Rafael Yglesias - Fearless

“Do you have strawberry pancakes?” he asked the young waitress as she handed him a menu.

“Sure,” she said.

He ordered them and a side order of bacon. He hadn’t had strawberries since he was eight years old. For that matter he hadn’t had bacon in five years. He looked at the LSD pill resting in the palm of his right hand. It was hardly wider than his fate line. Max had been taught how to read palms in college, not from a local Pittsburgh Gypsy, but from a moody drama school student. The line ran deep and unbroken from the base of his palm to between his middle and index fingers. It finished with a very distinct and tiny star.

“That means you’ll be famous,” she had said. Later they made love and he had the most passionate and unselfconscious sex of his young life, inspired by her reading: “You’re very directed and independent. You’ll do one thing your whole life, you’ll do it very well, and you’ll be a success.” They were strange words in 1967. You weren’t supposed to care about such things. In fact, to be called a directed person might have been taken as a put-down. But Max wasn’t insulted, although he asked her to help him “unfocus,” whatever the hell that meant. In his heart, control was his ambition; losing it, his terror.

That was why acid had been such a horrible experience. Grass and speed enriched or heightened sensations, but they never took control. Acid was different. For most of the trip he wasn’t even aware of having a consciousness. Feelings were pure and unmitigated. All fear was as acute as the fear he had felt while falling in the plane: sheer electric terror. And physical sensation was overwhelming. It took an hour to absorb all the details from one sip of orange juice.

He swore off all drugs after that. Why repeat the experience? He had spent most of the trip in a fetal position shouting: “I am Max Klein! My father is dead! My mother is Rachel!” The chant became legend among his druggy friends from whom Max was soon to be alienated. They decided he was “weird and uptight.” But the chant was necessary. He knew if he stopped he would forget that he existed and disappear. The most enjoyable part of taking LSD was at the beginning when he stood on the window ledge and yelled at the “control” that he wasn’t going to jump. Yelling temporarily gave Max the illusion of knowing what he was about.

He hadn’t thought back to those days in years. Why remember now? Because since then he had tried so hard to keep life battened down. He had been rigorously cautious. And what had happened? The plane had fallen out of the sky and so many had died.

He took the LSD. After all, it was fake. Why fear an illusion when he had survived the reality?

The pancakes arrived. Max was disappointed. The strawberries were pale slivers impressed into the pancake dough.

“Don’t you have whole strawberries?” he asked.

“I could bring you a dish of strawberries. I thought you wanted strawberry pancakes.” She had a mop of black hair, a flat brow, a short nose, and small eyes. Everything she said, like her looks, was toneless. She had a perfect deadpan. “If your thing is strawberries, I can make it happen for you.”

“I want lots of strawberries,” he said and worried about it all for a moment. But why worry? What more could happen now? He started to eat the pancakes. She brought a dish of whole strawberries and he ate one slowly. It wasn’t very good. The other time he had eaten them, when he was eight years old, they were sweet and succulent. He remembered that his fingers were still red from their juice while his father drove wildly to the hospital to get Max treated for his severe allergic reaction. Max had lain in the backseat, his mother’s frightened face looming, his father cursing and honking the horn, and he noticed the strawberry stains on his fingertips. He could still picture the long needle they used to inject Adrenalin into him as he gasped for air, dying. In his panic he had thought the needle was meant to stab him in the heart, to kill him faster because the agony of his suffocation was too painful for his parents to witness.

The waitress came by to refill his cup of coffee. “Are these good strawberries?” Max asked.

“They’re fresh,” she said.

“Really?” Max was surprised.

She thought for a moment, her pot of coffee suspended above his cup. “You know, I don’t know for sure,” she said, pouring. “I guess nothing’s fresh.”

He ate them all and the pancakes too. He waited for something to happen, either due to the LSD or the strawberries. After half an hour and two more cups of coffee, nothing had.

“Everything okay?” the waitress asked, slapping his check on the table. “Want another?” she gestured at his cup.

“Everything’s great,” Max said. “I seem to be invulnerable.”

“Yeah?” she frowned and shrugged. “Good for you. Maybe you can fix my car.”

Something in her tone reminded Max of his first girlfriend at college, Alison. He knew Alison had married and had three kids with a drama professor who taught at Carnegie. Her husband was a long-faced pale man named Ramsey. She had sent Max a Christmas card and called once, both a long time ago.

He got up and looked for the phone outside the men’s room, where it used to be. It had been moved, he discovered, to an alcove just inside the entrance doors. Unlike a New York booth its phone book was intact. He found five Ramseys listed. He called each one, but they weren’t right. He knew why after finishing. His memory had been faulty; actually, he remembered, her husband’s name was Paulson.

Maybe the acid is having an effect, he thought, wondering how he could have come up with Ramsey for Paulson. He also had trouble dialing, twice missing and hitting the wrong button. Maybe he was tired, although it was still early in the day: three-thirty in the afternoon he noticed while listening to the phone ring. Her husband should be teaching. Sure enough Alison answered. She knew him as soon as he spoke.

“Hi, it’s Max. Max—”

She shouted out, “Max Klein!” before he got to it. He was flattered by the happiness in her recognition.

He said he was in town for the day and asked right away if she could meet him for a drink. She suggested he come to the house but he declined. He wasn’t in the mood for a house of marriage and children.

“Anyway,” he said and his voice trembled a little, “I just want to see you. No one else.”

“Oh…” He could hear fear in her tone. Was it fear? “It’s been a long time,” she said. “I have four kids.”

“Four? I thought it was three.”

“I know. We’re insane. We had another monster. No, no, I don’t mean that—”

“Sure you do. Can you get away? For an hour? I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

She suggested, hilariously he thought, that they meet at a restaurant in the lobby of a Sheraton near her house.

“Oh, if it’s in a Sheraton I definitely want to meet there,” Max said.

She laughed nervously, misunderstanding his meaning. “We’re meeting in the restaurant in the Sheraton, wise guy.”

“Just as good,” Max said. “I checked out of a Sheraton about three hours ago. I guess I’m fated to be near a Sheraton every few hours.”

She wanted to meet in an hour. He insisted on a half hour. She arrived fifteen minutes late. Seeing her he understood why she had brought up the fact that she had four children as soon as he asked to meet her alone. She was fat. Not all over. In fact, her face was almost the same as years ago: a high shiny brow, long skinny nose, lively green eyes, and smooth white skin, still unwrinkled. But her waist and ass and thighs were inflated, and her once defined and high-flying breasts had been diminished by the girth of her middle and the thickening of her neck and shoulders. The worst atrocity to his memory of Alison, however, was her hair. As a college girl it had been long, straight and auburn — a gleaming fur as silky as a deer’s. Now it had been cut short and dulled to a muddy color.