The Duration Read online

  “The Internet sounds like a scary place.”

  “It is,” said Jimmer. “It is. I mean, it’s not if you know how to stay ahead of it. Which is why we’re interested in this start-up.”

  “Weaponizing again?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, sounding a little defensive. “But the real widespread applications aren’t martial. Or maybe it’s the other way around—like a Sun Tzu thing. Maybe all applications are martial. Anyway, for example, and, you know, this is confidential, right? I mean, I’m not worried about you, but keep this stuff to yourself, obviously? In the spa? At breakfast. Who knows who is lurking around? Loose lips sink ships and all that.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Just hold on a minute while I get off the other line with my broker.”

  It only took Jimmer a second to laugh.

  “Right. That’s not funny. No, but there are all kinds of applications for this stuff. If it works. Like imagine you could program an app to search the web and remove any mention of your name. Shit, every job applicant with a Twitter account would use it. It’s like that movie, the one with that guy, Eternal Sunshine? Right? Erasing memories. Except instead of working on your own brain, this thing would work on the web.”

  I had a vague sense that this sort of thing would be monumental for a certain kind of person engaged in a certain kind of lifestyle, but for me it was sort of remote. I mean, wouldn’t people just repost stuff? Wouldn’t the truth of what someone said or did remain in the world, whether or not anyone could find it online? But I could also see that both Jimmer and Vishy Shetty were people of this new world, future people, and that for them this sort of thing was probably like growing a pair of wings.

  “And you know what they call it?”

  I did not know what they called it.

  “They call it Webster. Which sucks. But we’re gonna call it WolfSpidr. No e. Because we prowl the web.”

  “Wolf spiders don’t prowl webs,” I said. I was really scared of spiders, and thus knew a great deal about them.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Jimmer. “Because it sounds fucking awesome. No e.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, and searched my mind for another topic, one to which I could contribute without betraying the trust of Ava Winston.

  Oh yeah, one leapt to mind.

  “Hey,” I said, the obvious cloudbank drifting over me after a half-day of sunshine. “Have you heard from Chickie?”

  “Um,” Jimmer said, and I could feel the effort it was taking him to switch gears. “No. You?”

  “Nope. I don’t know where he is. I tried him a few times yesterday and went looking for him last night.”

  “Where’d you look?”

  “The usual. The Knots.”

  “You worried?”

  Was I worried? I hadn’t been, until now.

  “Maybe a little, I guess.”

  “Shoulda called me,” said Jimmer. “I can track him.”

  I could hear Jimmer put his phone down and then the snap and crackle of nails on a laptop.

  “He’s in Sink City,” said Jimmer. “Downtown.”

  I could hear Jimmer’s voice drop as he said it. Only one reason for Chick to be in Sink City and it wasn’t a good one.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “My phone,” Jimmer said. “Of course.”

  I sat up on the edge of the bed.

  “Sink City, huh?” I said. “You can’t give me an address, can you?”

  Jimmer sounded almost embarrassed.

  “Sorry. I told you it was an older phone.”

  “Listen,” I said, checking my watch. It was closing in on 9 A.M. “Can you check again at eleven and let me know? If he’s not headed back here, I’m going to go get him.”

  “Uh, yeah,” said Jimmer. “I guess. But call him first. He’ll see that it’s you. Maybe that’ll get him headed in your direction.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Jimmer clicked off.

  I went down to the massage salon and sat through an unproductive shiatsu. Fulvio seemed concerned.

  “You are very tense,” he said. “Would you like a wrap?”

  “No,” I said. “But let’s wrap this up.” Punning because it felt frivolous and I could use some frivolity.

