wishing the whole time that he’d ordered something for dinner that would’ve come with a fork so he could stab Chris in the throat with it.
The waitress came by and dropped off another plate of nachos without even asking if Stanley wanted one. He was a regular, so she already knew. “Hey, who’s your good-looking friend?”
“Hi, I’m Chris. I’m from out of town.” He pronounced that like it was the name of a place.
“Nice to meet you, Chris from out of town . . . What’s wrong with your eyes, Stanley?”
Stanley had been trying to get her attention that he was being held hostage and to call the cops, so he’d been blinking SOS in Morse code. When Chris glanced back at him, Stanley tried to act normal. “Nothing.”
“Good. I thought you were having a stroke or something.” And then she went back to work.
Chris had not noticed Stanley’s escape attempt because he was really awed by the concept of all you can eat. “Your world is amazing, Stanley. There are several different animal proteins, mashed legumes, and . . . can it be? Are the black circular things olives?”
“Yeah.”
“They haven’t gone extinct yet? Fantastic!”
It was weird to see someone get so excited over something so mundane. “I don’t get you, Chris.”
“And I do not get you, Stanley. Your world is relatively very nice, and you live in the nicest part of it. Your time is an anomaly of luxury. Kings and pharaohs didn’t live like this. Your houses are the size of castles. You warm the air in winter and cool it in summer. You have cured most diseases. You live three times longer than your ancestors. Even your poor people are plump. You have this thing called electronic dance music. All that and no land sharks! How can you have all this and still remain grumpy?”
“Well . . .” Stanley had already listed the general concerns that all right-thinking people were supposed to be freaking out about. “My job isn’t very fulfilling. I feel stuck and I work for a bunch of jerks.”
“I work for an inscrutable crystalline entity that makes me travel through time and space to kill complete strangers.” Chris reached over and patted him on the arm. “So I get you. We are bonding. In the spirit of camaraderie we should drink alcohol together.”
* * *
—
Stanley the IT guy and Chris the time-traveling assassin drank a lot of Ox Knuckles’ finest that night.
Stanley wasn’t sure how many beers he had, but it was a lot. They just kept coming, as did the Jell-O shots, because Chris had been intrigued by the concept. Stanley knew he shouldn’t have, but he didn’t know what else he could do at that point—if the psycho killer wanted Jell-O shots, he wasn’t going to be the one to get in the way of that. He normally didn’t drink much, but he was a bundle of nerves, and a few beers took the edge off. But then he kept taking the edge off until there wasn’t any edge left at all. It turns out you can put down a lot while spending hours arguing philosophy with your polar opposite, and Chris was definitely a glass-is-half-full kind of dude.
“I’m just saying, Stanley, you can’t see the stuff that I’ve seen and not have a positive outlook on life.”
“You just said you lived through the black plague!”
“Yeah, but it got better.”
“But stuff doesn’t always get better,” Stanley insisted, realizing that he had crossed the threshold from drunk to emotionally drunk. “You’ve got to admit sometimes it gets worse.”
“I never said otherwise. Life kind of fluctuates, up, down, sideways once in a while. But it goes on. Mostly.”
“Life’s not fair,” Stanley muttered.
“Obviously. Sometimes terrible things happen to the nicest people, and there’s not a thing they can do about it.”
“Like getting shot,” Stanley said pointedly.
But Chris seemed completely immune to guilt trips. “Among other things. I knew some really nice folks in Pompeii, until big rocks fell out of the sky on them. That was terribly sad. But after bad things happen,