The Good Luck of Right Now (18 page)
Read The Good Luck of Right Now Online
Authors: Matthew Quick
Max asked what they wanted, why had they brought him to this place.
The doctor said, “How would you like to live here with the cat for a few weeks—say . . . three weeks?”
Max said he “would fucking not!”
And then Arnie started to sweet-talk him, saying that they would pay him ten times the money he would make in an entire year working at “the fucking movies” and that he could keep the cat at the end and they would give him complimentary pills that would help ease his “fucking anxiety” and the food would be “gour-fucking-met” and all he had to do was stay in the room for twenty-one days with the cat, but without coming out or having any contact with the rest of “the fucking world.”
“We would observe you,” Arnie had said. “And ask you questions from time to time. But that’s it. You wouldn’t have to do a thing, except play with the cat.”
I was amazed, and wondered if Max’s story could possibly be true.
I said, “So they just wanted you to be in the room with the cat?”
“What the fuck, hey?” Max said, nodding, his eyes open wide. “Fucking weird, right?”
“Why would they pay you to play with a cat for three weeks?”
“I don’t fucking know. But suddenly, while I was standing there fucking frozen, with the fucking clone of Alice purring at my fucking feet, I realized that the room was definitely a space-fucking-craft. Math. That’s what I used to figure it out. Fucking math.”
“Math?” I said.
“What the fuck, hey?” Max said, nodding confidently. “Three weeks was just enough time to travel to a different fucking galaxy if they put the craft in hyper-fucking-warp speed.”
I didn’t understand what type of math Max was using here, but he seemed so excited that I didn’t interrupt him. Maybe you understand, Richard Gere, because you are so much smarter than I am.
“So it all made fucking sense. And that’s when I fucking knew . . . that fucking Arnie . . . was a goddamn . . . fucking . . . alien,” Max said, throwing in the pauses for dramatic effect. “A yellow-color-loving alien from outer-fucking-space. They’re everywhere, you know. And I won’t let you or me go through what my sister fucking went through. No fucking way. Not going to fucking happen. Not on my watch.”
“Did you say
alien
?” I asked Max.
“Don’t you fucking believe in aliens? The universe is so fucking huge. Probability is on the aliens’ side. Those fuckers exist! How can you
not
fucking believe?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never really thought about it much.”
What I was really interested in was finding out more information about The Girlbrarian, so I said, “Max, have you ever read Jung? Have you ever read
Synchronicity
?”
“Synchronicity
? Isn’t that an album by the Police? ‘King of Fucking Pain’ is on that fucker, I think.”
“No, it’s a book written by Carl Jung. It’s about coincidences and how there are none.
Unus mundus
.”
“Unus-what-the-fuck-dus are you talking about here, hey? And what the fuck does it have to do with aliens? Or the fucking spaceship I almost ended up imprisoned in for three weeks?”
“Hear me out,” I said. “Before we met, I saw your sister at the library. Many times. You might say I felt a certain connection with her. I’ve been watching her working in the library for years and—”
“My sister? Eliza-fucking-beth?
”
“I had always wanted to speak with her, but I was too afraid.”
“Why?”
“That’s not the point,” I said, because I didn’t want to tell Max I was in love with his sister. I didn’t know how he would take that information.
“What the fuck
is
the point, then?” Max said.
“My mother died a few weeks ago, which led to my having a grief counselor named Wendy, who recommended I see Arnie, who just so happened to pair me up with The Girlbrarian’s brother. Think about it.
What are the odds?
”
“Who the fuck is The Girlbrarian?”
“The girl I have wanted to meet for years now!
Your sister!
”
“What the fuck, hey?”
“Synchronicity!”
“You want to fucking meet my sister?”
“More than anything in the world.”
“You don’t need synchro-fucking-nicity to meet my sister. I’ll take you to meet her right fucking now. No problem. And she can fucking tell you about the aliens who abducted her. What the fuck, hey?”
Richard Gere, I couldn’t believe my good luck.
