Austin Bunn - The Brink - Stories

It wasn’t suspicion that led her to his door, but an odd curiosity. A sense that Langy still had something of hers. She spied in on him from the open door. Langy sat on the edge of his cot, his wig curled like a cat on his lap. He wiped makeup from his face with a small towel. On the wall, he had pinned pages from tabloid magazines, dozens of European models and actresses, at beaches and premieres and weddings, shot from helicopters. It looked like the room of a teenaged American girl. Haley couldn’t recognize any of the faces. Europe really had its own zoo of famous people.

Langy swanned toward a mirror and saw her, suddenly, in the reflection. Without turning, with the delicacy of someone who felt comfortable being observed, he smiled and waved her in.

She entered and Langy pat the cot next to him. It squeaked when she sat. Langy ran the back of his hand down the length of Haley’s hair, and then he took a brush from his table and showed it to her, asking permission. Haley nodded, not entirely sure what she was agreeing to, and then Langy was combing her hair. As a girl, when her mother did it for her, it relaxed her like nothing else could. Her mother would say, “Tell me everything,” and she would spill.

Haley closed her eyes and while Langy brushed, the story came out. Saul, who managed to get her pregnant after fucking her twice. The nausea she had to lie to Mac about, and her rage that Saul had appeared in her life so casually only to come this close to detonating it. She just kept talking, about the clinic and cramps that followed, until what was buried inside her, this hidden awfulness, had been released.

When she finished, Langy lifted her left hand up to his face.

He peered closely at her wedding band. Then Langy turned to his bedside table and rustled through the drawer. It was teeming with jewelry — bracelets, necklaces, a jumble of glamour. He held his fist over her open palm and released a small loop of metal. A ring. White gold and expensive, but not theirs. Inside the loop was engraved for “my most beautiful — J.”

“Where did you get this?” Haley asked.

Langy put his hands together and made a diving motion.

The boy, Langy’s partner on the raft, entered the room breathlessly and stopped. In his hands he had a backpack. The top flap was open, revealing a row of metal pipes capped with duct tape. Langy leapt up and closed the flap. They spoke quickly and Haley understood that she didn’t belong, had come to the end of the detour and was now risking her life. She wanted to leave, but Langy and the boy occupied the doorway, chattering angrily. Langy grabbed the backpack, more forcibly than Haley thought was prudent, and exited into the dark.

Crowds of other workers had already assembled on their patios when Haley left the room, and the presence of other worried people consoled her. They whispered and smoked and stared as Langy, still in his outfit, moved like a blue blaze across the grassy compound to another room. A man in a dress carrying a bomb — this would never end up in her story. He knocked on another door and the concierge, in a white T-shirt and hospital pants, answered, picking his teeth. This is how they truly were. Haley realized that she’d been looking at masks, seeing only docile supplication, from the other side of the reception desk. An argument grew between them, the boy shouting too, until the concierge spied Haley.

“What is happening?” Haley asked, trying to make her authoritative tone outdo her fear. He must know that, as a Westerner, she had access to news agencies, enterprises of scrutiny, an embassy window with a person who cared. Langy and the boy set the bag on the patio and backed away.

“The boy finds this,” the concierge said.

“Where? Here? Tell me. In the hotel?”

The concierge did not answer, and instead held his hands in a prayer shape against his lips and tapped his fingers.

“It’s a bomb, isn’t it?” she said. She thought, So they do go in runs. “Tell me.”

“Yes. He finds it in the lobby.”

“You need to call the police.”

The concierge took in the rows of workers watching her on their patios and balconies. His eyes seemed to sweep over the expanse of the apartments, not suspiciously but with a hard, unhurried sadness. She’d seen the same expression in the faces of families back in Chicago when she told them their plots of gardens would be cemented over for buildings, for development. The look of a bitter ending. Then it occurred to Haley: when the news broke, when she told someone that a bomb had been found here, the resort would suffer, their jobs would evaporate, detonation or not. This place would be over and she would be responsible for it. In an instant, the consequences tunneled out and away from her. Forget the ring. She and Mac would leave tomorrow on the first plane, back to what was theirs.

“Please go,” the concierge said, and waved her off.

She walked through the gate and back into the foyer, then out to the beach, where a smaller, hardier circle of newlyweds continued to smoke. She folded her pants and blouse and walked into the calm lagoon. Nothing could hurt her out here. She swam out to the raft and lifted herself up.

The visiting yacht was nearby, and she could make out the bodies at the railing. They laughed at each other in a foreign language and leapt into the water. A woman in heels climbed down a rope ladder and fell. They were drunk, senseless, swimming at the boat’s waterline, champagne flutes held in the air. Soon they would all know better.

Leah,

I forgot to tell you about the gravity + how I felt it! When we took the van this afternoon, just you + me, the whole way I heard a hum, like when you walk into the house + sense a television is on. Like electricity at the fringes. My container lifted, then pulled against the seat belt. It was the ship, at last, calling me, readying me for the jump. I wanted so badly to tell you, but wanting is a feeling, the hardest one to subtract. I looked up, but there were just clouds, dumb earth weather. The ship was invisible, just like Bo explained, tucked somewhere, in the tail of the comet.

Science proves there are all kinds of gravities. Moon ache makes tides. Even you, Leah, pull me. In two days, when the comet comes closest, we’ll get on the scales + they’ll say zero.

We drove to the university to post the Final Offer + it was strange because we saw brush fires in the foothills near the freeway. They made such a bright yellow hem in the hillside. I think California is going to die right after we do. Gray smoke drifted in the sky, the sun on a dimmer. As I drove, I stared into the sun, dared it to blind me, but it didn’t so I won. When the snowflakes of ash flurried around the van, you weren’t scared because you had your Bible in your lap, the one that you highlighted so much in yellow + orange + green marker that it looked like the flag of some weird African country. You tucked your feet underneath you, pushed your glasses up + read from the unboring part. “I will show wonders in Heaven above + earth beneath, blood + fire + vapor of smoke,” you said, “The Sun shall be turned into darkness + the moon into blood.” It was as if the Bible were a movie that we were watching + also living in, like costars!

The sky was scrubbed clean over the campus, perched on the coast like it is. I parked in the lot at the student center + paid the parking meter, even though soon there will be galaxies between us + our parking tickets. Inside the center, I was surprised at how young the other containers were, younger than us even, coral-pink + bronze, like they’d been buffed + waxed + stored in a garage every night. I guess I’ve gotten used to being surrounded by later models, like Old Margaret + Darwin + Bo. The students stared at us in our black turtlenecks. This made you anxious so I stared back at them until their eye machines looked elsewhere. I wanted to shout, Don’t you know what’s happening? This planet is about to get recycled!!!!!!! But I didn’t. It would take way too long to explain. Besides, we didn’t bring the overhead projector.