Ring Game (35 page)

“You’re tired,” he said. He was tired, too. Two thirty in the morning, and they’d been wandering for more than an hour, periods of intense conversation interspersed with wordless walking, the soft scuff of his running shoes and the clop of Debrowski’s boots, a rhythm like that of a distant train passing. Crow wasn’t sure, but he thought maybe they were having a fight. Not a fight exactly. More like a renegotiation.

Debrowski said, “I’m not tired. In Paris, it’s time for coffee. I think I had this fantasy I’d come back and you’d have become a marine biologist or something, and you’d grab me and say, ‘Let’s go to Aruba.’”

“You want to go to Aruba?”

“No. I’m just having this girl fantasy. A handsome man appears and carries me away on his big white horse. That old thing. Don’t worry. It’ll pass.”

“You saying you want to go riding?”

Debrowski’s pace faltered, then picked up. “You’re being obtuse.”

“Not a good quality in a marine biologist slash equestrian.”

The Buzz coffee bar never closed. Debrowski added four cubes of jaggery to her espresso, poked at them with a wooden stirrer until they crumbled. A red neon lightning bolt illuminated their window table.

“I think what it is, I think you make me look at myself more than I want to. It’s that Crow stare. You take what I got, and you give it right back to me. I remember one time I was talking to Sam, and he told me that’s how you win at cards. The other players look at you, and they don’t see you, they see themselves.”

“If you haven’t figured out by now that Sam is full of shit, you’re even more screwed up than you think I am.”

“Your old man’s hipper than you think, Crow.”

“Now there’s a scary thought.”

“I’m thinking about asking him out.”

Crow laughed. “Sam would like that.”

“You know when I like you best? When you’re in trouble. Is that sick?” Debrowski’s head rested on Crow’s lap. They were on his porch swing, facing east.

“I think it’s normal,” Crow said. Orange mist bled onto charcoal sky. A row of pigeon silhouettes crowned the apartment building across the street. He could hear soft cooing.

“It doesn’t feel normal.”

“Normal never does.”

Debrowski didn’t say anything for more than a minute. He thought she might have fallen asleep, but when he looked down her eyes were on him. She said, “If I hadn’t been awake for thirty-six hours, that would probably have sounded really stupid.”

“I can’t even remember what I said.”

“This is kind of like getting drunk together, isn’t it?”

Crow frowned. “I’ve got an idea.”

“What’s that?”

“Let’s get some sleep. We’ve got to be at a wedding in ten hours.”

Debrowski sat up. “I’m too wired from all that coffee. Maybe I’ll go downstairs and unpack.”

“You go unpack. I’m going to sleep.”

“Good. Stay out of trouble. I don’t want to have to start loving you all over again.”

“I’ll do my best.”

The telomere, that cap at the end of every strand of DNA, controls the rate at which our cells age. This is scientific fact. But what many scientists overlook is the equally compelling fact that the telomere is but a physical manifestation of our essential spirit, a measure of our commitment to the Life Program. Why should one individual outlive another? Put quite simply, it is a function of belief and commitment. Do immortals have longer telomeres? Unquestionably.

—“Amaranthine Reflections” by Dr. Rupert Chandra

A
RLING BIGGIE ROAMED THE
gym with a spray bottle and a towel, wiping down the benches, cleaning handprints off the mirrors, picking up bits of lint, and rearranging misracked weights. The only sounds at Bigg Bodies were the squeaking of the spray bottle, the hum of the air conditioning, and the soft clank of iron.

The first customer showed up at ten minutes after six: a large, cheerful, gimpy black man wearing a navy-blue sweatshirt that read “Amaranthines Have Longer Telomeres.” Bigg’s eyes flicked to the man’s crotch, but saw nothing beyond a baggy pair of sweats. He’d never heard it called a “Telomere” before. And what the hell was an “Amaranthine”? Must be the new member Beaut had signed up. The Amaranthine—if that was what he was—limped straight back to the chest area and loaded a couple of forty-fives onto a bar, then sat down on the bench. Bigg thought about wandering back to introduce himself, make the newbie feel welcome, but he just didn’t feel all that friendly at that time of the morning. He moved down the long dumbbell rack, rotating each dumbbell so that the raised numbers on the ends read right-side-up. When he got to the sixty-pounders he remembered again why he was up at dawn, and how Beaut had annexed his massage recliner to keep his foot elevated. He thought about that goddamned Joe Crow.

