Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“Over,” she said, swallowing, licking her lips. A last little fizz of pain in her eyes. Julie could see it dying away, like Sally Kellerman in “Where No Man Has Gone Before” when the psionic fire went out of her.

“You okay?” he said.

“I am fine. If Lazar comes in here, I will not be fine. You will have to kill him.”

“I can do that.”

“You will have to be my Captain’s Woman, hit him with that Tantalus Field.”

“Dude is toast.”

She took hold of his hands in hers. “You are a good boy, Julius Jaffe,” she told him. “Your momma raised you right.”

“Thank you.”

“That must have been a weird, weird scene over there at that motel this morning.”

“It was insane . I don’t know what was happening. I don’t get what the deal is.”

“Who were the guys?”

“I don’t know, they work for, you know, Mr. Flowers, they have the suits, so they look kind of like Black Muslims, only with bling, and neckties, not bow ties.”

“Yes. Yeah.”

“I don’t know, it’s some kind of thing between him and Luther. Mr. Flowers and Luther. From back a long time ago, when Archy was little.”

“Archy didn’t tell you what it’s about?”

“No. He just said he would take care of it.”

Gwen bit her lower lip, not in pain, and shook her head once turning away from Julie. He was about to reassure her that Archy was coming, that he would come as soon as he heard that she had gone into labor. It occurred to him, however, that this might not be true. Julie had no idea what kind of situation Archy had walked into. The dudes from the funeral home went around armed and were probably dangerous, even if the big one, Bank, had proved surprisingly vulnerable to assault with a wooden katana.

“Titus, he’s the one ought to be in the emergency room,” Gwen said. “He was hurt, huh? I did the wrong thing, I should not have let him go. That was wrong. I don’t know where my head was. I guess I was feeling kind of crazy.”

“He had a bloody nose, but he was okay. He is pretty, like, tough.” Julie feeling a rush of gratitude toward Gwen for affording him an excuse to talk about Titus. “I think he lived in some pretty, you know, not so great places? Like where he was living here? Across the street from Mr. Jones.”

“I heard about that.”

“They treated him like shit.”

“Language, Julius.”

“It was a nightmare.”

“You like him, don’t you?”

“He’s my friend.”

Vulcan mind meld, Julie looking at her face could read her thought: Something you never really had before. “What did he ever say about me?”

“He… I don’t know. Probably he’s a little afraid of you. I know he, I mean, I could tell he was kind of, like, kind of excited about this.”

“The baby.”

“Yeah. His brother. He said you told him it was a boy.”

“It is. He is.”

“Yeah, he seemed excited. I bet if he knew you were going into labor, he wouldn’t have run away.”

“Huh,” Gwen said, and at first Julius took it for an expression of mild interest, Gwen registering a minor gain in information on a subject she formerly had known little about. Then the sound deepened and transformed and drew itself into a moan, huuuuuuuuh , and he saw that another contraction was coming on.

Julie heard the rattle of Gwen’s file in the rack outside. He stood up just as the door opened and a lean, pale doctor with a stubbly scalp stuck his head into the room. He wore blue scrubs and a stethoscope necklace.

“Seven minutes apart!” Julie reported, holding up the envelope. “Seven minutes!”

“Seven minutes!” the doctor echoed. “Is that English time or metric?”

Julie lost himself in a fascinated confusion over this concept, the year divided into ten months, the month into ten weeks, the week into ten days. No, that would be too many days.

Gwen had closed her eyes; Julie was not even sure she had seen the doctor. “Not you,” she said, her voice so soft it was barely audible. “No fucking way.”

Lazar glanced at Julie, trying to enlist him with a look. Julie returned his most basilisk stare, willing it to vaporize the doctor into a shimmering Tantalus mist.

“Who’s your friend, huh?” Lazar said to Gwen. He took a look at the fetal monitor, tried to take hold of Gwen’s wrist. “You having one right now?”

She yanked her hand free. “No,” Gwen said. “I’m fine. The baby’s fine. There’s no sign of distress. I can wait until Aviva gets here.”

Then the contraction rolled in over Gwen, and she was swept up in it, swept away. Julie felt himself, Lazar, the hospital, vanish from her thoughts. Lazar stood there watching her. His eyes had looked dead before, exhausted, but now Julie saw a quickness there, an alertness, almost, Julie would have said, a sense of adventure. Lazar waited and waited, glancing at the monitor display. When Gwen opened her eyes again, he said, “Tell you what I’ll do. And this is all I’ll do. Ms. Shanks, you can wait for your partner, hang out here and labor, I’ll be only too happy to stay out of your way. But the instant we see one little blip of what I feel to be evidence of fetal distress, I am going in and getting that baby. Period. Got it?”

Gwen only nodded.

Lazar seemed to hesitate, on the point of saying something more. But he just jotted a few notes in her file and walked out.

“I’m sorry,” Julie said, “I didn’t kill him.”

“That’s all right,” Gwen said. “There’s time. I think there’s time. I wish my mom were here.”

She started to cry about her mom a little bit. She said she missed her father and her brothers, all of them back in D.C. and Philly. Julie gave her a tissue, then a second. His father came in holding a rattling cup of ice.

“Aviva’ll be here as soon as she can,” he announced. “Probably any minute. Also, I brought ice.”

“Bless you,” Gwen said.

He handed her the plastic cup, and she crunched thoughtfully. Eyes aswim, staring at Julie in a way that made him worry he might start to cry, too. She was feeling sorry either for herself, having a baby three thousand miles from her family, or for him.

“You know where to look for Titus?” she said at last, around a mouthful of ice.

“Maybe,” Julie said, drafting a thesis almost immediately. “Maybe I might.”

“Go on and find him, then,” she said. “This baby is going to want his brother.”

“Idon’t know you,” said the little old Chinese lady. “Why I would know your friend?”

“No reason,” Julie said. “But—”

“He’s my student?”

“No. But like I said. He keeps his bike here. So I—”

“You think I’m deaf?”

“No.”

“Because you talking so loud.”

“I—”

“Deaf, old, Chinese, and stupid. That what you think?”

“No.” Julie took a deep breath. Start again. “Hello,” he said. He held out his hand. “My name is Julius Jaffe.” He took out the cards from his wallet, shuffled through them. Found one, an old one, that identified him as OCCULT RESEARCHER. Passed it to her. She read the proffered text, frowned, took another look at him, betraying neither skepticism nor interest.

“My friend Titus,” he said, “hid his bicycle behind your Dumpster, in the, uh, honeysuckle bush? He has to hide it there because, okay, when he was living in Mrs. Wiggins’s house? Around the corner on Forty-second? Stuff kept happening to his bike. I guess there’s a lot of people living there?”

“Miss Wiggins.” He could tell that she knew which house he meant. “Okay.”

“Like one time somebody took it and, like, rode it. And they broke it. And another time somebody sold it to buy drugs, and Titus had to steal it back. So he started hiding it back there because, I mean, there’s so much honeysuckle. You can’t see it. And because I am looking for him, to tell him that his baby brother is being born right now —”