Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (39 page)

“It’s not like that, Mr. Pope. We’re not negotiating about money—”

“Oh,
it’s not about the money?
Is that it? Yeah, it never is with you people.” Mark was lost; what people did Pope think he was? “Whatever the problem is, then, get over it. Immediately. This is a good job, and we want you to take it.”

Mark gathered what courage he had. “Why?”

“What?” barked Pope.

“Why do you want me to take this job?”

“Oh, don’t big yourself up. We’re gonna have a thousand of you. We want you now because Straw wants you near him. As far as I’m concerned, your book is grade-A bunk. But that man thinks you shit cotton candy, and whatever you do in your little sessions, it works. I haven’t seen him this focused in twenty years. And I need him to stay focused. So it is most certainly in my interest to see that he gets what he wants. And right now, what he wants is you behind some glass desk no more than a thousand yards from him. So that whenever he gets the shakes, you’ll be there to fan him with a hat or show him your dick or tell him a riddle or whatever the hell it is you do.”

“Right. Well. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Pope. As soon as I see James—”

“No, Marcus.” Pope sounded almost kind here. “
I’ll
tell you what you’ll do. You will call Mr. Straw today or tomorrow or maaaaybe the day after that, and you will tell him,
Yes, thank you, please, I would love to be the SIC of SineCo under the generous terms you outlined, and I can start immediately
.”

Mark drained his glass. He cradled his phone in the crook of his shoulder.

“We clear?” asked Pope.

“Yeah. We’re clear,” Mark heard himself say.

Given a minute to think about it, Mark would probably have allowed that in Newark Airport that afternoon, his neuro-slurry was maybe looking for trouble. What with the Leo-meeting anxiety and the high stakes of the Nike presentation and the thrill of the TSA tangle and the ticktock of the SineCo ultimatum.

But by the time Mark even thought to have these thoughts, the ride had started. The one banana he’d eaten at seven a.m. fought bravely against the double whiskey, the two chardonnays, and the Xanax. Or what he’d thought was a Xanax. But when he didn’t fall into a dry-mouthed slumber, he’d realized that, in his stupid drunk, he had fished out the wrong pill—a Nuvigil—from the bottom of his Dopp kit, and he went into a kind of fugue, and his mind kept running, and he kept drinking (the Nuvigil in valiant neurochemical conflict with airplane whiskey) until the flight attendant cut him off, and then he and the ghoul driving his body deplaned together, and the turquoise carpet in the Portland airport nearly made him ill, and the beach-themed restaurant in the concourse had quit serving so his ghoul got them a taxi and got them to the hotel and there was a fridge in the room and more pills in Mark’s Dopp kit and then they went out together, his ghoul and he, Mark as blank as a bodhisattva, but also gross and reeling.

He woke—if that was the word—in a dark hallway of his hotel. A tiny Latina chambermaid was whispering,
You okay? You need help?
Trying to stand up, he almost pulled her housekeeping cart down on himself. She steadied him and let him into his room with the key that he held in his hand. He thanked her, his voice a surprise to him, then leaned his head against the cool metal of the door frame. He took some breaths. In three minutes, he would vomit. On the upside, he seemed without injury, save for a mild carpet rash. He tried to savor his relief that his body had once again delivered itself home and apparently avoided the most basic disasters.

No idea. He had no idea about last night. Zero. A movie he never saw. In two minutes he would vomit.

He searched his pockets: wadded cash, a menthol cigarette, a swizzle stick, and…come on, come on, come on…
yesssss,
his passport and Node. Relief.

But then he checked his Node screen.

And the time! With a clench, he realized that he had been due seven minutes ago at Nike World Headquarters, where he was to address a passel of HR supervisors about Fostering a Prideful Environment and about the cross-platform-lifestyle delivery potential of SineLife. In one minute he would vomit.

The red light on his bedside phone was pumping. He dialed the front desk.

“Mr. Deveraux,” chirped the desk. “There’s a gentleman here from Nike. He’s very anxious that you come downstairs.”

