JOHNNY GONE DOWN (30 page)

‘Jesus Christ, keep that damn thing down, will you?’ Sam shrieked. He was sitting on the sofa with a laptop. He stared open-mouthed at me, his
eyes wide with terror. ‘What the fuck, man, can’t you ever relax?’

I took a few deep breaths and put the revolver in my back pocket.

‘Sorry,’ I said evenly. ‘Why are you up so early? I thought they were here.’

‘I almost died from a heart attack,’ he said, his face still flushed with fear. ‘Why are you up this early?’

‘I told you, I can’t sleep,’ I said.

‘Oh yeah, Johnny boy, well, you can sleep now. You can buy all the peace in the world and then some more.’

I looked at him, puzzled.

‘You are a psycho, Johnny boy. Another Life is the coolest thing ever, especially for middle-aged men with diminishing libidos. I just banged a couple of chicks this morning. I haven’t felt more alive in years.’

‘How the hell…’ I muttered.

‘The website is live now!’ he said. ‘Check it out. You made a cool hundred million dollars or so on it. That guy Philip has been saying in all the interviews that he is desperately searching for you. They are talking about you as some kind of urban legend; a mad scientist who stalks homeless shelters stealthily - like Bigfoot or the Yeti or something.’

‘How do you know all this?’ I asked, still confused.

‘I had put my media team on the job of tracking mentions of Another Life and checking websites which came up with that or variations of that name. The launch press conference just happened around midnight India time and the website went live immediately after that. I would have called you if I knew you were playing night-watchman. Check it out, will you?’

I let the news sink in.

‘Here, let me open the website for you,’ said Sam.

I didn’t know how to react. I was happy for Philip, but I didn’t want any part of that madness again. Not just Another Life; everything - MIT, Brazil, Cambodia, Minnesota. I wanted to move on, cut off all ties with my past, pretend that it had all happened to someone who no longer existed.

‘Why are you standing there with your hands on your hips like Shilpa Shetty?’ said Sam. ‘Come on, check out the website.’

I didn’t budge.

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ said Sam. ‘You should be jumping with excitement.’

‘It’s over, it’s the past. I don’t want to think about it.’

‘Don’t be a dick. Stop running away from yourself. All of this is you, you can’t not think about it.’

‘Thanks for the free psychiatric consultation, but no thanks.’

‘At least call Philip. I’ve read his interviews and he seems very emotional about you. Don’t do to him what you did to me.’

‘I want to protect him,’ I said.

‘Balls! The only one you are protecting is yourself,’ said Sam. ‘Face the past, else you’ll always be a victim. Plus, you did nothing wrong. You are a hero.’

‘Don’t get started on that.’

‘Just pick up the damn phone, will you?’ Sam exclaimed. ‘You need to come to terms with things.’

I called Philip despite the knot in my stomach. In his own way, Sam was right. I could never be at peace until I accepted my failures, apologized to everyone I had hurt, and grovelled for some kind of forgiveness.

‘Hi, Philip, it’s Nick,’ I said in a rush as soon as he picked up the phone.

‘Nick! Is that really you? Tell me it’s you.’

‘It is me. I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry - ‘

‘Nick, boy, why the hell did you disappear?’ Philip cut me off. He sounded more concerned than angry. ‘You didn’t mention anything about your whereabouts in the letter, and there wasn’t even a return address on the box that computer came in.’

‘Philip, I am really, really sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what came over me. After everything you did for me, I deserted…’

‘Stop, for god’s sake,’ said Philip. ‘I’m the one
who is sorry. I know I pressured you too much with the one-week deadline, so you bolted. I searched and searched for you, kept waiting for your call, but there was nothing. Eventually, I contacted the VCs myself, and of course, they bought it immediately. We have more money now than we ever dreamt of, even though I think I undersold it because I didn’t fully understand the technology. I need to apologize to you for that.’

‘You don’t need to apologize for anything,’ I said. ‘I’m the one who screwed…’

‘By the way,’ he interrupted. ‘There is someone else who is looking for you desperately.’

