Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

Abby musters a groggy smile when we arrive. Boxers and a MET-RX tee shirt. Corded legs and calves a-trickle with veins.

“Hey, troublemaker,” she says to Dylan in his one-piece pajamas with padded booties; I think he’s too old for them, but the fact they’re manufactured in his size makes this hard to argue.

I drive to the airport and check in. Doze with the pocketed lights of Hamilton burning through the airplane window. Awake to a New York dawn. Layover in JFK. Commuters shuffling under halogens that accord us the look of zombies cooling our heels between takes of a grade-Z horror flick. No jetsetters. Jetlagged middle-of-the-roaders. Economy-classers. Shreds of airline-peanut foil under our fingernails. We, the tribe of semis: semi-handsome, semiintellectual, semi-successful, semi-leisure class, semi-happy, semi-alive. Half lifers.

I’m in what a headshrinker might call “a fragile state of mind.” Not so much I cannot cope, not so much I’d abdicate my responsibilities, but… yeah. Fragile. There’s this commercial on TV a lot these days. For the Alzheimer’s Society. Maybe you’ve seen it? This old fellow in a house full of lemons. Shelves, the floor, fridge chockablock. He can’t remember he’d already bought them, see? Buys more and more. This poor old man in a house full of lemons. Playing solitaire. It wrecks me. Takes precious little, so suddenly. The ass-end of Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” on an easy-listening station. The smell of burning leaves. I’m standing there, welling up, asking myself: What the hell’s this all about?

A pair of leggy foreign girls — German tennis players to take a wild stab — breeze past. Young and somehow more attractive for their harried-ness: a woman-on-the-go quality. Speaking in exotic tongues. Hair done up invitingly. I try on a smile but catch my profile in a chain pizzeria’s mirrored facade and the sight — punch-squashed nose, cauliflower ears: reminders of a childhood in the ring — causes the smile to rot on my face. I can’t even summon the enthusiasm to play the gay divorcée.

Auf Wiedersehen, ladies.

The next flight finds me stranded between beefy members of the beleaguered proletariat. A breakfast omelette resembles novelty vomit. My stomach curdles over the vast grey Atlantic.

I work for American Express. Caretaker for Centurion holders. The Black Card.

It began as an urban myth: American Express distributed a card with which you could buy anything to the limit of the company’s 20.87 billion dollar worth. A decommissioned battleship or gently used space shuttle. But the card never existed. Until one of the bigwigs at head office said, “Why not?” The Centurion is limited to 4,000 clients worldwide. Member fee: $350,000.

You can look at me as a concierge. A perk built into the card’s exorbitant fees. Occasionally this reduces me to professional nose-wiper. I’m sent to monitor peculiar purchases. If a client’s aiming to buy a cruise missile, I have to say: nix .

Clients do fall from Centurion status. In those cases we do as with any deadbeat: cut their card up. I cut up Michael Jackson’s, if you can believe it. He was in Europe. We charted his egress by the locations of each gobsmacking purchase. Three Qing Dynasty vases ($750,000 apiece) at a Glasgow antiques emporium. The 1.5-ton chandelier from the Belfast Grand Opera House auctioned at Sotheby’s Helsinki. An attempted purchase of Marienburg castle, a deal nearly shepherded to fruition by Duke Philip von Wuerttemberg — that man knew a pigeon when he saw one — occasioned my dispatch. I tracked Jackson to a hotel room in Budapest. Ushered past mucketymucks and a diaper-clad chimp before reaching the man himself. Who was a mess. Face falling off the put-upon bones of his skull. “Big fan,” I told him awkwardly, snipping his card in half. “My first slow dance was to ‘Baby Be Mine.’”

That damn chimp scratched my arms all to hell. Novosibirsk airport holds the eye-bruising shade of a black market kidney. Red, arterial red, steak-tartare-served-on-a-stop-sign red stretching everywhere. The arcade past Customs consists of four Ms. Pacmans. Three of the four are busted. The man waiting at the luggage carousel — check that, luggage disgorger: scuffed tongue of a conveyor belt drooling suitcases into a metal basin — jabs a squared-off finger at the pocket he assumes I keep my passport in.

“ Shab-ruh-hoegan . Dis not name you company to give.”

“My company’s an idiot,” I tell him. That I’d refer to my company as a massive useless singular evidently tickles his Bolshevik funny bone. He smells strongly of pickled something: beets, to guess by the staining of his teeth. He leads me through the airport to a runway where a twin-prop plane awaits. My baggage handler is the pilot. Could be it’s this way all over Russia. The doctor who empties your bedpan cuts out your gallbladder, too.

It’s late afternoon by the time we touch down on a grassy landing slip. Goats graze over a stone wall. A Lada waits. Unsurprisingly, the pilot’s my driver. He guns the four-banger engine.

“Dah. Ve go.”

Stone houses, filling stations, churches with onion-bellied spires. Heaved-backed men with skin so hard and whitened it looks like an exoskeleton. It’s darkening by the time we reach a bluff overlooking the sea. A bay edged by cliffs. A military-style tent is set up on the beach below. A Jeep. Up the bluff with us: a TV truck. Russky station. The satellite dish on its roof is a rusted toadstool.

“Dah,” says my Man Friday. “Joo go.”

Egg-sized beach stones rounded smooth with each tide. Dark skeins of kelp. Blackness of water leeching into the sky. I hear frantic peeps. Light burns out of tents’ eyelets.

“Saberhagen?”

Conway Finnegan steps through the flaps. A St. Catharines native who hopped a ship to the Saudi oilfields and in the ensuing decades became our town’s richest expat. His American Express status took the same upwardly mobile route: green to gold to platinum to Centurion. We’d last met in Delta’s first class lounge at Dulles airport. He’d been off to “sort out some monkeyshines with those Halliburton bastages.” Even at sixty-odd Conway’s huge: a chunk of slob ice broken off the Niagara river miraculously grown legs, arms, and a salt-and-pepper head. One of those guys who, when he hugs you — as he does now — he cradles the back of your head as if you’re an infant with a neck too weak to support your skull. Despite this, he looks smaller than my memory of him. Circumstances tend to shrink a man.

“TV truck still up there?” When I tell him it is: “Vultures a-circling.”

We hop into the Jeep. Connie drives to the seashore. Flicks on foglamps bolted to the roll bar. “See it? Volganeft-188. Bearing cargo I paid for and insured.”

A metallic tusk juts from the water a few knots out. Moonlight bleeds along the downed ship’s hull to make it appear as a curved knife slicing up out of the surf.

“Borne for the western seaboard. Busted apart two-hundred miles from where she was loaded. Four thousand liquid tons of motor oil into the drink. Glug, glug, glug.”

Connie’s flashlight sweeps the shore. It lingers on tar-scummed life rafts. It takes a moment to accept the flat, eye-shaped objects washing in and out as flounders. The seaside is cobbled with dead fish. Oil-smothered birds. Feathers slicked down they’re tinier, the way a dog shrinks when you bathe it. Only the red pinpricks of their eyes aren’t black. “Cleaned a couple best I could,” Connie says. “Still, they died. Oil’s earmarked for Wal-Mart. Biggest oil-change providers in the hemisphere. I got a buzz from their legal eagle, Donald-someone-or-other. Real nut-buster. Says I better get out here, deal with the mess I’d made.”