“Of course. Tell him I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

Then Mark vomited.

Twenty minutes later, he had assembled himself into a functioning replica of a human. He would claim food poisoning, he would apologize, he would handle this somehow—Never Give Up!—he would come through it.

And at first it seemed he would. He shut off most of his higher-order cognition and concentrated on his breathing and the very immediate environment. In this way, he managed the tense drive to Beaverton with his Nike minder, a guy called Dave. Dave said, “You sure you’re okay?” Mark said, “It’ll pass.” But he rolled his window all the way down, which kept conversation to a minimum and cool air storming around his sour, pounding head.

But once they got to Nike and he had to get out of the car, Mark found that his condition was dire. At a grueling clip, Dave led him into an absolutely enormous building and then into a room where fifteen people had been waiting an hour for him. A big bank of windows looked out onto the fields beyond and the gorgeous late-summer Saturday morning he was keeping them from.

Mark plowed right into his presentation he had crammed for. But he missed all his punch lines, and he was sweating. It was soon clear to him that he was not going to be all right. After half an hour he called a break. In the bathroom he did an obscenely malodorous thing, then stood before the mirror blotting his clammy flesh with the linty eco-towels stingily dispensed by the wall unit. Strip clubs. That’s what it had been last night. Then to a bar with one of the dancers. But then maybe some ulterior task or destination. He remembered counting out hundreds.

“So it is only by being ready for opportunity that we are ready to seize it,” he tried. Some of his audience had not returned after the break. He became aware of the smell of himself, sweet and dank. The sun through the wall of windows was brutal. “But of course, you can never be ready, because being ready means you’re expecting something, and expecting something means that you will be disappointed when you don’t get it.” He tried to take a swig out of his bottle of water but found that it was empty, so he was caught suckling from a plastic bottle, which crinkle-crackled loudly. “But you can be ready to be ready…”

“Bullshit,” he heard a lady mutter from the front row.

Never a good sign. He persevered. There was a point here that had worked before. “As long as you wake up each day, saying to yourself: This is another day I will be able to…um…you need to skip your record…Now, I’d like half of you—let’s say, the half of the room to my right, your left—I’d like you to write down five fears. The other half of the room—your left, my right—write down your desires. Got it?” Mark’s head felt shrunken. He may have been swaying.

“Can I have a pen?” said a man in the front row. “That’s one of my desires.”

Mark gave the man his pen.

“I need one too,” said another man.

“Yeah, mine ran outta ink,” said a third.

“Why don’t I go look for some more,” said Mark, and he fled the room.

He was in a tremendous, carpeted corridor that receded fore and aft like a gyroscopic dream. Some people at a great distance, small as mice, crossed the corridor. He wobbled a bit; he thought he might come unstuck from the floor and pinwheel down the length of the building, like the dude in
Titanic
who bangs off the propeller and into the ocean. He obeyed instinct and made for a distant door and the green world beyond. Outside, a light breeze blew the stink off him. The panic and dizziness and queasiness receded a bit.

Okay, he definitely didn’t want to interact with Dave the minder again. He needed to get out of there. He would call Leo Crane. If he said,
Please come get me, I’ll explain when you do,
wouldn’t Leo come through? Closing one eye, he thumbed his Node until it gave him Leo’s number.

L
eila and Leo were sitting in a deep green Toyota Corolla, ten years old, a bike rack on the roof, in a vast parking lot on the Nike campus. Leo thought it felt like a stakeout on an old cop show. There was even a bag of nuts on the tray of the little console between them. Leila ate a few, absently. She was so concentrated. When did this girl relax?

“Were the walnuts in the car too?” he asked her. She had explained that the car was waiting for her in the short-term lot at the airport, keys on the right rear tire. The Dear Diary Travel Agency, she called it.

“No. They’re mine. They’re pecans, though,” said Leila. Then, almost suspiciously, “You don’t know your nuts?”

