Ring Game

by Pete Hautman

  That son-of-a-bitch Drew. All the time and effort to prep the guy, to bring him on board, and he spaces. Good thing he called.

  Hy rocked forward and stood up. A whiff of butyric acid followed him. There were little pockets of it throughout the apartment, like aromatic mines, waiting to be triggered. The garage was still unapproachable. He walked into the kitchen and looked over Carmen’s shoulder into the saucepan.

  “Spaghetti sauce?”

  “Sophie gave me the recipe. It’s ready. You hungry?”

  “Starving. Drew Chance is coming to the wedding.”

  “Who?”

  “Drew Chance. The guy on Hard Camera.”

  “Oh. Did he RSVP?”

  “I doubt it. You know, the presents alone are going to make this whole thing worthwhile.”

  “Sophie’s gonna be pissed, he doesn’t RSVP.”

  Hyatt shrugged. “You want to know something funny? Did you know that in Minnesota you can get married by a dog?”

  Carmen set the spoon on the edge of the pan. “Forget about it, Hy. I’m not getting married by a dog, I don’t care how it will look on TV.”

  Hyatt laughed. “No, I’m just saying it’s the law. If two people say their vows in public, and if they think they just got married, then they’re married. Doesn’t matter if the minister is licensed or anything. Doesn’t matter what they say. It still counts! They’re married! The minister doesn’t even have to be human!”

  “Tell me we’re not gonna be married by a dog.”

  “No. I just thought it was interesting. I mean, everybody makes such a big deal about weddings, and in the end it comes down to ‘bow-wow-wow,’ you’re married.”

  “You’re a weird guy.”

  “Yeah, I know that.”

  “You want to set the table?”

  “Hey, we’re not married yet!” Hyatt looked around the kitchen. “What kind of pasta are we having?”

  Carmen stopped stirring. “Oh,” she said.

  “You’re kidding, right? You forgot the spaghetti?”

  “Do we have some?”

  “Jesus, Carm, you scare me sometimes.”

  Carmen nodded. “Me, too.”

  The man behind the counter at Bigg Bodies sat with his thick arms crossed over his bulging chest, staring bleakly at his right foot, which was wrapped in a thick cocoon of white gauze and resting atop a stool. He did not look up when Chuckles limped in and leaned his elbows on the counter.

  Chuckles said, “You drop a plate?”

  The man turned his head slowly and stared. He reminded Chuckles of Chip. Squinty little redneck eyes. “Something I can do for you?”

  Chuckles leaned across the counter, offering his hand. “Name’s Chuckles. You the owner?”

  “I’m the manager. If you’re selling something, we’re not interested.”

  Chuckles kept his hand out. “I’m not selling. I’m buying.”

  The man with the foot seemed disappointed, but he took the proffered hand and pumped it once. “Beaut Miller. What are you buying?”

  “I’m looking to join a gym.”

  “Yeah? Well, you found one. We got it all. I’d give you the tour, but—” he gestured toward his bandaged foot.

  “’s cool.” Chuckles looked out across the room. “I see what you got.” Only a few guys were working out. He did not see Florian.

  “We’re running a special promotion, this week only. Join for six months, you get one month free. One forty-nine ninety-nine.”

  “What if I can’t decide till next week?”

  Beaut shrugged. “I could extend the offer.”

  “You got any lady members?”

  “Sure. Mostly they come in evenings.”

  “Got one named Florian?”

  “Florian?”

  “Yeah. Good looking woman. Got a kick like a mule.”

  Beaut laughed. “I got a Flow-REEN, only she just smells like a mule.”

  “Say what?”

  “Actually, our Flowrean smells more like dead fish. That the bitch you looking for?”

  Many thousands of Pilgrims had come to the Amaranthine Church of the One seeking to lengthen their pitifully brief lifespans. The majority, confronted with the rigors and costs of the Amaranthine way, chose to remain mortal. They came for the free clinic, and they left. Fewer than a thousand had gone on to attend an Extraction Event and, of those, only forty-four had completed the first five of the seven steps required to achieve true physical immortality. The sixth and seventh steps were held to be among the greatest secrets of the Amaranth. Thus far, only Rupe and Polly had achieved them.

