There were other things wrong with his breakfast. The eggs themselves were too round, meaning they hadn’t been poached in the classic sense. He wouldn’t have known the difference, except that when Amanda converted to the Church of Julia she declared that an egg wasn’t poached unless it was set free in water, although some minimal guidance was allowed involving a spoon and a splash of vinegar.
John sliced into the center of the yolk, which was perfectly done. Then he flipped all the toppings over so that the yolk could seep into the English muffin. He found himself looking at a piece of ordinary ham. Amanda would never have settled for that. She would have used either proper Canadian bacon with a peameal crust or imported prosciutto. And she would have tucked either the top halves of three spears of lightly steamed asparagus or else a little packet of sautéed and garlic-kissed baby spinach between the meat and egg. She never did understand why Benedict and Florentine had to be mutually exclusive, and he couldn’t agree more.
“Is everything to your liking, sir?”
“Hmm?” John thudded back into the atmosphere. “Oh. Yes. Thank you,” he said.
“Very good, sir.”
After the waiter moved on, John ate a piece of bacon with his fingers. He wasn’t positive it was finger food, but nobody gave him any dirty looks.
Except the kid in the corner. He was still staring at John, eyes narrowed to hateful pinpricks.
——
“You’re really going to talk to a reporter?” Celia said, as they stepped into the elevator.
“Yes. But you can’t say anything to anyone. About any of it.”
“Why would I say anything to anyone?”
“I don’t know, but … look. This is important. Promise me. Tell no one. Especially this new guy. What’s his name, anyway?”
“Nathan. You’re going to like him.”
“Sure I am.”
“Give him a chance. Please?”
Isabel looked impatiently at the padded interior of the elevator.
A ding announced their arrival on the main floor. They walked around the towering flower arrangement toward the restaurant. Celia said, “That’s him in the corner.”
“I can see that,” said Isabel. “He’s hard to miss.”
Nathan got up. He was walking. Stalking, really, with his hands deep in his jean pockets and shoulders hunched forward.
“What’s he doing? Did he see us?” asked Isabel.
“I don’t know,” said Celia.
He paused at a table. The man sitting at it looked up. He was holding half a piece of bacon between his thumb and fingers, like a cigar.
“Meat is murder, you jerk,” said Nathan. He slid his hand under the edge of the man’s plate and flicked his wrist, sending the dish flying. It fell facedown on the floor and cracked into four pieces. Droplets of Hollandaise splattered the man’s shoes and pants.
Celia grabbed Isabel’s arm and yanked her behind one of the Corinthian columns that flanked the restaurant’s entrance.
Nathan stormed past them and out the main doors of the hotel without ever looking back.
“Wow,” said Celia. “That was not cool.”
Isabel sucked her breath through her teeth. “Celia,” she said.
“What?”
“That guy. That’s John Thigpen. The reporter Bonzi wanted to kiss. The one I want to talk to.”
Celia looked back. John Thigpen was standing with palms turned outward, staring at the exit in wide-eyed shock.
“Oooooooh,” said Celia. “That’s Pigpen?”
“Yes,” Isabel said through gritted teeth. “That’s Pigpen.”
29
John was not generally superstitious, but on the off-chance that the breakfast incident was karmically related, he headed straight back to the Buccaneer to turn off the song.
He looked automatically over at Jimmy’s, and saw one of the thugs smoking a cigarette while Booger shat on the sidewalk. The guy looked at John; John gave a feeble wave, which went ignored.
As he approached, he saw that the door to his room was ajar. He paused with his ear to the crack, not wanting to disrupt a burglary in progress. The women in the room upstairs were squealing and laughing, which made it difficult for him to hear anything. He nudged the door open with his foot.
The room appeared empty, but he checked under the bed and in the bathroom, ripping back the shower curtain. The milky panes of the jalousie window were cranked wide, and the filthy gauze curtain blew in and out on a breeze. The dead flies had drifted to the bottom of the bathtub.
