Jonathan Lethem - The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

“Right. So if they follow you, you must be trouble.”

Don took the gun out of his belt, but kept it below the level of the Plexiglas barrier above the seat. I tried to scowl at him, but he ignored me.

“You don’t like it, why don’t you try to kill it with the car?” he said to the driver in a low, insinuating voice.

“You’re crazy.”

“Right. So just take us to the airport and shut up.” He looked at me. “How much you get?”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars. Sidekick change from a sidekick.” The joke was out before I thought to wonder: but who’s the sidekick here? It was possibly a very important question.

Don snorted. “Barely afford the tickets.” He put the gun back into his belt.

The Sufferer accompanied us through the maze of exits and into the roundabout of the airport. We pulled up in front of Delta. Don paid the cabfare and rolled off twenty extra, then paused, and rolled off another twenty. “Pull up there and wait ten minutes,” he said.

“Don, we’re getting on a plane. Besides, even if we weren’t, it isn’t hard to catch a cab at the airport .”

“Just in case. Me and this dude got an understanding. Right, man?” He cocked his head at the driver.

The cabbie shrugged, then smiled. “Sure. I’ll wait.”

I sighed. Don was always turning passersby into accomplices. Even when it didn’t mean anything. It was a kind of compulsive seduction, like Women Who Love Too Much.

“You’re getting me worried, Don. We’re flying out of here, right?”

“Relax. We’re at the airport, right? Just wait a minute.” He put his mouth at the driver’s little money window. “Pull up over there, man. We’ll walk back, we don’t have bags or anything. Just get out of the light, okay?”

We pulled past the terminal entrance, into a dead zone of baggage carts. The Sufferer trotted alongside, on the pedestrian ramp, weaving around the businessmen and tourists leaking out of the terminal.

Don rolled his window down a couple of inches, then got out a glass pipe and shook out the contents of a five-dollar vial into the bowl.

“Donnie.”

“Hey, not in the cab!”

“Minute, man.” He flicked his lighter and the little rocks flared blue and pink and disappeared. So practiced, so fast.

The Sufferer leaned close in to my window and watched. When Don noticed he said: “Open your door and whack that fuckin’ thing in the face.”

“Don’t smoke that crap in my cab,” said the driver.

“Okay, okay,” said Don, palming the pipe away. He pointed a finger at the cabbie. “You’ll wait, right?”

“I’ll wait, but don’t do that in my cab.”

“Let’s go, Don.”

“Okay.”

I opened my door and the Sufferer stepped aside to let us pass. We got out onto the walkway. Don stopped and shook his head, straightened his parka, which was burdened with the loaded pockets, and pushed the gun out of sight under his sweatshirt. We walked up to the entrance. The doors were operated by electric eye, and they slid open for us, then stayed open as the Sufferer followed.

Don and I both instinctively hurried into a mass of people, but no crowd could have been big enough to keep it from being obvious who the alien was with. A baggage guy stood and watched, his eyes going from the Sufferer to us and back again. He could as easily have been airport security — maybe he was.

“We’ve got a problem here, Don,” I said.

“Yeah.” He made a mugging face, but didn’t meet my eye.

“Let’s — here, you’ve gotta find a place for the gun, anyway.” I steered him out of the flow near the ticket agents, to a relatively empty stretch of terminal: newspaper vending machines, hotel phones, and a shoeshine booth. I didn’t see any lockers, though.

The Sufferer sat and cocked its head at us, waiting.

“What do your friends do when this happens?”

“What?” said Don sarcastically. “You mean when some big black animal from space follows them to the airport after an armed robbery?”

“When these things — when one of these things shows up, Don. I mean, it must happen to people you know.”

“One dude, Rolando. Thing started trailing him. Rolando fell in love, like him and the thing fucking eloped. Last I saw Rolando. Just that one dude, though.”

As people passed us they’d stare first at the Sufferer, then follow its gaze to us.

“Ironic,” I said. “It wants to help you, right? At least, I assume so. But it doesn’t know that you’re planning to go to California to dry out. It probably doesn’t even understand how airports work, how it’s fucking this up for you. How important it is for you to leave the city.”

I was babbling. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to hear him say Yes, I mean to get on a plane and change my life in California, Paul. You had a good idea. Instead of his grunting, distracted assent. It didn’t help that his big last farewell heist had netted pockets full of crack instead of cash.

And I didn’t for the life of me know what to do with the Sufferer.

“It doesn’t want to help me,” Don said.

“Yeah, well, in this case, anyway, it isn’t. We’re already gonna fit a bad profile, buying tickets at the last minute with cash. If there’s a Sufferer trailing around they’ll search us for sure.”

“They let it on the plane?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, how could they? So all we have to do is dump the drugs and the gun, then they can search us all they want, doesn’t matter, we’re gone.”

“Uh-uh.”

“What?”

“I’m on parole, Paul. Breaking parole to go. I can’t get checked out.”

“What? You never told me you were in prison!”

“Shut up, Paul. Sentenced to parole, one year. Nothing, man.”

“For what?”

“ Nothing , man. Now shut up. What, you think I wasn’t breaking the law? ”

“Okay, okay, but listen, we just have to get on a plane. We have to try. So stash the stuff—”

“Nah. This is no good. I got an idea.” He headed back to the terminal exits.

“Don!”

The Sufferer and I followed him out. He jogged back to the cab, hands protectively over the flaps of his coat pockets. We got back in and Don said: “Get us out of here.”

“Back.”

“Yeah, that direction. But get off the fuckin’ freeway.”

“Have to be on the freeway—”

“Yeah, yeah, I mean as soon as you can.”

I actually thought we’d lost the Sufferer when we exited into a blasted neighborhood of boarded-up and gutted storefronts, but by the time we’d driven, at Don’s request, back under the freeway and into a dark, empty cobblestone lot, the alien came loping up behind us.

The freeway roared above us, but the nearby streets were vacant. The people in the cars might as well have been in flying saucers, whistling past stragglers in the desert.

Don gave the cabbie another ten and said: “Get lost for fifteen minutes. Leave us here and circle around, find yourself a cup of coffee or something.” The cabbie and I exchanged a look that said Coffee? Here? but Don was already out of the cab.

I got out and the cab rumbled away over the cobblestones and around a corner. The Sufferer didn’t glance at it, just sat like an obedient dog and watched us.

Don ignored it, or pretended to, and walked over and took a seat on the fender of a wrecked truck. It was getting cold. I thought, stupidly, about the meal we would have been eating, about the movie we would have been watching, on the plane.

Don took out the pipe again and loaded it with a rock of crack. The wind bent the blue column of flame from his lighter one way, then Don sucked it the other, into the pipe. The Sufferer hurried up like a hunting cat to where Don sat. I stepped back.