  I threw a towel across my shoulders and headed for the caldaria, determined to lose myself in the eucalyptus fog. But when I opened the door and the steam started floating out at me, reaching for me, I closed it right back up. That steam seemed to represent something. I pushed through a side door for some fresh air but wound up in a service corridor behind the public spaces of the spa, where large wheeled baskets sat piled with towels, the ubiquitous white towels, the currency of resort living. The corridor was warm and smelled of laundry and old sweat. An almost alkaline smell, something I figured Head-Connect might consider using in its brochures—give us a month and we’ll turn you into a battery. Machines scrubbed and tumbled around a corner. I could hear the chirps and groans of the laundrywomen at the machines, the upbeat industry of immigrants. I leaned against the wall and let the steam cool on my skin.

  In the end, it was the smell that did it. It took me back to the locker rooms of the CYC, to Coach Harvey shouting at us, to the practice courts where Chick and I would drain foul shots for hours. And then back further, something deeper, my dad, home from his own Monday night pickup games, his North Gable Variety T-shirt wrung out and hanging on the bathtub rail, of him coming into my room and leaning over me and kissing my cheek, sweaty and flushed, and how only then, with the home complete, could I fall asleep.

  I went back to the room and checked my watch. It was only 9:45, but fuck it. Sink City, the Venice of Western New England. It was on the way back to Boston.

  I started to pack.

  Ava Winston was in the lobby, escorting a guest from check-in to facilities, when I came through.

  “Good morning, Mr. Johansson,” she said, blushing slightly and releasing the guest at her elbow into the down-spa current. She was dressed in her occupational finery and her golden hair was pulled back and I could just tell from 4 feet away that it would smell like lavender if I could get close enough. “I understand we missed you at Sustenance this morning.”

  I smiled and looked at my feet in a way that I hoped would be endearing. We stood there for a second, and then Ava noticed the shoulder bag I was carrying.

  “I thought you were staying until Friday,” she said, her face betraying little besides a slight widening of her eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I need to get back to Boston and take care of some things. But I’ll be back tomorrow. Or the weekend.”

  She raised her eyebrows slightly, still trying to maintain her balance. I checked the lobby and then leaned in very quickly and kissed her on the cheek.

  Ava’s hands started to come up, either in protest or in reciprocation, but she reined them back in and straightened herself up.

  “You can’t keep doing that,” she whispered, and I got the sense that she was serious.

  But I was serious too.

  “Seriously,” I said, to let her know how serious I was. “I’ll be back.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, her eyes going from wide to narrow, and I was a little glad we were in public. But then she sort of shimmered and the façade was maintained.

  “Well, thank you for staying with us,” she said. “We look forward to seeing you again.”

  Then she turned on her heel and headed to her desk.

  “I’ll be back,” I said a third time, as she walked away, third time means I mean it, but I might as well have been talking to myself.

  I hit the Pike hard with a bear claw and a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. The Pike was always better for leaving, downhill and fast, none of that sappy hill-town kitsch to slow you. Thirty miles of straight road between exits, Gare to Westfield, and another seven to 91, which would take me to Sink City. I took a slug of the coffee, which was impossibly sweet and hot, it was to
coffee what gin was to water, and every nerve in my body jolted awake. I passed through the toll and set the truck to cruise. The Berkshires were behind me in a flash. Come like a virus, leave like an exorcism.

  The plan was to hit Sink City and track down Chickie, talk some sense into him or turn him in, maybe even take him to Boston with me until he could clean up. Confess everything to everyone, wrap us all up in a nurturing environment. That would be ideal. Chick could sleep on the couch, meet some new people, watch college basketball with me at the bar on the corner. It’d be like the dorm we’d never shared. I could put a sock on the doorknob when Ava came over.

  The Pike intersected 91 at the bottom of a long defile, shortly after it crossed the gorge between Russell and Westfield. The Westfield River sloughed along beneath, on its way to join the mightier Connecticut, these rivers with their dead mills dotting the banks like the Pioneer Valley equivalent of the Berkshire cottages. The salmon were gone from the Connecticut, which was dammed up in a half dozen places by coastal industrialists, routed through canals, processing plants, turbines. Up to the north, some of the factory towns were rising from their ruins, Turners and Greenfield and Shelburne, beckoning artists and manufacturers and young families with their converted mills and their lantern festivals. But the central valley was still beleaguered, and Sink City was its sacrificial heart.

