Cap had gone to work convinced Nick had merely had a weird nocturnal drinking event. Cap had laughed, shaken his head and left Nick the spare keys to his apartment before leaving. Nick sat in Cap's living room watching cable television and drinking coffee, having already called in to the office sick. He was sick, Nick was certain of that. What he had, though, Nick couldn't begin to recognize. It couldn't be schizophrenia, because he remembered everything. Nor did he seem manic-depressive or psychotic, although he wasn't quite sure how they would manifest themselves to himself. Weren't psychotics little more than deranged killers? That wasn't him.
He walked over to the picture window and stared out into the gray morning and the light drizzle settling on everything. There was little traffic on the street below Cap's window, and the pedestrians who moved along the sidewalk were all shrouded from the heavens by umbrellas. The umbrellas looked weird from above, colored igloos that bobbed up and down as they moved by. Nick guessed they didn't offer very much protection on a day like today when, instead of a direct assault from above, the water atomized into the air and swirled in from everywhere on any available gust of wind.
Nick stepped away from the window and stared into the living room. It offered little comfort despite the overstuffed couch and chair. Inside this room were things that weren't his; there was nothing to pick up and prompt memories. There were only things to wonder about. He dressed and left, leaving the spare keys behind on the coffee table. His side twinged and he ignored it, concentrating instead on the beads of water that alighted on his cheeks and eyelashes. He caught a downtown-bound bus and stepped off it a block from Sarah's office building downtown. He stopped to look at his reflection in a window, fixing his hair as he stared at the hollow image of himself, and noticed a middle-aged black woman staring at him from the other side of the glass. He smiled weakly and scuffed his way toward Sarah's building, uncertain of what he would or could or should say.
He rode the elevator up and shuffled down the hall. Through the glass doors he could see the receptionist talking into a phone, her head bent down. He had gone through those doors hundreds of times to meet Sarah and escort her to lunch, but it had been months since the last time and now he was afraid of the other side. His stomach knotted and the pain in his side smoothed into a dull ache. He turned and headed back to the elevator.
He sat in the bar across the street and ordered a Bloody Mary, checking his watch to see it was only mid-morning. The oppressive gray outside blocked out time, made it meaningless, in much the same way it obscured the tops of the buildings. He sipped his drink and thought about how to try Sarah's office again. Maybe it was too early, maybe he should wait until she leaves for home at the end of the day. Maybe he should just go back to the apartment and wait to see what happened. Call Tagget and have him meet him, explain it all and see what the response was.
"Aren't you a little young to be drinking all by yourself this early in the day?"
Nick looked across the bar at the bartender, a fifty-ish man with graying hair, a mustache and a potbelly. Nick looked around the bar at the others: Three men, two drinking beer and one with a beer and an empty shot glass riding sidecar sat at the bar stools to his left; on the other side of the bar a woman, perhaps fifty and wearing too much make-up, pondered a glass of translucent red liquor.
"It's one of those days, you know," Nick said, sipping his drink.
"What kind? You get fired?"
Nick shook his head and winced a little at the pain in his right side. "No. I'm just visiting a friend for the week and his boss called him in for the day. Add to that the rain, and there's just nothing to do."
Nick was on his third drink when the woman sauntered over and sat down next to him. Nick looked at her out of the corner of his eye and ignored her while she fished a cigarette out of her purse, lit it and turned to face him.
"So, are you one of us?" she said evenly.
Nick shivered and looked at her over his shoulder. "What?"
"I said, "Are you one of us?'"
"No," Nick said, shaking his head once.
"Sure you are. Look at you: here in a bar in the middle of the morning. You're just like me," she said, tapping ash onto the floor, "except my name's Naomi."
"Naomi?" Nick said, his voice low. He tapped a cigarette from his own pack and lit it. "Actually, I'm just here because I don't have anyplace better to be, right now."
Naomi smiled widely, showing two rows of perfect teeth. "Yeah, me too. You don't mind if I join you, do you?"
Nick held in a sigh and shrugged.
"So, where you from?"
"Why?"
"I- heard you say you were on vacation or something. Where you from?" She asked, sucking deep on her cigarette. "Or are you going somewhere on vacation?"
"Going?"
Naomi tapped the bar and Nick looked down to see her finger resting on his passport.
"Oh, yeah. I lost my wallet, so I carry that for ID," Nick said.
