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Roy feels like a ghost—incorporeal, transparent, disconnected. Excised from what he recognized as his own life and his own time. People look past him and through him, which makes sense, because he’s not sure that any of this is real.
He wants a drink. He wants to wrap both hands around a cold glass of something and feel the condensation on his skin. He wants to be sure that objects won’t just pass right through him.
It was a grave—ha—entrepreneurial oversight not to put a bar directly across the street from the hospital. They’d make a killing, or a dying, or both of the above and quite a lot of tips to boot. Is there some sort of prohibition in the zoning? That sounds like exactly the sort of thing that some well-intentioned paperwork-pushing civil servant would impose on ordinary citizens who just need a fucking drink, now, please, oh, God—
Beyond the endless tarmac sprawl of the parking lot—broken only by the occasional cement-rimmed island with a tragic little tree—Roy finds some dingy storefronts. One of them is a bowling alley.
Fuck it, as Jean would probably say, if Jean was currently conscious. Any port in a storm. Any gasp of air in a flash flood.
If Roy is a ghost, he must be a poltergeist, at least: he’s able to open the door. He proceeds through the hellish, trilling, neon-flashing sensory overload of a small arcade, at the other side of which a lousy bar with sticky counters waits like an oasis next to the bowling lanes.
Roy sits down. The stools are sticky, too. They’re upholstered with that awful glittery vinyl that someone decided looked fun and futuristic circa 1998 and imposed on every single institution that bills itself as an entertainment venue from there on out.
The guy leaning back against the shelves and shelves of hideous rentable bowling shoes gives Roy a pitying look, which he supposes he has probably earned.
“Do you have anything hard?” Roy asks. “Or is it just a beer and wine license?”
“Sorry,” the guy says. He must get this several times a day. Roy pities him right back. Take that. “Here.”
The lamination on the faded paper menu is also sticky. Roy decides not to think about it too much. There is nothing on tap that he would drink under ordinary circumstances, but they don’t list any potent cocktails featuring bowling ball lubricant that would poison him enough to wipe out his short-term memory, and the circumstances have not been ordinary since he got the call.
“Do you have a recommendation?” Roy asks.
The guy grimaces. “Not really.”
Aunt Chris will sense it from across the country and fly in on a red-eye from Boca Raton to beat him with a lead pipe if he drinks watered-down domestic beer in a bowling alley. The sigh building in his throat aches the same way as suppressed tears—hot and hard, itching under the skin.
Wine would get him shitfaced much more efficiently, but regardless of what happens, he’ll have to drive home at some ungodly hour tonight. Chris wouldn’t even bother with air travel if he tried that one: she’d kill him with her mind from the other side of the continental United States.
The pickings are slim. Reality is unsteady. Life is precarious.
“Can you get me a Guinness?” Roy asks. It’s probably what Jean would want.
He shouldn’t think like that—in the conditional tense, partway to the past. Jean is very likely to live.
He shouldn't think like that, either. Shouldn’t conceptualize people like part of a roulette game, no matter how accurate it is.
“Sure thing,” the barkeep—shoekeep—ballkeep?—says. Roy feels like he blinks just once, albeit very slowly, and then there’s a clear plastic cup in front of him. The liquid is a murky pale brown, with a valiant but wretchedly half-hearted head. Roy thinks Boston Saint Patrick’s Day Irish. Roy thinks they need to clean their lines and their faucets before they poison someone. Roy thinks the health inspectors who get assigned to bowling alleys probably don’t enjoy their jobs.
The cup bears a somewhat faded impression of a logo with two crossed bowling pins encircled by a bright yellow shooting star. On the upside, if Roy finds himself desperate enough to try to drink this, he’s two doors down from the hospital. They’ll definitely get here in time.
“Thank you,” he says, and he fishes out double the price in cash to leave on the counter. It’s eight on a weeknight, and the combination of empty lanes and empty seats and tinny nineties one-hit wonders blaring from the speakers makes his skin crawl. Maybe he’ll stand outside and see how slowly he can pour this into the gutter. Do the storm drains here flow to the bay? Maybe he’d better not.
More zombie than ghost to it, now, as he lets his feet carry him into the concentrated auditory and visual assault of the arcade again. The low whine of taxed electronics engulfs him, interrupted at jagged intervals by the 8-bit howl of any of a dozen franchise theme songs all at once. Endless screens scroll hard-won scores from some bygone era when you couldn’t download a hundred diversions with better graphics onto your phone without even getting on the wifi. There’s an air hockey table.
The one at the bar around the corner from their office is cleaner than this model. He should have bought one and crammed it into their tiny breakroom like Jean kept needling him about.
He should have done a lot of things.
A soft but very emphatic “Fuck” draws his gaze away from the seductive green glow of the exit sign.
Sandwiched in between Mortal Kombat 4 and Rampage World Tour is a classic claw game, with a mound of cheap plush animals enclosed in glass. Standing in front of it, right hand fixed around the joystick, left palm pressed against the plexiglass, is a short blond with perfect shoulders and perfect hair and an ass that would have made Helen of Troy weep for sheer envy.