  The forty-two people now seated in the meeting room were all fifth-steppers and had reached a state known as “proto-immortality.” Rupert Chandra, seated on a swivel chair in the precise center of the small octagonal room, felt his chest swell with pride. He hoped that he could contain his emotions—but he also felt that these were his people, and that he could be himself.

  “Thank you all for coming,” he said, placing one hand over his heart. He pushed off with one foot, spinning slowly, watching the sea of friendly faces swirl around him. “I never expected so many of you—” He stopped the spinning chair. “—Would come to say good-bye.” He smiled and blinked; a tear spilled from his left eye. “But of course, this isn’t goodbye. Polly and I will return from Stonecrop. What is four weeks? A moment. A blip. A fragment of eternity.” He shook his head. “As you all know, the ACO has been our life, our dream. To have led you all into this unending future has been a great privilege and an even greater joy, but leadership has its price. The things we have to do to bring new Pilgrims into the fold, the Anti-Aging Clinics … you have seen me perform age reversals. We do these things to overcome the natural doubts of the Pilgrim, but there is a price. My cells suffer, draining energy from my system. Electron microscopic analysis has shown that my telomeres actually grow shorter during an age reversal. And Polly, my Eternal Companion, as much a part of me as this hand you see in front of my face, is drained as well. The age reversal demonstrations are necessary, but they are not healthy, and we have suffered; and that is why we are taking this sabbatical and leaving the church in your hands.” Rupe paused. “I asked you all here not only to say good-bye, but to make you a promise. In four weeks, Polly and I will be back, younger and stronger than ever. We will return with new energy, new spirit, and new ideas. We will have moved far beyond the Rupe and Polly you see standing here before you. We will be better than ever.”

  Falsehood and deception, betrayal and treachery. The words spilling from Rupert Chandra’s mouth went straight to Chip’s soul, staining it with the putrefying reek of the Death Program. In the old days such deceit would have been rewarded with a shower of stones, or fire, or a simple defenestration. But modern-day politics were more complex, more strategic. There were too many laws. The direct approach didn’t work anymore, not since the Jews and the Japs had taken over the government.

  Rupe was talking about step four again—Give More—telling them they had to give and give and give to reap the rewards of eternity. But Chip knew where that giving was going. It was going to the Doctors of Deception, to the architects of the Death Program. Not to building the future, but to concealing the past.

  The door opened and Chuckles slipped into the meeting room, late again, and winked at Chip. Chip the Security Chief nodded to the Head of Security, carefully expressionless. Another symptom of decadence. Chip permitted himself a grim smile. Once he became Director of Strategic Operations as Hyatt had promised, the first thing he’d do, he’d fire Chuckles’s black ass.

  35

  A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.

  —Mahatma Gandhi

  DEBROWSKI ROLLED ONTO HER side and fingered a Gauloise from the pack on the bedstand. “Let me see if I’m understanding this.” She fitted the cigarette to her lips. “You want me to go to this wedding with you.” She snapped a farmer’s match to life with her thumbnail.
r />   “That’s right,” said Crow.

  Debrowski sucked flame into the cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling. “Only we go in separate cars.”

  “I’ll have to meet you there,” Crow admitted.

  “And we don’t even go home together.”

  Crow closed his eyes. Sunlight angled in from the window opposite the bed. He could feel it on his feet. “You make it sound worse than it is.”

  “Months I’m gone, I come back and this is our big date? We hop into the sack, then arrange to meet at an American Legion Post?”

  “It’s not like I planned it that way.”

  “What kind of wedding present is it, you give the bride’s father—not even her father—you give him a free limo rental? Something you won in a card game? Jesus, Crow, sometimes you amaze me.”

  Crow opened his eyes a millimeter and watched her smoke.

