The Duration (24 page)

“Swear to God, Chick,” I said, flinching even as I said it. “I checked all inside it. The horn's not there.”

The tequila began dissolving the lining of my stomach.

“Chick?”

I could hear a sigh on his end.

“Come on, man,” I said. I tried to sell it, but it sounded fraudulent even to me. “Listen, it's a good thing, right? We've seen it through?”

Long pause.

“Nah, guy. Not a good thing for me.”

“Hey,” I said. “Jimmer's here, and we can hang on Monday, put something new together for ourselves.”

“Right,” he said. He sounded hollow.

I started scrambling.

“Let's just get to spring. Couple more weeks. Spring comes, we'll go out and look for the rhino again. Maybe Jimmer's got some technology that we can use.”

Chickie was quiet.

“Chick?” I said. “Guy?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Chick,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“Yeah,” he said, again. He sounded almost like he was crying. “Hey, it's cool. I got to go.”

“Come on, man,” I said. “We'll figure something else out.”

“Yeah.” Again. “Gotta go.”

“Okay. See you Monday morning, right?”

“Right.”

The line went dead.

I got really nervous and hit redial on the incoming number. Some random cop at the house of correction answered and identified himself as the duty sergeant. I said I was a friend of Philip Benecik.

“You mean Chickie?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Keep an eye on him?”

“No problem,” he said. “He's sitting about 15 feet from me.”

I heard a muffled conversation.

“He says he'll see you soon.”

I touched off my phone and vomited into the bushes.

Jimmer called a Head-Connect van to come and pick us up. Tudd was at the wheel.

“What is this?” he asked, looking askance at the Heirloom's beer signs as we piled into the van. I just shook my head. I smelled like vomit. The minor movie star smelled like beer. Vishy Shetty sat with Jimmer, while her assistant crouched behind them and frowned. The three Asian guys ducked their heads and huddled in the back, pretending not to understand anything.

“Unsustainable,” said Tudd.

Between me and the movie star, the van reeked. Tudd turned the car down the hill toward Fleur-de-Lys, shaking his head. In a moment, we were out of town, trees and shadows on either side.

We passed a flower shop, and the smell of lilacs wafted through. I couldn't smell my vomit anymore, if I kept my mouth shut and breathed through my nose. I couldn't smell anything but the flowers.

It was after ten on a Saturday night. It was March. There were no flower shops on Bramble.

Jimmer was holding up his phone, which glowed. A small black tab, shaped like the thin curling lip of a rose, grew from the tip.

“It's a prototype,” he said.

Sunday was a wash. Jimmer slept late, then went looking for Vishy Shetty. I ate my granola. I swam in the lap pool and stretched in the heat of the Bikram studio. By way of penance, I let Tudd drag me on a snowshoe excursion into the back woods, our wide titanium robo-steps crunching on the hard snow. We walked far enough that I could just make out, through the denuded trees, the chimneys of my old neighborhood, the pylons of a broken-down dock.

I called my office and left a message for the pool secretary, saying I had to be in court on Monday out in the Berkshires and I wouldn't be in for a couple of days. Law firms were weird places—emergencies arose, nobody knew what you were doing from day to day, and if you said you were in court, you were basically unimpeachable. Plus, I'd been busting my ass all week and had some goodwill banked. I called the house of correction and got the duty sergeant again, but when I asked to speak with Chickie, the sergeant said he couldn't talk.

At lunch, I was staring at a ginger turkey burger with a side of kimchi when Ava Winston stopped by.

“How is it?” she asked.

I shrugged.

She sat down.

“I heard about your little excursion last night.”

“Wasn't my idea,” I said, taking a bite of the burger to buy some time.

“The Heirloom? Really?”

“Talk to Jimmer,” I said through the food.

She frowned.

“Well, one of our guests checked out today, a week early.”

I'd seen the minor movie star wheeling his bags to a Town Car that morning.

I shrugged again.

“He say why?”

“He said he had to get back to his career,” she said. “He was trying to get sober here.”

“Wasn't trying that hard,” I said.

“That's not even close to funny,” she said. “Look, I can't tell what's going on with you, but I hope you'll respect what people are doing here. What we're doing here.”

I put down my turkey burger and considered it. The bun was whole wheat and topped with flaxseeds. The ginger peeked out from under, tart and pink and translucent, like the tongue, or the foot, of some bivalve. Thing was delicious.

“Dude,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Dude?”

“Ava. I respect what you're doing here.”

She looked suspicious.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

I thought it was funny. She didn't. She stood up to leave, her jaw tight.

“Wait,” I said.

Fucking Chickie.

“You don't even know. I'm trying. I'm trying really hard to hold a bunch of things together. I'm a goddamn Trapper Keeper.”

She was unamused.

“I am really trying.”

