Mark Fishman - No. 22 Pleasure City

The bartender had his back to Violet for some moments, then he shut the cash register drawer and turned to look at her, and while he was looking he took a few steps until he was standing across the bar from her.

He said: “Since the other night I’ve been carrying a lot of weight. In here.” He tapped his chest with a couple of fingers but kept on looking into her bleary green eyes. “I remember you, and I remember the guy that was with you.” He leaned forward against the bar. “Tonight that weight got too heavy for me to carry. I got to find a way to get rid of it. I’m in love with you.” He kept a straight face when he said it, but she couldn’t make out any part of his expression.

Violet was focused on a point above the bartender’s eyes because the eyes themselves were dancing from left to right and right to left in front of her and she couldn’t catch them long enough to look him straight in the face. His voice floated out of some faraway room and into her head and she heard the words but couldn’t figure out what they meant.

The bartender stood up straight and now her eyes connected with his eyes and she saw a sparkling light in them that hadn’t been there earlier and the light drew her in and kept drawing her in and suddenly it didn’t matter what his words were telling her because the glow in his eyes said everything. The light seemed to move around in a slow circle and the circle held her and she couldn’t move.

Words gathered in her mind and formed at the back of her throat and came out of her mouth slurred: “You got any money?”

“What?”

“Are you rich?”

“You’re drunk.”

“Maybe I am. But it’s a question.”

“I’m not asking you if you’re drunk. I’m telling you.”

“You don’t have to tell me, I know I’m drunk.”

“You want to know if I’m rich?”

“That’s right.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m considering it, but you’ve got to tell me if you’ve got money.”

The sparkling light in his eyes went out and the circle that kept her from moving let her go suddenly and she slipped off the bar stool and landed on the floor among crushed cigarette butts with her skirt twisted up around her waist.

“There’s no happily-ever-after, it doesn’t exist, and it’s ridiculous to think it might exist because you’d be encouraging a completely crazy thought to become reality and there’s no chance of that happening. None,” Fitch said.

He shut the notebook, put the pen in his pocket, took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth after he said this and hoped that by saying it he didn’t leave any room for her to keep on imagining that she loved him and he loved her and they’d spend their lives together doing what people did when they believed in something as close to a lie as this complete, undiluted bullshit. Fitch was exhausted.

“I don’t love you,” he added.

Angela stared at him from her tied-up position on the bathroom floor. The bare bulb gave her pale complexion a yellow hue.

“You’ve got to get it right in your head,” Fitch said.

“You’re breaking my heart,” she said quietly. “I’m in love with you.”

Angela meant what she said, he saw that much in her eyes and heard it in her voice, but he wasn’t going to give up trying to get through to her before he let her go. It was a promise he’d made to himself and he wasn’t going to back down on it. But he felt the pressure of the quiet as she looked sadly at him, as though the lack of sound were something heavier than any sound.

“I’ve been doing my job too well,” he said. “Don’t you see that? It’s a clinical thing.”

“I don’t see anything. I know that what I’m saying is right.”

“I’m trying to help you.”

And then the quiet was heavier.

“I can’t do it alone.”

She went on staring up at him from the floor without saying a word, and then a very small voice said: “Count me out.”

Shimura pulled his car alongside the agency car standing in the shadows on Delaplaine Road with its headlights out and its motor running and Aoyama behind the wheel with Eto sitting next to him in the passenger seat while together they were smoking cigarettes and listening to the radio and watching his car glide toward them and come to a halt in the night.

“It’s fixed,” Shimura said to Aoyama through the open window. “For tomorrow afternoon.”

Aoyama turned toward Eto, asked him if he’d heard Shimura. Eto nodded his head and tossed the end of the cigarette out in the street.

“Go get some sleep,” Shimura said.

The agency car drove away with its headlights on and turned left at Hartrey Avenue, and as he watched the taillights go around the corner he thought of Tomiko who was waiting for him at his apartment because her flight had come in at eight and now it was nearly ten o’clock.

Lying in bed next to Tomiko was the single most important thing Shimura had in mind as he swung the car around and headed towards Hartrey and turned right and kept on going without seeing much of the road except what was absolutely necessary to see so he didn’t get into an accident because an accident would slow him down and he didn’t want anything to stop him now. He was waiting to press his mouth between Tomiko’s legs, taste her, and feel her lips against his own when they kissed.

Pohl sat in a chair at his desk in front of the phone waiting for it to ring. It seemed to him that it was the only thing he’d been doing for days and that the rest of his life would be spent waiting for one thing or another. Shimura had told him he’d call at eleven to let him know what he’d learned from Fitch, whose name he didn’t use since it was against the rules Shimura’d made for himself, and so he referred to him instead as just another source of information.

Pohl felt the terrible slowness of passing time. It was only tenfifteen. It seemed like he was bolted to the chair, and then suddenly, somehow he was a long way off from the grief and everything because he was working to keep his thoughts as far from the telephone as he could by stretching them like rubber bands until they were taut and thin and might snap. It was a risk, and he knew that once they snapped he’d come back to where he was, which wasn’t a comfortable place to be.

So then he was wondering what he ought to be thinking about, telling himself that at a time like this it was necessary to think about something more than the weather but nothing to do with sex and it was a matter of finding the right thing between those two subjects that would take him out of the waiting and far from Angela. He wanted something to give him a lift. Despite his initial resolve to keep away from the subject of sex but knowing it would take him away from the desk and the phone he started on the topic of women.

At first it was women in general because no one face came to mind, it was all women in every shape and size, and everything he found attractive in them, their voices, necks and ears, their legs with muscles showing when they walked, their stomachs and thighs and arms when they wore very little to cover themselves up, every detail he could manage to think of until slowly all the women formed themselves into one woman, and it was Angela, and then he was feeling very low again.

He folded his arms on the desk, let his head rest against his arms, closed his eyes to the knowledge that life listed him as hooked and helpless and just another morsel to be chewed by bigger fish or swallowed whole with very little fuss.

Then he was thinking how this city that didn’t rank as high in the same field of perversity as others still had its particular form of magnetism and sorcery that drew the people who lived in it out of their routine and into excess until all they wanted was more until more wasn’t enough. He accepted the fact that he wasn’t different from any of them when he met Angela and knew that he wouldn’t stop chasing her until he got her and that when he did have her it certainly wouldn’t be enough to satisfy him. None of that kept him from wanting more.