No one.
With heart pounding, he returned to the bedroom. Only then did he notice that Starship was no longer playing. On the bed, in place of his computer, was a pastel blue Post-it note:
Room 242
John sighed and glanced at the ceiling. Room 242 was directly above his.
He walked to the end of the building and climbed the staircase. The paint of the handrail had peeled and been covered over several times, leaving it with the gritty texture of papadum.
The door to room 242 was wide open. He found himself looking at the back of his laptop, which was on the bed, open, and playing something that involved an electric guitar and wah pedal.
The red-haired woman had pulled up a chair and was resting her platform shoes on the bed. A blonde stood beside her, arranging bits of her hair with a cordless curling iron. She had hairpins in the corner of her mouth. The brunette was on the other side, watching the screen with interest and occasionally cocking her head to blow a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. Not one of them offered so much as a flicker of recognition that John was standing in the doorway.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
The redhead leaned in close to the screen, waggling her cigarette, her eyes growing misty. “Those were glory days,” she said wistfully. “Look at that. I invented that. Teabagging.”
The other women leaned in and sighed.
“Absolutely amazing, Ivanka,” said one of them. “Truly inspired.”
“Yes. I was star. I traveled in limos. Drank champagne all day long, and the coke! Everywhere you looked, line after beautiful line. And now …” She sighed tragically.
“Teabagging?” said John. “Teabagging? You’re watching porn on my computer?”
“That’s not porn,” Ivanka said indignantly. “That’s me.”
“You stole my computer!”
“I would probably say ‘borrowed,’” she replied, turning her face to the side and taking a drag from her cigarette. She blew a thin jet of smoke.
“How the hell did you get into my room?”
“Oh, you know. The manager, Victor, he is nice man. You”—she cluck-clucked at John—“not so much. Very unfriendly this morning.” She sat suddenly forward and stabbed a lacquered nail at the screen. “Look! Watch this!”
“Stop!” he yelped. “That’s liquid crystal!”
“See?” she said, ignoring him completely and dragging her nail across the screen.
Realizing he was helpless, John came around the bed. Ivanka’s red nail had left an impression around the form she had outlined.
“You see that? Tight as a conga, round as a basketball.”
“But with just the right amount of jiggle,” said another.
“Well, yes,” allowed Ivanka, taking another drag. “But time catches everyone.” Another heartbreaking Russian sigh.
“Excuse me? Do you mind?” said John.
Ivanka turned sharply toward him, suddenly paying full attention. “Yes. I do. That is why the frowny face.”
“The frowny face?”
“Didn’t you read note? You interrupt our beauty sleep, and Fat Man Bob doesn’t like us looking tired.”
“Fat Man Bob?”
“The manager at gentlemen’s club. Where we work.”
Ivanka leaned forward and clicked the laptop shut. “But I forgive you, you naughty boy …” She waggled her cigarette and winked. “You didn’t tell me you were big celebri
ty writer.” This last was framed by fingered quotation marks.
“What?”
“Victor. He give me something else besides key.” She cocked her head toward the bedside table. A glossy magazine lay open displaying a two-page panorama of panty-less women climbing from cars in microminiskirts. Strategically placed yellow stars covered the pertinent areas. CROTCH SHOTS SPREADING! screamed the headline. TOP STARS MODEL THE LATEST STYLES IN “DOWN THERE” HAIR!
John sat on the edge of the bed.
The brunette closed the freshly minted Weekly Times, slid it back into its FedEx envelope, and tossed it onto John’s laptop. He took both and stood up.
“You probably want this too,” said Ivanka, handing him a corporate American Express card embossed with his name. “Was also in package. You’re lucky you’re Big-Shot Writer. I have weakness for shoes.”
John stared at the credit card, slid it into his back pocket, and walked to the door.
As he was about to pull the door shut behind him, Ivanka said, “Tonight, you sleep.” She blew a kiss in his direction.