"Where'd you lose it?"
Nick smiled and looked in her eyes. They were violet.
"You have violet eyes. I didn't think anybody really had violet eyes."
"Elizabeth Taylor has violet eyes."
"That's what they say, although I've never thought to look at them to find out," Nick said.
"What? Have you met her?"
"No."
"How would you look at them, then?"
"She's on the cover of magazines all the time," Nick said.
Naomi shrugged. "Oh. I don't have much time for magazines. They're all filled with bullshit, anyway."
Nick nodded.
"So, where you headed to?"
Nick looked down at his passport and then at his watch. "Just across the street. What about you?"
Naomi tamped her cigarette out and finished her drink. "I think I'll stay here for a while, then who knows? You need someplace to go for the afternoon?" she said, looking up at him with her violet eyes, her expression neutral.
Nick felt the burning in his side flare up quickly and then vanish. "No. I think my buddy's going to get the afternoon off from work, so I should be fine."
Nick pushed a few dollars across the bar and tipped the last of his drink into his mouth. The edges of the world had softened during the morning and the knot in his stomach had gone. Naomi grabbed his forearm lightly as he stood up from the stool.
"Well, if you're friend's busy, I'll be here for a couple of more hours. Come back."
Nick nodded. "I will. Thanks."
Nick walked outside into the gray and stared up into the mist, letting it slick his face. He threaded his way across the street through the traffic huddled up before traffic lights and began walking down the block toward Sarah's building. He wasn't sure how to apologize, but he was sure apologizing was what he had to do. He turned into the small plaza leading up to the front of the building and saw Sarah push through the revolving glass doors, stop just a two steps out and open an umbrella. Seconds later, Josh Sammers popped out of the revolving door and ducked under the other half of Sarah's umbrella. Nick's stomach sank and the world listed. He walked quickly toward her as she and Sammers walked slowly beneath the umbrella. Sarah looked away from Sammers for a moment and saw Nick coming and she stopped, her eyes narrowing slightly.
"So, this is what it is?" Nick said, staring deep into her eyes. "And you said I was the problem lately."
Sarah screwed her eyes up for a moment. "What?"
"Yeah, I'm the problem, all right. How many dates have you been going on with him? I'm the one with the relationship problems and look at you: exchanging numbers and going on dates," Nick said quickly, wiping the moisture off his brow.
"Nick, listen," Sarah said, taking a step forward as Sammers, his eyes wide and shoulders slack, stood still. "You've been drinking," Sarah said curtly, shaking her head. "For Christ's sake, Nick, you've been drinking."
"No, that's not the problem, that's just a symptom," Nick said. "Now I know what's going on."
Sammers took a step
forward and raised his hands, palms outward to deny aggression.
"You shut the fuck up," Nick said quickly, pointing at him as if he were holding a revolver at his hip. "I've seen your fucking so-called pictures of naked blondes that you only painted so you could fuck them, and she's just supposed to be another one. Maybe you should just get the hell out of here."
Sarah gave the umbrella handle to Sammers and closed in to a few inches of Nick.
"Listen, Nick, you've been drinking. Maybe you've been drinking all night and morning, I don't know, I don't care. Right now you had better just get out of here. You're making an ass of yourself and I don't want people--"
"To what? To think that you're just another of this guy's sluts?"
Sarah slapped him full across the cheek, the repercussion fading quickly into the mist. "Get out of here before you say anything else."
Nick stared at her and looked at Sammers and then clutched his right side as it erupted in a hot flash of searing pain. He took a step backward and looked back at Sarah, her face drawn tight and her lower lip trembling, and nodded.
He pushed through the downtown lunch crowds, hunched over slightly to his right and massaging his lower waist as he muttered curses under his breath. Around him, people gave way and let him pass unhindered, no one willing to challenge him for right of way on the sidewalk. The mist turned to drizzle and began to soak through his clothes, chilling him and making the pain in his side more noticeable. He stopped at a bus stop bench and sat down on its soaked surface.
"It looks like I've fucked up this life pretty damn good."
He sat on the back of the bus with the other presumed derelicts, only it was he who reeked of alcohol, sweat and rainwater. Outside the bus window, the world zipped by in two and three block increments between lurches to and from the curb. The people on the bus seemed pallid, lifeless, different than they should have been after a summer of sun: To him, they seemed less, somehow, than he. Less alive and more docile, unaware of the world in which they traveled. The pain in his side faded as he stared out into the drizzle and watched the drenched world.