“I don’t really like nuts.”

“Seriously?”

She looked so disappointed that he backpedaled. “I mean, you know, in moderation; almond flour in a crust, some peanuts in your pad thai.” To show how reasonable he was, he popped a couple of pecans in his mouth, but then he couldn’t hide his distaste. The mealiness, the tang, the granularity.

She laughed at him. “You don’t have to like nuts.”

They’d been sitting there for an hour. They knew that Mark was somewhere in the enormous complex before them. Their Nike source—Leo’s friend Ted, who had also provided them cover at the security booth by claiming them as his guests—said that the seminar Mark was leading for the tier-one executives was scheduled to finish at noon. The idea was to swoop down on Mark when he left the building. If they could get him in the car, Leila was going to message a local Diarist who would bring them in, give Mark the real pitch, hopefully the eye test. Leo was also looking for a way to bring up the love-letterish part of his lemon-juice letter. They had so far avoided the topic.

But Leila kept returning to Mark and what would make him come with them. “Everyone has a way in,” she said. “There’s something we can say to him that will make him see. What’s he like, really?”

“Well,” said Leo. “His dad fucked off when he was, like, eleven. He really loves his mom. They’re pretty close. He’s very smart. Loves to do drugs, or did anyway. According to his book, he’s
moved past all that
. But if that’s true, I’ll smoke my hat.”

“Yeah, he was drinking hard in the lounge that time.”

Leo wasn’t thrilled that Mark and Leila had already met, nor that Mark had apparently performed one of his magic tricks on her. He decided to remake a point.

“You know, with that trick, there was only one card you could’ve picked, Leila. He probably had that jack hidden before the thing even started.”

“I didn’t say he was actually magic,” said Leila. “I just said it was a good illusion; I don’t know how he pulled it off.”

Nerves. Balls. Chutzpah, thought Leo. Whatever it was, Mark had plenty of it. Back when they ran together, anyway. Mark was your man for capers, for finding the fire stairs to the roof, for rapping on the windows of closing pizzerias and asking earnestly, through the glass,
You got any slices? Cold is fine
. He charmed, and bluffed, and talked his way into places. Leo looked out at the green sneaker campus. These people were engaged in a trick also, weren’t they? Pay an Indonesian four bucks a day; pay a PR machine a hundred million a year. Shazam, you can mark your shit up 500 percent and no one’s gonna say boo. Of course Mark was delivering a “seminar” to the upper executives. If you were willing to lie for money, you could probably go very far.

Leo’s cell phone rang: a 917 area code. Rosemary? Heather?

“Hello?”

“Leo?”

“Mark?”

“Yeah. Listen. I’m really sorry I couldn’t make it last night. I was ill. But I’m free now. I’m in Beavertown.”

Leo covered the receiver part of his phone and mouthed to Leila,
It’s Mark.
But she was pointing through the windshield at a man thirty paces away and mouthing to Leo,
There’s Mark.

“Mark,” said Leo, “hold on a sec.” Then he put the phone against his chest. “You ready for this, Leila?” he said.

She clutched his forearm, like a damsel in a nickelodeon. “Leo, we
have
to be able to convince him. If Straw brought him to the yacht, then he’s, like, a made man. Turn him and we can strike back at them. There’s no other way.”

“I know. I really think we can.”

“You think? Leo, if we tell him about Dear Diary, then he’s got to come with us, one way or another. We can’t let him go blabbing back to the Committee.”

The
we can’t let him go
part tightened the air in the car, as a bolt is tightened by the clever lever of a wrench.

Leo was being asked to vouch for the good-heartedness of his old friend. They had been like brothers once. He could have vouched for Mark then. Do people change at heart?

“Right,” he said. Then he gave Leila a look that said
Here we go,
and he opened his door, stood up.

“Mark,” he called.

Mark looked at Leo, looked at his own phone, then really squinted at Leo. He walked over to the car. “That was quick,” he said.

