David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Whatever with that,” said Mark, trying to get the room back. “I may have damaged my chances with Straw. And if Pope’s guys are outside my hotel, I bet it’s because he intends to keep me from Straw and from getting back on Sine Wave Two .”

The others considered this. “Well, your doppel’s holed up in his hotel, drinking,” said Constance. “Just like you were going to be. As long as the Bluebirds think you’re that guy in there, we can move you around freely.”

The just like you were going to be was unnecessary, thought Mark. “Yeah, but it’s going to be awfully hard to slip back on board without Pope’s say-so. They run a tight ship.”

“Think of a way, Dixon,” said Constance.

Mark thought.

“You guys got an outside line here?” he asked her.

Leila found Leo in the barn with his head pressed against the pony’s brown neck, his eyes closed, a serene smile on his face.

“Leo? You okay?” she said.

He opened his eyes, looked at her. “You smell this pony?”

She had been olfactorily aware of the pony since it showed up at the landing strip; pony was indeed a pleasant smell, or this pony was, anyway. “Okay, but you know how you’re in recovery? Or sober? Or whatever you’re calling it?”

“Yeah. You think this isn’t allowed?”

“What? Pony sniffing?”

“No. The eye test.”

“No. No. I’m sure it’s allowed. But if you’re feeling kind of ecstatic right now, don’t let it confuse you. This patch will be over in a few hours.”

“That’s no reason not to enjoy it,” said Leo. Then he looked the pony in her spheroid eye and asked: “Wouldn’t you agree, beast?”

Seeing him there, so blithe and pony-intrigued, Leila was angry. It felt misdirected from the get-go, the anger toward him. But it was a strong feeling, and she wanted to give it words. “And it’s not the important part of this, anyway.”

“What’s not the important part of what?”

“Feeling transcendentally interesting or sublime or even connected is not the important part of Dear Diary. Or of life, really. We have work to do, Leo.”

She had his attention. He stopped petting the pony and turned more squarely to her. “Those things you mentioned are pretty important to me, you know.”

“I know,” she said. “I mean, I let go and slip out into the big void too sometimes, you know. But I think most of the work we’re supposed to do is self-tethering. You have to at least try to connect yourself to the plain old world you live in.” A scrap of a poem came back to her. “‘For us, there is only the trying.’”

“Yeah, I know,” said Leo. “‘The rest is none of our business.’”

He knew that one! “But do you really get that? If things don’t go the way you want them to go, are you going to think you’re a failure?”

“What are we talking about, Leila?”

He was so disarming. She’d meant to be scolding him, and here he had ducked it like an aikido master and moved in closer to her. She could smell the salt of him.

“The letter you wrote to me.”

“Yeah, well, listen, if I was way off base, I’m sorry. It was worth a shot.” He didn’t look sorry.

“You weren’t off base, Leo.” They were standing close again, charged particles between them like fireflies. “But that teepee-wigwam thing of yours is a bad system. You’re either a genius or a loser? What if you’re neither? What if you’re in between, a little of both? That’s much more likely.”

He didn’t look loony anymore. He looked as clear-eyed as a raptor. “I know that. I know how I’m supposed to feel. I’m supposed to be okay with myself or change what I’m not okay with. But I’m halfway through my life, Leila, and it’s always been this way. Most of the time, I’m a loser. When I’m a genius, why shouldn’t I grab hold of the feeling? At least that way I can pull up the average.”

“Well, when you put it like that,” she said. “But feelings aren’t vines in a jungle; you don’t grab hold of them. You get through them or you enjoy them or whatever.” She was thinking of the plate smasher, and her one girlfriend, in college, and a maternal uncle — addicts all — who seemed always to be at the center of storms they could just as easily have steered around. “There’s a basic problem in the way you’re approaching this.”

“Well, when you put it like that,” he said.

“Sorry. No. That’s kind of an asshole thing for me to say.”

“I don’t think it rises to asshole,” he said. “But why do you care, Leila? I mean, about these habits of mine.”

Why did she care? Was that love, or whatever was preliminary to love? It felt more like a tapeworm, or like that Alpine-hatted worm from the Richard Scarry books, with a little suitcase, come to live behind her sternum. Leila had always suffered from what she feared was a deficit in romantic drive, a condition stigmatized in women. Even the people she had most loved she could not exactly recall falling in love with. It had felt rather more like moving slowly up a steep grade.

“Because you were right,” she said. “What you said in the letter. That there was more supposed to happen between us. It’s happening now, isn’t it?”

He nodded. The pony lifted her head. Her wild black nostrils flared and sniffed.

“Okay, but I’m not just some experience,” she said. “I go forward and backward in time. And if we’re going to do this, I want to know that you’re reliable. Are you reliable?”

He was looking out at the sky through the door behind her. She let twice the reasonable amount of time go by and then said, “Leo?”

“Yeah. I’m thinking.”

“You shouldn’t have to think so long to answer that question,” said Leila.

“I would like to one day live with you in Rome and bathe our child in an iron tub. Actually, any kind of tub, really. With you, I would always try my hardest — God loves a trier, they say. And I wouldn’t lie or hide. I want to feed you and fuck you and ask you what’s up and walk with you through whatever searing desert, down any choked street, into what joy and trouble might be ours.”

The words brought her to the edge of a high cliff. Rome? Our child? Why, how, did he let himself race forward like this? She could have fallen into him then, but he kept speaking: “But all those are just promises and fantasies, so I don’t see why they should mean that much to you. And reliable?” He made a little orchestra conductor’s flourish before his temple.

“What does that mean?” she asked, imitating the gesture, gutted by his swerve and disclaimer.

“It means that I feel like my mind’s a wild card. I don’t want to say I’m reliable and then spend my life trying to live up to that.”

She thought: His mind’s a wild card? Sounds worrisome. She said: “I think that’s exactly what you should do.”

“What?”

“Spend your life trying to live up to ideals. The rest is none of our business.” She could see him take that in.

“But what about when two or more of the ideals you’re trying to live up to come into conflict?” he said. “Like when you get to some door and you can’t be both reliable and adventurous and still get through the door?”

She left him there then, with the pony and his stupid angst, his Hamletian hemming. Why would he not just settle on one or the other? Their child in a bath in Rome, or not? It would be too much work, loving a man like that, torn as he was by twenty decisions a day. She walked back across the still meadow; the moon had set, and the sky was a blue speckled bowl.

She went back inside and found Mark and Constance and Roman clustered around a computer. Not one of the computers that Dear Diary appeared to fabricate here — the old laptops gutted and re-filled with the novophylum plants. The computer they were sitting around looked like an old PC, with a tower and a big monitor. Both were wrapped in tinfoil. Mark’s Node was attached to the computer’s tower with a short USB cord. A cable the gauge of a garden hose ran from the back of this setup along the floor and into the butt of a rifle that Trip was holding. He was making himself comfortable in a wooden chair by the window. Then he used another chair, overturned, to make a sort of aiming cradle, and he pointed the rifle out the window, at the sky.