Fingerprints and chalk spill were getting scarce. Bigg hung up the towel and spray bottle and retired to his office, where he sorted through the basket of papers on his desk. He ran across the membership application that the new guy had filled out. Charles Thickening. The address he’d given was care of something called ACO Ministries. Funny. The guy didn’t look like a preacher. Bigg flipped through his pile of unanswered mail. Most of it was ignorable: catalogs from vitamin supplement manufacturers, solicitations from bodybuilding promoters looking for sponsors, and bills for nonessential services. Bigg threw away everything except the utility bills and the latest issue of
MuscleMag
. He briefly considered the invitation to Hyatt Hilton’s wedding, shook his head and threw that away, too.

The cold vinyl on his back and knurled steel against his palms took Chuckles back to the iron pile at Stillwater. He turned his head to look at his surroundings. Infinite rows of red upholstered benches and neatly stacked weight racks. This was no prison weight room. This was the real world, where you could eat a Big Mac and open any door and sit under a tree on the grass. Chuckles gripped the barbell and lifted it off the rack. It felt heavy, but that was to be expected. It had been nearly a year since he’d been granted parole, and he hadn’t touched a weight since. Chuckles had never much enjoyed pumping iron, but in prison it was something you had to do just to stay even. In prison, the last thing a guy wanted was to get small. Bigger was safer. Maybe that was true on the outside, too. Maybe he should get back into it. According to Amaranthine theory, he should be able to shape his body without the inconvenience of physical exercise, but lately he had noticed that the cells around his middle had been growing faster than the cells in his arms and chest. A little exercise wouldn’t hurt.

According to Beaut, the guy with the broken foot, Flowrean did her workouts in the morning, usually about nine or ten, sometimes earlier. Chuckles had decided to get there early, be there when she showed. He didn’t want her to think he was following her. He wanted it to be, like, a coincidence. He’d seen what she was like when she was scared. His thigh was still throbbing, and his arm had stiffened up where the nurse had given him his tetanus shot. He did not want to frighten Flowrean. He just wanted to get acquainted.

During his three-year bid at Stillwater Penitentiary, Chuckles had spent a great many hours quietly constructing his fantasy woman. At first, inspired by magazines, television, and his own memories, he had experimented with different types of women—black, white, passive, domineering, tall, short, young, and old. He imagined women named Mai Lee, Gretchen, Thulani, Starflower, Dorita, Punky, and dozens more. He saw them in bathing suits, leather chaps, business suits, evening gowns, and birthday suits. He directed his mind to consider new combinations of physical features and bizarre behaviors—anything to distract him from the raw, cold fact of his incarceration. He conjured up a woman with four breasts, a woman with the brain of an Irish setter, a woman ten feet tall, and a woman who was turned on by the smell of his feet. As the months passed, he discovered common elements in his fantasy women, certain qualities and traits that felt right and true, and he found himself returning to an ever-shrinking repertory of fantasy players. Experimentation slowly lost its appeal and, about fourteen months into his bid, the women in his dreams had coalesced into a single construct: a female of mixed heritage, both fearless and afraid, large and small, alien and familiar. In short, he had conceived a woman very much like Flowrean Peeche.

Since his release from Stillwater, Chuckles had been with four dozen different women, every one of which had been a disappointment. Even his encounters with the First Eldress left him strangely unsatisfied. He understood this to be his own fault, something to do with a discordance between his expectations and the realities of the physical world. As the First Eldress would say, he was not sharing the fullness of his flesh. Sharing was a big part of the Amaranthine Way. The Sharing of the Flesh was one of the keys to stepping out of the Death Program.

Polly was a smart lady. She scared him, but she was smart.

Polly would answer all concerns by telling Chuckles to follow the Sharing of the Flesh, to let his cells lead him beyond his own physical form.

Rupe would tell him to focus his thoughts on a cellular level, to drive out the cells of self-destruction, to open his flesh to a new, life-affirming cellular structure. It came down to the same thing, Chuckles supposed: You get laid a lot.

