David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

He filled the coffeemaker from the bathroom tap, then called the deli around the corner and ordered an egg and bacon sandwich. He did his sit-ups and push-ups, proudly, on the dirty floor.

Now that he was back in Brooklyn, he had access to the weed he liked. Clean, hydroponic, fairly traded. He got good and stoned and got down to work.

After an hour, he had to get stoned again and take a brisk walk around his incredible city. He was trying to skip his record, open his heart, see through time. Or possibly he was trying to shirk work, hide from the truth, and find in the gabble of his stupid, teeming brain some way out of his current bind.

He wound up in Prospect Park in front of a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln. Mark didn’t like it at all. In this rendering, Lincoln was too richly robed — he was wearing a cloak, for Chrissake; the man was born in a log cabin — and pointing like a know-it-all to a bronze Emancipation Proclamation in his bronze hand.

Mark had a thing for Abraham Lincoln. Always had, since his dad had taken him to the Lincoln Memorial when he was a boy. Probably the same year he left. Look. See how he wants to get out of that chair? said Mark’s dad, leaning close to his son. See how his attention is focused on the thing that he had to do? That was a man charged with a great and difficult task. And even at twelve, in a beloved windbreaker, shorts, and tube socks pulled up high and tight, holding a huge eraser from the White House gift shop, Mark understood that his father, whose mother’s people were Louisiana from early times, was saying something important. So he had listened closely and he came away with the hope that one day he would be charged with a great task.

But Mark’s dad’s great and difficult task, apparently, was to abandon his wife and son, to go off and be gay somewhere. So why should Mark honor anything the man said?

When they came back from DC, Mark couldn’t stop talking about the Reflecting Pool and White House tour and, especially, the Lincoln Memorial. His mom was annoyed. They probably didn’t have the money to be taking vacations, even Amtrak ones. That was probably it. And one night, before she clicked the light off, she said, You know, Mark, sometimes we have to do the right thing even when nobody’s looking. Everybody’s got to help. There’s lots and lots of great people — and women too, remember, not just men — who don’t get statues, who live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Somehow that bedtime speech found footing in the coral of his little-boy brain, and in college, when Mark got to the end of Middlemarch , he really thought for a minute that George Eliot had somehow cribbed from his mom, but then he realized that it was just her sneaking the literary canon into his head, the way she liked to do. His charm was his dad’s, but if he was smart, it was because of her. She would not want him anywhere near this SineCo shit, he thought as he wandered stoned through the park on a Tuesday at noon.

There had to be another way. Straw wanted him to catch people in a net. Being a hack was one thing; being a criminal propagandist quite another. For his mom. For his mom, he had to say no to the job.

But the money. The money his mom might need.

Maybe, for his mom, he had to say yes to the job.

Two years ago, when he’d first come into what seemed at the time like totally bankable fame, when he had been certain that the universe was telling him, Here, Mark, you can take care of your mother, who took such good care of you, he had made certain promises to her: a less toxic house, with a little yard; a car that didn’t break down; a real doctor whenever she needed one.

But unless some rich gigs were forthcoming or some new source of income came into play, next month he should really tell her to give back the car, because that was money that should be put toward her health insurance. ( Toward! It cost two grand a month to be on hold with these people.) The insurance was called Healthy Choices, which made it sound like a cereal, but it should have been called Abstract Obligations — he couldn’t understand a word of the literature they sent him, even though Don’t worry, Ma, just have them send that stuff to me was what he’d said to her a year ago.

Health insurance trumped car right now, definitely. Her brain might be going coralline, according to some of the very initial tests they run on you if you can’t remember how to drive to the tire dealership at which you’ve worked for fifteen years, and if your home appliances start to menace and stump you, and if your bridge partner dumps you (and if you have a fully paid up Healthy Choices Gold Shield plan). And who knew how much money he’d need if it turned out she was slipping down the banks of Make Sense into the River Dementia?

Okay, so maybe this day, the brisk walk had led not to writing but rather to more of the morose and desperate outlook and hours of aimless walking and a few more terrible minutes at the typewriter and a few gorgeous minutes (those immediately following the five o’clock whistle and the untwisting of the gin cap) that he spent at his window looking at New York Harbor and Lower Manhattan, imagining how it would be when his stupid self-help book turned out to actually be a work of truth and power, of forgiveness and rebirth. Old friends would get back in touch; they’d say, I always knew you had it in you, Mark . His home would become a salon, with smart and worldly people who cared about ideas and distant struggles and good food and him.

And the stupid little fantasy buoyed him, and he found that a glorious evening waited outside. He walked east, the sun throwing his shadow long. His neighborhood was teeming with prosperous liberals and the harmless homeless, and he steered himself into a restaurant to find food and to douse again — with Thai beer, it turned out to be that night — the worry and fear that had stolen another day.

The next day, Blinc’s office called. Not with a reprieve on the book ( I’m sorry to inform you that Marjorie Blinc was mauled to death by her vizslas was what he’d secretly hoped to hear when he answered), but at least with a paying gig, the very next day. An overnight to Chicago, at Conch’s expense, to lead a morning seminar for…it wasn’t clear to him for whom. But anyway, it would be a break from the writing, and he’d probably get ten grand for it. That’s what he’d gotten last month for a similar-sounding gig. That would keep a few hounds from the door. He could hold off the Croatian with the threatening son, keep his mom’s car lease a few more months, find an electrician to bring his apartment into compliance, and the rest would go toward the worst of the credit cards.

Mark hadn’t actually spoken to Blinc since that unfortunate dinner in East London. She was conveying her displeasure and impatience with him by communicating only via underlings. Her chief assistant called him with the news of the Chicago trip, but it was a lesser assistant who waited until the next morning to send through the itinerary-and-engagement-specifics letter.

It could hardly be worse. He was to be on a “moderated panel” in a bookstore. It wasn’t clear even that he was the headliner. And then the really bad news: the whole thing was considered a promotional event, to which he was obligated by contract. There would be no honorarium. Hotel, airfare, and probably some fucking bagels. That was it.

The bookstore wasn’t even in Chicago. It turned out be in a suburb the name of which Mark did not recognize. Transport from airport to hotel was by shuttle van. The hotel belonged to a sub-brand of a better hotel and was only a few steps above the kind in which they shove the flight-bumped. It had a lot of frosted glass; the lobby plants needed dusting; in the elevators and even in Mark’s chill, dank room, there was an abundance of cheap advertising for local attractions and services — sky-diving, a cheese museum, a steakhouse called El Primo.