Roy’s feet gravitate a few steps closer, and then a few steps closer than that. The problem with feet—the curse and the blessing—is the way they take the rest of you with them.
The blond’s right hand is riddled with so many white scars that Roy mistakes them for an early-era Hot Topic fishnet glove at first glance. Tight black jeans, tight black leather jacket—not his fault that he made a rational association, is it? There’s a little silver cuff ring high on the shell of the blond’s right ear, glinting in the dizzily shifting multicolored light.
He watches the claw device sway back and forth, silver wires trailing. His gaze dips down to that scarred right hand again—a delicate touch this time, and then the blond mutters a much less delicate “Fucker” and drops the claw. It lands with pulverizing force directly on top of a little purple plush cat with huge yellow eyes and pale blue stripes. The arms curl inward, scrape along the fur, gain no purchase, and firmly close. The whole thing slithers back up to the ceiling of the cage, jerks its way over to the closest wall above the prize slot, releases an armful of mockingly empty air, and then swings back into the center again.
The blond bumps his closed fist against the glass—resignation, not rage—and then sighs. He rummages in his pocket, and metal clinks, and he takes out another token and turns it between his thumb and his first finger.
“It has to be the cat,” he says without even looking over. Roy would be terrifically embarrassed if he had any of the day’s allotted feelings left. “And I only accept backseat driving from mechanical engineers.”
“I’m sorry,” Roy says, since nothing else sounds any closer to adequate.
“Relax,” the blond says, sliding the new token into the machine without taking his eyes off the shining legs of the claw. “I don’t care if you hang out. I suck at this just as much when people aren’t watching. What are you in for?”
“What?” Roy says, which proves the longstanding theory that he can get too tired to say I beg your pardon.
The blond jerks his head in the direction of the hospital, and his ponytail swings. “Who are you visiting?”
Roy doesn’t have enough left in him to muster chagrin. “Is it that obvious?”
“Nah,” the blond says, and Roy can only just see the reflection of a faint smile in the glass—whip-quick, and then it’s gone. “I just spend a lot of time around here, and I still remember the first time. You don’t know how long it’s gonna take, or what you should bring, or what the hell you’re supposed to do with your hands. You don’t want to eat, but you get so thirsty, and you start out thinking you can handle it right up until you really, really can’t. So then you stop off at the first place you can find and try to get a drink.”
Roy can’t quite tell if that’s evidence in favor of the ghost thing, or leans more towards perambulating undead. On the one hand, this total stranger sees right through him; on the other, it feels like his nervous system has short-circuited and left the rest of his corpse unmoored from anything that passes for intellect.
“‘Try’ may be the operative word there,” Roy says. “I’m not sure this qualifies as a drink in the traditional sense.”
The blond snickers, nudging the joystick. The claw propels its silver skeleton slowly, stutteringly across the cage. “If you keep going for another half a block, you can get a can of Four Loko at the convenience store and make a night of it. I keep telling Marnie down at the gift shop that they’d make bank if they started selling those little airplane-sized bottles of the hard shit.”
He didn’t push at all about the question of who Roy was visiting, or why—just let the conversation veer away towards something simpler, safer, kinder. Easy. Merciful.
He jams his thumb down on the red button topping the joystick. The claw drops. Its spindly fingers caress the purple cat’s head and then slide away.
“Fuuuuuuck,” the blond groans, bumping his forehead to the glass just a touch too gently to qualify as banging his head against a wall.
“Close friend of mine,” Roy says. The plastic containing his not-a-Guinness sweats into his already clammy palm. “Car accident.”
The blond turns to look at him, mouth twisting. His eyes are even more arresting than his ass, which Roy wouldn’t have thought possible. “Ah, shit.”
Ah, shit. Roy should probably just get that tattooed across his collarbones as a warning. Put some decorative barbed wire around it. Oleanders. A crown of flame.
“He was talking two months ago about quitting and finding another job,” Roy says, because the floodgates are open now, and the city is doomed. “I convinced him to stay a little longer while he thought about it. He was out driving for us when it happened.” The bare bulbs that rim the marquee of the claw machine make it look like a Hollywood starlet’s changing room mirror, but Roy’s grateful that it’s not reflective. “They don’t know if he’s ever going to walk again. I haven’t figured out yet how I’m going to live with that.”
“Same way you live with everything else,” the blond says. “One breath after another. That’s all it is, and that’s all you get.”
“Some breaths are easier than others,” Roy says.
“You’re tellin’ me,” the blond says. He takes out another token and taps the edge against the console next to the joystick twice before he puts it in the slot.
Then he takes a deep breath, holds it, maneuvers the joystick, bites his lip, leans in so close that his nose almost touches the glass, and drops the claw.
Miss.
