The Duration (20 page)

I stepped over to the small room and looked back at Arvindo Blanc.

“Don't wait up,” I said. Gave him a grin.

He just blinked at me, a long languorous blink. I looked around the foyer, but everyone else was gone except for the minor movie star, who clenched a fist in solidarity before following Ava Winston off to Welcoming,

I entered the room.

The safe was real, just as Chick had said. About 5 feet tall and at least 3 feet across, 4-inch walls of gray steel on thick clawed feet. The words “Cary Safe Co.” were inscribed on its heavy front. I took out a note card and thought about my vices. Sloth. Gluttony. Avarice. How many more were there? Loyalty. Hah. What did people say when asked in job interviews for their biggest flaws? I took the pen and wrote
I tend to take on too much responsibility
on the notecard. I folded it into an envelope and dropped it into the wooden box. Arvindo Blanc was still out in the foyer, but he had his back to me and everybody else had left. Something that Ava'd said the night before came back, and I tried to turn the great safe's front handle toward the floor.

The handle didn't budge.

I tried turning it up. Still nothing.

This was a problem. A locked safe solved nothing, confirmed nothing.

I gave the handle a final tug.

The heavy door swung open with only token resistance.

I took a quick look out to confirm that nobody was watching, and then rifled the safe.

It had one central compartment, with notches along the inside edges for what must once have been shelves. There were no shelves in it now. Instead, on the bottom, there was a stack of wooden boxes, identical to the one above, each full of sealed envelopes. Here for the taking, the vices of the one-percent, or at least the ones they felt comfortable acknowledging. How boring would those be?

I felt the interior walls to confirm that there were no hidden drawers, and if there were, they remained hidden.

That was it.

I closed the door, got up, and returned to the foyer. Arvindo Blanc smiled at me and gestured toward the morning rays flooding through the rotunda.

“Brother sun is here,” he said. “But he is always here.”

I gave him the thumbs up and walked through my
M
door. Whatever it takes, pal. I suppose I should have felt disappointed. We'd found the safe, and it was empty. But I didn't, not at all. I felt relieved, relaxed, a load off my back. Jimmer was still asleep, probably, and Unsie was getting ready for work, and Chick was in a cold lockup up at the Berkshire House of Correction until Monday, but he was okay. There were no ghosts here at Fleur-de-Lys, nothing to chase except a better self

I felt ready to enjoy a good workout, a biomass analysis, and a sea-cucumber colonic, if that's what the day held in store for me. And if not, that was fine too.

Kelly and I met in law school in Washington, D.C. She was the daughter of lawyers and seemed to know what she was getting into. I was the son of teachers and took the LSAT because my college roommates were taking it. In first-year legal theory class, Kelly and I had been in a study group together, and I'd made her laugh by confusing the con law theorist Ronald Dworkin with one of the dwarves who accompanies Bilbo Baggins to the Lonely Mountain. She thought I was kidding.

Kelly was from California, a place I'd been only once before, but which had nonetheless shaped my identity growing up. I was a Magic Johnson fan, and Massachusetts, of course, was Celtics territory. I grew up at the tail end of the Big Three era, Bird, McHale and Parish. Magic's struggles in the early '80s playoffs—the Tragic Johnson days—were over by the time I started following him, and even with Jordan ascendant, Earvin Johnson was my man. Like Magic, I wasn't a great shooter, and my dribble was a little high, but I could see the court. Inglewood, the Fabulous Forum, Pat Riley's hair, the celebrities in the crowd—that was where I belonged.

I caught a lot of shit from the CYC kids, from old George Harvey, from pretty much anyone who found out there was a Lakers fan in their midst.

“Get your ass on the block,” George Harvey would yell at me, his testicles swinging in his sweats, whenever I tried to bring the ball up court.

“None of that razzle-dazzle shit,” he'd say when I'd throw a behind-the-back pass.

I practiced those passes for hours, and after Magic announced his HIV diagnosis, I practiced them even more.

And then along came Kelly, raised in Sherman Oaks, schooled at UCLA, knew her way around an earthquake and a seven-lane highway.

“What are you doing in the Northeast?” I'd asked her, as if maybe she'd just gotten lost.

She'd shrugged, said something about wanting to see the Old Country, the Atlantic, the vertical cities along the coast. She wanted a history that didn't exist out west. Twist my arm, right? When I got the job in Boston, Cradle of the Revolution, I asked her to come with me and she said yes. I showed her Plymouth and Salem and the Old North Church. We ate lobster and sat in traffic on the Cape, ate cannoli and stood in crowds in the North End. And then the Red Sox and the Bruins and the Pats kept winning, and the autumns did their thing, hot cider and pumpkins and hills that looked like piles of Skittles. I bought her a scarf, told her all my stories. We started weekending in the Berkshires. I figured we had her. I figured that the hooks were set, that, like the rest of us, she was here for the duration.

After she left, I had a dream about Magic Johnson. In the dream, it was early 1992, I was something like eight years old, and Magic had just gone on
Arsenio
to talk about his HIV. Some network guys decided that they would cast Magic in a remake of the
Captain America
TV series, but nobody had thought to adjust the wardrobe to fit a 6[']8["] guy instead of the regular-sized guy who'd previously played the role. So Magic Johnson is running around on a train loaded with explosives, battling bad guys, in a super tight red, white, and blue bodysuit that rides way up at his ankles and wrists. He's got the hood on, with the little gold wings on the sides, and whenever it's time for him to say a line, he just disregards the script entirely and looks at the camera and flashes that huge smile he has and says, “Man, I'm Captain America Man.” And the studio audience roars anyway.

