David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“But I knew he’d had some fun with the Cryogenetics profile — he added three inches to his height, said he was planning to be a marine biologist. That sort of thing. So I said he should at least let purchasers of his seed know that he was actually a depressively inclined binge drinker whose cracker magician father had abandoned his family and probably committed suicide.

“Mark must have changed since those days, because back then he was never inflated or hypocritical; he was always willing to consider a thing. So he said that he was smart, white, and skinny, and that that was mainly what these people were looking for. But then he said, ‘You’re right, I should give them a better picture of myself,’ and he started doing this loony pantomime, like a silent-film actor. He tied a Harvard scarf in an idiotic bow around his head, like a guy with a toothache in a cartoon, and he grinned goonily and pretended to be masturbating. I started filming because I filmed everything that year, and because it was so funny. We also were probably stoned. We were usually stoned. And then he picked up a Wall Street Journal and fastened his eyes on it as though it were the most forbidden erotica. That made it even funnier. So when he took his actual dick out of his actual corduroys and started actually masturbating, what am I gonna do, be the prude who yells, Cut? ”

She saw his point. The whole thing was honestly arrived at. Leo wanted her to know he was not a creep who’d secretly filmed his friend’s dick. Fair enough.

“But I know what it looks like,” he continued. “It looks like it was made by crazy idiot people mocking their own privilege and celebrating their own leisure and just generally being wildly unaware. And it looks like it was shot by a repressed gay best friend. It is nothing I want to be associated with. But that’s not even really the reason I can’t give it to you, that’s not the reason we can’t use it against Mark.”

“I know,” said Leila, seeing where he was headed. “Just because something is embarrassing doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

“Yeah. Exactly. We’d be not just blackmailers but creepy, prurient judgers.”

“Yeah, and you’d be the backstabbing old friend who kept the creepy footage,” she said.

“The only reason I still have it is that I have all the film I shot that year and most of the tape I shot in the years after I gave up film. To discard a reel of film because my old friend’s semi-hard dick appears in three minutes of it, that would be weird, wouldn’t it? Like, methinks he doth be a bit too repulsed by penises.”

“But then why did you threaten him with it? You called it incriminating. That’s why I’m here.”

He deflated a bit. “I was so mad at him, Lola,” he said. She was getting used to the name. “He dumped me. Like, as a friend. And in one of the so-called parables in that idiotic book of his, he made up this character based on me. I’m clearly the ‘spoiled son of a toy tycoon.’ Apparently, my insulation from the rigors of the market has kept me spiritually scrawny. ‘Like a hatchery fish.’ He actually wrote this shit. He still owes me eight hundred bucks.

“Then a few months back, I guess I just started having a hard time. I mean, at first it was great and then it got harder and harder, you know. And I ended up making some terrible decisions…or just, you know, forgetting to keep remembering that I’m not the center of things.”

“I don’t understand,” said Leila. This was how Rich used to talk sometimes. She’d learned to steer paragraphs toward a conclusion. “Do you mean you went crazy? Like, actually psychotic?”

It worked here. “Not psychotic, no,” he said. He spread almond butter on an apple boat. She waited. “My mind jumped the rails just before that happened. Or maybe I made that decision. It was like: Keep going up on this ride — which you’re going to have to get off eventually, inevitably, by the way — or jump off now. Anyway, my mind and I chose to jump off, which was the right decision, I think. But we landed in a terrible place. I wrote that broadside just before I jumped off.”

But here’s the thing, thought Leila. He doesn’t look crazy . Quite the contrary, with his apple boats and his well-matted art. And his eyes were soft and deep and they didn’t even seem that troubled. She had seen troubled. Refugees. They had reason to be troubled.

“But that was a rehab facility I picked you up at, right?”

He nodded, like he knew where she was going. “Yeah. Yeah. It was. And I know, maybe I’m not really crazy. Or anyway, I probably fall within the functional types, the shouldn’t-complainers. Probably the drinking and the marijuana made it worse, you know, tipped me over? And that was dumb. So I’m going to remove those from the equation and see if I’m still a fucking teacup, see how hard life is then.”

This too reminded her of certain Rich conversations. Too many. Rich was a man of broken resolutions. People like that will waste your time.

“That’s great. I mean it. I mean, if what you just said is that you plan to get sober,” said Leila, tamping out the little fire her heart had started to build for him. “But I’m not your sponsor or anything. I came here to see if you would give us the thing against Deveraux.” This was a kind of war; the Committee had done worse things to her dad than blackmail him. She would ask again. “Will you give me that movie?”

Leo walked to the open back door. A mild breeze, honeysuckle-sweetened, was coming in, enough to stir the dish towels hung on the handle of the stove.

“No. I’ve been up and down the question, Lola. I see no way around the moral prohibition against blackmail.”

“But the thing we’re trying to bring down is just terrible, Leo,” she said, exasperation creeping into her voice. “Who cares about Deveraux’s dick, or your feelings about it?” He winced. “They want to enslave us all. We have to stop them.” She didn’t want to go into her family troubles.

“I believe you. Please tell me what else I can do.” He had raised his voice. “There’s gotta be something else. Maybe your asking me to do this is some sort of test question, like a test from Dear Diary.”

She hadn’t thought of that. “No, this is not a test question. This is just a request for a thing.”

“Or maybe you were sent by my judges.”

“What do you mean, judges? ”

“You know: God, Higher Power, angels, Santa, Elvis. Whatever.”

“And in your case?”

“Dead parents.”

“Your parents are dead? I’m sorry.” Her heart blew on the little embers of the fire.

“Not your fault,” he said.

“But you think I was sent by them?” She leaned on the interrogative there a little bit, to make a point.

“Well, whether you were sent by my dead parents or by a global online underground trying to stop the nefarious plot that I made out more or less correctly when I went near-psychotic, my decision is the same: you’re asking me to do something that you know I should not do, that I know I should not do.”

That’s why he was turning her head. He let her see his confusion, but he would not budge from the place his conscience had told him to stand. It was usually the other way around: people pretended to be so certain of things, but they were just guessing at what they thought was right, and they could be swayed easily. Also, he smelled like coffee, and beneath that a very mild dank, like a barn. Also, he had nice hands.

He asked if she would like to take a shower or a rest or anything. Both sounded nice. She hadn’t had a real night’s sleep or a run in seventy-two hours, and she still needed to drive to LA tonight. That was fifteen hours at the wheel. It sounded brutal. Vehicle accidents still danger number one in conflict zones, she’d learned on those courses. People make poor decisions when they’re pushed, when they’re ragged. And she hadn’t yet heard back from Sarah or Dear Diary. She looked at her watch. Three hours, maybe. If she had three hours’ sleep, maybe she could take stock, at least.