“My brother’s got hepatocellular carcinoma,” he says. With a mechanical regularity this time, he reaches into his jeans pocket, extracts another token, and thumbs it into the slot. “I always stick around right up until he goes in for radiation, but I can’t wait up there. Makes me crazy. Have to give my brain something else to do, or I’ll fuckin’ lose it, and they’ve got enough problems, so I started coming down here. My friend’s grandma used to bring us here when our mom was sick, and I always promised Al I’d get him one of these stupid fucking cats—only their heads are so squishy that the game’s rigged against them. More than it’s normally rigged. You know these things are programmed to have a lower grip strength most of the time, and to drop shit on purpose at regular time intervals so that they stay profitable? It’s a pain in the ass.”
“I’m sorry,” Roy says again. He tries not to wince, but he isn’t particularly successful. All of his efforts seem a touch more challenging while standing in an overwhelming liminal space, clinging to a lousy impersonation of a Guinness and the shreds of his composure. “You probably get that all the time, but… shit. Well. I think I read something one time, about claw games. They were outlawed in a couple of states where they qualified as gambling, possibly?”
“Sounds about right,” the blond says. “Maybe one of these days I’ll get smart and just grab a different animal that’s easier to get, check the tag to see who made it, and see if I can buy one damn cat from the wholesaler.”
He has to push deeper into his pocket this time to scrounge up a token. Roy doesn’t know how many he’s gone through—tonight, ever—but is willing to bet that the principle of the thing will outweigh the workaround, at the rate he’s going.
The claw dutifully fails its disciple yet again, and this time the sigh is “Come on,” with a resignation that resonates.
The blond steps back from the nose-to-the-glass position for a second, peels his jacket off, and ties it around his waist, sneaking a glance over at Roy. Roy tries to sneak a glance back and gets distracted by the bright red gauze tape wrapped around the blond’s left elbow, pinning a cotton ball to the inside.
“Al can’t take mine,” the blond says. “He’s type O, because of course he fucking is, but I just donate any time I have to come in anyway. I figure that at least maybe it can help someone else. Maybe this time the universe will care.”
Roy watches his fingers curl around the top of the joystick—tightly, and then looser. Almost gentle.
“O negative?” Roy asks.
The blond glances over at him—it’s just surprise at first, but then the realization dawns, and he starts grinning so broadly that it lights up his whole face. Even the circles under his eyes don’t look so deep.
“You shit me,” the blond says. “Well? What the hell are you still doing here? Get over there and tell them to stick a needle in your arm.”
“One second,” Roy says.
He sets the shitty beer down on the end of a pinball placket with a relatively shallow incline and walks over to the grimy, battered-looking token dispensing machine. On his way over to it, he catches up one of the orange plastic buckets provided for collecting paper prize tickets.
He puts the bucket under the collection bowl for tokens, pulls out his wallet, and feeds two twenty dollar bills into the machine. The ringing of a deluge of cheap brass coins clinking against each other makes him feel slightly dizzy, but at least ghosts probably don’t experience vertigo.
He sweeps the last few stragglers into the bucket, brings it back over, and sets it down on the floor at the blond’s feet.
“Give ’em hell,” he says.
The beaming grin is more than he ever would have hoped for, on a night like this one. That’s victory enough.
“Hey, hold up,” the blond says as Roy gives him a fake salute and starts to turn towards the door. “Give me your phone.”
Roy knows—deep-down, from the feeble warmth climbing the inside of his sternum, with a strange and unshakable certainty he can’t explain—that forty dollars of tokens are worth a thousand times more to this kid than a black market iPhone sale.
Hell, maybe he doesn’t even have a phone. Roy’s not sure how he could fit one into the pockets of those pants.
Roy unlocks his and holds it out.
The blond flashes him another weary but undaunted sunspot grin and navigates immediately over to Roy’s contacts to create a new one. “Let me know how it goes, okay? I mean it. This shit’s so much worse when you have to do it alone. And listen to the phlebotomists when they tell you to sit down and drink water for fifteen minutes, because a lot of people pass out the first time, and that’s really fucking embarrassing.”
He hands the phone back. Roy glimpses Ed at the top, accompanied by the little yellow cat face emoji, before he slides it back into his pocket.
“Thank you,” he says.
“Whatever,” Ed says, warmly. He leans down, grasps the bottom of his left pants leg, and tugs the tight jeans up just enough to show… silver. Metal—intricate and ankle-shaped. “And—y’know. With your friend. Keep in mind that there are a lot of things they say you’ll never do again. They have to say that. And sometimes they’re right, sure, but… not every time.”
“Not every time,” Roy says. He thinks he believes it. “I’ll text you. Take care, all right?”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Ed says, grinning at him. “What animal do you want out of this fucking thing after I get the cat?”
“If you get the cat,” Roy says.
Ed gives him the finger. He bows. Ed has a gorgeous laugh to match the gorgeous everything else. Jean’s alive. Jean might not hate him—or at least not forever. They’re not right every time.
“Surprise me,” Roy says, and starts for the door.