Chuckles slowly lowered the barbell to his chest, feeling his pectorals stretch, feeling the cells lengthen and separate. He pushed, raising the weight, straightening his arms, squeezing his pecs, then lowered the bar again, repeating the movement, expanding and contracting his muscles. After sixteen reps he racked the bar and closed his eyes, directing the cells in his chest to divide, to grow, to draw nutrients from his blood. This was one of the more advanced Amaranthine skills, one he had been working on for the past several weeks. The process required absolute concentration. It was difficult with his leg and arm throbbing so, but he gave it a few minutes, imagining his chest swelling with new growth.

All things considered, Chuckles’s life was going remarkably well. He was free, immortal, employed, and getting oral sex from his boss. But he was still searching for his soulmate, for the one who would bring the present into phase with his self, a woman who could help him share the fullness of his flesh. He had a feeling about this Flowrean Peeche. He thought that he would like to Share his Flesh with her.

Yesterday, Flo had felt embarrassed and sad over her ill-fated luncheon with Joe Crow. What had she expected? She was a musclebound waitress who reeked of dead fish. Last night she had looked at her image in her bathroom mirror and cried. Who would want such a creature? Flo slept fitfully. She dreamed of being lost in an enormous mall, bigger than the Mall of America, but it wasn’t a mall, it was a gym, and all the men were looking at her, and she realized she was naked, and all she could think of to do was to dance, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

She woke up at dawn, hollow-eyed and irritable. She no longer felt sad, she felt angry. If Joe Crow was a fool, she was lucky to be rid of him, lucky to have kept her options open. There were two billion men on the planet, and no reason whatsoever to waste another moment on a man who refused to appreciate her. She should be glad.

Flo zipped herself into a black nylon coverall and grabbed her gym bag. She let her anger propel her out of her condo and into her Miata. She needed to get to the gym, work it off. Who did he think he was, kissing her off like some damn stalker groupie? She banged through the gears, pushing the little car hard through the early-morning traffic. Treating her like a little teenybopper with her first crush. Telling her about his girlfriend in Paris. Paris? Like hell. Probably didn’t even have a girlfriend. Probably gay. She was lucky to be rid of the rat weasel skunk son-of-a-bitch.

Flo pulled into the Bigg Bodies parking lot ten minutes after leaving her apartment, some kind of record. Other than the two limos parked at the back, there were only two cars in the lot: Bigg’s Cadillac and a yellow Corvette. Joe Crow’s car wasn’t there, and that was fine with her, though she really didn’t give a damn one way or the other.

Bigg was working on the payroll, trying to decide whether to fire Beaut, when he heard the front door buzzer. He leaned across his desk and looked out of his office, caught a glimpse of Flowrean Peeche as she blew past the counter, not bothering to sign in, and headed for the locker room. He regarded the papers on his desk. The numbers looked like meaningless scribbles. He squeezed his eyes closed, then opened them. Nothing had changed. Bigg got up, closed and locked his office door, turned out the light, and climbed into his viewing closet. Flowrean was standing directly in front of the mirror, staring at her reflection. She wore a silky nylon coverall, black with gold trim. Her gym bag, unopened, sat on the bench behind her. Bigg waited for her to unzip, to shake loose those breasts and flex those remarkable thighs. He waited for her to open her bag, to dress herself in her reeking sweats, to drape that dead-goldfish necklace around her neck. But Flowrean didn’t move. She simply stood staring at the mirror, almost as if she were looking straight through it.

Was he watching her? Flo wasn’t sure, but she smiled, aiming her eyes at a spot six inches on the other side of the glass. She gave it half a minute, then turned her back to the mirror. She thought about going into one of the shower stalls to change, but that felt wrong. It would be like hiding. She opened her bag and pulled out her workout sweats. The anger she had felt on the drive over was still with her, but now something else was happening, a hollow feeling in her womb, a shiver at the base of her spine. She tugged down the zipper on the front of the coveralls, took a deep breath, and dropped them. It took her less than five seconds to step into her sweatpants and pull on her sweatshirt. She turned back toward the mirror and lowered the necklace of dead goldfish over her head. Three of them had fallen off, but the other three were still hanging in there.

When she came out of the locker room, Bigg was standing behind the front counter studying the morning newspaper, frowning with concentration. Flo walked past him, going directly to the squat rack where she began her warm-ups, a set of twenty-five deep knee bends followed by some long, slow stretches.