——
Back in his room, he pulled the magazine from its envelope.
There, above his byline, was the title PORN KING PUTS SEX-CRAZED MONKEYS ON AIR! (John’s had been BIG BROTHER OR BIG LOVE? REALITY TELEVISION SHOWCASES AMOROUS APES.)
It got worse. John’s paragraph,
Formerly known as pygmy chimpanzees, bonobos were recognized as a separate species (Pan paniscus) in 1929. Peaceful, playful, and averse to conflict, bonobos are often called “the hippies of the forest.” Their society is matriarchal and egalitarian, and remarkable in its sexual behavior. Bonobos form and maintain social bonds through sex, and the females are as likely as males to initiate sexual contact. Wild bonobos, which are native to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, initiate some sort of sexual contact every four or five hours. By contrast, captive bonobos initiate sex roughly every hour and a half.
had become a bunch of sensationalistic gobbledygook glued together with such statements as “Monkeys have sex every hour of every day!” and “Bonobo babes use SEX to get what they want!” and “Pussywhipped males kept in line with SEX!”
John’s comment on the physical differences between chimpanzees and bonobos
Bonobos are smaller and more delicate than Pan troglodytes, with a refined, slim build and flatter features. Their limbs are long and elegant, and the females have more prominent breasts than any species of ape other than humans.
had been boiled down into a single statement: “The Pamela Andersons of the ape world!”
John’s references to their acquisition of human language
They are as closely related to humans as chimpanzees, sharing more than 98.7% of our DNA. Perhaps not surprisingly, bonobos have an extraordinary capacity for human language and abstract thought. These particular bonobos understand spoken English, and communicate using American Sign Language, having acquired human language in the same manner as human infants and for the same reason—a desire to communicate. They are also more computer-literate than some of their human counterparts.
had been removed completely.
He forced himself through the rest. None of it was his. The legal petition, the pregnancy, gone. The whole thing had been adulterated and sensationalized.
Seconds later, he was on the phone with Topher: “That’s not what I wrote! None of it!”
“Ech,” said Topher.
“No! Not ‘ech.’ It’s not what I wrote.”
“What do you think this is, the National Geographic? We have someone covering Lindsay Lohan full-time, for Christ’s sake. You’re not looking at a Pulitzer here.”
“I care because it’s wrong. They’re not monkeys, they’re great apes. They’re not chimpanzees, they’re bonobos. And they’re not Pamela Andersons. They’re A-cups at most, B, tops. Oh my God. I can’t believe I just said that.”
“Tell you what—when you turn in a piece two and a half hours before we go to press, you don’t get to complain. I, on the other hand, do get to complain. Especially when you hand in something as juicy as a saltine. Frankly, I’m a little worried. You need to unlearn everything you learned at Columbia. Forget The Philadelphia Inquirer and think National Enquirer, only glossier and with fewer aliens. I want you to memorize every word of this week’s issue. I want you to start watching TMZ and Access Hollywood. Go to the blogs: Perez Hilton, Mr Paparazzi. That’s what I’m looking for. And no more Latin, got it? And another thing. Get that interview with Faulks. And Isabel Duncan. Find shit out. Shit we can use. It doesn’t have to be true. There just has to be some tiny thing you can extrapolate from, if you get my drift. And you can always fall back on the old ‘sources said’ routine.”
“You want me to make things up about Ken Faulks.”
“And Isabel Duncan. And while you’re at it, I want you to remember why you got this job in the first place.” There was an ominous silence. “I think we understand each other?”
A single muscle to the side of John’s mouth began twitching. “Yeah.”
“Good. I look forward to your next piece. Which will be on time and full of juicy tidbits.”
“Yeah,” said John again.
“Excellent,” Topher said cheerfully and hung up.
