cask of Amontillado and the masonry of ancestral catacombs, a whiff of moldy death. The lights brightened and the audience awakened, table by table, from its daze and clapped with sustained appreciation. My bottle was damn near empty and I snatched it and sidled away before the bartender remembered to charge me. One for the road to Eldorado.
“Okay, you keep an eye on our buddy here—I’m going in,” John said as I returned to our spot. He smoothed what remained of his hair, scooped up As You Know Bob and Poe, and charged off to meet his destiny. L had expeditiously—for such a hulking man—retreated behind the beaded curtain of his alcove. A candle or lantern flickered murkily on the other side. A conga line quickly formed—at least a dozen starry-eyed supplicants bearing books, tattered magazines from the glory days of commercial horror lit, and in John’s case, a pair of cheap marionettes swiped from his kid.
“Good luck, pal,” I said to myself as Michael lolled in his seat, drooling and muttering imprecations in Pig Latin, far beyond paying John’s departure or my grousing any heed. I killed the bottle and left it crossways among the cascade of empty glasses and made for the stairwell, which proved jammed with a secondary crowd of night owls who knew nothing of the reading we’d just survived, or the beautiful thing that W Lindblad swore awaited us all, but were instead standing on line for the midnight jazz club upstairs to throw open its doors. How nice for them to be them and not us!
No one stepped aside, kissy-faces too enamored with one another, too intoxicated by their own adorableness, each of them locked elbow and flank in a swanky retro mass, as I pushed my way through the gauntlet of cocktail dresses, feathery boas and pinstripe suits and white fedoras. The people smelled pretty, and all I could see were their skulls dangling in Hell. Fuck you, Tommy L, fuck you and your little hand puppet too!
Freezing rain tick-tacked on the sidewalk awning, the roofs of parked cars. I tightened the collar of my overcoat and hunched in the stairwell, sharing the smoke of a drunk woman balanced on high heels as she waved a cigarette and cackled into her cell phone. The air was just chilly enough to slice through the fog and remind me of how much alcohol I’d guzzled over the past few hours, and for the first time since I’d walked into the Kremlin I visualized the gun waiting for me in the dresser drawer, back at the hotel. The psycho blonde had accused me of loneliness, but that wasn’t quite right. Loneliness didn’t justify self-destruction. Despair and grief, self-loathing and self-recrimination, failure and desertion… those were justifications.
Yet, the whole suicide plan sounded lame in the frigid glare of the lamps along the boulevard; a piker’s lament to avoid paying the tab. Robert Service once said dying is easy, it’s the keeping on living that’s hard, and of course the poet was on the money, as poets usually are when it comes to smugly self-evident affirmations. I planned to blast a hole through my skull less because of insurmountable heartache, but more because I’d become too weak and too chickenshit to carry the cross one more goddamned bloody step. The marbles were going into the bag and I was headed home, exactly like any selfish, self-indulgent fifth grade snot was wont to do when confronted with one losing throw too many.
I’d almost decided to ask the woman screeching into her phone for a cigarette despite the fact I wasn’t a smoker when John and Michael burst through the doors yelling and flailing their arms. I couldn’t understand a word—a string of guttural yips and clicks and snarls. They were men with hyena heads.
That did the trick. I leaned over the rail and vomited up the dark heart of the cosmos.
* * *
Michael went his way, barking at slow-cruising taxis that refused to stop while John and I hustled and caught the last train out of the city. Our car was empty. A throng of night-shift workers pressed on at one lonely stop, seemed to take our measure and with exchanges of warning looks moved on to the next car. Same deal with the squad of off-duty Army grunts a few minutes later.
John and I didn’t say much. His face resembled forty miles of bad road, as a country philosopher might say; hair disheveled and matted, eyes bulbous and