Timothy Hallinan: The Fear Artist

“Nein, nein,” Hofstedler says. “Tell him.”

“It’s an invention of mine. I call it a Hot Whiskey Boom-Boom.”

“What’s in it?”

He spreads his fingers and ticks them off as he goes. “Whiskey, hot water, Lipo-C-that’s a liquid vitamin C with very small molecules, plus human growth hormone and spirulina.”

“Spirulina,” Campeau says. “Pond scum. Yum, yum.”

“The Aztecs ate it. All the time.” The Growing Younger Man slaps his bicep. “Aztec guys were up for it day and night.”

Campeau looks over at him. “Yeah?”

“It’s like natural Viagra,” the Growing Younger Man says. He sips his drink and produces a minor grimace. “Better, because it doesn’t affect your blood pressure. Have you read all the warnings on a package of Viagra?”

“The one I like,” Campeau says, “is ‘Call your doctor if an erection persists more than four hours.’ I’d call a lot of people, but my doctor wouldn’t be one of them.”

“Four hours,” Rafferty says, “you could hang your umbrella on it. Be handy in this weather.”

“I’ve been drinking it for two years,” the Growing Younger Man says, “and I’ve never had old Buster fail to show up since.”

Hofstedler says, “Buster?”

Campeau says, “Not once?”

Rafferty says, “How’s it taste?”

The Growing Younger Man says, “Awful. Look at it, for Chrissakes. Green as the meat at Foodland.”

“But you drink it,” Campeau says.

“Buster,” says the Growing Younger Man with a decisive nod. “He’s always there .”

There is a moment of religious silence as everyone, except probably Toots, contemplates the fickleness of Buster. This is, after all, why these otherwise-intelligent men packed up their lives and moved here from less carnal climes. Only to be double-crossed by Buster.

“I’ll try one,” Campeau says. “Gimme.”

“Do you know how much this stuff costs?” The Growing Younger Man pulls his glass closer to his chest.

“Are you kidding me? Twenty years you been sitting next to me, knocking back one throat-closer after another, and I been sitting here, really nice about it, no matter what it looked like. And I listened to you whine about Jah for two years-”

“I did not whine about Jah-”

“In a city with twenty-nine million available women in it, I nodded and said ‘poor you’ a thousand times while you droned on, Jah this, Jah that-”

“Buy your own,” The Growing Younger Man says. “Jah was nothing-”

“She sure wasn’t,” Campeau said. “Barely competent.”

The Growing Younger Man says, attempting to narrow his eyes, “Excuse me?”

“Me, too,” Hofstedler says to him. “If you haff anger for Bob, you haff anger for all of us. You talked about her zo much that we all-”

“Leave me out of it,” Rafferty says. “I wouldn’t know Jah if she walked through the door wearing a neon hat.”

“Like you need-” Campeau says, and breaks off.

Rafferty leans forward. “Yes, Bob?”

“Nothing,” Campeau says. “Jesus, everybody’s so fucking touchy. I remember when you could-”

“Two dollah,” Toots says, slapping the snifter on the bar again. “And this time I make change.”

The tips of Campeau’s ears turn a deep red. For a moment, Rafferty thinks, things could get ugly, and then he realizes he’s just forgotten what it’s like. He says, “This is great, you know?”

Hofstedler says, “What is?”

“This. Just guys. Everybody bullshitting, not even expecting anyone to believe anything. Nobody’s talking about feelings , nobody will remember in ten minutes what anyone else said. We can all get wound up and then let it blow away. You know, the way things should be.”

“You should come more often,” the Growing Younger Man says. “It’s like this every night.”

“I’ll pay Campeau’s fine,” Rafferty says. “Just because I’m happy to see him.” The beer announces its alcohol content with a welcome glow. Like pink lampshades in a dim restaurant, it makes everybody look better. “I remember when people weren’t so touchy, too. So there, that’s four bucks I owe, and I’ll buy a round for everybody.”

“I don’t really want to drink that shit anyway,” Campeau says almost affably to the Growing Younger Man.

“I actually did Jah, too,” Rafferty says to the Growing Younger Man. “A couple of times.” He raises both hands. “Just kidding. Honest.”

The apartment house is right where he left it. He approaches it at a diagonal, following an invisible ley line that he can’t sense when he’s completely sober. Or half sober. He’s been out three hours, he’s had three more king-size beers on top of the two at the apartment, and the last thing he ate was a small helping of stir-fried chicken with basil and chilies about noon, before he went to the paint store. The beer has the whole hotel to itself.

“Eighth floor,” he says to the elevator, accompanying the words with a lordly wave of the hand. Once inside, he says, “Here. Allow me,” and pushes the button. As it rises, he bends his knees in a little plie that made Miaow laugh back when he invented it to help her with her fear of elevators. When he adopted her off the sidewalk, she’d never been in an elevator, and they did their plie together for months. With the dissonant emotional chords alcohol usually sounds in him, he immediately sinks into a kind of depressive nostalgia for the days when Miaow and he were closer, when she looked up to him. When she still thought he knew something.

She’s always been spiky and strong-willed, but when he summons up the picture of her with her hair parted strictly down the middle and pasted down with water, the way she’d worn it for years, looking up at him with a mixture of hope, faith, and potential disappointment-the emotional attitude created by a childhood of betrayal and homelessness-he can’t help missing the little girl she was then. And how essential she made him feel.

This is an issue Rose laughs off, as she does Miaow’s relationship, whatever it is, with Andrew. The last time he talked about it, Rose said, “If you didn’t want her to change, you should have bought a table instead.”

“A table,” he says aloud as the elevator doors open and the two men in uniform peer in at him.

Bruisers, both of them, wearing uniforms he doesn’t recognize. One’s smiling, one’s not.

“Wrong floor,” he says, pushing the CLOSE DOORS button, but the one who’s smiling sticks his foot in front of the door. In a moment of alcohol-fueled misjudgment, Rafferty aims a kick at the foot, misses, and staggers backward.

The smiling one laughs. He says, “We thought you’d never get home, Mr. Rafferty.”

The one who isn’t smiling takes Rafferty’s T-shirt in both fists and pulls him out of the elevator as though he’s an autumn leaf. The smiling one pushes the button that holds the elevator.

“There,” he says in more-than-serviceable English. “Now we don’t have to think about the elevator, do we? It’ll be here when we want it.”

“Who are you guys?” Rafferty slaps at the hands of the man holding his shirt, and the man raises them in mock surrender and takes a step back.

“We’ve come to take you with us,” Smiley says.

“Really.” Rafferty says, heading for his door, “shame you went so far out of your-” He’s almost yanked off his feet by the neck of his T-shirt, which has stopped moving so suddenly it feels like he snagged it on a building.

“Yes,” Smiley says, stepping into the elevator as his friend hoists Rafferty under his arm and carries him back across the hall. “With us.”