by Joshua Corin
Since Em’s death, she had been spending a lot of time at meetings.
It was like she was addicted. Hah.
Well, there were far worse addictions to be had. And what else was Xana supposed to do with her time? She knew far too many ways to get into trouble. Many of them were enjoyable. At least in the short-term.
“Short-term thinking’s what got you into this soup.” That was Jonesy. Xana’s sponsor. They met for breakfast every Monday morning at a coffee shop downtown. Jonesy was a professor at Georgia State. Since Xana had joined The Program, she had gone through five other sponsors, but Jonesy was…something special. Special good or special bad, well, that depended on the day.
Xana decided to pay Jonesy a visit. He’d have better advice than any one of the lost souls who’d be in attendance on a weekday morning at an AA meeting by the airport. And if he didn’t have helpful advice, he’d at least provide a helpful distraction, and that would get her through at least to noon.
She drove with the radio off. All the local stations would be talking about the mosque. Even the FM stations. She considered launching a music app on her phone, but her wanton driving had, once again, sent her phone sliding from the passenger seat to the floor of the backseat. At least she had the good sense to keep a pack of cigarettes in a vise between her thighs. The drive to Georgia State took two cigarettes. She found a spot in the faculty lot, snagged the parking ticket she’d received last time from her glove compartment, strained to grab her phone, activated something nasty inside her lungs with that strain and proceeded to cough for a full minute until her eyeballs popped out and her internal organs were spread across the interior of her car like a gooey tarp, and then headed over to the several-story greenhouse-like structure at 85 Park Place, home to the Georgia State University College of Law.
With almost ten minutes to kill before Jonesy’s arrival, according to the department secretary, Xana was so tempted to strike up a forced conversation with this woman, trapped as she was behind her desk. Instead, she planted herself outside his office like an overeager undergrad and passed the time by reciting a dirty limerick she knew in each of twenty-two languages. Not surprisingly, it translated the prettiest in French, the most incomprehensible in Mandarin, and the most vulgar in German. O Deutschland, Deutschland, Deutschland. It had been far too long since she had gotten drunk in…
No. Sigh. No.
“Groucho!” Jonesy approached from the end of the hall. Peeking out of his leather side-bag was his cat. Baruch was white haired. This was all the breed information Jonesy had when he found her in the shelter and all the breed information he decided he needed to know. White-haired, blue-eyed Baruch. Never referred to as a pet, always referred to as a companion. Baruch blinked lazily at Xana. So did Jonesy. “Is it Monday?”
“Every day is Monday,” Xana replied.
“Oh, are we trading places today, Groucho? Are you to be the beloved philosopher and I the stubborn irritant?”
He unlocked his office door. Xana followed him inside.
“Oh, so you want me to stick my foot up your bony ass?” she asked.
“Go ahead. I’ve been meaning to get an enema for months now.”
Jonesy had a large and lovely office. He had covered the floor with a soft green-and-yellow Persian rug and had covered the bookshelves with a menagerie of purple-pink rhododendrons, and along the sill of his window, which did not open, he grew tomatoes and beans. Before Xana had even mentioned breakfast, Jonesy had his hotplate plugged in and was tossing ingredients from his sill and from his mini-fridge into the pot.
“So,” he said, opening the drawer in his desk where he kept his spices, “you need me to talk you down from saving the world, am I right, Groucho?”
Chapter 7
“Oh, you’re never right,” Xana replied, “but I’m okay with exploring your hypothetical.”
He grinned, opened a tin of tuna for white-haired Baruch, and then set his stew on the hotplate. His teeth were as white as the hair of his cat. These teeth were quality porcelain. His original teeth were somewhere in a ditch in Dublin. Dublin had been Jonesy’s rock bottom. He wore his twenty-year chip on a beaded necklace, and not hidden underneath his shirt but out for all to behold and admire.
“You reek of tobacco. How many cigarettes have you had today? If it’s fewer than ten, I’m an iguana.”
“Addictions don’t go away. The best we can do is transfer them.”
“So take up something healthier, Groucho. Like skydiving.”
“Sixty-two percent of recovering alcoholics smoke at least two cigarettes a day.”
“Is that true?” Jonesy asked, glancing up while stirring the stew.
“I don’t know. It sounds right, though, doesn’t it?”
“I’ve never smoked even a gram of tobacco.”
“Didn’t you used to spend a thousand bucks a week on cocaine?”
Jonesy shrugged. “Let’s cast stones at each other after we eat.”
He ladled broth into two ceramic bowls and handed one to Xana. She sipped it with a spoon. The base was tomato, that much was obvious, and the breadcrumbs were, well, breadcrumbs, but the seasoning…pepper, sure; salt, of course; but something else. Not oregano or basil. Nothing Italian.
“Dill?” she asked.
“Close,” he answered. “Caraway.”
“It’s very good.”
Jonesy nodded. He knew.
“How is your sick friend?”
“Her name is Hayley.”
“I wasn’t inquiring as to her name, Groucho. I was inquiring as to her health.”
Xana paused. Stared out the window at the city. “She has a week. Maybe less.”
“And what would you do if you only had a week to live?”
