by Frank Sibila
She enjoyed a cigarette, the first she’d smoked in some seven years and one that did very little to remind her why she’d once allowed the damned things to become a habit, then stubbed it out with irrevocable disgust, leaned against the back of Yorick’s rental car, and powered up Felicia’s phone, preparing to making contact with Frank.
Unsurprisingly, the phone rang immediately. Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me to the Moon.”
She checked the number and then held the phone to her ear.
“Detective Anne LaMont, Las Vegas Animal Welfare Division. Who’s speaking?”
After a moment, a young woman said, “I was … dialing my friend’s number….”
“This phone was found inside a shipping crate beside a mound of dead ocelots. We are trying to track the owner. Please identify yourself at once.”
The connection terminated.
Monica smirked and went to dial again, only to be interrupted a second time by another performance by old Blue Eyes. Boy oh boy oh boy. Turn off somebody’s phone for a few hours, and the whole world goes crazy trying to reach them. But she could keep this game up all day. “Department of Homeland Security.”
There was another pause and then an equally hesitant voice: “Ummm, I thought this was Felicia Starlight’s number.”
This time she recognized the voice. “It is. Hello, Frank.”
“Is that you, Felicia? Your phone’s been off since yesterday! Where’s—”
“Try again,” Monica suggested.
The moment of silence that ensued ended with a moan and a disbelieving “Monica?”
“Hello, Frank.”
“Monica Custer?”
“How many Monicas do you know?”
“What the hell are you doing with Felicia’s phone?”
“Talking on it,” she said and hung up.
It was really a very nice day. She turned her face toward the sun and allowed the rays to bless her with their warming light.
The phone rang again. Once again, Frank’s number. She picked up. “This conversation better be more interesting than the last one.”
“Where’s Felicia?”
“Getting a rubber band engraved.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Or at least, she might be. It’s just one of several possible services available in the gift shop.”
“What gift shop?”
“The gift shop where we are.” Monica sighed. “Try to keep up.”
“Where’s George?”
“Which one? I have two.”
“Yorick!”
“I have two of those, too. One Yorick, one Urich.”
“You have a George Yorick and a George Urich?”
“One’s Urich, U-R-I-C-H; one’s Yorick, Y-O-R-I-C-K. Cool, isn’t it? I’m thinking of putting them on opposite ends of a shelf and using them to keep my books upright.”
“Put on George Yorick,” Frank said very slowly, bending all of his powers of enunciation to the slight difference between vowels.
“I’ve been putting him on since yesterday.”
“Goddamn it, Monica!”
“Don’t blaspheme,” she said, waving a finger even though he was not physically present to see it. “I’ve also been putting on the wrong George, this Anastasia girl you hired, and this Felicia girl you thought you hired. We’re all having a great road trip together, commemorating pointless monuments with tacky souvenirs. The biggest problem, considering some of the places we’re eating, is gonna be avoiding catastrophic weight gain, but I think I can talk the others into only stopping at hotels with pools.”
“Monica—”
She shushed him. “They’ve given me their cell phones, they all know through me that you’ve said they’re to stay away from New York at all costs, and they’re all willing to follow me to the four ends of the continental United States. I’ve always wanted to see Seattle. Or Austin. Guess I’ll decide after I hang up.”
He tried again. “Monica—”
She said, “You were a lot more interesting crying out my name in Vegas,” and hung up on him a second time.
Five seconds. The phone rang again.
Guess who. “I’ve talked to your husband, Monica.”
“Oh, him.” She gave the word the intonation she would have used to reference a distant cousin not seen or mentioned since childhood had that cousin been brought up by a rarely seen aunt who wanted her to know where he was working now. “What interesting thing was he doing?”
Frank hesitated again. “I’m legally unable to tell you.”
“Oh. So he wasn’t painting the den, then.”
“I did tell him that the two of us would not be doing any business in the future.”
One of the things Monica found most annoying about cordless phones was the ensuing lost tradition of playfully wrapping the cord around her little finger while she did the same thing to somebody imploring her for undeserved favors. “That’s nice, but not very helpful as long as you won’t admit to ever having done any business with him in the past.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Have I mentioned that Felicia is connected to organized crime and thinks she can charge you $5,000 a day just for driving Yorick around?”
Frank was silent for so long that she thought she’d lost the connection. “Really?”
“Really. Don’t blame me for that one. You did that to yourself. I can’t be blamed for taking advantage, can I?”
“No,” he said sadly. “I guess you can’t.”
“Were we on better terms, I’d offer to straighten this out for you, but my hands are well and truly tied.”
“Monica, I need those cell phones placed back in the hands of the people who own them.”
“I appreciate that, Frank, but I think we’ve reached the point in our relationship where we need to talk about my needs.”
