actually, that’d be rad.”
This was going somewhere.
-
07
Obviously, the phone number was disconnected.
I ordered a pizza.
-
08
“I guess that’s it,” I told the cat while she sat on the floor by my feet and watched me toss two eggs, diced teriyaki Spam, pepper, salt, and a finely-cut green pepper into a big bowl, stirred and beat it together, and then stepped over her to throw the mixture into the hot pan. She rolled over onto her back and looked at me oddly, as if she understood but was telling me “Well, what did you expect?”
Brooks had gotten back to me, not actually bothering to call because, like real writers with important things to do, he was touring airport bookstores signing stuff and shaking hands. He’d sent me a text message with the answer to my who-called-me query about that weird call.
It was a throwaway phone, the kinda cell phones you buy that, according to him, cops called burners, but other people called cheap knockoff iPhones. It had come from a store in Times Square, it was a year old, and there was no name.
Another dead end. I tossed the egg and pepper and meat in the pan around, making a nice little omelet, slid it onto the plate with the bagel waiting, topping off my homemade egg sandwich with a drizzling of sriracha. I wasn’t too concerned about the phone number either, mostly because I hadn’t heard anything from that guy since. It wasn’t entirely out of this world for you to get a weird random screaming phone call, especially when you lived in New York, as cliche as it seemed.
The phone started to ring somewhere, right as I was sitting down at the couch to watch a Mothman “documentary.” I put the plate down, stalking around the apartment. A variety of girlfriends always noted that I had a habit of putting a plain black slab of metal and glass face-down and forgetting about where it was when all my furniture was also black, and they weren’t completely wrong. It took me almost a full minute to find it in the bedroom when I answered, not bothering to look at the screen. “Yeah?”
“Hello, Mister Fo..Foteeoh?”
“Fotiou, yeah.” If there was one thing that I had gotten tired of more than the jokes about breaking plates, it was people who tried even when they couldn’t pronounce my name. Achilles Fotiou.
No wonder people just said “Lee” most f the time.
“Hi, this is Darrell Reese? Over at Buck’s?”
“Oh, hi, how are you?” Buck’s was one of the bigger publishing houses I worked with regularly, feel-good light books that made a decent return so they were churning them out regularly. I’d established a decent relationship with them and become an unofficial official proofer for first passes of their new potential manuscripts. Darrell was the guy who emailed me work and confirmed I was getting paid. I don’t think I’d actually ever talked to him over the phone or in person.
“Good good, just wanted to run a few things by you. First off, we’re gonna have two potential ‘scripts for you sometime next week, if that’s OK. I’ll email you the contracts and specifics tomorrow.”
“Alright, no problem. Is that it?” Usually they didn’t call, email had basically made the publishing industry into one that could function almost entirely without phones. I was curious what had made them call me. There was some hesitation on the other end for a couple of seconds.
“Well…we got a call, and it was weird? Someone called to check a reference and dropped your name.”
“What?”
“Yeah, someone called and said they were confirming a work reference, and said that you had recommended this person to them. I didn’t know what they were talking about, and then they asked for an address or email for you so they could then confirm something since they’d lost your contact information.”
I was getting a chill, a weird uncomfortable feeling. “Darrell, I have no goddamn idea what you’re talking about.”
“I didn’t think you would, so I gave them some runaround. He got real mad then, started yelling.” This was starting to sound uncomfortably familiar.
“Do you know someone named Jane Kimball?”
-
09
From what I could tell, someone had been calling around, using my name indirectly to be able to get information on what I knew about this Jane girl. Clearly, someone knew something about her that I didn’t but thought I did know it, if not more.
But what did I know.
Darrell had been smart enough to recognize that something was wrong, given whoever it was the runaround before he’d started yelling. Sounded familiar. I thanked him, made some unrelated work arrangements, and hung up.
That, combined with the burner phone news that Brooks had told me, was making me more than a little paranoid that something was going on with this girl. I took a breath, and scrolled through my phone for a number. I tapped out a quick text message, and figured in a day or two I’d hear something back. I didn’t really want to talk to her, but right now it seemed like the best option.
Somewhere in the apartment, something crashed, and I looked over at the cat sitting on a pile of books she’d knocked off the coffee table. I grabbed my wallet and coat and, on an impulse, headed out the door. It felt like a So Hop sort of lunch day.
So Hop was a weird little place in Queens, nestled between an apartment building and a building that seemed to never really have any sort of permanent usage, having been a small bank, a restaurant, a succession of bars, and then moving on to be a lounge and back to a restaurant before, once again, going empty. It was an old-school Chinese food restaurant with more than just French fries and General Tso’s chicken on the menu, and it was almost always crowded. I’d been going for years since I found it not that far from my apartment, somewhere not that close to where most of the Chinese food joints in the neighborhood tended to be, which made me a little suspicious as to how it had been open and successful for so long. I’d always had a suspicion the place was a mob front, but that just felt like something sort of racist to think.
Then one night at a party with some relatives I’d casually mentioned this to someone after a few beers and their eyes widened. “No, seriously re, it totally is! Your cousin Stelio says they do laundry from him, the napkins, always paying with cash, malaka!” Most of my cousins and semi-attached relatives tended to lapse into Gringlish, the modern Greek-English patois you saw and heard a lot around New York City, especially among the Greek communities in Queens. It was a hallmark of the growth of a weird little immigrant community that was forcing the culture around them into the square hole of their lives, rather than reshaping for the round peg. Or something like that.
Regardless, the dumplings and spicy chicken were aces with all the rice you could eat, and I could sit and work sometimes on slow days and eat and nobody would bother me. The fact that I didn’t hog tables with an order of rice and tea for hours but shoveled food into my face, not to mention paying in cash, tended to make me a favorite customer.
Today was perfect, with an open table and the fried pork dumplings fresh and hot coming out of the kitchen not long after I sat down. I started scrolling through my phone again, messaging back and forth with one or two people. Brooks warned me to be careful, that someone who went out of his way to keep a burner private and hustle to get info on me and on this girl was probably dangerous.
I was in the middle of texting him back, because Brooks’ mind ws now that of a tech-savvy teenager, when the phone rang and a familiar face showed up on the screen with the caller ID. It was a face I hadn’t seen in a while, and when I swiped the screen to answer, it was a voice I hadn’t heard for even longer.
“Hey, Sara.”
“What’s up, Lee?”
Everyone knew Sara. We’d all known each other when we were young and stupid and hanging out at concerts and basements and house parties, doing stupid things and putting awful stuff into our bodies.
Sara put more into her than us, and for that, over time, she paid a price. Disappearing for a year or two, a few rehab
stays, drifting off with strings of shitty guys, abusive guys. She lived with a woman one year I know, some older hick lesbian that was a friend of her mom’s, then with some friends who weren’t really friends…so it went.
Like just about every guy in our teen and 20-something social circle, we’d dated for a shirt amount of time before I realized how terrible it was. Sara was flakey, she was a recovering opiate addict who still drank like a fish, she was a blackout drunk who fought constantly.
Sara was a mess who had few problems dragging you int whatever sort of interpersonal drama she was currently engrossed in with whatever current or former friend, boyfriend, girlfriend, family member, or whatever.
Sarah knew everything and everybody.
-
10
“Hiii,” Sara said, “Lee! What’s up!” She was, to a fault and almost automatically, flirtatious, same as ever, though a part of me could tell she sounded…tired. Like life, the life we’d all lived to an extent and she’d pursued infinitely harder and faster, was starting to, if not catch up, then weigh her down a little bit.
“I’m good, what’s up?” I cursed at myself for that one, the lamest way to reconnect with
Save Changes Page 4