“Well try harder,” she said, a drill sergeant, a motivator. Her eyes flared. “Or hold less. I mean,”—she bent aggressively toward me, spoke in a harsh whisper—“goddamn it. Grow up.”

She looked around the dining room, unnerved by her own profanity.

“No more nonsense, all right?”

A defensive sort of resentment welled up inside me. Nonsense? Grow up? What was she, my mother? You want to see nonsense? A bunch of rich people in sweat clothes picking at their blackberries and trying to stop the hands of time. A grown man named Tudd hovering somewhere nearby, with skates, probably. This whole fucking ridiculous enterprise. Nevadan snake-oil merchants cleaving like barnacles to the hull of this shiny sinking ship.

“Right, no more nonsense, yeah,” I said coldly, picking up my ginger turkey burger on a wheat bun with flaxseeds. “Now, sorry, but I have to finish this because I have a hot fucking stone massage in twenty minutes.”

Ava flushed. I couldn't tell if it was authentic or another tool of the trade.

“You know,” she said, leaning in. “When we were kids, I really liked you. You could've had a shot too, but you were never serious. You were too busy off with your friends, hiding, screwing around.”

She bit off the last two words, then stood as if to move around the dining room, check on other guests. But she didn't. She just walked out.

Goddamn. I mean, this—this Head-Connect bullshit, this rhino-horn stuff—this wasn't even my thing. I'm busting my ass to make things work smoothly around here, to pull these various idiots along, and I'm going to get treated this way?

You know what, fuck that. I should just leave them all to their own devices. See how they like it then.

I actually did have a hot stone massage on the schedule, and to tell you the truth, I'd been looking forward to it. I finished my ginger turkey burger and tried to use some of my new mindfulness techniques to calm down. I filled my mind with the taste of the kimchi. Tart, fermented. Greenish. Everything was green. A good color. A color of growth. I started to feel better. I'd lied to Chick, but it was okay because it was going to help him. Chick's arraignment would happen tomorrow, and after that we'd get together with Jimmer and Unsie, get all sorted out. Just like old times. I'd lied to Ava Winston, and then used profanity with her, but it was okay because she was tough-loving me. She could handle it. Plus, I had a shot with her in high school and she had some nice calves. They were long and supple, like aubergines, which were not green but purple, purple calves propelling her across the taupe carpets of Head-Connect. I was a good guy. I tried. I replaced the image of kimchi in my mind with the image of Ava's supple purple calves and sat with that image, turning it around and around in my head until I felt calmer. Then I went to my massage.

At 7
A.M.
on Monday morning, I dressed in my suit and drove up to the Knots, parked in the hard salt-stained lot of the house of correction, and escorted myself through the adjacent front doors of Berkshire Superior Court. The courthouse was gray stone, a three-story building that fronted East Street. Its front doors funneled visitors past metal detectors and sleepy cops. At bigger courthouses, there was sometimes a special expedited entrance for attorneys, and all you had to do was flash your bar card and you could skip the line. Sheepish defendants, forlorn girlfriends and toddlers, all waiting to be screened. They'd stare at you—the attorney—with a mix of avarice and contempt.

Berkshire Superior was a small enough courthouse, though, that we all entered through the front. I'd never been there before, but when I was a kid we used to drive by it all the time on the way to a rye-bread bakery my dad liked out on East Street. The courthouse was the sort of steady, permanent structure around which municipalities coalesce. City hall was a block away. The public library was across the street. The house of correction backed it up. In the courtyard, a bronze pioneer named Frankfort Knot stood atop a stone column and grimly surveyed the roundabout.

I nodded to the guards and slipped my keys, phone, and bar card into a plastic tray for inspection. The metal detectors beeped for my belt, the younger of the two guards performed a disengaged wanding, and I was through. It was a lot easier to get into a court of law than it was to get into Head-Connect. A caramel-colored guy behind me got more scrutiny, possibly because he was wearing a Jets parka.

The ground floor was a warren of offices and administrative cubbies, middle-aged women and men in uniform who clicked across the marble floors like stagehands in the wings of a theater. I checked the docket and climbed the two flights of stairs to Courtroom 5, the Honorable James T. Ralph presiding.

You walk into a courtroom for the morning docket, and it's like walking into the least happy prom you've ever been to. The tension is thick. Half the people are there for the first and, they hope, but also secretly doubt, last time. They don't know what's going on. The other half are regulars who know the drill and are trying to work an angle. Every head turns to see who you are, to see whether you're their exonerator, and then turns back to their private worries.

I walked in and stood to the side near the doors, behind the rows of wooden benches. The real estate you claim in a church when you get there late, if you're an ambivalent churchgoer, where you can sneak out before the Eucharist. Back when we used to go to church regularly, my dad would always angle to stand at the back, my mom always trying to push us up into the pews.