Fight Song A Novel - By Joshua Mohr Page 0,48
Dumper put us on round-the-clock duty. Apparently, there was a lawsuit at a company in Copenhagen. An exec drowned swimming off-hours after drinking too much Aquavit.”
“Do you think anybody will ever swim here at this hour?”
“Hope not.”
“I feel like I’m having a dream right now and this is probably supposed to mean something symbolically.”
“My name’s Randy,” the lifeguard says. “I have $50,000 worth of student loans and live with my mom. How could this be either of our dreams?”
Coffen brews some coffee in the kitchen and goes back to his desk, leaving Randy to his music and woes. Bob gets a text from Schumann: Just came again. Tilda’s incredible.
Coffen: What about your wife?
She never understood the quarterback dormant inside me.
Little Schu?
Leave him out of this!
Where’s Björn?
We let him go.
WTF!!??
Tilda thought it was the right thing to do.
This is bad, Coffen writes.
He promised not to hold any grudges.
You believed him?
I give people the benefit of the doubt.
He’s going to kill us.
Tilda’s horny. Ciao, Coffen!
The lack of grudge-holding from Björn doesn’t last long. Forty-five minutes later, Björn is suddenly standing next to Coffen’s desk. Björn is there holding a wee mouse by the tail. And the mouse happens to be wearing a wee football helmet and a wee lil’ football uniform.
“How did you get in here?” Coffen asks.
“I’m holding this,” Björn says, swinging the mouse some, “and your first question is how I got in here?”
“What’s with the mouse?”
“Meet Schumann,” says Björn.
“Give me a break.”
“Here’s the thing about picking fights with a sorcerer,” Björn says. “Wouldn’t you assume the sorcerer’s coming out on top? And this guy didn’t expect any consequences? What, he thought I’d simply let it go and shake his hand and buff his hubcaps and buy him a candied ham like all’s forgiven? I’m not that mature. Ask my ex-wife. When I feel wronged, I fight dirty.”
“What about Tilda?”
“She’s fine. I might make her win the lottery. She’s the one who convinced this maniac”—he points at wee swinging Schumann—“to let me go.”
Schumann makes a series of some chirpy, peeping, mouse-type noises.
Björn shakes his head and says, “More lip service.”
“You understand him?” Coffen asks.
“He keeps trying to apologize,” Björn says, “as if there’s an appropriate way to say sorry for violating my civil liberties and kneeing me in the testicles.”
Bob takes a deep breath. He was caught off guard with Björn appearing out of thin air and waving the rodent around. But now Bob’s pragmatism gets going: There is no such thing as magic. This is merely a mouse, a decoy, a dupe. Stay calm. Everything in life has a rational explanation.
Coffen’s occupation lends itself to such a practical mind-set. In a sense, Bob is a magician when building a game—when he writes code, anything his imagination can dream up, he can make happen in the game. Say the character gets his foot run over by a magical lawn mower, and then the wound bleeds root beer dribbles from the toes, and if you drink the root beer you time-travel to Civil War–era Gettysburg. Nothing is impossible.
This, however, is real life and lots of things are impossible, so Bob says to Björn, “There’s no way that mouse is Schumann.”
“Call him if you don’t believe me.”
Coffen calls Schumann’s cell. Björn continues to swing the mouse by the tail. The voicemail kicks in and there’s a similar series of peeping mouse-type noises. Bob decides not to leave a message.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Coffen says. “You’re a tough audience.”
It dawns on Bob that the magician might be here to exact revenge on him, too. Not the mouse-type vengeance that Bob doesn’t believe in, but the tried-and-true vengeance of alerting the proper authorities that Coffen was an accessory to the first kidnapping. “Björn,” Bob starts pleading, nervously futzing with the plock’s hands, changing the time to 5:15, then to 9:45, finally settling it back at midnight, “I didn’t know what he was doing … I didn’t ask him to kidnap you … I never put him up to this and actually tried to stop him from doing anything crazy. Please don’t turn us over to the cops.”
“I know, I know,” he says. “We of the dark arts can look deep into a man’s mind and appraise the truth. This isn’t on you, which is why he’s a mouse and you’re still sitting there wearing some kind of clown makeup.”
Bob can’t tell Björn the truth, feels too stupid saying it out loud, but likes wearing the makeup because it reminds him of the action. They