Michael Crichton - Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues

The phone rang a long time. Finally a dull voice said, “Hello?”

“Hello, is Sukie there?”

“Who?” A very dull voice, and then I remembered the time change.

“Sukie Blake, Susan, is she there?”

“What number are you calling?” the guy said. He was being very, very careful about waking up and I couldn’t stand it.

“Sukie, man, Sukie, the blond chick who lives upstairs, the one with the weird eye?”

“Oh.” He mulled that one over. “Yeah. Hold on.”

Then there was a silence. I stared around my room and lit a cigarette and blinked in the smoke.

“Hello?” Dazed voice.

“Hello, Sukie?”

“Who is this?” Really dazed.

“Sukie, what’s going on out there?”

“What?” She was beginning to wake up. “Who is this?”

I thought I heard some sound in the background. Some sound in the room. “Are you alone?”

“Goddamn it,” she said. “Who is this?”

“Peter,” I said.

She laughed. Three thousand miles away, I heard that laugh, and it made me smile. “Oh, Peter,” she said. “It’s seven-thirty in the morning.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

There was a yawn at the other end, then, “How was your exam?”

That made me happy. She’d remembered I was going back to take an exam.

“Terrible. I thought about you the whole time.”

“What kind of an exam was it?”

“Economics.”

“Peter, that’s not good, you thought about me during an economics exam?” And after another yawn: “What did you think?”

Hmm, what did I think? That was a drag over the telephone. “Oh, you know.”

There was a pause. A short pause while she woke up still more. “You wanted to know if I was alone,” she said, her voice low and amused.

“No,” I said, “you weren’t awake. I asked how you were.”

“I’m not alone, Peter,” she said. “When you called I was in bed with eight puppies.”

“I didn’t ask you whether you were alone,” I said.

She gave a low laugh. “Peter, you’re sweet, do you know that?”

Well, that was it. Like walking out on a limb, and finally the limb snaps. I looked around the room, the goddamned dreary room, and I said, “Listen, I want to see you.”

She laughed again. “I want to see you, too.”

And then in a sudden rush I said, “Then why don’t you come out here?”

“To Cambridge?”

“Sure.”

“How, Peter?”

“I don’t know. There must be some way.”

She asked me then if I had any money. I didn’t. I asked her. She didn’t. Swell.

“Swell,” I said.

It was quiet on the line. A kind of depressing quiet.

“Maybe,” I said, “I can figure out some way to come out there.” But I knew it wasn’t true. In a few weeks I would have to start studying for finals. She must have known it wasn’t true, too, because she sounded sleepy again when she said, “All right, Pete.”

“No, really. I’ll figure something out.”

“I know. I believe you.”

And I guess in a way she did. Finally she said she was costing me money, and I said the hell with the money, but I couldn’t really afford to say that, so I hung up and realized that I was very tired and that I wanted to sleep for a long time.

I DIDN’T WAKE UP UNTIL lunchtime the next day. I am a man of few vices, one of them most unquestionably being the time I spend with my eyes closed. But as soon as I was up I was remembering Sukie, and the phone call, and all she’d said.

I caught up with John in the dining hall, and joined him over a plate of sawdust and beans.

John looked up and smiled. “Peter,” he said. “How’s the head today?”

“Fine. How’re the eats?”

“Awful,” said John. “I didn’t expect to see you for quite a while. Heard you had a little trouble with that economics exam yesterday.”

“Trouble?” I tried to look surprised.

“Heard you barely finished.”

I sighed. I thought he’d been talking about the Senior Tutor. I get messages from the Senior Tutor three times a year: after fall-term hour exams, after mid-terms, and after spring-term hour exams. I was expecting one any day now, but at least it hadn’t arrived yet.

“No, that was no trouble,” I said. “Just had better things to think about.”

John laughed, and then frowned at his potatoes.

“Jesus,” he said, “what the hell is that?” He held a clump aloft for all to admire.

Somebody said, “A hairpin.”

“A hairpin, Jesus,” John said. “I could get lockjaw or something from eating this crap. Look at it, it’s rusty.”

I’d had enough to eat right then. “Heard from Musty?” I asked.

John looked up sharply. “Any reason why I should’ve?”

I had to play this one right. I didn’t want to keep anything from John but then again I didn’t want him to fuck me up, which he undoubtedly would if he had time to do so. All I said was, “No. Nothing special.”

John dropped his potatoes and lit up a smoke. “Okay,” he said, “what’s the big secret?”

“No secret.”

“Well, then, what’s all this garbage about Musty? C’mon, Peter, I’ve known you too long to just think you’re wondering out loud when you drop something like that.”

“Like what? Christ, you’re as paranoid as all these other creeps.” I spread an arm out to encompass the dining hall, which was filled with guys studying over their meals. “You’ve just got a different angle on the paranoia, that’s all.”

“Uh-huh.” John nodded grimly. He blew some smoke in my direction. “Then who were you calling after the exam yesterday? Not Musty, by any chance?”

I had to laugh. John managed to have a finger on anything that went down.

“No, not Musty. I was talking to a chick.”

John put his smoke out and laughed heavily. “A chick, eh? Not a California honey, by any chance? Yes?” He sat back and sipped at his coffee. “Far out,” he said, “far fucking out.”

“What’s far out?”

“Nothing. It just makes sense, why you’ve been blowing your mind ever since you got back here two days ago. And me thinking it was the climate.” He laughed again. “Far fucking out.” He looked suddenly serious and leaned over to me, across the table. “What’d she tell you about Musty?”

“I told you already. Nothing.”

“Then what’s this riff all about?”

“I was just wondering if you had any more trips lined up, in the near future.”

“California trips?”

“No, mescaline trips.”

“What’s wrong with you, you got blue balls after a couple of days around this lady?”

“You might say that. You might just say I want to see her. What difference does that make? You got any trips lined up, or don’t you?”

John searched his coat for another butt. “Not in the near future. Not till after exams, I’d say.” He cocked his head and said, “But even if I had a run lined up, you wouldn’t be able to do it…” letting the statement wander off into a question. I knew what he was asking.

“Aw, hell,” I said, “I could probably work something out.”

John took a long drag on his smoke and nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s good to hear you say that, Pete, ’cause I wouldn’t want you going around with some kind of wild misconception in your head about me letting a chick run the dope in.”

I searched around for another smoke and thought that one over. I’d known he would say that—John never let chicks in on his deals. It was a completely bullshit prejudice, because chicks were cooler for a run, if anything, than a long-haired dude could ever be. Most big dealers on the Coast, in fact, used only chicks—but I wasn’t on the Coast and I wasn’t talking to a Coast dealer. I was talking to John.