Extraordinary Adventures Page 9

  “Do you want me to call Serena?” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Serena, Officer Stanton.” He let that sink in. “I have her card,” he said.

  Thomas Edison visibly weighed his options, executed some complicated math in his mind, and then, with a shrug, he gave in.

  “Fuck it, Mr. B.,” he said, angry, compliant against his will. “Go ahead. Be my freakin’ guest. It’s your funeral.”

  And this is when things got crazy.

  He opened the door and the man there—who looked like a boy at first, he was so small, so miniature—leaped up from his seat on the toilet and fumbled for a gun, which was set on the bathtub rim behind him. Bronfman had never seen a gun in person, and it was so big, much bigger than he’d imagined. It was bigger than a small cat. Across the sink was a long plastic cutting board with great pyramids of white powder and smaller piles of white powder, and even smaller piles, and small bags of plastic full of white powder. Bronfman knew what it was, of course, because he had seen something very similar on television. Drugs. The little man was making drugs. He was probably in his mid-twenties, dark-skinned in a white sleeveless undershirt, tattooed ferociously, with pockmarked cheeks.

  He had the gun in his hand, but he held it by his side. His hand was trembling. His hand was trembling as if it wanted to shoot Bronfman, but his arm was holding it back.

  “Tommy,” the man said with a high, sharp voice. “What the fuck!”

  “It’s nothing,” Thomas said. He smiled and laughed, but not even Bronfman bought it. Thomas was scared, too. “Seriously, it’s cool. This is my neighbor, Bronfman—Mr. B., I call him, and he’s a cool dude. Aren’t you, Mr. B.?”

  Bronfman wanted to agree with Thomas—that seemed the best choice among the choices he had. But his brain was flatlining, and the truth was he wasn’t that much of a cool dude. The little man raised the gun, then lowered it. His whole body was shaking now. He really wanted to shoot Bronfman. He wanted to kill him. This was clear.

  The man bit his lip to keep from exploding; that’s how it appeared to Bronfman, anyway. “Scared the fuck out of me,” he said. “Fuck, Tommy. You think this is a game? It’s not a game. It’s fucking real life and it’s also like a war, a real life war, and in a war there are casualties.” He glared at Bronfman. Then at Thomas. “So we going to do this or what? Are we okay? Are we okay? Are we fucking okay?”

  “We’re okay,” Thomas said.

  “We’re okay,” Bronfman said. “Very much so.”

  The man looked at Bronfman with such malice that he thought he might bite him. Instead, he pressed the nose of the gun into Bronfman’s stomach—quite hard, too, so hard it hurt. It cut. Bronfman winced. “And that’s not even a bullet,” the man said. “This hurts, but a bullet is pain. So you know, okay, I’m reserving one of my bullets for you. Gonna put your name on it. Just in case. What’s your fucking name again?”

  “Bronfman,” Bronfman said.

  “Bronfman? What kind of fucking name is that?”

  Bronfman tried to speak. He thought that he was going to say something, but no words came out. He opened his mouth and one small sound did come out, like a dying dog’s final whimper.

  “You want to live, Bronfman?”

  “Yes,” Bronfman said. “I want to, very much.”

  “Then act like it,” the little man said, kicking the door shut and slamming it hard, half an inch away from Bronfman’s face.

  Thomas took Bronfman by the shoulders, one hand clamped on either side. And then, his lips so close to Bronfman’s ear that Bronfman could feel the heat of his breath, he said, “I told you we shouldn’t have gone in there.” Bronfman knew there was no way he could escape Thomas’s grip. Cowboy up! he thought. But there was no sense in that now. He could flail and kick and scream and bite and cowboy the hell out of it, but there was nothing he could do. He had not been blessed with native strength. His muscles were no more than scarves around his bones. Thomas—he was strong. He could break Bronfman. But he wouldn’t. Thomas wouldn’t kill him. He would just make him wish he were dead. He never should have come in. He knew too much now. Bronfman felt himself crumbling, his knees unable to support his weight. His heart wasn’t beating so crazily fast anymore. It had stopped. He couldn’t breathe if he wanted to, and he wasn’t sure he did want to.