Had they traced me already? Eventually, their path would lead here. As if one wasn’t enough, now I would have two mafia groups duking it out to get me.

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘I’ve forgotten his name. He scared me because he kept calling me a faggot and said he would shoot me through the phone if I didn’t quickly find out where you were. He spoke in a funny accent. I would peg him as a Spaniard.’

‘Marco!’ I said.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said Philip excitedly. ‘That’s his name. Please get him off my back if you can. He scares me.’

My heart sank. Why was Marco trying to contact me when we had agreed not to speak for five years?

Something had happened to Lara. He would never contact me otherwise.

‘We need to talk about the money transfer,’ said Philip. ‘It’s a lot, so you will need to create multiple accounts in multiple banks…’

‘Later, Philip. I need to rush now,’ I said. ‘Thanks for everything.’

I put down the phone.

‘That wasn’t too bad, was it?’ said Sam, smiling at me. His look quickly changed to one of astonishment. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Now what has happened?’

‘Something has happened to Lara.’

‘What? How? When?’

‘I’m going to find out,’ I said and dialled Marco’s number.

He picked it up at the first ring.

‘Marco!’ I said. ‘Are you okay? Is Lara safe? Why did you try to contact me?’

‘Buddha, finally,’ he said softly, a voice ashamed to show emotion. ‘I’ve been worried. You shouldn’t have fucked with him.’

‘I know,’ I said, unexpected tears welling up in my eyes. ‘It’s a long story.’

Marco laughed and my spirits lifted. It couldn’t be all that bad if he was laughing, could it?

‘I know the story, men. Why do you think you are still alive? He would have found you in a day. All of us from Brazil to Peru to Chile to Ecuador
to Venezuela to Colombia are working for him in a way,’ said Marco. ‘But it worked out well, actually.’

‘What worked out well?’ I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

‘I struck a deal to give him ten years of free distribution in Brazil without taking a commission, besides expanding from coke to crack, speed, meth and acid. He agreed to get the Godmother off your back as well if I deliver.’

This wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted peace, but not at Marco’s expense.

‘Don’t do it, Marco,’ I said. ‘You will get into big trouble.’

‘I
am
trouble, men,’ he said, the usual cowboy bravado returning to his voice. ‘This is a blessing in disguise. I’ve expanded the business significantly since you left, and this will take me to the next level. Just like the retail stores, right? It will take a while to break even, but then the profits will pour in.’

I knew this was no business decision. What had I done to deserve such friendship? I was a fundamentally flawed person who wrecked lives wherever he went. I didn’t deserve such unconditional love.

‘Pay him off, Marco. I have all the money in the world and then some more,’ I said, thinking of Another Life. But I knew it wouldn’t work even as I said it.

‘Rather than interfere with my future plans,
do you want to plan your future with your wife instead?’

Suddenly, I didn’t want to speak to her. I didn’t trust that the Colombian mafia would let me go. I didn’t believe that the handler, whom I had humiliated in front of his customers, would forgive and forget. I didn’t want to re-enter her life and destroy it again.

‘Are you there, men?’ he said. ‘We’ve both been trying to track you down since I agreed to his terms a couple of weeks ago. You move fast, don’t you? Every time we reached somewhere, you were already off. Here, speak to her. She is pissed off.’

She deserves better than me, I thought. We had taught each other love; she would love again. I wanted to put down the phone but couldn’t bring myself to do it.

‘Nikhil,’ she whispered at the other end.

I began to cry, my mind a confused jumble of emotions.

‘Lara,’ I said softly.

‘You silly man, you silly, silly man,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t you have told me once? Did you really think I could just move on after all these years?’

‘Lara,’ I repeated.

‘I love you, Nikhil.’

I waited for the joy to envelop me, but I felt nothing except a growing unease. It had taken just a couple of hours, and everything had resolved itself.
It was too easy, too perfect, too neat - and I didn’t trust it. It couldn’t be over. I had been deceived in the past before. There was a shadow lurking somewhere in the corner.

