David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

A beautiful girl walked into the lounge. She went to the little concierge desk, not looking entitled enough. The woman at the desk examined her ticket, a trace of disdain apparent in her manner. The girl had a rolling suitcase and was dressed like she had come from somewhere hot. She was maybe five foot four. The fittings and furniture in the lounge, which were king-size, made her look like a waif. She made straight for the bar. Parked her rolly suitcase, mounted a bar stool.

Mabshu? Oh, come on, this was ridiculous. He was a public intellectual, for Chrissake. He moved on. VARESH. Ravesh! No. Sharve? No. Shaver. Ha, yes. Shaver. Mark took the circled letters of the word shaver — S and A —and scribbled them at the bottom of the page. His Bloody Mary arrived, and Mark sipped, sipped, and then drained it. He tried to casually place the empty glass outside his little zone of executive kerfuffle.

It was after his second drink that he decided to start fetching his own Bloody Marys from the bar. That steward was a little too on the ball for his liking. Plus, the girl at the bar had not turned around. Mark strode up to the bar and ordered another drink. He placed himself near the girl, but not too near. “You can skip the celery stick,” he told the barman, who was Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan or something. “The celery stick is a bit much, don’t you think?” He addressed this to the girl, who had apparently barely registered his presence beside her.

“Hmm?” she said, and she met his gaze briefly. Where could she be from? Even just the hmm told him she spoke American, but she was something other than white. “Yeah, a bit much,” she said. She returned to the notebook she was reading and writing in.

Fine, then. It was while returning to his perch that he noticed an older woman walking toward the back of the lounge with a pack of cigarettes.

What was this? Could there be…? Yes, there was a smoking lounge attached to this lounge. The rich world was still surprising him. You could smoke… inside an airport . He put his drink down by his seat and ambled pointedly toward what turned out to be a negative-pressure conservatory-type thing labeled, romantically, Fumoir . Would wonders never cease? The problem now was that he had no tobacco. There was only one other lounger in the fumoir, the woman whom he had followed in. He bummed a smoke from her and lifted two extra from the back of the pack. She was Israeli. Mark heard all about her granddaughter in New York while he sucked the life out of a slender cigarette. The low drone of the extractor system made the lady hard to hear. Plus her accent didn’t help. And it was a smoking room, the fancy name notwithstanding, and smelled like it; no amount of expensive up-dressing could disguise that.

In the silent outside beyond the frosted glass of the fumoir, the sun made a shimmer of things, and little trains of luggage carts snaked down painted-on tarmac-avenues. The tires on planes: Were they little or big? They looked amusingly diminutive beneath the planes but massive next to the jumpsuited men who serviced them. Maybe the sixth or seventh step could be something like Keep It in Perspective. Or better yet: Choose Your Perspective.

He returned to his spot in the lounge. Shoot, he had left the Jumble faceup on his papers. Actually, he’d left all his stuff unguarded. Is that just one of the things you can do when you are among the first class? He hoped so. But, no, there must still be a type of thief who operates within the wealth-saddled set, lifting merch from his hosts and fellow travelers: the cigarette case from the end table, the Rolex from the gym locker, the Vicodin from the medicine cabinet. He should be more careful. Step Nine: Watch Your Fucking Back.

He returned to the Jumble. LAVNI. He squinched up his eyes. Nothing.

The girl at the bar was still rabbiting away in her notebook. It was strange that she had been so cool to his opening. Not strange because he was all that or anything. But who doesn’t have time for a little interaction? Sheesh. Vilan? No. Laniv? No. Nilav? No. Anvil? Wait, was anvil a word? Yes, that thing you just hammer away on. Ha — three words expertly unjumbled. But anvil yielded only an A, which he scribbled down next to the other letters he had netted. What would a lazy aphorist need? And what the fuck was shambu? Hubasm?

His phone chirruped at him. It was a message from Nils. Meeting location changed. Await instructions.

Well, excuse me , he thought. A different kind of waiting, when you don’t know how long you’ll be waiting. He closed his eyes, just to rest, not to sleep. As if providing a living caution against public sleeping, an overweight man snored at random intervals in the corner, drool like beetle silk strung between his slack lower lip and the fist-size knot of his iridescent purple tie.

Maybe busham was a kind of plant, or a unit of measurement. Hadn’t he heard something like that? Like, twelve bushams to a furlong or something? He stood up and neatened his piles of papers and put on his jacket and buckled his valise and put it in his seat. He ate a breath mint. He walked to the bar.

“Make me another one of these, would you?” he said to the barman. Then, turning to the girl, he said, “Have you ever heard of the word busham? ”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“ Busham. B-u-s-h-a-m? Is that a word? Like a measure of something?”

“I think you mean bushel, ” she said. She might be younger than him, but she was worn already around the eyes, or maybe just recently underslept. She was ragged but beautiful in the way that hair-gel ads were always trying to sell raggedness as beautiful.

“Ah. Yes. Bushel. ” Mark bit his lower lip.

The girl returned to her notebook, but then seemed to reconsider. “Why do you ask?” she said. Whether this was out of patronizing politeness or genuine interest, Mark could not tell. He could work with either, for now.

“Oh, it’s just this thing I have to copyedit. And I think there’s a misprint.”

“It sounds like ambush, but swapped around,” she said.

Well, hell: ambush . “Yeah, ambush, ” he said. “Thanks.”

“No problem.”

The barman had stuck a stalk of celery in Mark’s drink. “Oh, it’s fine like that,” Mark said, but not before the man had flung the celery stalk in the bar sink so that it suddenly seemed as if Mark was saying that the barman needn’t make the whole drink all over again; as if he, Mark, were forgiving the celery contagion. He realized this made him look like an asshole, so he was especially grateful upon receipt of his drink and made a stupid mmm-mmm sound when he put the drink to his lips, standing there at the bar. That made him look like a real douchebag, so he left a ten-pound note on the bar and retreated.

Okay, so ambush gave up its A and its H . So he had C, K, S, A, A, A, and H.

Well, the first word was obviously just A, the article. Give one A to each of the remaining two words. A wash cak? A cash kaw?

Oh, how he sometimes despised himself. In his seminars, he was always warning against self-pity, which everyone knows was this terrible character flaw, with its overtones of mope and sob and gripe. But what about straight-up self-despising, like, with good reason? Aren’t you supposed to be appalled at yourself sometimes? He meant not just the confusion over the drink order just then, or the midday drinking, or the being stumped by a juvenile word game when he was under binding contract to deliver a book within weeks. He meant his general dishonesty, the part of him that always had to calculate his approach angle to any situation. Presumably, everyone did this some of the time. You can’t just blob around, all id, like a clothed baby. You had to game it. But he had gotten to the point where it was all game. How much better waking life must be for people who did not operate this way. Here was the self-pity part, he supposed, because it seemed to him that he had an invisible handicap, and if buses could kneel for wheelchairs, the world should be able to accommodate him somehow.