by John Raymond
Back at the table, he found his grandpa asleep. His head was tilted awkwardly on his shoulder, and the snoring, while not at its most awful, brain-rattling level, was loud enough to bother the nearby eaters. A spill of cracker crumbs made a sad snowdrift on his chest. Aaron brushed off the dust and checked his phone, figuring he’d wait until the bill arrived to wake up his grandpa. He could see his fantasy waitress off taking an order from a trucker at the counter, but, interestingly, he no longer found her quite so fetching. That silly blond ponytail wasn’t his thing, after all.
He was just scrolling through his emails, finding nothing of note, waiting for Kari to reappear so he could flag her down, when he noticed the bag was gone.
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute here. Hold on. No, this isn’t right,” Aaron said, his voice rising, and he lurched to his feet and stumbled around the booth, searching the floor, the seat, the tabletop, as the whole dining room gradually went quiet and watched. He looked along the baseboard of the booth, where the rug ended and the grit and crumbs of old meals collected. He tipped the chairs and felt the indentations where the legs had been. He enlarged his circle and searched under the neighbor’s table and went back to the booth at a new angle. Sometime during his flailing, Grandpa Sam woke up, too, snorting, and feverishly joined the search, peering under his legs, behind his back, also to no avail.
The restaurant manager came over, and one kind old woman approached, wanting to make sure no one was having a stroke, and then, somewhere in the mix, the police arrived. The two cops listened with mild concern as Aaron tried to explain what had happened—the gold, the bag, the drive—and they pulled aside a few people for private interrogations. Aaron and Grandpa Sam waited in the booth as they talked to Kari, the busboys, the cashier, and some neighboring customers, but the questions must have been minimal, because it was amazing how quickly the suspects were released and the room fell back into its old order, minus the gold.
Fifteen minutes passed, and the manager was already back at the counter, thumbing his phone, and Kari and the busboys were again making the rounds, filling coffee cups and clearing tables. A family of 49ers fans was back to eating their roast beef sandwiches and discussing the new uniforms, the return to classic style, the surprising inclusion of the 49ers ligature below the neck. The only sign that a crime had occurred anywhere in the vicinity was the presence of the two cops at the register, straining to understand the tiny, mole-encrusted Mexican cashier, denying that anything had happened.
Even Aaron’s grandpa was back to normal, about as expressive as a cinder block. He sat there staring into space, as if the event had already been digested and ten years had passed. Remember that day when the gold was stolen? What a terrible day; thank God that day is gone forever in the mists of time. Since waking up he hadn’t said more than four words, the only clue pointing to the incredible disappointment and sorrow he felt being his eyes studying the air, the edges red and wet with a viscous fluid somewhere between tears and chicken fat. Seeing those damp eyes made Aaron want to stand up and murder somebody, to smash someone’s skull into wet, bloody bits. Who was it going to be?
It seemed incomprehensible that no one had any clue. He could not believe it. They didn’t know anything. They didn’t know what shit food they were eating. Or where Iraq was on a map. But, worst of all, they had no idea who his grandpa was, what visions he came bearing. They thought he was just another lazy American like them, stunted by generations of luxury, rendered stupid by the years of unearned wealth, when in fact he was the angel of history itself. He was the angel of fucking history, and he’d been mugged right in front of them, and they had no fucking clue.
He scanned the room again, grading the suspicion level of the remaining patrons. The gaunt trucker with the beef-jerky skin. The Chinese teenager with the silver iPad. Everyone in the restaurant seemed like a plausible suspect. Everyone had known of the bag’s contents, that much had been figured out. And thus, everyone had a clear motive, the same motive, twenty-five thousand of them, to be precise. Aaron racked his mind for any forgotten clues, but in his memory, the suspects all looked like that waitress’s ass. Every face in the restaurant, white, black, Mexican, Eskimo, they all looked like that waitress’s fantastic ass.
