or stand on the street that had once fallen under its clock-like shadow. Those were the sort of things I could control during the day. But my sleep regime regularly had other plans.
In my next dream it was still September, eleventh day of the month, first or second year of the new millennium (depending on your mathematical point-of-view), and I’d just been herded through one of those underground turnstiles that led into The Mall at the World Trade Center as it looked in its final remaining moments before the North Tower came crashing down upon it. If I focused in on some of the details I could make out the letters of an Ann Taylor Loft, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and a Warner Bros. Studio Store, but most of it was a confusing blur of lights mixed with mostly indistinguishable voices and hollers of our rescuers. And the sprinklers were on.
“GO, DOGGY, GO, THE CHILD MUST WAKE TO BE SAVED!” said one such rescuer, who urged me to run on through the rain with a commanding wave of his arms.
The child must wake to be saved? It didn’t make any sense. What made him even odder was the fact that his face was smooth, almost entirely featureless, no eyes or nose or mouth could be found on him.
His walkie-talkie added to the confusion. It beeped and relayed the babble of dream-like dyslexia. He was clearly a New York City police officer, blood-blue shirt and chauffeur hat. I never doubted that part. But now that I got a better look at his face, if I really focused away from the electric lit store logos blurred by sopping sprinklers, if I magnified in on him as one might in a dream and concentrated on its hidden contortions, I was almost certain this time, he was the HOMELESS MAN; the same mystery hitchhiker who’d recently followed me across America, haunting my steps with his meaningless babbles. The very person whom Alex had pounced on in San Francisco with the even-more absurd claim that he'd murdered his father. Only his beard was cleanly shaven, and he’d likely showered earlier that morning (as any New York City on-duty cop would), and he wasn’t talking to himself for once.
Unlike my actual escape from the North Tower seven years earlier, this was only a dream. I know that now. Not that I was certain of it at the time, we rarely are until that moment when we wake. In the real twin towers, the cops were actual flesh and blood people and not this seemingly otherworldly hitchhiker. Sure, maybe he was real flesh and blood, I couldn’t say one way or the other, but one thing was certain; he couldn’t have been there with me in the North Tower on the actual morning of the attack. It just wasn’t possible.
“PICK UP THE PACE, GO, DOGGY, GO!” a second police officer commanded us in the typical linguistic babble of my homeless stalker. “THE CHILD MUST SEE THE SIXTH FINGER AND KNOW!”
I didn’t like how slow my legs carried me through the underground mall, no matter how fast my brain begged for them to go. Every other evacuee (I sometimes wonder if I've ended up in their nightmares just as they were regularly regurgitated into mine) seemed to move faster. And I didn’t like the fact that this second police officer, now that I focused in on him, was the same homeless man, freshly shaven and showered and without the scars. Were there many of them? And was the voice on the walkie-talkie George? I'd heard him speaking of this mysterious George fellow before. No, unlike my actual plight through the underground mall in the final seconds before the North Tower fell, this was only a dream. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
TURN LEFT, another faceless officer pointed with his gloved fingers. GO STRAIGHT, and GO RIGHT, proclaimed others. GO DOGGY, GO! Maybe I was running in circles. The Minotaur-like maze of wringing-wet corridors was all so endless and confusing. But the escalator, with the promise of a sunny Tuesday morning (there were glass doors on the top of it), was finally within sight, the e
nd of Dante’s journey.
Someone stood on the other side of those glass doors.
Elise.
On the actual morning of September Eleventh, the woman soon to become my wife was thousands of miles away attending her fifth semester of college at USC, and I was here. But that’s what dreams are good for, pulling the silhouette of memory out from under you as it wrestles with unresolved issues in the subconscious.
“Elise, get out of here!” I said.
She saw me but couldn’t make out my words.
So I ran faster, as fast as my legs could carry me, which was so very entirely slow, and weighted down, and sluggish, so slow that the escalator grew seemingly further away with every single step. Except when I actually did reach the base of them, they stopped, just as they had on that actual morning.
“Elise, get out of here!” I called to her again, running up the stairs, but she paid no attention to the seriousness of the situation.
Lights flickered off.
The darkness was complimented with a deafening explosion. I remember thinking it was a freight train plummeting over a cliff and folding the dozens of its accordion-like compartments into a single pancake on the canyon floor below. The outside light shattered into a thousand shards of glass; next the roar of a tornado and the tug of hurricane-force winds. The pain must have been overbearing, because Elise let out a blood curdling scream.
“Elise!” I cried again, holding both hands out.
But it was too late. My wife was suspended a dozen feet up into the air. The evacuees only several steps higher disappeared into its violent gust, I never saw them again, and Elise whisked away with them as the escalator shriveled away from my feet. I spiraled backwards, perhaps first upwards, just as it actually happened (it doesn't seem at all possible, but really, what about that day did), with barbed glass and debris shaving my jawbone and face. The razor-edge of an escalator step cut into my spine, and all I could do was curl up into a knot to protect myself from the constant downpour of debris.
Goodnight Sometimes Means Goodbye (Wrong Flight Home, #2) Page 4
