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The dark-haired man made Sue Roundtree nervous. Of course you got all kinds at the emergency room, but this one was calm, too calm, alert, observant. Like he was waiting for someone, but that wasn’t really the purpose of the emergency room, was it? Other people had a weird feeling about him, too; but then they looked at his file and mumbled something about an injury, so he was okay to be there, but apparently it wasn’t serious enough to treat him right away. So the man stayed there, and whenever his roaming gaze landed on Sue, she looked away quickly, feeling slightly foolish for doing so, and yet at the same time relieved.
Lester Nygaard did not notice the dark-haired man at first. He was too busy being in incredible pain from a broken nose, which eventually settled into a persistent ache—impossible to function around, but you sort of felt you ought to, since there were occasional moments when you forgot about the pain, just for a second. That was evidently why they thought it was okay to just let him sit here waiting, with an ice pack for comfort. Wasn’t like he was bleeding out or anything.
Lester opened the can of grape Faygo he’d bought—for a dollar twenty-five!—from the hospital vending machine and swiftly found that he couldn’t drink from it without bumping his nose. What he really needed was—
A straw. It appeared before him, wrapped in crisp white paper, fully intact, and Lester looked over to see who held it, even as he quickly took it. It had come from a man two seats down, a man who was very out of place in Lester’s existence. He was broad-shouldered, muscular, though still with a sleek look about him—this was someone who ‘worked out’ in the way that normal people didn’t really have time or energy for. Dark hair, swept back from a pale face—somehow attractively fair, not sun-deprived pallid. Huge hands. Dressed all in black, hard to even tell exactly what he was wearing. High cheekbones, full lips, blazing blue eyes focused right on Lester. This was not someone who got his genes from the muddy, shallow pool of the upper Midwest.
Lester suddenly remembered he was supposed to say something. “Oh, thanks, sorry,” he stammered, throwing in several sentiments.
The man nodded, his expression grave. “You need it,” he proclaimed, and his voice was deep, smooth, possibly accented, and Lester found himself mesmerized again, instead of responding like a normal, polite human being.
“Ah jeez, thanks,” he sputtered. What else was there to do but unwrap the straw and use it, sighing with rare satisfaction when he finally tasted the bubbly, sugary, allegedly grape-flavored concoction (which was, however, warm). Was it normal for people to carry straws around with them? Well, one of his uncles always did—straws, napkins, plasticware, the detritus of fast food take-out—the better to whip out a fork and save the day just when everyone thought all hope was lost. Maybe this fella was the same way. Though in no other way did he seem similar to Lester’s Uncle Marty.
“What happened?” the man asked after a moment, his gaze intense. This was no mere polite inquiry between strangers.
But Lester was too preoccupied to give that much thought. Someone asked you a question, you tried to answer it. And this was an obvious question whose answer Lester had been chewing on almost since he’d picked himself up off the sidewalk. “Well, it was a misunderstanding, you know,” he downplayed. It was good practice for everyone else who would soon ask.
The man blinked at him slowly, as if he found this answer wholly unsatisfactory. “Did you misunderstand him?” he queried. “Or did he misunderstand you?”
The question frazzled Lester, who felt it was non-applicable. “Ah jeez, what? Sorry,” he responded in confusion.
Elegantly, as if gliding through water, the man slid into the chair right next to Lester. Now Lester could smell him—sort of exotic but also comfortingly familiar at the same time, like the aftershave of a favorite relative he hadn’t smelled in decades. It relaxed him slightly, even as the man’s physical presence overwhelmed his other senses. “There is no need to apologize,” he intoned, his voice low and silky. “I wondered, who misunderstood whom?”
Lester blinked at him, trying to answer, and realized that indeed, the question was non-applicable, because there really hadn’t been any misunderstanding at all. He’d thought Sam was going to punch him, and really the man was just toying with him; but even Lester could see, with blinding clarity if only for an instant, that this did not count as a misunderstanding.
The man was waiting patiently for him to answer. “Well, it was three against one, I don’t mind telling ya,” Lester finally confessed, biting off the words. Somehow it was freeing to admit this, but also frightening, and he quickly dialed back. “I mean, two of them were boys, but big for their age. And then their dad—he’s a big fella.”
“He hit you in front of his children?” the dark-haired man rephrased. His voice was steady, but there was a deep layer that was appalled.
