The Bend of the World: A Novel (6 page)

He smiled—not a grin, not a smirk, not a guarded display of approval or pleasure, but an actual unmediated expression of joy. Really? He said, and then he laughed, and his laughter, too, was disturbingly genuine. Global Solutions Solutions for a Global World?

16

This, more or less, was how we ended up crushed in the back seat of Mark’s little fast car on our way to what Mark called Our Club. New friendships require less bargaining than old ones, less planning, fewer points to settle and details to iron out; for instance, I’d left my car on a side street in Oakland; if it had been Tom or Derek or even Johnny (not that the issue would have come up with Johnny, who didn’t have a car and did not, to the best of my knowledge, know how to drive), I’d have worried about that part—for no good reason, but nevertheless. But that evening it had seemed immaterial. The valets had brought Mark’s silver teardrop around, and we were off.

We whistled down Fifth Avenue, past the university and the hospitals, a pile of immense, mismatched buildings that climbed the hillside to our right like a stepped bastard ziggurat and from whose satanic bowels there emitted a constant Luciferian thrum. Packs of students crowded across the intersections. A helicopter passed overhead. We ran a red light. Honey, Helen said, red means stop.

It was yellow.

It may have been yellow at one time.

Don’t worry. If I kill someone, we’re by the hospital.

Again, Helen said, a timing issue.

Beyond the hospital the road dropped in a steep S-curve toward the cantilevered highways that clung to the cliffs between the high bluff of the Hill District and the Monongahela. Across the river, lights stepped across the Flats and up the Slopes, and it struck me, not for the first, more like for the thousandth time, just what a preposterous place it was for a city, what a precarious topography. We crossed the Birmingham Bridge in a tight single lane between traffic cones. Whole lanes and great portions of the high arch and suspension cables were blocked and swathed in sheets of translucent plastic, which were illuminated from within by powerful work floodlights, revealing the silhouetted work of the tiny men within—tent caterpillars, ten million years hence, our successors.

We were on Carson Street briefly. A girl in tight pants vomited. Young men stood in gaggles outside of bars, simultaneously sinister and preposterous in their puffy jackets. I hate the South Side, I said.

Doesn’t Johnny live above Margaritaville? Lauren Sara had seemed to be sleeping before she spoke, her head canted back against the seat.

Yeah, I said. I keep telling him to get out of that shithole. We should stop and say hello.

Who’s Johnny? Mark asked.

My best friend.

Your only friend, said Lauren Sara, not cruelly, and anyway, I reflected, it was awfully close to being true.

We turned onto Eighteenth Street and wound our way up the Slopes. In the daylight, these were lovely neighborhoods, if a little run-down. The houses sat at odd angles to the streets, and the streets ran in switchbacks crosswise to the hills, and the whole thing was reminiscent of an Adriatic hill town, suggestive of a militarily defensible poverty, or else, not in the least because of all the little Slovak churches, of a winding stations of the cross, but there, at night, with the stands of houses suddenly replaced by bare sagging trees, with the occasional howl of a distant dog, with the old, orange streetlights buzzing and the intermittent creepy pickup truck rattling in the other direction with a slight few inches between sideview mirrors, with—was it me, or did everyone sense it?—something vague, insubstantial, and yet still threatening among the stands of weedy woods, something misty, something that, even if it didn’t have the material form to drag you down into a ravine and have its murky way with you, might just have the power to compel you to wander off on your own into the weeds, well, the point I’m making is that on a strange road in a strange car with people who were, after all, still strangers to us, there was something odd about that drive, something unsettling, something that strongly suggested no good would come of it.

But then, quite suddenly, we were above the city. We’d stopped climbing several minutes before and were winding through an unfamiliar neighborhood when we burst out onto Grandview. The city, at night, was like a strange ship, like a sharp barge splitting a larger river; the black tower of the Steel Building like a crow’s nest; the filaments of bridges like gangplanks, and you could almost imagine the whole thing plowing right on down the Ohio, hanging that gentle left onto the Mississippi at Cairo, and floating toward the Gulf; you could imagine waking one day to find yourself on an urban island, surrounded by water; or, anyway, I could imagine it, Atlantis, or thereabouts.

We ended up somewhere just off Grandview in a little commercial district with an Italian grocery, a storefront pharmacy advertising diabetic socks, and a few square cement-block buildings that might have been plumbers or repair shops. Mark parked along the curb across from the largest of them. Here were are, he said.