  Thomas Edison hugged him.

  “I’ve got your back, Mr. B.,” he whispered into Bronfman’s ear. “You’re my neighbor, dude. You’re part of my tribe. You get robbed, I get robbed. If I had been here when that shit went down, believe me, I’d have shot first and asked questions later.”

  Thomas wouldn’t let him out of his sticky hug. “Okay,” Bronfman said into his shoulder. “Okay. Thanks, Tommy.”

  “Want to see it?”

  “See what?”

  “My gun,” he said. “The Glock. It’s a lot bigger than his.”

  “I don’t think so,” Bronfman said.

  “It will take a man’s head right off.”

  “Really?”

  Thomas finally let him go. “It would have been nothing for me to wipe that scum off the face of the fucking earth. I just wish I hadn’t been out looking for a job when it happened.”

  “No,” Bronfman said. “You definitely should have been looking for a job. You need a job.”

  “But you get it, right? I’m there for you. And you’re there for me. This”—he indicated with his eyes what was going on behind the bathroom door—“this is nothing. It’s business. That’s all it is. But it’s not your business. And it’s definitely not the business of Serena fucking Stanton. Your shit’s not here. That’s what this was all about. You thought I had it and I didn’t. You unjustly accused me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bronfman said. “I—”

  Thomas took Bronfman’s jaw in his hands—his jaw—and closed it. And he held it closed. “You don’t need to apologize. Let’s forget it ever happened—all of this. Because I get it. Look at me. Look how I live. If I were you, Mr. B., I’d think it was me, too. But I’m not that guy. I’m not. You feel me?”

  Thomas let go of his jaw, and Bronfman tried to smile, but all he could manage was a face twitch. “I feel you,” he said. He had heard people say that, and he had always wanted to say it himself. That he had the opportunity to do so now made him, in light of what had just happened, inordinately happy. He forgave Thomas Edison completely. “I feel you,” he said again.

  FIVE

  There was no gunplay that evening, no music, no real noise of any kind. But it didn’t matter. Bronfman, alone in his apartment, pacing from room to empty room, found it impossible to “take it easy.” He couldn’t fully breathe. The air could not get all the way to the bottom of his lungs. He was gasping, sweat dripping down both sides of his face, down the shallow canal of his chest. He imagined a bullet with his name on it, and how big a bullet it would have to be in order to accommodate his entire name. None of this was good, not at all.

  He had to get out, so he walked to an Italian restaurant a few blocks away. It was called Mario’s. It reminded him of a place he’d gone to with his mother when he was a kid, every Sunday night. Mario’s didn’t serve the best food in the world, but the plastic red-checkered tablecloths, and the waiters with their bow ties and their charming accents, gave the place an authentic Italian feel. Not that Bronfman knew what Italy felt like; he had never been there. Mario himself was a tiny old Sicilian with only three or four teeth left. He always made his customers smile; in fact, he wouldn’t leave you alone until you did.

  Furtively, Bronfman spied the patrons at the other tables. They weren’t eating dinner the way he was eating dinner. Bronfman was eating to live, because without food he would die, and Mario’s offered adequate sustenance. For these other people—families, couples, a middle-aged woman out with her grandfather—eating was a kind of celebration, like dancing. Or it was like a very small party. Or it was like a modern reenactment of something our most distant ancestors did, sharing food as a
n expression of friendship and love. Bronfman was just slopping calories into his mouth.

  The spaghetti was very good, though. Eating always made him feel better, no matter what. He read the directions on a jar of chili flakes and thought of Sheila. All it said was “Use sparingly.” And when he was done he paid up, and left.

  It was cooler on his way back home, now that the night had come. It wasn’t windy, but the cars speeding past him made it feel as if it was. It was only when a truck passed and blew his tie into his face that Bronfman realized he had forgotten to take it off. He took it off and stuffed it into his back pocket, where, he knew, it must have looked like a tail. It didn’t matter to him now. A patrol car sped by, but it was going too fast for Bronfman to see whether it was Officer Stanton. Bronfman almost waved, but he worried that if he did the officer, whoever it was, might think he was in trouble and stop and then get upset when he discovered that Bronfman was fine and had just waved to say hello.

