Hitchers (30 page)

“How long has Mick been gone?”

“I haven't been keeping track, but almost as long as you.”

“How is Gilly doing on the album?” I finally spotted the Maserati, tucked behind a minivan. I dragged the key along the side of it, really grinding it, before getting in.

I caught pieces of her muffled conversation with Gilly before Lorena came back on the line. “Gilly says he's about halfway through ‘Love Two Sizes Too Small,' then he's got ‘The Winds of Change.' But he's stuck, because he feels rushed to finish before Mick disappears and there's no longer any point in working on it, and he doesn't work well under pressure.”

The Maserati's tires squealed as I backed out of the space. “Well that's just terrific. Can't he just cut the last song? It's a double-CD, for God's sake. What difference does one song make?”

Another pause and muffled conversation.

“It's a themed composition. It all links together, and the final
song is crucial.”

I muttered curses under my breath. “If Mick comes out, don't let him go anywhere,” I said. “I'm on my way. I'll see you in a couple of minutes.” God dammit, Mick needed to help him. I had to find some way to make that happen.

As I sped to Mick's I tuned to the news on the radio. It made me crazy that Grandpa had no interest in knowing what was going on in the rest of the city. Maybe he was afraid they would discover a way to exorcise hitchers and didn't want me to hear it.

More people were massing outside the perimeter, and a lot of them were armed. NPR reported it as a loosely organized group; at least three people claimed to be leading it. More people were arriving every hour; the National Guard was getting uneasy.

When I got to Mick's I brought Gilly some iced tea from the fridge and made him a sandwich, gave him a pat of encouragement, and left him alone to work.

Lorena and I talked quietly on the couch until we heard Mick curse softly and rise.

“All right, Mick?” I said.

“Yeh,” Mick said noncommittally as he pulled a beer from the fridge. The top popped with an angry hiss as Mick went out of his way to avoid going near Gilly's work.

I didn't understand him. He was acting like Gilly's project was radioactive. “Come on, Mick, you've got to help him finish.” I went over and checked Gilly's compositions. It didn't look like he'd made any further progress. I swept up the pages from the table and held them up to Mick. “He's down to
two damned songs!
One and a half, really.”

Mick shook his head slowly. He looked awful, his eyes half-closed and ringed with red, his skin grey.

I didn't know what else to do, so I shoved him in the chest. Beer splashed over his wrist as he was jolted backward.

“Hey, piss off!” Mick flung his bottle sidearmed, sending it spinning over my head spitting beer in a wide arc. “I already told you,
but it didn't get through your thick skull.” He poked savagely at his own temple. “I can't write any more. My brain is a bleeding fried egg. Gilly had to write ninety-nine percent of my last album, and that was twenty bloody years ago. I'm done. Washed up.”

That's what all his foot-dragging was about? I put my hands on my head, shook it in disbelief. “Can't you at least
try?
I think you've got a fighting chance to get out of this alive.” I put Gilly's work back on the table. “That's more than I can say for myself. I wish I had a chance. I'd do
anything
, if someone would just tell me what I needed to do.”

Mick just stared at his feet.

“Why can't you at least
try?”

Slowly, he raised his head to look at me. “Because it's fucking brilliant, that's why.” He lowered his voice. “Can't you see that? It's—” His eyes teared up; he shook his head, not able to find the words. “It's fucking genius. It's
Sgt. Pepper
. Anything I add will spoil it.”

Summer was back. She'd been standing quietly by the couch; now she spoke up, her voice gentle. “But it's meant for you. He's writing this for you, as much a gesture of friendship as anything. If you're gone, and you don't perform it, everyone loses. You heard him—he's freezing up.”

Mick picked up a guitar leaning against the dining table, studied it as if he'd never seen one before. “If he finishes in time, I'll sing it.” He plucked a string. “If not, tell Gilly he's got my vocal cords now; he can bloody well learn to use them.” He looked at me. “Whatever you do, don't let him overeat and turn me into a bloody Elvis. Make him take me a few laps on a stationary bike once in a while. He can go out on tour as me. My big comeback.” Silent, Mick replaced the guitar, stared down at Gilly's work. He shook his head in disbelief, marveling. “Fucking brilliant.”

