David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

I know — I had you at binarily. Act fast, Lola. How long do you think a weak-minded addict will stay on the shelf? Because that day you walked in? That day I saw you? I swear, my heart slowed and my breath came easier. All that rabbiting I do — it just stopped. Not stopped by like magic, but stopped with reason. You are as strange and amazing as anything my stupid little brain has ever come up with, and you are from outside of it. You have no idea what great news that is. And I’m going to lift some copy here, but there is a time for everything, that day and night here you were the still point of the turning world, and I knew for sure that I had a place in it. That place is next to you.

The Argentines have a phrase: my media naranja, they say — my half-orange.

But listen. Even if you’re not interested in the above, know that I am furious at these people who have harmed your family. Let me help you stop them. I am highly qualified to oppose secret nefarious cabals, and I have an idea, a new angle on the thing.

Guess who got in touch yesterday, Lola? Mark Deveraux. He wrote to me. I think he wants to apologize or something. He’s going to be in Portland this weekend.

We never considered just asking him for his help. Why didn’t we consider that? Your people must have decided he would never go willingly. But I think he might. Mark may be a self-centered bullshitter, but he’s no evil genius. And he got me out of a few ditches. When my parents died, I was kind of ghosting around, seeing flames everywhere, and my sisters had me going to this vulture-y trauma counselor. Then Mark showed up in some girl’s Saab and took me up to Maine, where the girl’s parents had this pretend farm on a private island, and he installed me in one of their converted barn guesthouses, and for about a month he brought me magazines and pot and soup. Then there was this other time, when I bought the bookstore and totally failed at that, and when I had to sell it, he came and helped me pack it all up. I leaned on him hard then too.

Point is, I think he’s a good man, at heart. Maybe he’s gotten caught up with these people without meaning to, and all he needs is to be offered a way out. That’s how it’s been with me sometimes. Like when you came to get me.

But I want you there with me when I see him, Lola. I need you there. You’ll do a better job explaining the situation than I would. Come up here. I’m supposed to see him on Friday.

I understand that there is some danger here, and haste. I will not waste your time, and I’m taking precautions. I will mail this care of your sister, at her workplace. And you figured out the ink thing. I knew you would. Let me know that you’re coming, and when. Leave a message on my landline saying you’re at the dentist’s office or something, and leave a callback number that is actually the date and time of your arrival. I’ll be here.

I really am quite sure that there is something we’re supposed to do together, that there is more that is supposed to go on between us. Aren’t you? Isn’t there a held breath in your life right now? I’ve missed a few boats already, and I really don’t want to miss this one too. I realize that in that metaphor or analogy or whatever, you are a boat. That doesn’t really quite get what I mean, because I am also a boat. We are both boats and we are both passengers. We should not miss each other.

Leo Crane

Years ago, a boyfriend who was trying to make up for some bad behavior had written hundreds of little notes to her and left them around the apartment they shared in DC. He was the drinker, that one, a poet and a plate smasher. Those notes bought him six more months with Leila. But, finally, the affair had left her with a mild distrust of love letters.

Not this one. She recalled what Leo looked like; how his voice had sounded. A key in her was turning. She realized how unfair it was of her to leap into his life like that, demanding something and then vanishing. She hadn’t even given him her name.

Mark had a Friday-morning flight out of Newark, and when the car dropped him at Terminal C two hours before departure, he was in a sharp suit, with a charged laptop and his wits about him. He was nervous about seeing Leo that evening and about the Nike thing the next day.

The security line had stalled. The guy in front of Mark cursed under his breath, gathered his plastic bin, and moved — shoeless, beltless — to the next line over. Mark saw the problem. The TSA agent in Mark’s line was getting stern with some poor schmuck who apparently had no boarding pass. “Sir, without a boarding pass, I cannot let you through,” the meaty agent was saying. “Sir, you will have to step out of the line, sir. I’m not going to tell you again, sir.”

Mark thought, Jeez, this guy hasn’t been in an airport in ten years? But then he looked closer and started listening. The man was speaking Spanish; a chewy, Central American kind of Spanish. He was trying to make himself understood. Mark’s Spanish was poor, but even he understood what was going on. The man’s wife and daughter were through security, twenty feet away from him. The daughter clung to the wife while another agent swabbed the daughter’s wheelchair with one of those dainty little wands. It wasn’t an airport-issue wheelchair, but a more specialized job. The daughter had matchstick legs and a severely torqued spine; her face was bent with worry and pain.

Some muscle at Mark’s core flexed, and without deliberation, he said to the TSA agent, “This man just wants to walk his wife and daughter to the gate.” The agent ignored him. But the Central American man gave Mark a thank-you look, so Mark, who still had his shoes on, stepped closer. “He just wants to stay with his daughter a little longer,” said Mark to the agent, “Look at her. It’s no big deal. Just let him through.”

“You have no input, sir. Step back in line.” The agent was about Mark’s age, though smoosh-faced and small-eyed. He had a shit job, but it had one perk, and that was being able to tell anyone — any civilian — to Step Back in Line.

Mark felt his breath go thin. Some line about the Gestapo came to him. But he wanted to get to Portland this morning, and though you could make a point — probably should make a point, actually — you were not going to beat Homeland Security while standing in Security Checkpoint C-3, even if you still had your shoes on. So Mark stepped back in line, though he did not drop his eyes while he did so.

Their little fuss had attracted two more agents, one of whom hovered near Mark while the other tried to get the Latino dad to leave the line. People behind Mark were shifting to other lines. The supervisor interacting with the Latino dad wanted him to return to the ticket agent and get something called an escort pass. The Latino dad was saying he had tried to do that; that the ticket agent had told him to ask the TSA. But none of the gloved and badged men in the huddle spoke Spanish.

“Look, he tried that,” said Mark, from behind his little minder, a mousy dude who didn’t even really fill out the royal blue of his TSA uniform. “They obviously told him you people make this kind of call. He got the runaround. Why not just let the man walk his family to the fucking gate?”

“I’m going to need you to stay out of this. Choose a new line now,” said the supervisor, a handsome, mustachioed black man.

Then a few things happened quickly. Mark waved his hand before his face, rolled his eyes, and curled his lips; the international sign for Oh, whatever —the same maneuver a six-year-old uses to infuriate a reprimanding parent.

But the mousy agent who was standing near Mark took the wave as an aggressive act and grabbed Mark’s wrist and twisted it about an axis it did not possess. Mark yelled. The girl on the far side of security half collapsed, and her dad made a break for his daughter. A clutch of agents, who had been doing nothing but poke through bathroom kits for years, sprang into action, tackling the dad. Mark, who had two self-defensive maneuvers — the head-butt and the run-away — automatically employed the former on the agent who was trying to bring him down. This did in fact get Mark’s wrist released, as the agent put his hand to his own cracked brow. But then the handsome mustachioed supervisor was on Mark in an instant, and Mark’s arms were wrenched behind him and he could hear the plastic cuffs being zizzed tight.