“I’ve never given it much thought.”
“That also doesn’t answer my question.”
“Baruch,” said Xana. Baruch looked up from her tuna. Xana pointed at Jonesy. “Kill.” Baruch returned to her tuna.
Jonesy flashed his perfect fake teeth and handed Xana a bottle of water from his fridge.
“When did we start drinking bottled water in America? When did we start to think of ourselves as a third-world country?”
“I’ve been to many third-world countries, Jonesy. A lot of time the people are lucky if they can get water, period. They don’t care if it comes in a bottle or a balloon.”
“So fix it.”
“Ahh.” Xana wagged her finger. “Back to the hypothetical.”
“You don’t feel a need to save all those starving children? Have you not seen the commercials?”
“It’s a false equivalent. There’s nothing I can do about that problem, but there might be something I can do about this.”
“And by this I assume you mean the attack on the mosque.”
“Yes.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, Groucho, but nobody yet knows what exactly the attack on the mosque even is. Isn’t it the height of arrogance to assume you can repair an engine without first even lifting the hood?”
“So I lift the hood. I take a look. I investigate. What do I have to lose?”
“If you duck under the police tape and trample an active crime scene, I expect you’ll lose the rest of your morning, perhaps tonight and tomorrow, too. You don’t have a lot of people in law enforcement looking to do you favors.”
“I still know a few guys,” Xana replied, but Jonesy was right. The FBI would be managing the crime scene, and there was no love lost between her and them. Her accident had been an embarrassment for the entire bureau. She had some friends on the Atlanta PD, but this was Buckhead. In the South, jurisdiction was a thing to be ignored at one’s own peril.
The truth was, however she might want to pitch in, she couldn’t.
“What you’re feeling right now, Groucho, that fru
stration, it’s called life. It sucks, doesn’t it?”
Xana answered him with both middle fingers.
“Ah yes. I forgot you were a multilinguist. So tell me, Groucho, what will it take to talk you down off this ledge?”
“I’m not the one on a ledge. I’m fine. But people have been murdered, and if I can in any way avenge their loss, I would be selfish not to try.”
“There it is.” Jonesy dabbed some broth from his lips. “Your savior complex has come out to play.”
“I can save people. I have saved people.”
“And for every person you saved, you hurt another. You said as much the first time I heard you speak at a meeting. You’re the great flood. You’re excellent at cleaning; never mind the dead bodies.”
“Eh, that’s a false equivalent. I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve punched and kicked a ton of assholes. I’ve broken a chair over a few. I once smacked a truly stubborn son of a bitch in the back of the head with a first edition of Bingham’s The Rule of Law. But I’ve never killed anyone.”
“Haven’t you, though?”
Xana gritted her teeth. She knew that was coming. Maybe she had even been goading him to say it. She may not have been the one to pull the trigger but Jim’s blood was on her hands. Em’s blood was on her hands. Her recklessness had led directly to their deaths, and who knew how many others?
All because she had overstepped. All because she had drawn outside the lines.
And wasn’t this, now, the very same thing? She was a civilian. At best, her presence at the crime scene would be akin to one of those lollygaggers she loathed so much when she had been on the job, those human maggots compelled to crawl along the sites of criminal investigations. The psychics. The amateur sleuths. Feasting on the miseries of strangers. Not content to let the professionals work.
“You want some advice, Groucho? Sure you do. You’re here. Well, this is my advice. For the next forty-eight hours, you need to pretend you’re Amish. That means no computers, no radios, no phones. No TVs. Insulate yourself from the outside world. We’ll manage, somehow, without you. Read a long book. Read Proust. Lose yourself in the evocative language of that self-hating Jew and before you know it, your fever will have passed. Now help me wash these bowls and spoons in the faculty sink or the next time you come here, you’ll be eating the canned tuna and Baruch and I will be eating the soup.”
After Xana helped Jonesy wash the bowls and spoons in the faculty sink, after she hugged him goodbye and gave Baruch a farewell scratch underneath the chin, she wandered across the grass toward her Rambler. She felt lighter. She had been right to come here. Leave it to that eccentric old man to rescue her from herself.
As the Rambler’s air conditioner slowly cooled the interior of the chrome wagon to an acceptable level, Xana, resting behind its wide wheel, took out her phone and hovered a finger near the off button. The screen was already littered with all the news alerts she’d missed. But Jonesy was right. She needed to disconnect.
Then her phone rang.
Caller ID: Hayley.
“Hey, Hayley,” she said. “What’s up?”
“This is Hayley’s father….”
Xana felt her whole world freeze.
“An hour ago Hayley had…the doctors are calling it an ‘oxygen incident’…they told us that if there’s anyone we need to call, we should call them and…I think Hayley would want you to be here….”
By barreling through I-75’s breakdown lane, by hopping through poorly paved side streets, and by ignoring all stop signs and red lights, Xana was able to make it to Piedmont Hospital in twelve minutes. So much for following the rules. Her tires squealed as she took the turn into the hospital complex, and she very nearly plowed into the police car blocking the road and the two uniformed cops setting up the blue barricade.
Barricade?