As if on cue, Summer and I approached from either side until we were at his shoulders, as if corralling a skittish mustang. Summer put a hand on Mick's shoulder; as gently as I could I pulled out the
chair Gilly had been using.

“He can always erase it,” I said, offering Mick a pencil. “If it sucks I'll make sure Gilly chucks it. I swear.”

Mick appraised me, then looked at Summer. He pulled one side of his mouth into a dry half-smile, reached and plucked the pencil out of my hand. “Fine. You want to see how washed up I am? What an empty shell I am? I'll write some bloody music. I'll take a dump on Gilly's bloody Mona Lisa.”

As he pulled up the chair and retrieved the pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket, Summer and I retreated. We grabbed our jackets and kept going right out the front door.

We tried to step through the narrow door into the elevator at the same time, bumped and stumbled in like a couple of stooges.

Laughing, Summer nudged me with her shoulder. “Klutz.”

I laughed, put my arm across her shoulders for a minute, drinking in the electricity of that touch. I wanted to wrap my arms around her. Maybe I would have, if Grandpa hadn't taken over at that moment.

G
randpa collected all of my sketching pencils out of the case of drafting materials he'd pilfered from Mick's place and hurled them into the trash. “Crap. Fancy crap.” He sat at his table, in his house, plucked a plain number two pencil out of the case, slid a fresh piece of Bristol paper from the stack.

It was hard to pay attention to what he was doing, because most of my energies were directed at not slipping out. It was like holding two buckets of water in my outstretched arms while balancing on a beam, or waiting outside a restroom door with a raging case of diarrhea. For hours. Every few seconds I lunged to gain a better psychic grip.

Slowly, inexorably, it was getting worse. I could hang on for now, but what about tomorrow, and the next day? As Krishnapuma had observed, consciousness is osmotic. A water droplet can't resist being pushed through a membrane.

The pencil Grandpa was clutching wobbled wildly over the paper. He held it there, willing my hand to hold still.

It wouldn't.

Frustrated, he dropped the pencil. “God dammit.” He couldn't wait to get started. If his hand would stop shaking I was sure he'd do a couple of
Toy Shop
strips in the old style, without Wolfie, Little Joe miraculously back without explanation, and ship them off before I could intercept them. He probably suspected I wasn't going to waste what time I had left making calls to try to stop them from being published, and he was right.

Pushing out of his chair, Grandpa went to the kitchen cabinet he'd stocked with whiskey. He poured a generous shot of Jack, spilling twice as much on the counter. He carried his glass into the studio and stood at the window, surveying the treeless stretch of lawn.

It seemed so frivolous, to simply stand there gazing out the window. Grandpa had all the time in the world, though; I was the one in a hurry. I desperately wanted to get back to Mick's, to see how the album was progressing, to see my friends, if only one last time.

Grandpa noticed the old
Toy Shop
originals stacked at his feet, some of the special ones we'd kept when I sold off the bulk of them. He picked up a few.

“Hm,” he said, thumbing through them, breathing heavily through my nose. He retrieved another handful, riffled through them, then grabbed all of them and took them to his desk.

He found a boxcutter in the drawer, and proceeded to slice up half a dozen strips, cutting circles around characters, toys, backgrounds, and separating them into piles. I watched, trying to understand what he was up to.

“Even while I was dead, the ideas kept coming,” he said as he selected a Little Joe and a Tina from his stack and set them in the first empty panel of the blank strip.

He cobbled together a “new” strip like this, pasting old images into the panels, typing out the dialogue on my computer and then pasting that over old bubbles of dialogue. It was a painstaking process, but even with his shaking hands it was still faster than I could draw a strip from scratch.

I wondered how Summer was doing. I would have given anything
to have a few minutes alone with her—completely alone—to tell her how I felt, to see if she felt the same. Sometimes there was something in her eyes, something that might be veiled feelings for me. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.