——
John had settled on his bed with the Weekly Times and was trying to undo his education when the foundations of the building were rocked by a deafening ka-boom, followed by the tinkle of raining glass. John jerked his knees to his chest and covered his head. Once it was clear the explosion had happened outside the motel, he leapt up and threw open the door.
The building across the street was completely engulfed in flames, a sheath of diaphanous white-blue that tapered to red and yellow at the ends of greedy tendrils. John glanced at his feet. They were surrounded by shards of glass—the windows had blown out with such velocity that pieces had traveled across the street. People on both levels of the Buccaneer had opened their doors and were stepping outside—the strippers, the muumuu woman and her undershirt-wearing husband, the Asian family who had gone hopefully down to the pool on their first night and abandoned it on sight. Several people were already on cell phones, cupping their hands around the mouthpiece so they could be heard over the din. John looked back at the burning building.
A human fireball leapt through what had been the front window and barreled full tilt down the street. A woman on the balcony directly above John began to scream—it was Ivanka, and this familiarity in the midst of chaos jolted him into action.
The human-shaped fire ran and ran, arms flailing and hands slapping at the all-engulfing flames, which trailed behind like the tail of a shooting star. John scanned the exterior wall of the Buccaneer for a fire extinguisher. There wasn’t one. He bolted back into his room, swiped the bedspread, and sprinted down the street.
The person collapsed on the asphalt like a marionette whose strings had been sliced. John caught up and threw the bedspread over the form, trying to tuck it around and under, starving the flames of oxygen, patting at stray flicks of fire, and rolling the person back and forth as parts of the bedspread threatened to ignite. With the flames finally extinguished, John pulled the blanket away from the person’s head. He dropped to his knees and hovered, unable to tell if the person—he assumed it was a man, although at this point it was hard to tell—was still alive. John held his ear to the charred mouth. He examined the chest for signs of breath. He heard sirens, growing mercifully louder.
“Hang in there, buddy. Hang in there. Help is on the way.” He felt powerless. He wanted to hold the guy’s hand, or provide some soothing contact, but he could see no part of him that wasn’t burned, so John just knelt beside him and murmured comforting things. He had no idea if he was effective. He had no idea if the man even knew he was there.
Two fire trucks careened around the corner.
John leapt to his feet, waving his arms and screaming, “Here! We need help here!” But the vehicles swept past and
came to a stop in front of the burning building.
As John stared helplessly after them, a police car pulled up. John lifted his hands in a gesture of desperation. The cop surveyed John through the window, and then climbed out. He was in no particular hurry.
“What happened?” he said to John, glancing at the burned man.
“I was in my room over there”—John lifted a quivering finger at the Buccaneer—“and I heard something that sounded like a bomb and came out to see what the hell was going on and this guy came flying out, just burning up. I chased him until he fell and then I put out the fire with my bedspread, and has anyone even called an ambulance? Why didn’t the fire trucks stop?”
From the scorched form came a low, keening moan that progressed to a wail. Once the man started, he did not stop. He pleaded and begged, he swore and cried, he prayed and wept for his mother, although his ruined face barely moved.
Moments later an ambulance pulled up. John stood watching as the ambulance crew removed the charred bedspread and loaded the man onto a gurney. His initial outburst had subsided to piteous moaning.
“I need to know what we’re dealing with,” said a paramedic, looking into the blackened face. “Do you understand? If you want me to save your eyesight, I need to know if you were cooking meth. Do you understand?”
“They were,” John said. “At least, I’m pretty sure.” He was hugging himself, shaking violently. It was the smell of burned flesh, the sight of another human being whose life had just changed irreparably, if not ended.
“And why do you think that?” said the cop.
“I thought it was a restaurant. There was a sign. Pizza and bento boxes. I walked in the other day. I was hungry. But there was no pizza. They had guns. And a pit bull. And the place smelled like nail polish remover.”
The cop gave John an appraising stare, then went over to the ambulance and spoke to the paramedic, who glanced at John, said something back, and nodded. The cop returned.
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