  I pulled over at a lookout on 91 and got out of the truck. You could see the whole place from here. There were the church spires and bell towers and Sink City’s immense town hall, the distant fields and water towers. I looked out over the Flatgate Mall, the first of its kind in western Massachusetts, which must have seemed like such a good idea when they built it back in the early ’80s but then choked the retail life out of the downtown, leaving behind a blasted cityscape of bars and barber shops and boarded-up warehouses. You could see the good bones of the place, the brownstones, the regal corpses of the factories, the two canals cutting through the eastern edge of the metropolis. You could see what was possible if they could begin to lure the bohemians down to weed the medians and colonize the firetraps, join forces with the children of the immigrant population and the Olde Sinkers hanging on to the hillsides. If they could come together to imagine a future. A Portland, even a Portsmouth, with mixed-use developments and galleries and maybe some rebooted manufacturing. A place where you could get microbrews and a butchered pig and some textiles along the wooded edges of the river. You could get those things now, actually, but few people were ballsy enough to do it. So instead, they were building a casino, which would no doubt solve everything.

  I got back in the truck and headed down into the city. Past Monsta Kuts and the Nines and O’Hara’s, past the convalescent homes and nursing homes and graveyards for those too tired to move south. Past the derelict lots and the kids loitering on corners at 11:15 on a Tuesday, just trying to make it through the day. Down to the flats by the river, the urban frontier, where a handful of pioneers were digging in and renovating an enormous mill project. There was a children’s museum there, and, surprisingly, the National Volleyball Hall of Fame, less gaudy and less popular than its roundball sibling to the south. Outside the children’s museum was the empty bed of a water sculpture, dry since 1984.

  I pulled over near city hall and tried Chick’s numbers again. No answer. I was about to call Jimmer, see if he could work his tech magic and get any more precise on coordinates, when I spotted a purple Trans Am parked up the block, near the massive bell tower of the congregational church.

  I swung around and came by it from behind.

  Nobody in the back seat. One person in the driver’s seat. I looped around again and parked, walking quickly up toward the passenger side. The sidewalk was cracked and stained and I had my Head-Connect sweatshirt hood up over my head. The door handle was cold but snapped open when I pulled.

  I jumped into the passenger seat. Elvis LaBeau, behind the wheel, jerked awake with a start.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, when he recognized me.

  I looked at him like a dad who’d caught his son coming in after curfew.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” I asked.

  LaBeau looked fleetingly at the glove compartment, but whatever was in it he wasn’t dumb enough to go for. Instead, he sat still in the driver’s seat, appearing to calculate the odds that, even in Sink City, a public beating would be tolerated. After a second he rubbed his eyes.

  “You try saying no to him,” he said.

  “Where is he?”

  LaBeau gestured with his head toward the bell tower.

  “Up there,” he said. “Listen, I didn’t seek him out or anything. He came to me, said he had nowhere else to go.”

  That stung.

  “I kept Robbie out of the loop, if that matters to you.”

  “Don’t matter to me,” I said, even though it did. I felt like I should present a hard front. It’s easier to open a fist than to make one, something like that. “I’ll bust that motherfucker up.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d be careful about that,” LaBeau said, gesturing to the church. “You got a weak link here. And Robbie, between you and me, is still hoping for a happy ending with his brother. That high school shit. He might see Chick’s head as a peace offering.”

  “For who? Tim-Rick?”

  LaBeau shrugged.

  “Just saying. He’ll take the dude’s money, but you don’t really want to give him a reason to go tribal.”

  “He knows what would happen, though, right?”

  LaBeau shrugged again.

  “You going to be around full time then?”

