The Bright Spot Page 3

  “You told Sylvia people call you Ted.” She kissed my neck. She was good at it, accomplished even. I stirred to life.

  “Mmm. People call me lots of things. I was kidding with her.” I opened my eyes. Lu looked back at me with her big brown eyes, climbed on top of me, resting her chin on her folded hands, settling her body on mine like a cat on a sofa back. God, she felt good.

  “You don’t seem like a Nicholas to me.”

  I propped up my head and met her gaze, shifted my position, trying to make her as comfortable as possible. “How about Nick, then?”

  She smiled. “Did you say ‘dick’?”

  “If you like.”

  She kissed my mouth. Buck groaned and snorted as he found himself being evicted from the bed with a rude shove.

  Lu and I had originally had this conversation some weeks before and had repeated it several times since, so that it wasn’t about anything but getting to the same blissful conclusion.

  But while usually on a Saturday we would fall back to sleep to the sounds of Buck crunching dry food in the kitchen, waking only when he demanded his walk, this morning Lu whispered in my ear again.

  “Come on, Nick. Wake up.”

  “Mmm?”

  “Drink your coffee. We need to get going. Today’s the day.” She kissed my cheek and went into the bathroom. I opened my eyes to get a glimpse of her retreat, a sight I never tired of.

  It was the day of the special, one-day, mysterious job—a bit of a journey, I’d been told—and we mustn’t be late. “My coffee will be cold,” I grumbled in mock protest.

  “Is that a complaint?” She turned in the doorway, framed and beautiful.

  “I have no complaints. Not a single one in the universe, in the multiverse. I can’t even imagine a single complaint.” She smiled at my lustful excess and disappeared into the bathroom. I groped for my coffee where I knew it would be on the bedside table. It was still warm. Lu had covered the cup with the saucer when she set it down, knowing she would call me Ted, and we’d make love, and here I’d be, listening to her shower, living in paradise, drinking warm coffee. Lu always seemed to know what she was going to do two, three, four steps down the road. I wasn’t like that. But I didn’t mind following her. I didn’t mind it one bit.

  Even the ReCreation gig wasn’t turning out as badly as I’d imagined. The Frankenstein alternative was now entitled Billy and the Big Guy and was drawing pretty decent numbers—on their way up for three weeks running. The plots were always the same: The sickly sweet Billy gets himself in trouble by being so good that evildoers everywhere come looking for a piece of him, just to have a shot at bringing down such perfect goodness. On the brink of certain death for our little Billy, the gentle giant monster—Big Guy, as Billy calls him, BG for short—shows up from whatever contrivance has delayed his arrival, and, after all attempts at reason fail in a couple of minutes or less, reluctantly lays the evildoers to waste with spectacular carnage, ripping hapless villains limb from limb, head from trunk. The gore drenches the audience like a shattered watermelon.

  Lu and I are the Boris and Natasha, the Gomez and Morticia, of the tale, the vaguely sexual recurring evil, bumbling after our heroes, recruiting new enemies to the cause along the way, never actually suffering BG’s wrath ourselves. Not too far below the surface—in these shallow plots nothing went very deep—our sexuality was, in fact, the real enemy. Certain financial realities had finally impressed themselves on Wally’s horny muse—namely, that any number of villains might die a gruesome death, but no lovers were to fuck. So Lu and I never did the deed, but we always acted like we just had or wanted to in the worst way. It was our sexuality that put us in the mood for some evil fun, just like the fallen Adam and Eve. The sustained lust wasn’t much of a stretch for me and Lu. Just why all this puritanism was proving popular with the young, I won’t speculate. Adolescence was hard on everyone, Mary Shelley included. Course, she turned hers into art. We came along and turned her art into schlock.

  William turned out to be an even bigger asshole than he first seemed to be, but the monster, whose real name was Stanton Wetherell, was as nice a guy as you ever want to meet. All of us got in the habit of calling him BG, and he didn’t seem to mind. He endured his thankless action sequences, tearing apart thin air—the victims were pasted in later—with patient good humor, but I couldn’t imagine him tearing apart a fried chicken wing, much less separating an evildoer’s head from his worthless body. His most recent career had been wrestling, but he couldn’t cut it there. “Nobody loved me, nobody hated me,” he said of his failure. I knew how he felt.