‘Are you still there?’ she asked, her tone alarmed.

‘Yes,’ I said silently. ‘I missed you. I am sorry. I am sorry for everything. I love you.’

‘You are coming tonight, Johnny boy, aren’t you?’

I looked at my son, who was knocking himself out silly with his inflatable green monster and Lara, who sat on our futon, smiling as she read a book. How could anyone leave these two and go anywhere, especially me, still paranoid about losing everything in a flash once again? There had been way too many coincidences that had got us together - and I didn’t trust coincidences. We were safe here in Delhi, thousands of miles from trigger happy South American cartels and from the bleak loneliness of the US, yet I knew things could unravel any moment.

‘Of course not,’ I said.

‘You need to get a life, Johnny boy. It’s been six months since they got here and you haven’t ventured anywhere without them,’ Sam said on the phone. ‘They need a break, even if you don’t.’

Lara looked up from her book. ‘Go,’ she said.

‘It’s not about them,’ I said to Sam. ‘I have
nothing to say to anyone in this MIT reunion. You guys will be on a dick measuring trip. I am a managing director, you are only a CTO, oh no, I am a CFO. I’ve nothing to contribute. I am no better than a college dropout.’

He laughed. ‘Yours will be the biggest dick in the room tonight! I’ll pick you up at seven,’ he said and put down the phone.

I looked at my watch. Six p.m. My son squealed with pleasure as he finally knocked out the monster doll. There was no way I was going, I thought.

‘You need to go,’ said Lara, pushing strands of her hair back into her ponytail as she looked up from the book. I felt the same tenderness towards her that I’d felt when she was pregnant.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. I looked longingly at my son. ‘I would rather play with him.’

‘Did I ever tell you about the misguided botanist this writer wrote about?’ she said.

‘Look, let’s not get…’

‘The gentle botanist saw the butterfly struggling in her cocoon and felt so bad that he pulled her out so she wouldn’t have to suffer,’ said Lara. ‘Of course, she shrivelled up and died instead. The botanist didn’t realize that struggling in the cocoon, fighting and stretching the larvae, is what makes the ugly, fat moth a butterfly.’

‘Profound,’ I said. ‘But what has that got to do with anything? I just want to play with my son.’

‘Like the botanist, you want to make sure he doesn’t suffer, but you’ll end up smothering him instead. You don’t realize that your struggles were essential to make you what you are. You can’t deny him his own.’

‘So he can become like me?’ I said, pointing at my prosthetic arm.

‘Yes, exactly, so that he can become like you,’ Lara said. ‘So that he touches lives everywhere he goes, so that he has friends who won’t think twice about giving up their life for him; so that he meets someone who loves him more than he loves himself.’

‘You don’t love me,’ I said bitterly.

‘Are you going to get ready or not?’

Reluctantly, I went to our room to get dressed for the non-occasion. We had been fighting about my supposed over-protectiveness ever since we had been reunited six months ago. Why didn’t she understand that I couldn’t shake off this vague feeling of impending doom when we made silent, unhurried love in our sprawling bungalow in Lutyens Delhi, or when large sums of money kept flowing in from Another Life so that my days passed just watching my son play, or when we sat together in our garden, lazy and quiet, basking in the warmth of the winter sun.

Despite having everything I ever wanted, I wasn’t happy. It was too perfect - a picture waiting to be sullied; calm waters about to turn tempestuous; the
lull before the crashing storm - it had happened before, and it would happen again. Only, this time, I didn’t have the will to fight it. I was forty, Lara was thirty-nine; we weren’t getting any younger and we had a three-year-old son to think about. I knew I was protective, but I didn’t want my son to become like me - jumping at unknown sounds, recoiling at strange faces, and sweating in his nightmares. I wanted him to experience life, but not at the price I paid for it.

‘You look good,’ she said when I emerged from the room in my suit. ‘You will have to fight away the women.’