“I—I embarrassed him,” Lester reasoned quickly, “in front of his children.” That’s what had happened, wasn’t it? He leaned in closer to the skeptical stranger, dropping his voice. “You see, he mentioned, er, well, with my wife—” Vague hand gestures got his point across, he hoped. “Only he didn’t know she was my wife now, and his sons laughed—” He felt sick to his stomach, remembering Pearl’s assets being bandied about by loutish teenagers. “Well, she does have soft hands,” he added in a mumble.
The man’s brow furrowed slightly, a motion Lester found oddly fascinating. “He slept with your wife—”
“No, not slept, exactly—” Lester tried to clarify, because somehow that was important.
“—he had relations with your wife, and he hit you in front of his children,” the man summarized slowly, as if making sure the situation sunk in fully, “and you’re worried about embarrassing him?”
“Well, Sam’s very—” It was indeed starting to sink in for Lester. The whole twisted situation. “Back in high school—once he put me in an oil drum, and rolled it onto the highway.” He didn’t know why he was telling this to a stranger. Maybe because he had to tell someone, or it would burst out of him like a hideous creature, made of hate and rage. He could feel it now, clawing at the inside of his chest—
“He bullied you in high school?” The stranger had rested his hand on Lester’s arm, an unexpected but not necessarily unwelcome gesture that coincided with the cooling of his ire.
“Four years,” Lester ground out. There was something satisfying in putting a name on it, a name that was bad, that painted the perpetrator in the right light. “Sam was always a bully.”
“Sam--?”
“Sam Hess.”
The stranger nodded, and Lester wondered briefly if he knew Sam, or perhaps was even friends with him. The town was small enough that you never knew who you might run into, and Lester began to tense up. The man didn’t pull away, however. In fact his thumb started rubbing a gentle circle on Lester’s arm, which was just a little distracting.
“If someone did that to me,” he replied slowly, thoughtfully, “I would be very angry at him.”
“Oh, well, heck—” Lester was about to shrug it off like he always did, the momentary triumph of truth too difficult to maintain.
“I don’t think such a person deserves to live.” Lester’s eyes jerked up to meet the stranger’s, which blazed blue like stars. People said things like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna kill him,’ all the time, but no one said it quite like this man, the tone, the gravity. “He contributes nothing to the world but misery.”
Lester pulled back slightly, feeling uncomfortable now, and dropped his arm from under the man’s hand. “Ah jeez, if you hate him so much, maybe you should just kill him for me!” he joked. He was trying to break the sudden tension he felt; but there was an underlying desperation and bitterness that he couldn’t quite conceal. He’d have to work on that.
Instead of getting what Lester was trying to do, though—distance himself from the conversation—the stranger stayed where he was, and raised an eyebrow in a suggestive way, a way that implied outright murder was not something unreasonable. Lester forced himself to laugh, nervously; when the man’s expression still waited patiently, he leaned back in quickly.
“I was just joking,” he stated explicitly, glancing around to see if anyone might be listening. “Heck, ya know, you don’t just—” He looked around again. “—you don’t just kill people you don’t like!” The world was not a video game.
“My name is Magnus,” the man said unexpectedly. He seemed to be searching Lester’s face for something. “Do you remember me?”
Lester felt sure he would have remembered this man. “Oh, have we met before?” he asked anyway.
After a moment Magnus smiled, slightly forced, resigned. “No, I suppose not,” he allowed, which seemed an odd conclusion to the inquiry. “What’s your name?”
“Lester,” he replied. He watched Magnus’s upper body for any sign that he was going to try and shake hands—Lester wanted to be prepared to respond in kind, of course. “Um, what brings you here?” If they were going to talk about all of Lester’s private concerns—something he was quite regretting now—they should do the same for Magnus.
He could tell right away the other man played things closer to the vest than Lester did, which irritated him. “Oh, nothing serious,” Magnus claimed, with a dismissive shrug. Wasn’t that why people used the emergency room? He leaned on the arm of the chair, putting himself in Lester’s personal space. “I think I’ll be in town for a while, if you’re looking for me,” he stated significantly.
“Why—why would I be looking for you?” Lester stuttered, fearful that he’d missed something. Then he realized how rude that might sound. “I mean, sure, that’s good to know,” he corrected. Mustn’t be rude, after all.