  But now, things were better in my life, spectacularly better, like in a movie or in a story, about the time it ends, if you choose wisely. I was in happily-ever-after territory here, and as far as I could tell, there were chapters and chapters left. Thanks mostly to Lu, I was happier than I could remember ever being. Sometimes it was hard to believe this was my life, and I didn’t want to change a thing in it. Nicholas Bainbridge had done all right for himself. Mr. and Mrs. Bainbridge hadn’t raised any stupid children.

  But before I realized all this, I’d said yes to a weekend job, a job that had grown increasingly mysterious in the weeks since. I think Lu knew it was the mystery that interested me, and so she kept me in the dark. I didn’t know the story. I didn’t know the gimmick. All I knew was the contact’s name—Mr. Salvador—and the money. Too much. Way too much. Whatever it was had to be way illegal at those prices.

  “What’s the crime?” I finally asked.

  Lu stopped and thought about it. “Lying to an old man,” she said. “What is that, fraud?”

  “But he wants to be lied to?”

  “That’s right.”

  But I couldn’t get anything else out of her. Mr. Salvador would explain. In the limo. On the way to the job. Today.

  Buck reminded me he needed his morning walk by jumping back up on the bed and standing on my chest. Sometimes his chowish body was a little heavy for his Pekingese ways, but he’d won me over completely. I’d just about taken over the dog-walking duty. I liked doing it. I’d never had a dog before. I found I liked wandering around the neighborhood first thing in the morning. A boy and his dog.

  I stuffed my hip pocket with plastic bags and headed out the door. It was a fine Saturday morning, still early in a way. Everybody who worked Saturdays—which on our block was pretty much everybody with a job but me and Lu—had already gone to work. Everybody else was still inside, except the dogs and their people.

  Buck had quickly introduced me to every dog in the neighborhood—those he liked and those he didn’t, those who walked themselves and those who came with people attached. One of the solo acts, a blond chow I suspected of being Buck’s daddy, was a particular favorite of mine. Most of the ones with people lived in the gentrified blocks and came with pedigrees, the very latest gear to accomplish the difficult task of hooking a person and a dog together, and sweaters. Houndstooth seemed to be in this season. You could always tell a lot about a dog from how he dressed.

  “What kind is he?” a woman once inquired of Buck, as the two dogs sniffed each other’s butts, circling this way and then that. Her own dog, Kyle—trussed up in something like a violet parachute harness over his salmon mohair—was a variety with a name like someone sneezing. I didn’t quite catch it the first time, and didn’t want to hear it repeated. Gesundheit lurked on the tip of my smartass tongue.

  “Buck’s an Ipso Facto,” I said proudly. “Very rare.”

  “Is that so?” she said. “He sure is a handsome one. Such a lovely coat.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was just a mutt on a rope getting so friendly with her Ah-choo, and he did have a lovely coat at that—splotches of rust and tan like a pinto pony.

  Buck, the little social climber, strongly preferred the gentrified alleys, and, if left to his own devices, would always choose the turns that took us there. I suppose the garbage smells were more promising—the remains of crab dip or g
oose livers—the stockade fences more satisfying to piss on than chain link, the pampered cats more easily intimidated and less diseased. That morning, I headed directly for one of his favorite alleys. I wasn’t trying to rush him exactly, but I wanted to get back and take a shower myself. If we did our usual aimless meander wherever his nose led him, there might not be time.

  My strategy worked, and he did the job right away. I bagged it up, and he was doing his little victory dance, a stiff-legged kicking routine Ipso Factos do, when the gate in the stockade fence beside us flew open like a saloon door, at the exact moment I dropped the shit in the trashcan and let the lid fall closed.

  “Good morning,” I said pleasantly. That’s how I was brought up.

  “Take that out of there this minute,” a sour-faced man snapped at me. He was nicely dressed in expensive casual clothes. I don’t know if I could feel casual in anything that cost quite so much as those, and maybe he couldn’t either. He looked awfully young for the look on his face. It usually takes years to get a look like that. Maybe he was bred for it.