  “I don’t see why you have to be the one to drive it,” she said.

  “I told you why.”

  “I wish you hadn’t agreed to it.”

  “I wouldn’t’ve if I’d known you were coming home.”

  “Yeah, well I’m home now.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Debrowski raised her eyebrows and fired twin jets of smoke through her nostrils. “I am telling you.”

  Crow grinned. Debrowski took another drag and tried to hold a scowl, but her face broke up and she started laughing, then coughing. Crow waited for the hacking to subside.

  “You ought to quit those,” he said with all the self-righteous confidence of one who had quit—again—just a few months ago.

  Debrowski shrugged and swung her legs off the mattress. She walked to the window and looked out. Sunlight silhouetted her body. “You’ve got a nice view here.”

  “I sure do,” said Crow. He especially liked the bright line where the sun grazed her hip, and the shadows that fell across the backs of her thighs.

  “You can see the sky. Downstairs, I can’t see anything.”

  “You know what I don’t get?”

  “What?”

  “How come you don’t have any tattoos?”

  “I like to keep my options open.”

  “When we met, I was sure you’d have a lightning bolt or something on your butt.”

  “You disappointed?” She turned to face him.

  Crow smiled. “Not really. Look, I’m sorry about this wedding thing. You don’t have to go, you know.”

  “Not go? Not go to little Carmen’s wedding? I wouldn’t miss it. The only question is, who am I going to go with?”

  Debrowski balanced a slab of paté de foie gras on a slice of baguette and bit into it. The heady aroma of chopped black truffles filled her sinuses, raised goose bumps on her bare belly. They were sitting on Crow’s porch, looking down at First Avenue. Debrowski had on a pair of Crow’s jeans and her motorcycle jacket and nothing else.

  “What have you been doing with yourself? I mean, besides playing cards and pumping iron.”

  Crow followed her example with the paté. “I went fishing with Sam,” he said. “And I did that thing for Axel.” He tasted the pate, chewed slowly. “This is really good.”

  “It had better be. It costs about five dollars a bite. We’re lucky the customs officer didn’t crack it open to look for contraband.”

  “What else you bring back?”

  Debrowski looked in her bag from the duty free and pulled out six more tinned pates.

  “More pate? That’s all? No cheeses?”

  “What were you expecting? What did you bring when you flew back?”

  “Nothing,” Crow admitted.

  “You know, for an unemployed muscle car-driving poker-player, you’ve got some pretty high standards.” Debrowski glared.

  Crow helped himself to more pate. “I thought you missed me,” he said.

  “I did miss you.” She reached over and rubbed her knuckles lightly on his scalp. “I was afraid you’d changed.”

  “I have changed. I’m stronger, and I have less money.”

  “Me, too. Maybe it’s not a bad trade-off. But you know what the other half of it is? I was afraid you’d changed, and I was afraid you hadn’t. You know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “I was hoping you’d found something to be passionate about, Crow.”

  “I’m passionate about you.”

  “Remember when you used to talk about opening a fishing camp?”

  “I don’t know anything about fishing.”

  “That’s not the point. The point is, you had something going in your head. I mean, is this where you want to be in ten years? Sitting here eating foie gras and waiting for the next card game?”

  Crow looked thoughtful. “The paté is not bad,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Debrowski said.

  Crow looked over but her face was in shadow. He waited until they reached the next streetlight to reply. “Sorry about what?”

  “I’ve been sniping at you ever since I got back.” She looked tired. A few more steps and her face returned to shadow.

  “You’re tired,” he said. He was tired, too. Two thirty in the morning, and they’d been wandering for more than an hour, periods of intense conversation interspersed with wordless walking, the soft scuff of his running shoes and the clop of Debrowski’s boots, a rhythm like that of a distant train passing. Crow wasn’t sure, but he thought maybe they were having a fight. Not a fight exactly. More like a renegotiation.