“Monica—”
“You see,” she said, leaning back against the car and enjoying the feel of the sun-baked metal, “over the last day or so of travel to pointless destinations, I’ve had plenty of time to think, and I’ve come to the conclusion that while remaining married to my pig of a husband out of some misguided sense of responsibility to our wedding vows and the well-being of the other women of the world speaks well of my personal sense of integrity, it’s really not a great long-term lifestyle option.”
“That’s great.”
“The problem is that my marriage has been, in a sense, too much like the war in Iraq.”
“I can’t wait to hear this analogy.”
“I got into it with the best of intentions, with faulty intelligence, and without sufficiently planning for an exit strategy. I cannot walk out without some degree of certainty that I won’t leave chaos and anarchy behind me.”
Another long pause. “… Okay.”
“I need the goods on him, Frank.”
“You know I can’t do that,” he said.
“Then,” she said, “we’ll just keep sending you postcards from our great American road trip.” She hung up again.
This was fun.
The phone rang. Latest in a series. “I do have an alternate suggestion.”
“I’m listening.”
“Meet me.”
“Meet you where?”
“Some intermediate location. Airport, your choice of city. You fly there, I fly there. We sit down at any open restaurant and meet for negotiations.”
“Interesting,” she said.
“We hammer out what happens next. If it doesn’t work out, you fly back to wherever, meet up with your caravan at a prearranged location, and we’re back to where we are now. If it does, though—”
She supplied one possibility. “Looking forward to a second romp?”
“I’ll confess that I’m turned on as
all hell right now.”
She thought about it and said, “Me, too, surprisingly enough.”
“Really.”
“Yes. It’s just too bad that the circumstances are so much less than ideal.”
“Downright demented is how I would put it. I promise you, we won’t even consider the possibility until all of this is out of the way.”
“No fair.”
“What?”
“We should be allowed to at least consider it.” In fact, now that the possibility had been raised again, it was pretty damned impossible to put back down.
“Oh.”
“But not until this business with my husband and my carload of Stockholm syndrome sufferers is concluded.”
“Oh, absolutely. Have an airport in mind?”
She thought about it for a moment, named Salt Lake City, provided a rendezvous time for later that evening, and snapped the cell phone closed, terminating the call.
It started ringing again almost immediately, and she deeply considered answering it as the Department of Health or Area 51 but decided that this would be overkill, and powered down.
It was a shame. As much as Monica had always believed in disproportionate response, Felicia herself had done nothing to her and did not deserve the collateral damage. Nor did Anastasia. Nor did Yorick and Urich; they were just doofuses and deserved the special consideration fate afforded people destined to spend the days and nights of their lives not entirely understanding the world around them. Even Frank, for all the moral shortcomings of his chosen enterprise, wasn’t that bad a sort, though she would sadly do what had to be done, if they couldn’t find some way to redraw the map between them.
No, as far as Monica was concerned, the only person who deserved the full force of her own cunning was Keith himself. Keith, who had lived this long acting the way he acted only because he’d never lived in any environment that included polar bears and ice floes. Any more primitive society would have set him adrift years earlier and waved at him while he receded toward a horizon emblazoned by stars, yelling that it wasn’t his fault and all he needed was one more chance. If she closed her eyes, she could just picture him jumping up and down in his parka, waving a narwhal horn above his head as he pleaded for rescue, even declaring with absolute sincerity that it had never been his fault at all, because it was just the way he was raised….
“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” Felicia said.
Monica jumped awake and saw Felicia, who had returned from the infinite wonders of the Amazing House of Rubber Bands, sans Anastasia, Yorick, and Urich, and any fresh pickups like an Oorick or Eurich or Ohrick. The escort was staring at her, her expression enough to establish that she’d been holding the gaze for several seconds. “Sorry,” Monica said. “I was drifting.”
“You weren’t drifting. You were dreaming. You were with somebody.”
“My husband,” Monica said.
“No shit. You must really love the guy.”
Monica smiled. “Let’s just say I can’t wait till the next time I see him. Listen, can I trust you?”
“As long as you pay me, you can trust me.”
“I’m going to have to toodle off for a day or so to make some advance arrangements. If all goes well, we might be able to head home a few hours after that. But while I’m gone, there’s something I’m going to need you to do. Yorick with a Y is carrying a check—”
Felicia said, “Already taken care of.”
“Really?”
“Sure. I told him it would be safer in my hands, and he forked it over. Didn’t even argue.”
“Really.”
“What can I say? The guy’s either a total moron or an authentic American saint. It’s in my luggage. I dunno if I’ll be able to get him to endorse it over to me, but figure I’m not gonna try until Frank gives me the go-ahead.”
Monica coughed. “Yeah. Holding off’s a good idea….”