  Buck didn’t like his tone and snorted back at him.

  “Get him away from me,” the man said, though Buck was all bluster and nowhere near him.

  “Calm down, would you? You’re scaring my dog. You have a nice day now.”

  I gave him a little wave with all my fingers, avoiding the obvious temptation, and started dragging Buck— who was apparently ready to stay and make a fight of it—down the alley. But Mr. Casual was itching for a fight too and hollered after me. “I told you to get that creature’s shit out of my trashcan!”

  Now I didn’t like his tone. I should’ve kept walking. Instead, I walked back, stopping just where Buck reached the end of his tether a foot from Mr. Casual’s Italian loafers. I pointed at the can. “It says ‘Property of the City’ on it. The city doesn’t have much left. But it’s still got the garbage cans. And this alley we’re standing in, for that matter. This is what they call public property.”

  “That’s my can.” He pointed to his house number painted rather amateurishly on the side.

  I gave it a critical appraisal. “I hope you didn’t pay anybody to do that. Rather shoddy work. Why don’t you just piss on it? That’s what Buck does. Me, I plan on putting all his shit in it from now on.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “You going to call the trashcan police? Nine-one-one? Wouldn’t want to let some crazed nut who picks up after his dog and throws it away in a city trashcan run loose in the public alleyways! Oh my! Oh my! I’ll tell you what, neighbor. I’ll make it easy for you....” That’s right. I gave him my address. Can you believe it? I don’t know what I was trying to prove. If I was too stupid not to just walk away, I probably should’ve just beaten the crap out of him and been done with it. He would’ve sued me for everything I was worth—he might’ve cleared a dollar ninety-eight—and that would’ve been that. But no, I had to get cute. Live and never learn.

  I hurried Buck home like he’d been the problem, feeling more pissed off about the whole business than I knew I should. But by the time I emerged from the shower, I’d put Mr. Casual and his trashcan in perspective.

  What did I care? I had a limo to catch with the woman I loved. I told Lu that, telling her the story of Mr. Casual as I was getting dressed. It wasn’t the first time I told her I loved her. But it’s the time I remember most often. Our eyes met in the mirror, and there were tears in hers. Happy tears, she said. Like most people, I guess, I had a whole lot more experience with the other kind.

  MINVIRT

  4

  FATHER: A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has a life which is truly his, marked with his own special characteristics....And as a result he is always somebody! Whilst a man ... And I’m not speaking of you personally at the moment ... Man in general ... Can quite well be nobody.

  —LUIGI PIRANDELLO, Six Characters in Search of an Author

  I CONFESS I WAS LIKE A LITTLE KID STANDING ON the curb waiting for the limo to show, childishly impressed by the size of the thing when it hove into view. I’d never been in one outside of once or twice in virtuals, though I thought of them more as movie cars. In the movies from a century ago, back when everybody and their dog drove Hummers and RVs bigger than Lu’s house, and middle schoolers hired regular limos for the homecoming dance, something like this is what it took to impress. Now, in this neighborhood, it was only slightly less noticeable than a flying saucer stopping off at Murphy’s for a cold one. Forget what the thing must’ve cost—one of those prices rounded off to the nearest point million. Just the annual fees on it would keep the whole Murphy’s crowd in beer and pizza for a year, with plenty left over for the limo driver.

  He sat up front reading a newspaper and was the only one around not paying attention to the car’s arrival. He made a show of perusing the headlines and finishing off a Danish. They still called them drivers, though this one seemed largely ornamental, or maybe he was supposed to be security. The car, of course, drove itself, unless the whole grid collapsed, and what good would he be then? He didn’t look particularly entertaining. Whatever his purpose, he gave us only a brief glance as we climbed inside, but his eyes gave him away. In that brief glance, he’d taken in all the neighbors watching through cracked blinds. I recognized the paper he pretended to read. It was two or three days old.

  As we nestled into the curved seats, the limo closed up around us like a black velvet case for a dinosaur egg. The windows too went black. I looked for some way to open them, but there wasn’t any. We weren’t supposed to know where we were going. Maybe we weren’t going anywhere. There was a box in the middle, no one and nothing else, though there was room for a three-piece band and a dance floor. I got it. We were meeting our host in the box.