  Should he call Officer Stanton? The wild idea just flew into his head the way an errant bird would fly through an open window. Not to tell her about the drugs his neighbor was selling—he was already detaching from that part of his life, putting distance between himself and a reality that he wanted no part of—but to ask her out on a date, and then another and another and another, and then all of a sudden spring it on her: Would you like to join me for a weekend at the beach? No matter how ridiculous, no matter how unrealistic, no matter how inconceivable something was, it appeared the mind could think whatever it wanted anytime it wanted to. Bronfman’s mind was like an untrained puppy.

  The truth was he should call his mother; she would want to know what happened. And years ago he would have called her. Even a few months ago, he would have called her. But now, the way things were for her, the slippage she was showing, it didn’t make sense to. What could she offer him? And she may not even remember that he had been robbed; why upset her all over again? The mother he remembered, the one who had raised him with such courageous flippancy, was gone, and in her place was a fading image, like a Polaroid picture in reverse. This was probably why the table at Mario’s felt so big. It wasn’t just at dinner that he was alone; he was alone wherever in the world he happened to be. Oh, Bronfman, he thought. Snap out of it! Don’t be that guy. Don’t be Bronfman!

  At night, King’s Manor turned a phosphorus yellow. Parking-lot lights—towering above everything on single, impossibly thin, metal legs—illuminated the asphalt like a dozen jaundiced suns. Years ago real gangs used to hang out here, apparently, and shoot one another in the dark. Now that it was bright as noon here, the gangs had found other places to die.

  He turned into the complex just as some of Thomas Edison’s friends were getting out of a car. He recognized them. There was the fat one, the Hispanic one, the pretty girl. They always came together in the same old car. Bronfman stopped and watched them pour out of the car, laughing. Why did they always come here? Didn’t they have anywhere better to go? Apparently not, because who would choose to come to a place like this if there was anywhere else that would have them? Thomas Edison, like Bronfman, was performing a service.

  But nothing appeared to bother them now, laughing and laughing as they mounted the stoop to Thomas Edison’s place, knocking with outrageous force at Thomas’s door. “Police!” the fat one said. “Open up, motherfucker!”

  Thomas Edison opened up, and the crowd poured in.

  The girl hung back, though. She was lighting a cigarette, and her face glowed in the tiny firelight. He had seen her in passing, her features Japanese, or Korean, or Chinese—he didn’t know. She had hair so black that Bronfman thought of it as the black to which all other blacks could be compared, the origin, the source of the color. Bronfman had never been closer than ten feet away and had never spoken to her, but he had a little visual crush on her, the same sort of visual crush he had on a lot of women.

  But as the match flamed, momentarily bright as a torch, he could see that she was wearing a hat. She was wearing … a cowboy hat. And there was no mistaking it, none. It was Bronfman’s hat. She was wearing Bronfman’s cowboy hat. The silver star shone like a real one, reflecting the flame as she brought it toward her lips.

  Bronfman loved that hat. One of his many “uncles”—Kevin, his name was, or Kev—had taken Bronfman to a fair, and he had won it for him, throwing darts at balloons. What do you want, my man? The hat or the bunny? The hat. And Kevin won it. The hat fit so perfectly on his tiny head. It was a perfect fit in every way, and, magically, it turned Bronfman into a kind of cowboy, at least in his own mind. Bronfman was eleven, and he loved the hat so much that it hurt him—it made him ache. He wouldn’t take it off. He wore it every single day. He wore it when he went to bed. When he woke up and found it on the floor beside the bed, he picked it up immediately and placed it on his head. When school started in September, he wore it there as well, every single day, until he was told that he couldn’t wear a cowboy hat to school. This was arduous, but he endured its absence by thinking about it all day long. The first thing he did when he got home was find the hat and set it, at a jaunty angle, on his head, check himself out in the full-length mirror on the back of his bedroom door. It was as if with the hat he were trying to create a different version of the self he was so clearly becoming.

  He was wearing the hat the day he got hit by a car. Eleven and a half years old, Bronfman had wandered into the street, his mind on other things, oblivious of everything, and an old lady in her Buick LeSabre, driving slowly but mindlessly, bumped into him and knocked him about three feet into the sky. He floated in slow motion and landed on his back, on his own grassy lawn, sucking air.