“I’ll explain later. Get in,” said Leo. Without really meaning to, he had used a tough-guy, brook-no-argument voice. He opened the back door for Mark. But Mark either ignored or misunderstood Leo’s body language; he folded himself swiftly into the front seat. Leo couldn’t very well make a point of it. But Mark was always pulling shit like that.

“Lola Montes?” Mark said, as if he were running across her in some context that was only mildly unexpected, like at the tennis club. “Mark Deveraux. You helped me with the Jumble. We played cards.”

Oh, no, no, no,
thought Leo.
Not this time, pal.

“Mark, you don’t look very well,” said Leila.

Ha,
thought Leo. Mark really didn’t look very well. He was the color of lunch meat.

“Wait, you two know each other?” Mark asked.

Neither Leo nor Leila answered that one. Instead, Leo asked, “You finished with your seminar in there?”

Mark nodded and said, “I believe so. You guys were waiting for me, weren’t you?”

“We were,” said Leila. “I need your help, and Leo said you’d help me.”

“You want to get out of here?” said Leo.

“More than anything,” said Mark.

They crested the hill that was the city’s natural western boundary and approached the dark mouth of the tunnel. Leo imagined what this place would have been like long ago for, like, a Clatsop Indian coming in from the coast to trade with the strange new foreigners. Probably there would have been no
REMOVE SUNGLASSES
sign, as there was now, before the tunnel entrance. What a world, thought Leo, in which a municipality or highway department or whatever made a huge sign about such a thing.

Concentrate, you idiot,
he thought. Why was he such a muddy thinker? His thoughts splayed like roots, spreading outward, forking and subforking. Was that the pot? It had to be the pot, right? Years of it.

But no. He’d always been like this. Long before the pot. He’d always looked for ways to alter his outlook. As a boy he would spin around in the front hall until he fell over, and he loved the upside-down rides clamped in his dad’s strong hands; he could still recall how the chandeliers sprouted like mushrooms from the floor. Also at that age he could achieve a sort of glycemic state of grace by eating four or six mini-Snickers bars, a bag of which was on top of the refrigerator. So, no, he had always been a bit like this. Or upside-down rides are a gateway drug.

“Which one?” Leila asked Leo. He surfaced from his thoughts.

“Get in the far left lane.” There was an important trifurcation on Highway 26, just as you came through the tunnel. The one highway flayed itself into three and you had to choose your lane without hesitation. You had to beware of late-choosers who might slice across your lane. Leo had once seen an accident in this place, when a too-late-chooser miscalculated his vectors and hit the orange-coned apex that cleaved one lane from another. That point was called the
gore point,
for reasons having nothing to do with gore. And the water-filled things that he’d seen the car plow into were called impact attenuators. He could have used an impact attenuator that morning fifteen years ago when he woke in his smoke-filled bedroom and stood and saw greasy gray streams, wraithlike, slipping beneath his bedroom door and staggered down three marble flights of the town house calling for his mom and his dad while smoke curled around corners and the wallpaper popped into flame. Orange and amber and black lizard tongues lapped up the walls, like an upside-down ride gone fiendishly awry.

It would have been easier if that impact had been attenuated over the course of many years instead of being delivered within about five minutes—the two minutes it took to get outside onto the sidewalk and the three minutes he thought about going back inside to find his mom and dad or the dogs; those three minutes that he waited, a grown man afraid of fire, until the windows on the third story cracked like a shot and black smoke billowed out through the fissures.

There is a club for these people, the people who have waited outside the burning houses knowing that they will not go back in and knowing that the not-going-back-in will ruin them.

Hell, you could use impact attenuators for all levels of trauma—for getting dumped, getting fired. Or could you use a similar device to sort of extend life’s joys? Could you stretch out the moments in which you knew you were safe and loved? Were joy and trauma really the same thing, just positive and negative values of the same ordinals?

