Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

thirty-nine: narwhals and empanadas

I COULDN’T GET back to sleep, of course. I lay on top of the blankets on the couch for about three hours, feeling like a couple of unpleasant animals were fighting to the death inside my stomach. At some point Oxana had given up on television and sloped off to the bedroom, but I hadn’t even noticed.

Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up, poured myself a drink (with full awareness of the irony) and called the only number I had for Sam. His message was the same: Sam, growling in his best Robert Mitchum voice: “Go ahead. Arouse my interest.”

“Look, man, I’m not even sure you’re going to hear this,” I said to his voicemail. “I hope you’re in a motel somewhere, and that you made some sleeping arrangements before you started your evening’s adventure.

“First off, don’t be a fucking idiot. Whatever you think of me, it’s not worth what you just did to yourself. But it’s done, so now you have to start over, that’s all. You fell off the wagon before. Remember that thing with the kids who died in a fire? Man, I thought you were going to drink another body to death in a single week that time. Didn’t help them, though, and it didn’t help you. And you puked all over my only suit. Three different times.

“And here’s another thing. Don’t bullshit yourself. You’re angry at me because I wasn’t a very good friend, and you’re right, but not because you really believe I was going to turn you over to the Big Happiness Machine. Because if you think I was going to hand over the guy who let himself burn to death to show me not to be afraid—you still remember that, don’t you? Even with a nasty-ass hangover and a gut full of angry feelings, you remember that, right? If you think that I was really going to do that to you, that’s some kind of weird self-hatred trip. And okay, yes, a lot of this was my fault. I was scared to say anything because it does look bad and it made me shitty even pretending. It does look like I was going to sell you out. I was embarrassed. But I never thought you’d actually believe it. I didn’t say anything because it felt to me like I hadn’t stuck up for you in front of our bosses. Ex-bosses, I guess.

“Okay, maybe it was also because I didn’t know how you’d take it. I don’t really know how to deal with a world where I’m not sure what my friend Sam is thinking. You spooked me bad by not telling me about the whole Third Way thing, and I’ve never quite got over it. It wasn’t because you kept it from me—I can understand that, we have freaky jobs, and you have to be careful, and other people were counting on you. But it spooked me because I never thought you’d get so serious about anything that didn’t automatically include you and me staying friends. Yeah, I know, I sound like a wife or something. Live with it. You were knee-deep in your future happiness while I was still home doing the dishes. Fuck, I don’t know, make your own metaphor. I haven’t slept all night.”

Jesus, I thought, is this thing even recording all this shit? What if it cut off five minutes ago?

“Anyway, that’s really all I wanted to say. When you hear this, I hope you’re already sobered up. And if you still hate my guts, well, that’s just something I’ll have to deal with. But don’t ever try to convince yourself that I was really going to sell you down the river, ‘cause that wasn’t going to happen. Couldn’t happen. I was a prisoner of war, and I said and did what I had to to survive, and that’s all. You’re my best friend. I love you, man, even when you call me in the middle of the night to tell me I’m a traitor, and I should fuck off and die. Because that’s how it works.”

I put the phone down then. I finally managed to get a couple of hours of sleep.

• • •

San Judas International was built south of the city on reclaimed tidelands in what was, at the time, a largely unused portion of southern Sunnyvale (before Sunnyvale joined up with Jude, one of those hive-of-scum-and-villainy backroom deals that people still swear about). It’s on the edge of the bay, and only about twenty-five or thirty miles south of San Francisco’s airport. I’ve always thought it was a bit strange to have three major airports in such a small area as the SF Bay, but if we had more bridges and tunnels and stuff, we probably wouldn’t. As it is, the bay keeps everyone separate and each of the major metroplexes wants their own landing strips.

Hey, I wouldn’t mind my own airport either, but you don’t hear me whining about it.

Because of the Celtic knot of freeways around the airport itself and the edge of the bay down there, what we could have probably managed in about an hour on bicycles took just as long on a weekday morning in a car. However, I discovered one cool thing about my otherwise stone-ugly ride—I could use the cab lanes. I mean legally, unlike the way I usually did.

I’d never had the slightest dealings with LOT, the Polish airline, so I decided to do the advised three-hours-early thing for international flights. But when we got there it looked like they weren’t exactly fitting customers onto the plane with a shoehorn, so instead of Oxana hurrying through security, we found a coffee shop and had a second breakfast. I wasn’t that hungry myself, but even in mourning, Oxana was a very healthy young woman. She plowed through pancakes and bacon and toast and jam and a couple of coffees while I nursed a tomato juice and said a silent prayer that the Bloody Mary Fairy would appear from nowhere and dump bitters and vodka into it.

I could have just ordered one, sure. That’s the great thing about airports, nobody knows what time zone you’re in, so nobody bats an eye when you order booze at nine in the morning. But for a zillion reasons I felt like I shouldn’t. Magical fairy intervention, however, would have meant it wasn’t my fault, see?

Give me a break. It’d been a long week. A very long week.

Oxana was still angry with me, but she had the good grace not to make a big thing of it, so I didn’t have to look like some old guy ditching his young girlfriend, or worse, somebody sending his wife-by-mail back to Mother Russia because he was pissed she had the wrong color hair or something.

“But how will I know what you do?” she asked. “If you die or no?”