  He wasn’t stupid, Elvis LaBeau. He knew what was up.

  “Tim-Rick’s over it.”

  “Tim-Rick tell you that?”

  “Yeah, he did. He’s moved on, so if Robbie is hoping for some reconciliation, Chick isn’t the way to go about it.”

  “Maybe get Tim-Rick to tell him that.”

  I sat steaming. These assholes and their stupid games. This old bullshit. I would kick all their asses.

  “Tim-Rick. What a stupid name, anyway.”

  “Robbie told me that it’s two names.”

  “No shit.”

  “No. Like, it’s the names of two people combined. Their mom was pregnant with twins, but only one made it. She couldn’t choose, so she combined the names.”

  That struck me as a terrible idea, and I didn’t give much of a shit about Tim-Rick Golack.

  “That’s fucked up, man.”

  LaBeau raised his eyebrows.

  “Weird the shit people will tell you when they’re high.”

  We both sat there for a second. I imagine we were thinking the same thing, wondering what it would be like to carry your dead brother’s name around for your whole life.

  Enough with that shit. I checked my watch and looked up at the bell tower.

  “What’s he doing in there?”

  LaBeau shrugged.

  “Getting high, or coming down, probably. Dude’s been high since last night.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “The Knots. Came out here this morning because last night your boy said if I didn’t drive him he was going to hitchhike. He was in no shape to hitchhike.”

  “What’s he on? Oxy?”

  LaBeau nodded. “Among other things. He’s an addict, man.”

  “No shit,” I said. “And what the fuck are you doing to help?”

  He looked at me.

  “What do you want? I’m an addict too.”

  He looked down at his hands. Opiates were coming in like rot out here.

  “Shit. I took him in, let him crash. Dude has a fucking tent. It’s freezing out. I drove his ass here so he didn’t freeze to death. I’m the one sitting here waiting on him.”

  He reached into his coat pocket, but all that came out were his keys.

  “I don’t need this shit, dude. You want him, you got him,” Elvis LaBeau said, and put the keys in the ignition. He was making a pretty good
point. “Call the cops. Turn us in. You’d be doing me a favor.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Go home. I’ll take care of this.”

  For a minute, I didn’t get out and he didn’t start the car. The two of us, we deserved each other.

  Then I opened the door and stepped out onto the asphalt. Behind me, the Trans Am coughed to life, and LaBeau was gone before I’d crossed the street.

  I checked the nave and the chancel, the narthex and the pulpit, a whole catechistic vocab coming back after fifteen years away. No Chick. The church was dark and quiet, votives flickering within a side grotto, velvet confessionals gossiping to each other. The rug swallowed my footfalls and I moved up to the choir. From the balcony, the empty wood of the pews shone in the cold late morning.

  I found him at the top of the bell tower, in a small round room with a high ceiling from which the Sanctus hung. He was slumped silently on a bench, hands in the pockets of a light coat, passed out or asleep. His breath made clouds in the open-windowed room. His beard looked rough and his skin was pasty.

  I sat next to him and waited for him to wake up.

  So, yeah, sure, a bell tower again. I felt it, the symbolism, the events from half a life ago, half our lives anyway, the way you wonder, as you always do, in that useless way, how things might have been different if things had been different. But, and I’ll be honest here, I was also thinking about Ava and Boston and my job and my life and all the things that did not involve my drug-addicted friend breathing unevenly on the bench next to me. Like my other, non-drug-addicted friends. And my new familiarity with yoga. And my weight, which was down about 5 pounds since last week and was beginning to seem scalable. All these things. And about how I would share them with Chickie when he woke up, and he would see what I was seeing and might offer an insight or two that changed the way I saw them, or propose some vaguely outlandish but nonetheless thrilling alteration. And he would do so with a smile and genuine fellowship. And we would wind up laughing.

  And then the Sanctus bell rang, thunderclaps in the small room, because it was noon.