Xana shifted into park and scrambled toward them. The main hospital building loomed in the distance.
“What the fuck?” she asked.
“Ma’am,” said one, remarkably calm given she had almost flattened him, “we’re going to need you to get back into your vehicle and turn around. If you require medical attention, the next nearest hospital is Emory. Do you need directions?”
Oh, right. The mosque. The emergency room must be overcapacity.
“Look, I don’t need the ER. I’m here to see a friend. Who is dying.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but nobody is allowed in or out. The entire hospital is under quarantine.”
Chapter 8
“People ask me if I miss the sex,” said Poncho Diller between forkfuls of syrup-soaked waffle, “as if that was all my marriage was, me and Judy going at it on our bearskin rug. You ever had sex on the furry back of a grizzly bear, Denny? It’s downright outstanding.”
Denny Donohue fiddled with the leather band of his wristwatch. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t discuss that topic, if you please.”
“Which topic? Bears? You afraid of bears, Denny?”
“I’d also prefer it if you called me Representative Donohue.”
“Of course. Yes. As a sign of respect.”
“It’s not just respect,” Denny forced himself to mumble. There were other people in this diner, and they had ears, and, worst of all, one or two of them may have been journalists. “I am a state representative.”
“Denny…if you weren’t a state representative, we wouldn’t be having a conversation. Do you think I want to be here, sitting across from you, in this hole-in-the-wall?”
“Well—”
“I do, actually. I love this place. Best chicken and waffles in midtown, and anyone who disagrees has yet to hear the truth of God. And you ordered a bowl of oatmeal. It pains me, Denny. It’s sacrilege.”
“I’m on a diet.”
“Oh, dear Christ, no. One of the saddest sentences in the English language. When we’re done here, Denny, I’m going to give you a hug. You poor, poor sheep. But back to my point, which wasn’t sex with my ex-wife, if you can believe it. I brought up sex with my ex-wife because I knew it would get under your skin and I need to get under your skin, Denny, because that’s where your heart is, and I need to get at your heart. I need to send a spear right through your heart.”
Poncho scrubbed a stream of syrup out of the crevasses between his chins and waited for Denny to respond.
First, some more fiddling with the watchband. Because the state representative had lost weight. This was why his watchband fit looser than he was accustomed to. And not from a diet, thank you very much. The man was ill. Probably cancer. And receiving treatment on the down low so as not to alert his constituents—or worse, the opposition.
Upon finishing his watchband-fiddling, Denny then glanced around the diner. His gaze was nervous. Poncho genuinely did want to give the old, sick man a hug. And he would—after he flipped Denny’s vote on HB 44.
“Mr. Diller,” Denny finally said, “my mind is made up.”
“Oh, Denny! Denny, Denny, Denny! Another one of the saddest sentences in the English language! Listen to yourself. You can’t seriously be sitting across from me in this place, eating your oatmeal, and telling me that you advocate for a closed mind. I know you’re better than that! Let the Yankees call us hayseeds and rednecks and racists and, sure as David played the harp, some of those accusations are true, but you are more than the stereotype, sir. Their minds may be made up about us, but let us be better than them! Or to put it another way, a man whose mind is made up doesn’t need to diet. Because if you are on a diet, then you’re open to new experiences. If you are on a diet, then you favor change. And you are on a diet, aren’t you?”
Denny’s face shrank in on itself. “Yes.”
“Yes. You are. And so you are open-minded and so you can hear me out. And by me, I mean the governor. Now, let me hear your objections to the governor’s bill. I promi
se to listen with an open mind. Maybe you will change the way I’m thinking, and I will go back to the State Capitol and tell my friend that he’s backing the wrong horse here. All I ask in return is that when you’re through trying to convince me, you give me a chance, an honest chance, to try to convince you. Do we have a deal, sir?”
Ten minutes later, Poncho ordered a second breakfast. This time he went eggs Benedict. He poured syrup on that, too. He paired the eggs Benedict with an ice-cold glass of tomato juice. He finished the eggs, then he finished the juice, then he finished up with Denny.
“Go vote, Denny,” he said, and he swarmed the man with a warm embrace. “You’re a good man.”
They split the bill.
Poncho waited until he was in the back of the long-necked Buick idling for him in the parking lot before he took out his phone and made the call.
The governor’s answer: “Yes! Yes! Oh, wow, you’re amazing! Poncho, you are the man!”
Which returned Poncho to thoughts of his ex-wife, Judy, and the bearskin rug. Judy at her most ebullient could make the windows in their home tremble against their frames.
At least he still had the rug.
The route from the diner to the capitol building was a straight shot, but Poncho had the driver stop along the way at a 24-hour convenience store/cigar shop. He patted the wooden Indian on its braided brow and proceeded to the counter, all the while inhaling the shop’s chestnut-warm aroma of lit Italian tobacco.
But Gus, the proprietor of the smoke house, had his back to his sole morning customer and was instead transfixed by whatever was on his counter-mounted TV.
So Poncho searched the counter for a bell to tap.
But then he heard a snippet of the broadcast, and then he found himself staring over Gus’s shoulder at the TV, and then he was back in the stretched Buick, dialing the governor.