It was hard not to think about my mother’s philosophy—The Good Luck of Right Now.
More proof, as the bad of Mom’s death would directly lead to the good of meeting The Girlbrarian for the first time.
Maybe Arnie
had
been an alien who tried to trick Max into boarding his spacecraft, but the good that balanced out the potential bad of his deception was surely taking place at that moment.
I had never been more certain of anything in my life.
I didn’t care what The Girlbrarian said to me as long as I finally got to speak with her. She could have recited the Declaration of Independence seventy-six times in monotone and without making eye contact once, and my eyes would be riveted on her beautiful plump lips. And now I didn’t have to worry too much about coming off as a freak or failing to say anything at all when I first met her, because Max would be with me.
Max is very talkative.
Max would explain why I was there, providing me with a legitimate reason to be in the same room with The Girlbrarian.
Max would provide a natural bridge for me—a cause for The Girlbrarian and me to speak, even if we ended up talking about aliens.
My fantasy was about to come true.
I was about to accomplish a life goal.
As I walked to The Girlbrarian’s apartment, escorted by her very own flesh-and blood-brother—noticing the increasing amount of trash and broken glass on the concrete and the rising frequency of abandoned boarded-up homes—I thought about all of the random seemingly unrelated events that had to happen sequentially to put me in this very situation, this exact moment in space and time.
I wondered, Was there really math for this sort of thing?
Like maybe some secret division of the government had worked out an equation for people’s lives—like you just plug in the variables of your existence and you get the guaranteed outcome.
fatherless + fat + jobless + ugly + Mom is your only friend x Mom dies – you are approaching 40 years of age
abused grief counselor + bipolar priest + in love with Girlbrarian x possible alien therapist + Guinness at Irish pub
Equals where I am right now!
Is that crazy?
I was never very good at math.
Regardless . . .
Who could deny The Good Luck of Right Now?
Who?
It was so obvious.
You appeared to me for a few strides and you smiled like you were proud. You gave me the thumbs-up, Richard Gere, and I could tell you were thrilled for me.
Just be yourself
, you said, encouraging me. And then you laughed in this good Richard Gere movie-star way.
And be confident. Women love confidence. Remember that. Give her the fairy tale. What your mother wanted, but never got. Like in my movies, but this time—in real life. Don’t overthink it. Trust your instincts. Break the cycle. I believe in you, Bartholomew Neil. Richard Gere believes in you! The Dalai Lama believes in you too. His Holiness told me himself.
I felt as though fate were finally on my side, and so I grew more and more confident with every step I took.
Thanks for being there, Richard Gere.
You are a true friend.
Your friendship makes me a better man.
And it’s nice to share all this with someone.
Your admiring fan,
Bartholomew Neil
Dear Mr. Richard Gere,
I bet you are wondering why my last letter didn’t supply the details that collectively make up my first-contact story with The Girlbrarian, who shall be referred to from here on as Elizabeth because she does not like to be called The Girlbrarian.
“I’m a woman. Not a girl,” Elizabeth said from behind that curtain of brown hair when she found out I called her The Girlbrarian. “And I am not an official librarian either.”
Her voice was . . . reluctant and damaged and beautiful and maybe like a bird with a broken wing singing unfettered all alone in the wilderness when she thinks no one is listening, if that makes any sense, which it probably doesn’t.
Turns out she was only volunteering at the library—perhaps waiting for a sign, but more on that later.
Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened and the fact is, it all seems sort of unbelievable—like if I told you exactly what transpired, you would call me a liar; you might even think I’d gone insane or was making the whole thing up to sound more important than I really am. And maybe you will choose to believe that I am lying in the end, when I am finished telling you everything, but there is nothing I can do about that.
I’ve been taking a few days to process, before I committed it to paper.