At Welcoming, a squadron of Head-Connect techs weighed us and pinched us and quizzed us about our diet and work life. My tech's name was Tudd. Like Judd but with a
T
. Tudd was my age, maybe, it was hard to tell, with thin blond hair and ripped arms sticking out of a tight polo shirt. He used instruments that looked like pliers on my stomach. He asked me how much fish I ate and whether it was farmed or line-caught. He made me do math in my head. He asked me if I spoke French. He asked me how far I jogged and at what pace. He asked me to touch my toes, stand on one foot, and jump straight up in the air. In high school I could dunk. I told Tudd that, and he seemed skeptical.

“It's hard to stay in shape when you're living a sedentary lifestyle,” he said. He said that in the first forty-five seconds of our session.

Tudd asked me how long I was staying at Head-Connect. I said the weekend. He seemed concerned.

“You could use a month,” he said. “At least.”

“People stay here for a month?”

He nodded.

“Some people live here. We have residents.”

I must have looked skeptical, because then he said, “It's also a state of mind.”

Tudd walked me through the gym, open floor plan, all the resistance machines, gleaming chrome and padded benches. A couple of dozen people were in there, moving from machine to machine, some guests but some staff too, differentiated by how well their workout clothes fit and how casually they approached the machinery. I wanted to find a bench press, do some Paleolithic grunting.

“No free weights,” Tudd said. “We promote a holistic approach. Resistance from within, overcome from within.”

“But what if I don't put up much resistance?” I asked.

Tudd looked me over.

“You are putting up a lot of resistance already, Mr. Johansson.”

I wasn't sure if that was a slam or a come-on or some sort of spa wisdom, so I just rolled with it.

Tudd took me through twelve machines, and on each one I felt like I could have tripled the resistance he was recommending, and at the end of the twelve I could barely remember my name.

“So this will be your routine for the week,” Tudd said. “Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, with aerobics and Bikram yoga and meditation in the middle.”

I was clutching at a cup of water.

“That is from a spring in Vermont,” Tudd said. “They also make our cheese. And our outdoor attire.”

“Who does?” I asked.

“Vermont,” he said.

He walked me over to the services desk and handed me off to a small, attractive African-American woman.

“He should have the salt rub,” Tudd said, and the African-American woman nodded and pecked at a tablet.

“And here is your personalized menu,” Tudd said, handing me a piece of paper folded into thirds. My hands were sweaty and shaking.

“Don't worry about it,” Tudd said, taking the paper back. “I've uploaded it already. You can find it on any of our monitors, under guest services. Have a good massage and I will check back with you in a bit.”

He clapped me on the shoulder. His hand felt like wood.

“Good Welcoming.”

I nodded. I wasn't sure if we were supposed to be pals now. Hard to be pals with a guy who has just kneaded your liver.

I was sort of looking forward to the massage, because I was sore as shit, but also because, you know, all bets are off with a massage, right? Probably not, but I always wondered about that. Then the pretty African-American woman passed me off to a rash-looking and substantially older Italian man named Fulvio who had me lie down naked on hot wood slats while he played trance music and spread this sticky mix of salt, nettles, and Vaseline all over me. He had hands like pliers.

“Do you have a cat?” Fulvio asked me as he ground the salt-nettle mix into my upper thighs.

I said no.

“A salt rub is like being licked head to toe by a giant cat,” he said. “Like a panther. A panther bath.”

I stayed silent. I was pretty sure he was breaching protocol.

Fulvio rubbed and flexed and squeezed me so hard that I felt like a baseball glove. He bundled my junk up into a towel and shoved it brusquely away while working on my hip sockets. He put really hot rocks on my spine and the backs of my knees. I wanted to say something, or cry, but you can't, can you? It felt like that would be surrendering. Plus, Fulvio kept saying, “Is good, no?” and once I got into the habit of agreeing I couldn't stop. After an hour, a sponge bath, and several realigned vertebrae, he helped me up from the table. I felt woozy.

“Now,” he said. “Eucalyptus steam and plenty of water today. We removed a great number of toxins from your system.”

He sort of hugged me into a standing position and took me by the arm. I felt like I might collapse. What if the toxins were the only thing holding me together?

Fulvio gave me a thick white robe and led me through a short hallway to the showers.

The men's clubhouse was lined with gleaming oak lockers and mirrored vanities. A few other guests were in there, in various stages of undress, ruddy cheeks and limp appendages, but still seemingly more comfortable with their bodies than I was. I wondered how long it'd been since their Welcoming. Elixirs crowded the sinks, oils and hair creams and mouthwash. I washed my mouth out with a green liquid that tasted like parsley. I stripped down to a towel and put my robe and sweat clothes into an open locker. I showered with more oatmeal scrub. I checked my eyes—were they less bloodshot? Was my skin more resilient? Maybe.

The caldaria were accessible via a tiled corridor down a short flight of stairs at the back of the showers, and walking through it I got the sense that I was underground, that perhaps the corridor linked the new Head-Connect wings with the older Fleur-de-Lys mansion. I climbed up an equal number of steps at the end of the corridor and emerged in a small hallway with doors on either side. The doors were glass and heavy and behind them nothing was visible but steam. Each one had a description written on a slate by the entrance. Peering in, I sensed that there were other people around. Hard to see, but I could feel them, sort of. Steam rooms made me a little uneasy. You could never be sure what was going on in them. When I got to the entrance to the eucalyptus room, I grabbed another towel and kept walking.