  Debrowski said, “I’m not tired. In Paris, it’s time for coffee. I think I had this fantasy I’d come back and you’d have become a marine biologist or something, and you’d grab me and say, ‘Let’s go to Aruba.’”

  “You want to go to Aruba?”

  “No. I’m just having this girl fantasy. A handsome man appears and carries me away on his big white horse. That old thing. Don’t worry. It’ll pass.”

  “You saying you want to go riding?”

  Debrowski’s pace faltered, then picked up. “You’re being obtuse.”

  “Not a good quality in a marine biologist slash equestrian.”

  The Buzz coffee bar never closed. Debrowski added four cubes of jaggery to her espresso, poked at them with a wooden stirrer until they crumbled. A red neon lightning bolt illuminated their window table.

  “I think what it is, I think you make me look at myself more than I want to. It’s that Crow stare. You take what I got, and you give it right back to me. I remember one time I was talking to Sam, and he told me that’s how you win at cards. The other players look at you, and they don’t see you, they see themselves.”

  “If you haven’t figured out by now that Sam is full of shit, you’re even more screwed up than you think I am.”

  “Your old man’s hipper than you think, Crow.”

  “Now there’s a scary thought.”

  “I’m thinking about asking him out.”

  Crow laughed. “Sam would like that.”

  “You know when I like you best? When you’re in trouble. Is that sick?” Debrowski’s head rested on Crow’s lap. They were on his porch swing, facing east.

  “I think it’s normal,” Crow said. Orange mist bled onto charcoal sky. A row of pigeon silhouettes crowned the apartment building across the street. He could hear soft cooing.

  “It doesn’t feel normal.”

  “Normal never does.”

  Debrowski didn’t say anything for more than a minute. He thought she might have fallen asleep, but when he looked down her eyes were on him. She said, “If I hadn’t been awake for thirty-six hours, that would probably have sounded really stupid.”

  “I can’t even remember what I said.”

  “This is kind of like getting drunk together, isn’t it?”

  Crow frowned. “I’ve got an idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Let’s get some sleep. We’ve got to be at a wedding in ten hours.”

  Debrowski sat up. “I’m too wired from all that coffee. Maybe I’ll go
downstairs and unpack.”

  “You go unpack. I’m going to sleep.”

  “Good. Stay out of trouble. I don’t want to have to start loving you all over again.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  36

  The telomere, that cap at the end of every strand of DNA, controls the rate at which our cells age. This is scientific fact. But what many scientists overlook is the equally compelling fact that the telomere is but a physical manifestation of our essential spirit, a measure of our commitment to the Life Program. Why should one individual outlive another? Put quite simply, it is a function of belief and commitment. Do immortals have longer telomeres? Unquestionably.

  —“Amaranthine Reflections” by Dr. Rupert Chandra

  ARLING BIGGIE ROAMED THE gym with a spray bottle and a towel, wiping down the benches, cleaning handprints off the mirrors, picking up bits of lint, and rearranging misracked weights. The only sounds at Bigg Bodies were the squeaking of the spray bottle, the hum of the air conditioning, and the soft clank of iron.

  The first customer showed up at ten minutes after six: a large, cheerful, gimpy black man wearing a navy-blue sweatshirt that read “Amaranthines Have Longer Telomeres.” Bigg’s eyes flicked to the man’s crotch, but saw nothing beyond a baggy pair of sweats. He’d never heard it called a “Telomere” before. And what the hell was an “Amaranthine”? Must be the new member Beaut had signed up. The Amaranthine—if that was what he was—limped straight back to the chest area and loaded a couple of forty-fives onto a bar, then sat down on the bench. Bigg thought about wandering back to introduce himself, make the newbie feel welcome, but he just didn’t feel all that friendly at that time of the morning. He moved down the long dumbbell rack, rotating each dumbbell so that the raised numbers on the ends read right-side-up. When he got to the sixty-pounders he remembered again why he was up at dawn, and how Beaut had annexed his massage recliner to keep his foot elevated. He thought about that goddamned Joe Crow.