This was what he was offered? He sniffed loudly with disgust and shook his head as he thought about it, the endless weeks of work for the small periods of vacation. The short weekends filled with errands, chores and -- at some point -- boredom? Marriage, children, house shopping, and a pension? A better job with the same exact routine? Another birthday ending in a zero and marked with a humorous card about the aging process? This was it? Waiting in the rest home for the monthly hour-long visit from the kids and grand kids? That was a future?
He slid down in his seat and looked at the others riding the bus, most of them staring blankly outside. He assumed their thoughts were about getting wet and staying dry, what was for dinner or on television that night. Such small thoughts.
He stepped off the bus at the stop near his and Sarah's apartment and walked along the sidewalk until turning into the Grove. He pushed into the air-conditioned darkness and took a seat at the bar. The bartender walked down toward him and cocked his head to his side. Nick knew him but couldn't remember his name.
"Whoa, you must being having a bad day. What can I get you?" the bartender asked.
"Whiskey, up," Nick said as he felt through his jacket for his cigarettes. He lit one and looked around the bar.
There was a thunk and Nick looked up at the bartender. "Have you seen Mordechai, lately?"
"Who?" the bartender asked.
"The old guy with the beard that's always here."
"No. Never seen him."
Nick nodded and took a large swallow from the drink and shuddered inside as the alcohol burned down his throat. For a moment, Nick thought he could see through the bartender, as if the bartender had momentarily become a hologram. Nick shook his head.
Maybe there was a way to explain all of this to a psychiatrist. Maybe it was just a chemical imbalance in his brain. Or maybe a sudden accumulation of moments all coming together at the same point that was what was shaking him up. The doctor had told him the lump on his side was only fat tissue. Perhaps he was letting his imagination run wild with the pain he thought he felt in his side. Couldn't that be kidney stones? And, of course, he was turning thirty, soon. Time to get married and make an honest woman of Sarah, if he could ever reconcile this.
"A symbiont," Nick said to no one and took a sip of his drink.
How had that ever entered into the mix? A little creature living in his body, helping him out, somehow, altering his thoughts and enhancing something in him? What? But, then, why had Mordechai, Claypool and Kara come after him? Or had that not happened, too, but merely been some drunken hallucination. Who cared if Neanderthal man had been wiped extinct by Homo Sapiens? What did that mean? There was no sense in it.
You're losing it, Nick. You need to relax.
"I'm fine," Nick said.
"What's that?" the bartender asked as he leaned against the shelves holding the liquor bottles.
"I said, 'I'm fine,'" Nick said.
The bartender nodded and walked farther down the bar, folded his arms and stared up at the baseball game playing on a television mounted on the wall.
Are you sure? You've nowhere else to run and have explained nothing to those who could let you in. How can that be fine? Is the whiskey helping? Is this bar your safe haven?
Nick looked around the bar, moving his eyes slowly through the shadows. He shook his head sharply. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and shivered as he felt the cold of the air-conditioning work through his wet clothes.
I'm sitting on the stool when Mordechai approaches, only it's not the same Mordechai with the stained beard and black jacket. This is a new man in his role, sent over by central casting to be more viewer friendly. He sits nearby and pushes tobacco into the bowl of a pipe. His eyes are soft and he has a concerned look on his face as he stares over at me while matching his pipe.
"Do you need any help?" he asks, his voice soft and mellifluous like a BBC broadcaster.
I shake my head, "No, I'm fine."
"Hey, man, are you alright?" the bartender asked, supplanting the old man's voice and leaning over the bar.
Nick jerked from his stool and fell onto the floor of the bar, the world spinning crazily for a moment and then jerking into position.
"Whoa! Are you okay? Are you hurt?" the bartender asked, leaning forward across the bar and resting his weight on his outstretched arms.
Nick looked up at him from the floor and then scanned the room. Nobody but him. Nick stood up slowly and smiled awkwardly at the bartender. He pulled out the contents of his back pocket and slid a few bills onto the bar. He stared at his passport, last used six years ago on a two-week backpacking trip though Spain, downed the last of his drink and headed out into the drizzle, certain he had to become somebody else, somebody nobody would look.
TWENTY-NINE