Fuck. Concentrate,
he told himself. He said that part aloud, actually, but he was in the backseat and the other two didn’t hear him. They were chatting. Chatting! She was telling him about the jack of spades, about when she’d found it on her suitcase. Mark was smoking a mashed-looking cigarette, keeping its lit tip at the crack of the window. Leila was smiling. Why was she smiling for him? Leo worried that girls, despite all the feminist dogma they’d been taught to espouse, liked jerks. Or, more precisely, that they responded to jerk behavior. He knew this was unfair, to lump girls into one class like this, but he’d been burned before by a girl he loved, who’d left him for an incurious dimwit with a steely gaze and a big, swinging dick.

“Leo.” He came back. Leila’s eyes in the rearview, with meaning meant for him. “Can you do me a favor? Can you text those guys for me?” Maybe this was strategic, her acting all charmed by Mark; she needed to keep him occupied. That would be fine. She handed her funny phone back to Leo. Then she rattled off a number. It was like no phone number he’d ever heard.

He took a moment composing the text message; he didn’t quite understand what Leila had told her Dear Diary contact they were doing. So he went with:
Package collected. Where can u meet us?
He thought that was pretty slick.

“Take me back to my hotel, would you?” said Mark. “It’s downtown.” He named the hotel.

Leila found Leo’s eyes in the rearview again. There was a question in them. Leo understood: Should they even let Mark out of the car? Should they tell him now that they wanted him to betray his employer and join their side? What was the segue to that? Mark’s hotel was five minutes away. To stall for time, Leo started to issue driving directions that bent their trajectory, as a plane circles the airport. They went back across the Fremont Bridge and slipped onto I-5 South, where it scarred the east bank of the Willamette and separated river from city. Then up over the shitty old Marquam Bridge and back down onto the 405. If Mark noticed that they had crossed the same river twice, he didn’t let on. But he was sure to notice if they crossed it a third time on that same loop, so Leo told Leila to peel left off the 405 and drop down to the 30. That put them in a patch of tattered warehouses. As they waited at a red light, a forklift crossed their path moving a mammoth coil of steel.

“This really the way to downtown?” asked Mark, the penny wobbling on a ledge.

“Yeah, well, Leila should’ve turned left back there,” said Leo. “It’s my fault. I wasn’t clear. We’re not far now, though.”

“Who’s Leila?” said Mark. “She’s Lola.”

Fuck. He had forgotten to use her code name.

Leila took it in stride. “No. I’m Leila,” said Leila.

“You told me Lola,” said Mark.

“I did. I was traveling under an assumed name.”

“No shit?”

The little Nokia luminesced in Leo’s hand.
We’ll meet you dwntwn. Come now
was the message on the screen. “Take a right here, Leila,” said Leo. They were on Front Avenue, beneath the bridges. The phone started to issue driving directions, which Leo relayed to Leila. They drove toward the heart of the city.

When they were on Sixteenth, driving south, the phone told them
Get Gas Here
.
Leila had just enough time to turn left into the Radio Cab garage, a brick two-story, inside of which was a gas station that not many people knew was open to the public.

“Ten dollars regular. Cash,” said Leila, to the pump jockey, a hipster with a waxed mustache.

“Do we
really
need gas?” Leo asked Leila, leaning forward.

“What’s going on?” said Mark.

“Not really,” said Leila, “but look,” and she pointed through the windshield to the car in front of them, at the other pump. A deep green Toyota Corolla, ten years old, a bike rack on the roof.

A doppel-car. And looking through the back windshield, Leo could see three people in it. A woman driving, a man in the passenger seat, a man in the backseat leaning forward.

“What’s going on?” said Mark again.

The pump ahead of them finished with a thunk, and the mustachioed pump jockey retracted pump’s nozzle, spun the gas cap, and took two bills from the driver. The car eased out the Kearney Street exit.

Wait three minutes. Then proceed eleventh couch
instructed the phone.

“What’s the eleventh couch?” Leila asked Leo.

“That means Eleventh and Couch Streets. We pronounce it ‘Cooch’ here, for the street. I don’t know why.”