He was still seeking clues of possible guilt when the bigger, goateed cop returned from the last round of “interrogations.” He was a solid fireplug of a man, the skin at his collar pink and freshly shaven. He should have been pumping weights at the nearest LA Fitness, not packing a gun. Not surprisingly, he came bearing no real news.
“We’ll be filing a report, for sure,” he said. “But we don’t have much to go on yet. No one has any real information here. But something definitely happened. We know that much. You had a bag of gold, and now the bag is gone. So, as far as we know, anyone on the premises could be the perpetrator.”
“Yeah,” Aaron said, seething. He was almost more pissed at the police than at whoever had ripped off his grandpa. At least the criminal wasn’t incompetent. “So what happens now, sir?”
“The investigation keeps going,” the cop said. “We still have customers to track down. Credit card records to check. Video cameras to look at. It could take awhile.”
“No video,” the other cop said, sidling up. He was the Laurel to the Hardy. Or the Hardy to the Laurel. Whichever one was the thin one to the big. He was notable for his five o’clock shadow, a purplish smudge covering his dimpled jawline.
“Right,” the first cop said. “No video in this part of the restaurant. But a lot of data to sift through. A lot of data. You two might as well go home and get some rest. We have your number. Nothing’s going to happen today, I can tell you that much.”
“So when will something happen?” Aaron said.
“I wouldn’t put a specific time frame on it. Could be a few days, could be a few weeks. Could be a few months, even. Depends on the data.”
And before Aaron could even register his dismay, the cops exited, returning the restaurant to complete normalcy. All around them, people who had no idea what had transpired less than an hour before were eating, and out in the world many former customers were already forgetting everything they’d seen. Maybe they’d mention the day’s event to their wives or children, a little anecdote around the dinner table, in the bar. Through the window, Aaron could see the men and women of Dublin coming and going in the mall’s lot, pushing shopping carts, talking on phones, chasing toddlers, dozens if not hundreds of potential thieves flowing in and out of the grocery store, departing the scene for parts unknown. Demoralized, his grandpa sighed.
“Unbelievable,” Aaron said.
“No,” his grandpa said. “Not so unbelievable at all, I don’t think.”
“No, I guess not.” They sat in silence, buffeted by the noise of the knives and forks on ceramic, the low babble of midafternoon conversation. “So what should we do now?”
“We wait.”
“We could be sitting here for a long time, Grandpa.”
“It won’t be long.”
“What do you mean?” If his grandpa had some idea that the thief always returned to the scene of the crime, he’d been watching too many cop shows on TV. Not that the cop shows even believed that inanity anymore.
“I know who it was. It won’t be long.”
“Who?” Aaron stared at the ceiling, too exhausted to rise to the bait.
“I don’t want to say.”
“Just tell me.”
“There are some things you can’t understand,” Grandpa Sam said. “You can never understand. But I know. This is something I know. We wait.”
13
Mark Harris’s ass, encased in form-fitting Lycra, pumped away on the narrow, bone-hard bicycle seat. It was called the gluteus maximus, Anne remembered from high school biology class, and Mark’s was a thing of toned firmness, she noted, beckoning her onward with every shifting, clenching flexation. At times it almost seemed like it was winking at her.
She didn’t want to thi
nk about Mark’s ass anymore, so she turned her attention to his shorts instead. The material of Mark’s riding shorts was some kind of scientific wicking textile, which meant the padded fabric was somehow drawing the sweat away from his ass skin as they rode, sucking it into the very cloth itself and yet somehow also remaining feather light in the process. He’d explained the whole moisture-wicking technology at great length, something about braided strands of fiber, themselves braided together, or something, but Anne still didn’t really understand the science. The sweat had to go somewhere, didn’t it? Did it form little pockets or bubbles in the fabric? Was it a sponge? Did Mark have to wring out his shorts at the end of the ride? Or pop little sweat packets like blisters? Who cared?