“Well, that depends, but since you gave me your address I can always write to you. Or even email. You guys have email in the Ukraine, right?”

She gave me that look young women always give embarrassing older men, no matter what we’ve said or done. “Yes, stupid. We have car and email and even airplane.”

“No, you don’t, or I wouldn’t have to send you out on a Polish carrier.”

“You are head-butt.”

Once she’d finished eating, we still had a while to go before I could put her through security with a good conscience, so we took a last walk around the concourse. San Jude doesn’t have quite as many tourist attractions or sports teams as San Francisco, so the gift shops always seem a little impoverished by comparison. We had the Cougars, of course, who had been there forever, but they were a minor league baseball team. We were going to get an NHL franchise next year, and a contest had already been held to pick the name. The winner had been “Narwhals,” which I wasn’t quite sure about, but the shops were already stocking merchandise in the team’s projected purple, green, and gold; the stuff with the official logo, a narwhal smashing up through ice, and the less official stuff, like a cartoon narwhal on a t-shirt I saw that said, “I’M HORNY. PUCK ME!”

SJ International’s also got the usual airport array of weird local foods—you can mail frozen empanadas to your friends back home in Kansas!—and other odd businesses that only grow in airports, like vending machines full of overpriced phone chargers and earbuds and whatnot. Oxana actually bought a couple of these things (I’d given her a few hundred bucks for the road, to make sure she could get transportation back to the Scythian camp in the mountains.) She and Halyna probably would have enjoyed a trip to Bender Electronics or one of the megabox stores, I realized now. I felt bad I hadn’t taken them there instead of the gun warehouse and the fucking fatal museum.

Airports are weird places. Actually, they remind me a little bit of Heaven—not, God knows, because they’re so lovely, but more because everybody’s kind of off on their own little trip, surrounded by their own bubble, like the cheerful but not particularly chatty souls Upstairs. I’m sure people meet and make lifetime friends in airports, but I can’t imagine it happening to me. Too disconnected. Too . . . airport-ish.

After we walked in glum silence for a little while, I led Oxana to the security gate and hugged her, then watched until she’d gone all the way through the scanners and out the other side. I wasn’t treating her like a child—more like a hardened criminal. If I’d just dropped her off at the airport she would probably have traded in her ticket, turned right around, and the next thing I heard of her would have been the bombing of some local Iranian Community Center. She didn’t want to hurt any Persians except the goddess herself, of course, but she really wanted to bring some pain to Anaita. As it was, I wasn’t a hundred percent certain she wouldn’t sneak out again once I’d left, but short of flying to Kiev with her, I’d done all I could, and I was desperate for some private thinking time.

My phone rang on the way back, but I was busy trying not to get crushed between a very large furniture truck and someone entering the Bayshore right in front of me at about thirty miles an hour. A couple of miles later I pulled off the freeway and parked at a gas station to check the message.

It was from Sam. You know the expression, “death warmed over”? He sounded like death had been warmed until it caught fire and had to be extinguished with a tenderizing mallet. Like a man who’d been gassed in the World War One trenches and had only just learned to talk again.

“I hate myself, Dollar. More than I hate you. Fuck you and your friendship and good sense and seeing the other side of things. Fuck alla that. You’re still a rat bastard. Remember when you ate all my Baja Nachos while I was in the restroom that time? Yeah. So fuck yourself. Head for Neverland. Write your name on the mirror in blood. Yes, blood, asshole. Then step through.

“I’m going to go shoot myself now. I just remembered that the worst part of drinking is the sobering up. Did I already tell you to fuck yourself? I hope so, ‘cause my head hurts too much to say it now.”

And then he’d hung up.

Believe it or not, this was a good thing, despite the death’s-door sound effects. This was Sam forgiving me, in his own Samlike way, and telling me how to join him in Kainos. Which was good, because a plan I’d been thinking about for the last few hours was beginning to take practical shape, and I really did think I was going to need to visit Sam’s compromised paradise. The plan was a completely crazy one with almost no chance of working, but time was running out. So, as far as useful ideas, well, let’s just say the new one didn’t have much competition.

The more I thought about it as I made my way south on the rain-slicked freeway, the more certain I became that I was either a genius or the biggest idiot ever to tape a “Just Kill Me” sign to his own back. And not only was the idea itself astoundingly dangerous, every step on the way to implementing it was crazy suicidal, too. But it was the first decent possibility that had occurred to me since we’d escaped the Stanford Museum, bloodied, beaten, and carrying nothing but the dead body of a young Ukrainian woman.

Look, let’s be honest, I don’t have that many ideas. I don’t have any good ones (as Sam would be the first to tell you) but even if you ignore quality, I don’t have that many of them, so I wanted to start putting this one together. Unfortunately, I realized as I was passing the first of the San Judas exits, I needed one major component to make it work, and that wasn’t going to be easy to get. It would require me striking a bargain with someone who might be even stronger than Anaita, and who had certainly proved that he hated me as much as she did.

Yeah, you see where this is going, and yeah, you’re right. It was stupid in dozens of different ways. Suicidal, too. But it’s not like I had a lot to lose. One way or another, someone was going to rip my soul out of my body soon—mainly just a question of who and when and how official it would be—so heading for Five Page Mill to visit Grand Duke Eligor was just giving the executioner a choice of weapons.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t terrified, of course. Doesn’t mean that at all.