  Miraculously, he wasn’t hurt—not a scratch on him. Even the hat hadn’t budged. It remained on his head throughout his short flight and hard landing as if it were glued there, as if it were a part of him. That was the most remarkable feature of the whole potentially fatal adventure: the hat stayed on. “That’s one lucky hat!” Kev said, and his mother, who always tried to believe in bigger things, said that he was blessed.

  But that was then, and this was now. The miraculous hat was in the possession of another.

  “Hey!” he called out to the girl—bravely, he thought. He ran toward her and the justice he was due. “Hey!”

  Apparently she heard him, because she dropped the still burning match on the ground and looked up, coolly watching him run toward her, this strange man waving and bellowing “Hey! Hey!” He was out of breath by the time he reached her. Smoke floated like fog around her head.

  “Can I help you?” she said.

  He took a few more breaths and, when he was able to speak, said, “Where did you get that hat?”

  She looked at Bronfman, a puzzled expression, and then shook her head and took another deep pull on the cigarette. “Why?” she said. “You want one like it?”

  “No,” he said. Then, “Yes. I mean—”

  “I’ve had this hat for a really long time,” she said. She never for a second stopped looking at Bronfman. She didn’t even blink. “Long as I can remember. It’s, like, my favorite thing. Not sure they make them anymore. I could ask my pop.”

  “Wait. So that’s your hat?” he said.

  “Of course it is. Would I be wearing it if it wasn’t?”

  Bronfman took a long look at it. It was his hat—or, rather, it was the same type of hat his hat was. But his hat was not unique in the world. Who knew how many thousands had been manufactured at the cowboy-hat factory way back when. That she would have one and be wearing it the very night his went missing was a coincidence that he found hard to swallow. But he swallowed it. Not swallowing meant that he would have had to take it (whatever it was) to the next level (wherever that was), and he wasn’t ready to go there yet. Or probably ever. He felt the welt rising on his stomach, where the gun had dug a hole.

  “I’m Coco,” she said, extending her hand.

  Her hand was as small as a child’s.

  “Bronfman,” he said.
“I’m Tommy’s next-door neighbor.”

  “Well, what do you know,” she said. “Howdy, Bronfman.”

  She offered him the rest of her cigarette and he declined, so she dropped it right there on the sidewalk and crushed it with the heel of her shoe, and, without even saying goodbye, hopped on the stoop and absconded into Thomas Edison’s apartment, closing the door behind her, disappearing into the smoky gloom.

  DAY

  EIGHT

  ONE

  Almost precisely midway between the seven and ten days Carla D’Angelo had promised, Bronfman received the brochure, the pamphlet, and the necessary paperwork. It was all very glossy, very first-class. Very real. And what nice photographs. The condominiums were beyond elegant—sleek and metal, and plush carpets, and overstuffed couches, and gigantic ottomans, and the balcony views of oceanic infinity. And bright. The sunlight seemed to come in a purer form in Destin. It was like butter. Even the bathroom impressed. No one used shower curtains anymore, apparently. Everything was see-through. Everyone showered in glass boxes. There was nothing to hide. And, if the beach shots were any indication, why hide anything indeed? The men and women whose toes played in the snow-white sand were very attractive. They were lightly tanned, taut and smooth, thin, healthy, strong, happy, content. Just living in the now.

  He looked at the pamphlet for a long time.

  He wanted to be there. He wanted to be them.

  He signed and sent in his reply form, indicating his abiding interest and formal acceptance of all stipulations associated with this opportunity.

  It was official. He had seventy-one more days.

  DAY

  NINETEEN

  ONE

  Bronfman almost moved after the robbery. It wouldn’t have been difficult, after all, having so few possessions now to move. But Thomas Edison encouraged him to stay. “My friends will get right suspicious if you move, Mr. B.,” he said. “They’ll think something’s wrong. They will track. You. Down. So just stay put. I’ll be your bodyguard. And who knows who’ll move in if you go. Some fucking jerk. Someone not half as cool as you, probably.”