  “You’ve been dealing with a virtual Mr. Salvador,” I guessed. “You’ve never actually met the guy.”

  “That’s right,” said Lu.

  “Lu, he could be anybody.”

  “I think that was sort of the idea, Nick.”

  We lurched into motion. I could feel the turns. Right, left, right. I would’ve thought it’d be smoother. I hadn’t been in a car in a long time. The only light came from the box, glowing sky blue, waiting. Lu and I traded a glance. She was leaving it up to me.

  What the hell—I touched it, and she did too, and we were in Mr. Salvador’s virtual. The box seemed to morph into a handsome deco building about a meter high. A hotel? Pretty standard opening. We seemed to shrink down to its size, and I was immediately disappointed. This thing wasn’t near as ambitious as the limo it was playing in. The illusion was clearly bounded, stopping at the curb with a gray wall of emptiness. Cute. Craning my neck back, I saw cloudless sky. Not so much as a pigeon. And I wouldn’t trust the elevators. It was clean, though. Cleanest building you ever saw.

  This was a strictly no-frills illusion. What they called minvirt —short for minimum virtual—“they” being people who talked like that. How little can one manage and still deliver the illusion of reality? they wanted to know. They gave me a pain. I could imagine the gang who did this thing spending hours deciding on just the right shade of gray for nothing. That would get bogged down in a discussion of just what sort of nothing they were after this time. Like last time? Oh no. Something new. A new nothing. And so on and on and on until you wanted to murder them all. I’d worked for these guys, and that was the part they liked—talking it to death. That’s why there were always so many of them, so it wasn’t as obvious they were just talking to themselves. That’s why the more min the minvirt was, the more max the budget. All those espressos started adding up to real money.

  There was a row of shiny, new newspaper machines alongside the building. Besides the stuff that could have been anywhere—Apartment Guide, Fifty Plus, and USA Today—there was a Washington Post, so this must be DC. Forty years ago. The headlines were all about the soldiers coming home, the wonders of workware, though they were still calling it Freedo
mware back then.

  We entered the diner at the corner of the building. In a booth in the back was a man with silver hair, tanned and fit, dressed in a knit shirt and slacks like he’d just come off the golf course.

  “Jesse Salvador,” he introduced himself. He pointed to an old-fashioned clock on the wall, the second hand whirling around. “We don’t have much time.” He dealt photos on the table like a fortune-teller. The first one was an old man, well up in his eighties I’d say, sitting in a rocking chair a couple of sizes too big for him, on a porch somewhere. In the background, a blurry woman in a bonnet looked on. My guess?—a nurse or visitor took the picture on visitors’ day. The old guy may or may not have noticed.

  Then there were a series of grainy shots that looked like the diner we were sitting in, the very booth, blown up from old video, the time and date in the corner. I checked the sight angle, and there was a camera up above the counter looking right at us like the eye of God. I hadn’t seen one of those big, bulky things in a while. Cameras had become more discreet as they had become ubiquitous. What good was a spy you knew was watching? In the very booth where Lu and I sat across from Salvador, the photos showed a man and a woman across from each other. If you used your imagination, you could believe the man in them was the old man in the first photo but quite a bit younger.

  The next photo, a passport shot of the same vintage, confirmed the suspicion—the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears. He was also a dead ringer for me, except he wore a beard. There was a separate shot of the woman in the booth as well. She might’ve been sitting at a bus stop. I don’t think she knew anybody was taking her picture. She looked a lot like Lu, but way too pale. Even her hair was white. But that was easy to change.

  “This is James Dumfries today,” Salvador said, pointing to the old man. “This is James Dumfries and Galatea Ritsa forty years ago,” he said, pointing to the couple in the booth and in the other two shots. He tapped his fingernail on the old man’s forehead for emphasis as he told their story. “Here’s the deal: The old man is loaded, with nobody in the world to leave it to. But he’d pay anything, he says, anything to see himself with this woman again.” He smiled like someone changing a diaper. “He loved her, you see. You two will play the lovers for him. Make the poor old fart happy before he kicks off. I believe we have agreed on terms.”