Such was the chatter in her mind as she passed the one-mile mark on her first bike ride in approximately three decades. Not since she was a little girl rolling down the wide, white sidewalks of Sun Valley with her handlebar streamers crackling in the breeze could she remember the sensation of flying over the ground like this, her feet grinding on the pedals, her hands squeezing the rubbery grips. How, exactly, she had come to be here, stuck behind Mark Harris’s sweating ass, piloting a rented carbon-frame twelvespeed, packed into her own ridiculous riding togs, the kind she had always assumed would never touch her body, was hard to say. She’d always laughed at these black tights, this absurd, multicolored shirt, this honeycombed, ergonomic helmet thing. A person might as well hang a sign on their back saying, “I am a total fucking prick.” Now that person was her.
Barring the sight of Mark’s back end, though, she had to admit the experience was not altogether unpleasant. Blurring trees, speeding grass, hanging sun, were all arrayed around her like proffered gifts. The scents of moist, mushroomy earth and sappy forest blew into her lungs, almost obscenely clean. Even the mildew and decay smells were invigorating. Flying along, she was all of eight years old again.
It was so nice that she wondered if she’d slipped into some alternate dimension, some zone where the normal laws that governed her life were temporarily suspended. Already, she could tell, the past twenty hours were entering the realm of personal myth. In fact, she could almost pinpoint the exact moment the switch-over had occurred: it was yesterday afternoon, 3:30 PM, midway through her phone conversation with Mark on the topic of her first meeting with Charlie Arnold. She had just delivered the basic summary of the meeting’s minutes (Charlie’s mild openness to the idea of extending a proprietary permit for the city’s wastewater) and was heading into the interpretation (the need for some invented technological gadget as a dangling carrot) when Mark had suddenly stopped her and demanded a face-to-face meet-up.
“This is too important,” he’d said. “We shouldn’t do this on the phone. We need to be together and hash it out. Let’s have a strategy meeting this weekend, all right?”
“Uh . . . Okay.”
“You can come up here? That’s cool?”
“Whoa. Wait a minute.”
By Mark’s account, his schedule was too packed to allow a trip down to L.A.; thus, it would be much better if she just jetted up to Portland for a night or two. She should see his place anyway, he’d argued, now that they were in business together. The food alone was worth the trip. She’d tried to beg off, offered to Skype as long as he needed, but he’d demanded a visit. He wanted to show her his world, he’d said. And, as she didn’t actually have anything keeping her in town—no dates, dinners, or work obligations to speak of—in the end she’d relented.
Within ten minutes, a flight confirmation number had popped into her in-box, and two hours later an ominous American town car stocked with bottled water, single-wrapped Life Savers, and a chauffeur from Ghana was idling at her door. She’d easily made the 7:20 PM flight from LAX, and by 9:30 PM she was on the ground in Portland, where another chauffeur, this one Russian, had met her at the airport and whisked her away, past the dowdy, depressing outlying hotels and warehouses, alongside dark embankments covered in blackberry vines, past foreboding off-ramps to nowhere. The city itself, when it finally melted into view, was much smaller than she’d imagined, a dinky little Lego town, somewhere between a jewel box and Dubuque.
In the morning Mark had appeared in her hotel lobby outfitted for a full-on biking safari. Under the hotel’s elk-antler chandelier, he’d flashed open his trench coat to reveal his superheroic costume, with all its ugly Day-Glo stripes and its silly pockets and its padded codpiece. She’d been unable to stop herself from physically blanching.
“I didn’t know you were a biker,” she said.
“Biking is the new golfing,” he said. “This is how we do business this decade. Come on. You’re going to love it.”
“What? No, no, no. You have fun, Mark. I’ll just catch up with you after.”
“No, we’re biking today. Come on. Get up.”
“I don’t even have the right shoes.”
“We’re going to fix that. Now let’s go. This is happening.”
