David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Mark plowed right into his presentation he had crammed for. But he missed all his punch lines, and he was sweating. It was soon clear to him that he was not going to be all right. After half an hour he called a break. In the bathroom he did an obscenely malodorous thing, then stood before the mirror blotting his clammy flesh with the linty eco-towels stingily dispensed by the wall unit. Strip clubs. That’s what it had been last night. Then to a bar with one of the dancers. But then maybe some ulterior task or destination. He remembered counting out hundreds.

“So it is only by being ready for opportunity that we are ready to seize it,” he tried. Some of his audience had not returned after the break. He became aware of the smell of himself, sweet and dank. The sun through the wall of windows was brutal. “But of course, you can never be ready, because being ready means you’re expecting something, and expecting something means that you will be disappointed when you don’t get it.” He tried to take a swig out of his bottle of water but found that it was empty, so he was caught suckling from a plastic bottle, which crinkle-crackled loudly. “But you can be ready to be ready…”

“Bullshit,” he heard a lady mutter from the front row.

Never a good sign. He persevered. There was a point here that had worked before. “As long as you wake up each day, saying to yourself: This is another day I will be able to…um…you need to skip your record…Now, I’d like half of you — let’s say, the half of the room to my right, your left — I’d like you to write down five fears. The other half of the room — your left, my right — write down your desires. Got it?” Mark’s head felt shrunken. He may have been swaying.

“Can I have a pen?” said a man in the front row. “That’s one of my desires.”

Mark gave the man his pen.

“I need one too,” said another man.

“Yeah, mine ran outta ink,” said a third.

“Why don’t I go look for some more,” said Mark, and he fled the room.

He was in a tremendous, carpeted corridor that receded fore and aft like a gyroscopic dream. Some people at a great distance, small as mice, crossed the corridor. He wobbled a bit; he thought he might come unstuck from the floor and pinwheel down the length of the building, like the dude in Titanic who bangs off the propeller and into the ocean. He obeyed instinct and made for a distant door and the green world beyond. Outside, a light breeze blew the stink off him. The panic and dizziness and queasiness receded a bit.

Okay, he definitely didn’t want to interact with Dave the minder again. He needed to get out of there. He would call Leo Crane. If he said, Please come get me, I’ll explain when you do, wouldn’t Leo come through? Closing one eye, he thumbed his Node until it gave him Leo’s number.

Leila and Leo were sitting in a deep green Toyota Corolla, ten years old, a bike rack on the roof, in a vast parking lot on the Nike campus. Leo thought it felt like a stakeout on an old cop show. There was even a bag of nuts on the tray of the little console between them. Leila ate a few, absently. She was so concentrated. When did this girl relax?

“Were the walnuts in the car too?” he asked her. She had explained that the car was waiting for her in the short-term lot at the airport, keys on the right rear tire. The Dear Diary Travel Agency, she called it.

“No. They’re mine. They’re pecans, though,” said Leila. Then, almost suspiciously, “You don’t know your nuts?”

“I don’t really like nuts.”

“Seriously?”

She looked so disappointed that he backpedaled. “I mean, you know, in moderation; almond flour in a crust, some peanuts in your pad thai.” To show how reasonable he was, he popped a couple of pecans in his mouth, but then he couldn’t hide his distaste. The mealiness, the tang, the granularity.

She laughed at him. “You don’t have to like nuts.”

They’d been sitting there for an hour. They knew that Mark was somewhere in the enormous complex before them. Their Nike source — Leo’s friend Ted, who had also provided them cover at the security booth by claiming them as his guests — said that the seminar Mark was leading for the tier-one executives was scheduled to finish at noon. The idea was to swoop down on Mark when he left the building. If they could get him in the car, Leila was going to message a local Diarist who would bring them in, give Mark the real pitch, hopefully the eye test. Leo was also looking for a way to bring up the love-letterish part of his lemon-juice letter. They had so far avoided the topic.

But Leila kept returning to Mark and what would make him come with them. “Everyone has a way in,” she said. “There’s something we can say to him that will make him see. What’s he like, really?”

“Well,” said Leo. “His dad fucked off when he was, like, eleven. He really loves his mom. They’re pretty close. He’s very smart. Loves to do drugs, or did anyway. According to his book, he’s moved past all that . But if that’s true, I’ll smoke my hat.”

“Yeah, he was drinking hard in the lounge that time.”

Leo wasn’t thrilled that Mark and Leila had already met, nor that Mark had apparently performed one of his magic tricks on her. He decided to remake a point.

“You know, with that trick, there was only one card you could’ve picked, Leila. He probably had that jack hidden before the thing even started.”

“I didn’t say he was actually magic,” said Leila. “I just said it was a good illusion; I don’t know how he pulled it off.”

Nerves. Balls. Chutzpah, thought Leo. Whatever it was, Mark had plenty of it. Back when they ran together, anyway. Mark was your man for capers, for finding the fire stairs to the roof, for rapping on the windows of closing pizzerias and asking earnestly, through the glass, You got any slices? Cold is fine . He charmed, and bluffed, and talked his way into places. Leo looked out at the green sneaker campus. These people were engaged in a trick also, weren’t they? Pay an Indonesian four bucks a day; pay a PR machine a hundred million a year. Shazam, you can mark your shit up 500 percent and no one’s gonna say boo. Of course Mark was delivering a “seminar” to the upper executives. If you were willing to lie for money, you could probably go very far.

Leo’s cell phone rang: a 917 area code. Rosemary? Heather?

“Hello?”

“Leo?”

“Mark?”

“Yeah. Listen. I’m really sorry I couldn’t make it last night. I was ill. But I’m free now. I’m in Beavertown.”

Leo covered the receiver part of his phone and mouthed to Leila, It’s Mark. But she was pointing through the windshield at a man thirty paces away and mouthing to Leo, There’s Mark.

“Mark,” said Leo, “hold on a sec.” Then he put the phone against his chest. “You ready for this, Leila?” he said.

She clutched his forearm, like a damsel in a nickelodeon. “Leo, we have to be able to convince him. If Straw brought him to the yacht, then he’s, like, a made man. Turn him and we can strike back at them. There’s no other way.”

“I know. I really think we can.”

“You think? Leo, if we tell him about Dear Diary, then he’s got to come with us, one way or another. We can’t let him go blabbing back to the Committee.”

The we can’t let him go part tightened the air in the car, as a bolt is tightened by the clever lever of a wrench.

Leo was being asked to vouch for the good-heartedness of his old friend. They had been like brothers once. He could have vouched for Mark then. Do people change at heart?