for me immediately. Before he could say another word I got in and drove off and left him there, standing in his overcoat by a bank of trash cans.
x.
IT WAS EIGHT-THIRTY IN the morning by the time I got to storage, with a sore jaw from grinding my teeth and a heart about to explode. Bureaucratic daylight: pedestrian morning blaring, bright with threat. By quarter of ten I was sitting on the floor of my room at Hobie’s house with my mind reeling like a spun-down top wobbling and veering from side to side. Strewn on the carpet around me were a pair of shopping bags; a never-used pup tent; a beige percale pillowcase that still smelled like my bedroom in Vegas; a tin full of assorted Roxicodones and morphs I knew I ought to flush; and a snarl of packing tape into which I’d cut, painstakingly, with an X-Acto knife, twenty minutes of delicate work, pulse throbbing in my fingertips, terrified of going in too hard and nicking the painting by mistake, finally getting the side open, peeling the tape off strip by strip by careful strip, with trembling hands: only to find—sandwiched in cardboard and wrapped with newspaper—a scribbled-up Civics workbook (Democracy, Diversity, and You!).
Bright multicultural throng. On the cover Asian kids, Latino kids, African American kids, Native American kids, a girl in a Muslim head scarf and a white kid in a wheelchair smiled and held hands before an American flag. Inside, within the book’s cheery dull world of good citizenship, where persons of different ethnicities all participated happily in their communities and inner-city kids stood around their housing project with a watering can, caring for a potted tree with branches illustrating the different branches of government, Boris had drawn daggers with his name on them, roses and hearts surrounding Kotku’s initials, and a set of spying eyes, peeping slyly to one side, above a partially filled out sample test:
Why does man need government? to impose ideology, punish wrongdoers, and promote equality and brotherhood among peoples
What are some duties of an American citizen? to vote for Congress, celebrate diversity, and fight the enemies of the state
Hobie, thankfully, was out. The pills I’d swallowed hadn’t worked, and after two hours of twisting and flopping on my bed in a torturous, falling, half-dream state—thoughts flying, exhausted from my heart beating so fast, Boris’s voice still running through my mind—I forced myself to get up, clear the mess strewn round my bedroom, and shower and shave: nicking myself in the process, since my upper lip was almost dentist-chair numb from the nosebleed I’d suffered. Then I made myself a pot of coffee, found a stale scone in the kitchen and forced myself to eat it, and was down in the shop and open for business by noon—just in time to intercept the mail lady in her plastic rain poncho (looking a bit alarmed, standing well back from rheumy-eyed me with my cut lip and my bloody Kleenex), although as she was handing the mail over to me with latex-gloved hands I realized: what was the point? Reeve could write Hobie all he wanted—phone Interpol—who cared any more.
It was raining. Pedestrians huddled and scurrying. Rain pelting hard at the window, rain beading on the plastic garbage bags at the curb. There at the desk, in my musty armchair, I tried to anchor myself or at least take some kind of comfort in the faded silks and dimness of the shop, its bittersweet gloom like rainy dark classrooms of childhood, but the dopamine slam had dropped me hard and left me with the pre-tremblings of something that felt very like death—a sadness you felt in your stomach first, beating on the inside of the forehead, all the darkness I’d shut out roaring back in.
Tunnel vision. All those years I’d drifted along too glassy and insulated for any kind of reality to push through: a delirium which had spun me along on its slow, relaxed wave since childhood, high and lying on the shag carpet in Vegas laughing at the ceiling fan, only I wasn’t laughing any more, Rip van Winkle wincing and holding his head on the ground about a hundred years too late.
What way was there to make it okay? None. In a way Boris had done me a favor by taking the thing—at least, I knew that was how most people would see it; I was off the hook; no one could blame me; the greater part of my problems