There was light coming through the glass door. There was an unilluminated sign on the wall above it.
THE FRATERNAL ORDER OF THE OWLS
, it read.
NEST #93
. And underneath, painted right onto the blocks:
A “PLACE” FOR “FAMILY.”

17

It was a sort of social hall, smoky and too brightly lit, the bar populated by very fat old men and very skinny young ones with a few girlfriends and wives scattered among them, the former in tight jeans and little T-shirts that squeezed their bellies and accentuated their tits, the wives in high-waisted jeans and Steelers sweatshirts and sensible hair. Everyone was drinking beer; some were backed up with watery-looking scotch; one girl with a huge purse was drinking something pink and laughing too loudly and attracting some eye-rolling. That’s Alyssa, Mark said. She’s a regular. She gets all tooted up, and then she gets loud.

This place is cool, said Lauren Sara.

I have to tell you, I told Mark, that when you said we were going to your club, this isn’t exactly what I imagined.

You thought we were going to drink brandy in the library? I’m a proud Owl. It’s an important service organization.

I glanced around. There were pool tables in the back. There was an unattended karaoke station. There were two bartenders, a pretty black-haired girl who looked no older than fifteen, and a thirtyish dude with a high-and-tight haircut and a twice-or-so-broken nose. No one was paying us the slightest attention. I feel conspicuous, I said.

Why? You think you’re the first suit that ever wandered in looking for something? Go grab us a pool table. I’ll get some beers. He strode toward the bar and snapped his finger toward the bartender and his voice and demeanor changed into something very nearly close to almost authentically Pittsburgh: Joey, you dick, he said.

My man, said Joey.

18

Mark and I played a game of pool while the ladies “used the restroom,” so to speak, and then they returned, glassy-eyed, and a small fold of glossy paper passed between Helen and Mark when she kissed him on the cheek. Then Mark led me down a flight of stairs, but instead of going into the bathroom we walked through a blank door at the end of the hall and into a portion of unfinished basement that was filled with broken artificial Christmas trees and light-up Santa Clauses. This is the stuff of nightmares, I said. I’ll never sleep again.

Sleep is a human weakness, Mark said. He’d latched the door behind us. There was a glass table with a couple of chairs near an old slop sink, and the purpose of this room, and of our visit to it, if it had not yet been obvious to me, became so. Do you know that dolphins sleep by shutting off one hemisphere of their brain at a time, so they’re always active and aware? That’s my goal. I’m training in that direction.

Chemically? I grinned.

By any means necessary, he answered.

You should meet my friend Johnny. He could probably tell you about sinister yogis or something who can already do it. Or a government conspiracy. CIA mind control. Military psyops. Jesus, those are serious.

Your friend sounds right up my alley. I’m into anything sinister. And as for all this, we ought to get while the getting is good. My darling Helen tends to have little mishaps in which the stuff [he drew quotation marks in the air] tends to fall into the toilet. He drew them again. I’ve strictly forbidden her from purchasing any more from our friendly bartender, and since I know that’s useless, I’ve also forbidden Shawna from selling her any.

I sniffled and handed back the bill. Shawna?

The bartendress, I should say. The Owlette. The brains of the operation.

19

The following occurred:

(1) Did cocaine. (2) Took a piss. (3) Returned to the pool table. (4) Played doubles: Mark and Helen vs. Peter and Lauren Sara. Lost. Mark and Peter vs. Helen and Lauren Sara. Lost. (5) More beers appeared. Several shots of whiskey appeared. (6) Peter and Helen vs. Mark and Lauren Sara. Won. (7) Rematch. Won again. (8) Girls wandered off again. (9) Mark said something like, Just you wait and you’ll see what I was talking about. (10) Asked him what was the real story with my company. Your company? he said. Never confuse service and ownership, he told me. (11) Felt a slight pounding behind my eyes. Concluded I should not have mixed quite so carelessly. Decided another beer would do the trick. (12) Girls returned. (13) Honey, Helen said, you’re not going to believe what happened. I believe everything, Mark said. I dropped the stuff in the toilet, Helen said.
Incroyable
, Mark said. I don’t believe it. You’re making fun of me. I’d never. Asshole. Couldn’t tell if they were fighting or not. (14) Felt a thin current of hate as if near a lightning strike. (15) Got the feeling from the placement of their bodies, however, the cant of their hips toward each other, the tilt of Mark’s head toward hers, the way they drew into closer proximity as they fought or pretended to fight or flirted by means of fighting, that there was an intense and frightening physical attraction between the two, something stronger than magnetism, as in the bonds of an atomic nucleus, which, if broken, would explode. (16) Felt self-conscious staring and tried to talk to Lauren Sara. Found her tap-tap-tapping on her phone. Who ya textin’? I asked. Tom. Fuck Tom; what’s up with Tom? He says there is a party in the apartment where Steinman is staying. It sounds terrible. I want to go. We just got here. No, we’ve been here, like, an hour, and it’s boring. It’s not boring. You’re just staring at that fucking girl; it’s boring; I’m gonna go to the party. We don’t have a car. Tom said he’ll pick me up. Whatever, I said. Do what you like. (17) Felt bad twenty minutes later when she left. (18) Ran out behind her and said, Listen, stay at my place tonight. Yeah. She shrugged. Okay. Cool. (19) Realized that she hadn’t been half as angry as I’d imagined her to be and found myself infuriated by her nonchalance, as it suggested something inadequate about us, something not quite fully felt. (20) Went back inside. (21) Found Mark and Helen playing pool. (22) Realized how very good they both were. (23) Realized that I hadn’t sunk a shot in either game that Helen and I had won. (24) Listened to them circle and taunt each other. You’re always behind the eight ball, Helen said. That’s funny, Mark said, coming from you. (25) Zoned out for a bit. (26) Came to and heard Helen say something like, Fuck your new friend. (27) Heard Mark say something like, Just don’t talk about it on Facebook this time. (28) Saw Helen throw her cue onto the table and stalk up to the bar. (29) Tried to appear as if I hadn’t been listening. Didn’t fool Mark. (30) Nevertheless, Mark said, So, Global Solutions. You know I’m going to fuck you. You’re going to fuck me? Not kindly, not lovingly, without compassion or quarter. That sounds terrible. Fair warning; get out while you can. Eh, if you lay me off, I can get unemployment. You don’t seem like the type. I shrugged and said, All scams are essentially the same, something Johnny had once said to me in another context entirely. It seemed to impress Mark; at least, he smiled. (31) Mark said, Where’d your girlfriend go? Her friend got her; she went to a party. We bored her. She’s not excitable. You stayed. You guys are more interesting, and I hate her friends. That’s a recipe for disaster, Mark said; you can neither like nor dislike each other’s friends; all outside affections are doomed, or else yours is. So I shouldn’t have any friends? I asked. (32) He shrugged. We don’t, he said.

20

The drugs, or, more accurately, the baby laxatives and other miscellaneous and sundry substances with which they’d been adulterated, had found their way to my beer- and hors d’oeuvres-soggy gut, and I had to dash to the bathroom. It was not clean. While I sat there, I felt the first nibble of conscience, the first stage whisper of what would several hours hence crescendo into the next day’s regret, the sense, strange but familiar, that I could hear my own future self whispering to me across all the hours between us. Asshole, he was saying. I didn’t do drugs, nor drink heavily, nor abandon my girlfriend in favor of strangers I’d only just met; well, not habitually—plainly I did do these things, when pressed, or when sufficiently tempted, or, anyway, I had done them, at least once, that night.

Conscience is a strange thing. I didn’t believe that drugs or drinking heavily or staying out late were bad or morally suspect; I wasn’t especially worried about Lauren Sara, who, I was sure, I would find later that evening in my bed, or who would find me there, depending only on which of us escaped our respective parties first; we might have sex, or might not; we weren’t that kind of couple; I might hold her, or might not; it was warm enough that whichever of us was first into the apartment would open the windows in the bedroom; there would be the distant sounds of hospitals, which were ubiquitous in the city, and ambulances and late-night traffic and the strange, feral children whom we never saw, and who seemed to play only at night. In the morning, one of us would make coffee; Lauren Sara would get on her bike and ride off to do whatever it was she did when I wasn’t around; I sometimes thought that she proved the crackpot science that said the world is created by observation and those things not observed at a given moment cannot with any certainty be said to exist. I would putter around the house, make more coffee, call my parents, check my email, chat with Johnny online or on the phone, consider dinner, run to the gym to play racquetball or swim a few laps once my hangover had become manageable; meet Derek or someone at a bar and have a beer and watch the Pens for a period or two; go home early to Lauren Sara or not to Lauren Sara; sleep well, get up, and get on with it.