(I’m afraid you might not approve of my recent decisions, because you haven’t appeared to me in days. Why? Are you shooting an important movie? Perhaps you are with the Dalai Lama? Planning one of your Free Tibet dinner fund-raisers? Maybe you are visiting Tibetan monks who suffer in the burn wards of some faraway hospital after failed self-immolation attempts, and if so, please tell the burned and healing monks I hope their efforts will prove fruitful and they are not in too much pain.)
Regardless . . .
You’re never going to believe what I’m about to say next, because I can hardly believe it myself: I’m writing you from upstate Vermont—although I don’t know what town we are in.
Max and The Girlbrarian are in a motel room together, sleeping in twin beds—I know because Max asked the motel manager several times whether the room had two separate beds “with fucking space in between, hey, because this is my
sister
”—Father McNamee is in our room praying, and I’m sitting here shivering on a wooden chair outside in the parking lot ringed by snowbanks, writing you next to our rental car, under the billions and billions of stars that make up the Milky Way, which I only just noticed because the motel owners shut off the big sign that reads
FRIENDLY FAMILY MOTEL REST STOP HOSPITALITY
in giant outer-space-green neon letters.
Max insisted that I wear a shiny brownish gold “fucking tektite” crystal on a leather rope around my neck while I sit outside at night in the country, because it’s supposed to protect me from alien abduction.
How, I cannot say exactly.
Max purchased it off a website called:
Fight Back! Protect Yourself from Aliens Now!
Apparently, your risk of being abducted by aliens increases swiftly the farther away you are from a major city, and so Max and Elizabeth are each wearing three tektite crystals of their own, but Max said you have to work your way up to three, and so I should start by wearing only one. Father McNamee said he would trust the Almighty to protect him and therefore is not wearing an anti-alien tektite crystal of his own.
Max also said that if I look up at the northern Vermont night sky long enough, I will definitely see a UFO at some point—“Look for lingering fucking orbs of lights that move too fucking rapidly across the sky and then stop on a fucking dime to hover,” Max said before he left me out here to write you, saying he was “crazy fucking tired” and had seen enough “fucking UFOs” already—but I’m not really interested in space or extraterrestrial life-forms, especially since Max has told me such horrific stories about these beings from far, far away and their plans for us.
Father McNamee said that Jesus, God, the Holy Spirit, Satan, angels, and demons are all technically extraterrestrials, since they’re not “of this world.” But that’s all he would say on the subject of aliens. Well, except that he also said it wasn’t officially wrong for a Catholic to wear the special anti-alien tektite crystal, which is why I don’t feel any guilt, even though Mom probably wouldn’t have approved or understood the need. It was simply nice to receive a gift from a friend. If you can believe it, Richard Gere, this was the first present I have ever received from anyone except Mom. Life is really looking up.
I don’t think Mom believed in aliens, but we never did have a conversation about that.
This is also the first time I have ever left the Philadelphia area (if you count the South Jersey Shore as the Philadelphia area, and most do), and while it is exciting to be traveling north, about to leave the country even, it is also a little terrifying, especially because I am finally going to meet my biological father, who is supposedly alive and living in Montreal. Father McNamee has been in touch with him, which I will tell you all about shortly.
It’s been an overwhelming few days, and it’s taken me this long to organize my thoughts before I could offer them to you in any sort of order that would make sense.
After I met The Girlbrarian—Elizabeth, I mean—I came home that night and found Father McNamee kneeling in the living room, praying, which was an improvement, because he wasn’t drunk in Mom’s room or vomiting into our toilet.
When he opened his eye, it wasn’t tiny like a black snowflake, but began to suck like a whale’s blowhole again—and I knew that the storm in his mind had passed.
“I need a passport,” I said.
“What?”
“I need a passport.”
Father studied my face for a moment and then said, “How did you know we’re going to Montreal?”
“Montreal?”
“Montreal,” he said. “Yes. My hometown.”
“I’m going to Ottawa, not Montreal.”
“Ottawa?”
“Ottawa.”
“No, surely you mean Montreal.”
“Ottawa.”
Father McNamee looked perplexed.
“How long does it take to get a passport?” I asked.