The preparations had been exhaustive. It was like some awful version of Pretty Woman. An even more awful version, rather—getting outfitted in all this douche-wear, assembling all these extraneous, absurd gadgets. Mark had insisted on buying everything for her, playing the consummate alpha host, and then he’d rented her a bike that was admittedly as beautiful as a sculpture, as light as a pinecone. He’d strapped it to the rack beside his own, and in his silver BMW they’d zoomed to the top of the West Hills, heading north along Skyline to the drop point for one of his favorite excursions. And thus, now here she was, zooming downhill through a mossy tube of maple trees, layers of luminous greenery smearing in her vision, and things were getting really fun.
They snacked at a cute little barn on a bucolic river island north of the city, in the middle of rolling blueberry, raspberry, and strawberry fields, near a cute little produce stand surrounded by cute little food carts and beer vendors. All around them, cute, healthy-looking, brown-haired families wandered among the bales of hay, fondling broccoli and kale, admiring the caged farm animals, and for about two seconds the scene sparked some understanding in Anne about why people moved here from Southern California: ahhh, the fantasy of white people stewarding the glorious land. Here we can shop for produce out of rough-hewn wooden bins and drive home to cook it in our Craftsman bungalows, unmolested by any people who might not share our worldview. They were children of Leni Riefenstahl up here, cheerfully doing their morning calisthenics in the wheat fields, happily grinding Jew bones into the dirt. But whatever. Good for them. They were irrelevant to the world at large, thank God. With the first leg of the ride officially ended, the ritual purification performed, Mark, his multicolored shirt jauntily unzipped, his ruddy face drenched in spring sunlight, was ready to get down to the true pleasure of the day: business.
“So, you met with Charlie Arnold yesterday,” he said. They were sitting at a picnic table with honey-colored beers before them, their helmets like two bright stones on the wood. Even though no one was within hearing distance, Mark had lowered his voice to a conspiratorial growl.
“I did,” she said.
“And he seems interested. That’s good news.”
“I’d say he’s open to being interested,” she said. “He might eventually become interested. That would be more accurate.”
“He didn’t close any doors, is what you’re saying.”
“No, the door is most definitely open.”
“See, that’s fantastic,” he said, clapping his hands, grinning at the blue sky. “That’s the best we can hope for right now, Anne. Fantastic. You’re doing great work.”
Anne was mildly disturbed by his excess of optimism, but then again, she thought, of course he would be that way. Only a morbidly wishful thinker like him would ever have the nerve to corner the market on one of the very elements of nature in the first place. Gross optimism was a prerequisite for the job.
“I don’t think I’d be celebrating anything yet, Mark,” she cautioned. “It was only one conversation.”
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br /> “Ah, but it was more than a conversation,” he said. “It was a conversation with you.” He tapped her knuckle. “And you mean something to him. You command his respect. It’s not just a normal door you opened. It’s a special door.”
“Charlie makes his own decisions, believe me,” she said.
“Don’t sell yourself short. You command his respect. I know that for a fact.”
“He doesn’t even know what I’m asking for yet.”
Mark waved off her doubts. “People think decisions get made based on ideas,” he said, “but that’s not actually the case. Decisions really get made based on relationships. And that’s a good thing, Anne. I trust people more than ideas any day. Don’t you? So just trust me—you’re doing an amazing job. You’re putting yourself on the line out there for BHC, and that’s a big deal to me. I thank you for that.”
Anne wasn’t sure what to make of his gratitude, but she accepted it, clinking his thick glass. He probably gave this kind of canned pep talk to his underlings a few times a week, doling out the praise like gold stars. It was a form of social control, maybe even the sentimental flip side of his perverse humor. And yet, despite all her cynicism, sipping her beer in the sun, she found she appreciated the gesture. Even if Mark’s praise was utterly fake, or merely self-serving, or a blunt tool of manipulation, the fact that he made the effort demonstrated some level of comprehension about what she’d done, about how much time and energy she’d spent outside his line of vision, and that was more than most managers could usually understand, in her experience. Most just assumed that all the work they didn’t witness happened by itself, like plants growing, or the weather.