When the strip was finished Grandpa packed it up, addressed it to the syndicate with a note insisting they print it immediately, that I'd had a change of heart about my new direction and wanted to get back to the basics of good writing and solid craftsmanship. More would follow soon, he promised.

Whistling tonelessly, he took the package to the post office in his Maserati and overnighted it.

In some ways losing to him was the most painful part of this. It wasn't right, wasn't just that the fight was fixed and this cold, arrogant bastard got to win.

“You had thirty-odd good years,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. The asshole didn't even know how old I was. “You had use of your legs.” He took one hand off the wheel, turned it up in supplication. “I am sorry it's got to end this way.”

Yeah, he was all torn up inside; that's why he was whistling.

I
felt my fingers begin to tingle while Grandpa was pouring himself another drink. Grandpa dropped the bottle; amber whiskey chugged onto the linoleum, spreading toward the refrigerator.

Gasping with relief, my hands still trembling, I called Summer's number.

“Hey. It's Summer.” She was whispering.

I was expecting Lorena, and felt a fluttering in my stomach on hearing Summer's voice.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“The High.”

“French Impressionists exhibit?”

“Where else?”

“How is Gilly's album coming?”

“That's why I'm here. Gilly's working frantically. He needed solitude. He'll call when it's finished. And Finn? Gilly said Mick did good. Really good.”

I gulped back tears. “That's great. Can I meet you at the High? I'd like to see you.”

“Yeah. Hurry.”

I hung up without saying goodbye. We kept our conversations short now; precious moments shouldn't be wasted on hello, goodbye, participles or adverbs.

It occurred to me that, assuming I made it to the High Museum before Lorena or Grandpa took over again, this might actually be goodbye.

As the Atlanta skyline rose into view through my windshield, I wondered how many more times would I get to see it. Maybe this was the last.

Maybe I should plan to slip out of my body with the skyline stretched out before me, then I could watch it while I blew away. That wouldn't be the real skyline, though, just a reflection of a shadow of a memory of the real one.

“Maybe we can make this work, find a way to share one body,” I said. How transparent that must be to him—I was suddenly willing to negotiate because I was losing. Wasn't bargaining one of the stages of coming to grips with your own imminent death? First there was denial, then anger, then bargaining.

I was dying, wasn't I? Not in the usual sense, not because my body was going to cease functioning. I was dying in a completely new and novel way, by having my body stolen from me. Maybe this would become the twenty-first-century version of AIDS or the bubonic plague. Maybe every time there was a mass murder now, the hole would open up and souls would flee back to the world of the living. Maybe if I could hold on, keep too much of myself from blowing away, I would get my own chance. I wouldn't want it though; I wouldn't want to put someone through what I was going through. Unless it was Grandpa.

In the stages of dying, depression came after bargaining, then acceptance. I didn't want to go through those last two; I wanted to go back to anger.

I splurged for valet parking, raced up the concrete stairwell, through the folk art exhibit, past urns and mirrors, into the French Impressionism room.

Summer was sitting with her legs crossed, chin on her fist, staring through
Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond.
I sat beside her silently, looked up at the painting.

Summer was right; I felt better.

“When I took an art history class, the instructor went to great pains to make it clear that French Impressionism was overrated by the unenlightened masses,” Summer murmured, her chin still on her hand. “He likened it to how children are attracted to bright, primary colors.”

“He was full of shit,” I said.

“I know.”

I rotated 180 degrees to look at a Manet. Summer followed, her slim legs vaulting the bench.

A gondola driver was navigating among blue and white poles jutting from a canal in Venice. The driver looked as if he didn't have a care in the world, had no place to go, could enjoy the cool breeze and rippling periwinkle water all afternoon. I remembered having afternoons like that, but they were so far removed from my present that I doubted my memory. In fact all of my memories from before the day I drowned in that reservoir seemed ancient and unlikely, as if I'd been born in that water, and everything prior had been implanted.