David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Fuckshitfuck . Now well past house, thumb drive still in sweaty fist, Heckle still on her like the clap.

Leila was fifty yards down the dusty road when she heard her name called. She turned and there was Dah Alice leaning on her gate like an Okie. Dah Alice waved, scooping the air with her tawny hand as if to paddle Leila back to her.

Leila turned and jogged to Dah Alice. She passed Heckle. It was as close as she’d ever been to him. He had a handsome, planar face but rough skin; he smiled at her and kept on running.

The two women spoke across Dah Alice’s gate.

“Alice”—Leila dropped the honorific, trying to convey the urgency—“I came to see you, but I did not stop because I thought those men seeing us together would cause you trouble.” She waved up the road to indicate Heckle and then vaguely offstage to mean Jeckle, wherever he was.

“Those men are friends, Leila,” said Dah Alice. “I asked them to watch you. There are others watching you who are not good.”

“I don’t know what is happening,” said Leila.

“So often it is like that,” said Dah Alice.

“Not like this. This is different.”

“This is how we live, Leila.”

Leila didn’t know if they were talking about the same thing. But there was no time. The policemen would still be looking for her, the ones who were not good. “I’m leaving today,” she said. “I don’t know when I will come back.”

“Are you going back to Hollywood?” asked Dah Alice. Leila had never managed to clarify for Dah Alice the difference between LA County and Hollywood.

“Yes, I am. My dad is sick now. His heart. And I’ve become a liability here anyway.”

“I do not know what a lie-a-bility is, but maybe that’s just what you are supposed to be,” said Dah Alice.

“No. It means I’m not helping. I’ll come back, though. When I can.”

“Oh, Leila, do not say this,” said Dah Alice. “But you keep learning your Burmese, yes? Maybe one day you can show me Hollywood?”

“I would love to, Alice. One day, yes.” She put the thumb drive into Alice’s papery hand. “Here is all the information I have on those women for the scholarships. I erased it everywhere else, I think. Can you keep it safe? Maybe tell the women that I will try to see that this still happens?”

When Leila got back, the two fat policemen were parked outside her apartment. She thought about giving them a little rub-it-in wave, but then thought better of it; she still had a few hours in the country. Just as well. Inside her apartment, a cigarette lay smoking in a tea saucer on the kitchen table. Creepsville.

She washed quickly and finished packing. Then she checked her e-mail again. Hello: mail from Ding-Dong.com. She opened it. Something strange happened: her laptop screen blinked blank for a second, then came back on, as if from a mini-reboot or a petit mal seizure. When it returned, the Ding-Dong e-mail was open.

Got your message. Can you meet us in Heathrow tomorrow morning.

Leila was going to be in Heathrow tomorrow morning. She had a seven-hour layover. She closed the e-mail without responding. But it didn’t close back down into her e-mail program. It shut itself into a little owl icon that appeared on her desktop.

Mark woke from the clammy reaches of his skull into the gloom of the flat. He stirred the duvet around his legs, cast the lumpy feelers of his parched mind across the pillow and into this new day. The first task was to locate himself. Lately, determining where he was when he woke was a process. Blearily, he took in the room. Outside the window, a bit of leaking cast-iron gutter rat-a-tat-tatted drips onto the brick sill. Ah yes: the SineCo flat in East London, his current home base.

He had been writing last night. He remembered having strong feelings about something. He spidered half his body out of the bed and collected a legal pad from the floor. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and read what he’d written.

You have to try every day. Life is ten trillion decisions. Wouldn’t you like to notice that you’re making them?

And:

The loss you feel over and over again is the same (but from the other side).

There was also some stuff about how this, what we’re living, is just Middle Life, between Pre-Life and Afterlife. Plus some doodles that any teenager would call substandard, mainly heavily drawn arrows meant to stand in for logical leaps too beautiful and complex for words.

Fuck. It was all shit, all of it. And there wasn’t even enough of it. The trap he’d laid for himself with all of his dishonest behavior and vanity was going to spring on him.

Uh-oh. A morning like a cliff edge. Must endeavor not to think until poisonous slurry has finished slopping about my brain. Just make some coffee. Tomato juice in a cardboard box in the fridge. A worthy sort of muesli in the cupboard. You have to move forward, like a shark, even if you are a self-hating shark with a wicked hangover.

He tossed the legal pad aside, flung off the duvet, and tacked toward the bathroom.

On the toilet, he cast his mind into last night’s turbid little sea. He had dined with his agent, Marjorie Blinc, at an unmarked restaurant. After two tumblers of bourbon, he’d ordered what turned out to be Chicken Architecture — a torqued tower of stacked planes: chicken, skewed ellipses of latticed potato, chicken, red cabbage, chicken. It was a dumb thing to order when you were having what turned out to be a business dinner. His meal kept toppling beneath his knife, and he would end up with a shard of potato lattice stuck out of the corner of his chewing mouth, like a cow. Blinc ordered seared tuna that looked like five pretty matchboxes on a wide white plate.

He’d been nervous going into the dinner — that’s why he’d opened with the circus whiskies. In six weeks, he was supposed to deliver to Blinc his second book. Sadly, it was to be called Keep Your Promises, Not Your Secrets: Ten Steps to Committed Living . At dinner, he had tried to tell her that he might need a bit more time with it, and that maybe it would have to be a different kind of book than a straight-up, ten-step self-help book, and that he would like to revisit the issue of the title. At that, Blinc put down her last half matchbox of tuna and said, Oh, this is all in the contract .

That fucking contract. He couldn’t comprehend it; it was all in consideration whereof s and for a period not to exceed s. When he had shown the document to an attorney friend of a friend, the man had looked at him askance and said, “I don’t understand. You didn’t sign this, did you?”

Mark had laughed and said no, but his stomach had lurched straight down.

Mark was basically a sharp and levelheaded person. He didn’t come from money; he came from a scrabbling, single-parent home and his mom had taught him frugality, so he usually managed not to get screwed by the cable or the insurance company. He sometimes even remembered to redeem the mail-in rebate coupons that came with his juicer or his German dishwasher. But then he’d gone and signed a fat contract without really reading it. He hadn’t even correctly understood Blinc’s role. He had thought she was his agent. Her company was called Conch Shell Communications. But he had lately come to understand that she was his employer. Apparently, Blinc had been his agent, at first. And she had gotten him a big advance for the first book, and an even bigger one for the second. So big, in fact, that he had neglected to clarify some basic issues. Like: Blinc had sold the second book to Conch Shell Media. But Conch Shell Media was the publishing arm of Conch Shell Communications; Blinc was the CEO of both companies. What the fuck?