Hal Ackerman - Stein,stoned

Goodpasture gave up the pretense and surrendered to honesty. “All right, Harry. May I please call you Harry? I don’t mean it as disrespect.”

“Call me what the hell you want. Stop bullshitting with me.”

“I just thought if you saw the connection between Nikki and my weed it would be outside the NO DANGER zone and you wouldn’t come. Forgive me for underestimating you.”

“You don’t get it. She came to me for help, Brian. When I said no, I violated every principle I ever believed in. I fucked up. Nothing I can do will ever unfuck me. But I’m going to keep trying until it starts to feel a little bit better.”

Goodpasture nodded like he had seen this sort of thing before. “People fall in love with her quickly,” he said.

“I’m not talking about love, Brian. I’m talking about principle!”

“Yes, that’s definitely what you’re talking about.” Goodpasture reached into the leather pouch slung over his shoulder. “I want you to see that I have principles too.” He handed Stein a chunk of hundred dollar bills.

“I owe you this for bringing you here under false pretenses. And also for underestimating you.”

Stein fanned it and guessed there were fifty. He put it in his pocket with no pretense of declining the offer. “Not to mention the little matter of a stopped check.”

Goodpasture winced. “Sorry about that. It was somebody else’s idea.”

“What’s the deal on that guy anyway? He’s got the sense of humor of turpentine.”

“He does have his social liabilities. But, you know, what he does. You’ve seen those people. The government makes ‘life’ a holy grail until people get old or sick. Then they’re dumped into the same crap heap as old refrigerators. Do you know what they spend on law enforcement trying to stop us from bringing in a little weed? Wouldn’t it be better to spend that same money on life enhancement?”

“You don’t need to sell me on the cause. I’m just saying about your doctor friend. Get him a colonoscopy, man. Unclog his sorry ass.” Goodpasture smiled and tipped his water glass to Stein as a toast. And then Stein was all business. “I have two days here before I’m back on daddy duty. There are forty some-odd cafes with buds entered for the Cannabis Cup. We can split the work. You go to half, I go to half? We find the one that matches yours and-no, wait. You’re right. I have to go to them all. They’d know who you are and hide the stuff if they saw you waltz in. All right.” He girded himself to go into action. His legs didn’t quite get the message and buckled. He had to brace himself from tipping over.

Goodpasture guided him to the bed. “Plan A is for you to take a nap. Your eyes are falling out of your face. It’s probably yesterday or tomorrow for you.”

The mention of a nap brought the exiled thought of sleep tumbling back into Stein’s consciousness and he instantly craved it. Goodpasture stood and massaged the tight ligaments alongside Stein’s neck. “I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours.”

“Just one question. Why didn’t you tell Nicholette where you were going? Why make her worry like that?”

“She knew.”

“She knew?”

“Of course she knew.”

Goodpasture smiled at how blindly in love with Nicholette Stein was.

“She was an exceptional woman,” Stein said.

Goodpasture agreed. “She was.”

The door closed behind Goodpasture’s departure. Stein’s body dissolved down onto the luxurious feather bed. The pillow looked wide as the Appalachians. It beckoned him and he swooned. The wall mirror above the bureau reflected somebody’s elderly uncle. Only it was Stein. He had to look away. His rucksack was still hanging on the inside door handle. It had caught in the door jamb when Goodpasture left and air currents in the hallway had left the door partly ajar.

There was a rustling of motion passing the open door and perhaps that was what had caught his attention. But there was something else, more persuasive and more subtle. It was a smell, wafting in from the hallway. It had not been there before. Whoever had caused the sound of motion had left that scent in her wake. It made Stein’s entire body tingle from toe to scalp. He had smelled that scent on only one person in his life and there was no mistaking who that person was.

It was Nicholette.

A jolt of adrenaline propelled Stein into the hall. At the same time that his brain knew it could not possibly be Nicholette, every other system in his body ordered Go. Find. See. Get. The corridor was deserted, but the scent hung keenly in the air. Stein felt a peripheral sense of motion to his left. The impression of a trailing garment disappearing down an adjoining corridor. He broke into a trot down the carpeted hallway. The plush pile felt firm and resilient. To his pleasant surprise, so did his calf muscles. He felt no sharp, crumbling pain. No ache of rust and gravity. No shock of protest from the shallow cavity of his chest. He imagined himself a Lakota brave running tirelessly through woods and plains, his body its own vehicle.

That feeling lasted about fifteen feet.

As he approached the T-shaped intersection he heard the elevator door slide open in the corridor to his left. He tried to accelerate but his breath was now wheezing through constricted passageways and his legs had taken on weight. He latched onto the edge of the wall and used it to whip himself around the blind corner. The elevator doors were closing. “Hold it, please,” he called out but to no avail..

Brushing aside the internal voice that repeated “what are you doing?” at each new escalation of the insanity, Stein pulled open the heavy metal door to the fire stair and vaulted into the passageway. The stair went straight down then hooked a hundred and eighty degrees to the left. He grabbed the guardrail and yanked himself hard into each turn. He was wearing only his jeans and a flannel shirt over his 1969 Mets T-shirt, but he broke a sweat as he hit the seventh floor landing. Air was not plentiful. He wanted to stop at each floor and run into the corridor in hopes of having gotten there before the elevator. But the thought of just missing it again and losing those precious seconds kept him going. He staked everything on the hope that it would stop at enough floors for him to beat it down to the lobby. He thought of himself as John Henry battling the steel-driving machine. Then he remembered that John Henry dies at the end of that song.

He reached the mezzanine and jumped down the last three steps and pushed forcefully through the door into the lobby. In other cities people might have looked askance at a wild, disheveled creature bursting out of the catacombs. But Amsterdamers during Cannabis Cup season took such occurrences as matter-of-fact. He heard an elevator bell ping. The sound came from his left, which puzzled him because his inner compass told him it should be to his right. But he followed his ears. The light for floor #2 was illuminated in the bank above the elevator door, and Stein positioned himself in front of the doors that would open in a moment. But instead, the light indicating floor #3 went on. It was going up, not coming down. In a panic he spun around and saw that another elevator car had preceded him down and its passengers were dispersed into the lobby.

He had not won the race with the machine after all. There was kaleidoscopic motion all over the lobby, a universe of particles simultaneously expanding and contracting. He didn’t know what he was looking for. But amidst the sea of scents and pipe tobacco and shoe leather and artificial heat, Stein sniffed out that floating Jet Stream of aroma that had guided him. His neck swiveled until he locked in on the source. The glimpse of a woman hurrying out the front door, a trailing arm, the back of a leg.