ELEVEN
MONICA MADE IT TO THE RENDEZVOUS a full three hours before Frank did, and had, in that time, discovered the special kind of Zen that goes along with being in no particular hurry in a place where others are frantic or rushed or operating on adrenaline and sleep deprivation. The Starbucks she parked herself at in the Salt Lake City airport was one of these places, in part (she supposed) because the region was home to a major religion that eschewed coffee as a stimulant, and so many of the people around her must have been congregants avoiding the place for fear of being spotted there, and in part because the airport’s hub status rendered it the temporary home of many who never would have touched ground here had their airlines not firmly insisted on it, and who now peered around anxiously as if afraid of being abducted by natives. In their company, Monica felt as free as a bird, soaring for reasons that had nothing to do with her caffeine consumption since leaving the Yorick-and-Urich caravan behind earlier this morning. Thinking about it, she found that they had more to do with the prospect of jettisoning the oaf once and for all, and also with (surprise, surprise) the prospect of seeing Frank again. She wondered if it was infatuation or just the thrill of dueling. She wondered if they really had anything in common once they weren’t mortal enemies and then wondered if the phrase “mortal enemies” wasn’t overstating the case just a tad.
She had called Keith’s cell a little while ago, determining from the clarity of his inflections that he wasn’t immediately pre- or postcoital (two distinct states she’d been able to identify in his voice more than once when catching him with unexpected phone calls). If anything, he had that peculiar strangulated whine that afflicted him whenever circumstance, or her own vigilance, forced him into an extended fast. He’d said he was sorry: a certain indicator of suffering. He’d also said he missed her: the dead giveaway. Things were going to be better in the future, baby. Always bullshit and never to be trusted, but coming from Keith, always the last words of a drowning man. Then he’d asked how long it would before she would come home, demanding a specific time—a symptom that he hadn’t completely given up on finding some willing receptacle today but was being careful enough to determine how much time he would have to use it before she marched in, ready to be mollified. The man lived his life as if it were a plate-spinning act, depending on momentum alone to avoid the shattering crash.
As always, after talking to her husband, she was left depressed, disquieted, and disturbed by the mere phenomenon he represented. How common was his kind? How many of the people walking the earth were not human beings as she would like to define the term, but specimens of some other kind entirely, something that looked like people and talked like people and even smelled like people but had something other than people brains powering the space between their ears? How many people were in her position: chained to that type by habit or legal obligation or just inability to escape, but realizing the magnitude of their mistake every time the creature beside them did something no reasonable, thinking person would ever do to another? And (she didn’t know why this question kept coming up) did recognizing one mean that she would be able to recognize the next? Like, for instance, if that next happened to be Frank?
(And where the hell did that thought come from?)
She was still considering that one when she spotted the man himself, just one figure in a gaggle of other travelers escaping the latest flight from New York, visible from the exasperated look on the face that appeared when the madding crowd thinned enough to provide an unobstructed view. He looked more harried, more haunted than she’d ever seen him look before, which was saying a lot, since she’d been driving him crazy since she’d met him.
Pity shouldn’t have entered into it, of course. Frank was an enabler who deserved whatever he got. But she found herself feeling pity anyway. He looked like a man who’d been running a treadmill since dawn.
He spotted her. She saw him spot her and relished the way he automatically smiled before the wariness took over his features.
Then he seemed to remember that he shouldn’t have been happy to see her and altered course to meet her, rolling his day traveler to the Starbucks and the table where she’d spent the last few hours making a serious dent in the annual gross national product of Brazil. “Monica. Waiting long?”
“About three hours,” she said.
He winced as he sat down. “That’s a long time to spend in an airport.”
“Most people think so,” she told him. “I’ve never minded it. A good airport, by which I mean one with a fine collection of places to browse, is like a shopping mall where everybody else has to race to the opposite end carrying all their worldly possessions. If I tire of retail, I just watch the races. You know the one thing I don’t understand?”
“What?”
“Every major airport I’ve ever been in has a store selling luggage. Why would anybody need to buy luggage at the airport? Wouldn’t your presence at the airport imply that you already have some?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe you’re supposed to buy so much at the airport that you need an extra rolling suitcase just to bring it home.”
“But don’t you see? That’s precisely the part that doesn’t make any sense. If you’ve just arrived somewhere, you’re not going to start checking out all the great shops, because your main objective is always to get the hell out of the airport. And if you’re hanging around the terminal waiting for a flight, you’ve already checked any bags you can’t carry with you and have only the ones you can. You can’t load yourself up with more, so what’s the deal? How does that work?”
He nodded, temporarily so caught up in the intricacies of this mystery that he’d completely lost track of the series of events that had obliged him to spend the last few days bouncing back and forth across the country. “Maybe airport shoppers see a suitcase they’ve just gotta have and buy the size one up from theirs so they can put the one they’ve already packed inside the one they just bought. The carry-on count remains constant.”
