Adverbs (5 page)

L
et me explain what is happening to the Jewish people,” the guy said. He had just come out of the lounge, and had spilled maybe coffee all over his vest, so recently that it still glittered and beaded on the ugly puffy fabric of it. He was speaking very loudly over music coming from his headphones, and this did not make him the best spokesperson as to what was happening to the Jewish people. We listened anyway. Lila and I had been Jewish all our lives and we were curious about what would happen to us.

“They want the money, right?” the guy said. “Let me explain it. They want all the world’s money, right?”

“Right,” we said. I was almost out of money myself and soon would be chained to a student loan. All the world’s money
was
something I wanted, come to think of it.

“And the world’s money is down in San Francisco,” the guy said, “or San Fran, as everybody says. I’m going down there myself as sort of a freelance guard. Something terrible is going to happen down there that the Jews will use as an excuse. Maybe a building, like with terrorists, will…” The guy plucked his earphones from his ears and dropped them around his neck like one of those stupid pillows people wear on airplanes, and then
spread his arms out like he was tossing handfuls of flour. He made a noise like a ten-year-old boy pretending to blow things up which is always the trouble. It was very pretty to look at, but then again I was drunk. I don’t know why Lila was listening but she has always been kind.

“It’ll either be guys with bombs or a volcano is my theory,” the guy said. From his earphones we could hear an old song sung enthusiastically by the original artist. “You know how I know it?”

“I’m guessing a pamphlet you read,” I said.

“I’m going to go with the Internet,” Lila said. We turned to see if there’d be a guess from the only other person in the lounge, but the bartender was still cranky at the both of us and he stacked napkins to show us it was so.

“Both of you big-breasted girls are wrong,” the guy said. “I did it by reading birds. They behave badly when disaster is going to strike. You know, like with earthquakes.”

“Wouldn’t an earthquake be more likely,” Lila said, “in San Francisco?”

“Not in my theory,” the guy said proudly.

“Well, that’s a great theory,” Lila said. She made a gesture like she might put her hand on the guy’s stainy vest, if she weren’t all the way across the lounge.

“Yeah,” I said. “Go tell someone that theory and they’ll interrupt the Super Bowl.”

“You think I’m hilarious and crazy,” the guy said, in that sudden spooky clarity only exhibited by crazy people. He walked backward toward a pair of swinging doors. “I’m just
wrecked up. I’ve been beaten down by the knowledge of all the terrible things happening, and my theory is to tell my fellow man. In San Francisco my fellow man will see how wrecked I am and he’ll treasure all the time he has before the Jews take over. So you’re welcome, even if you don’t love me and never will.”

He put his tunes back on his head and left us there. We shifted in the booth of the lounge and I raised my finger to the bartender, who brought me another bourbon. “San Francisco,” he said, shaking his head. “And I was just going down there to work in my brother’s bar with better tips.”

“We’re going to tip you,” I said, “at the end of our day.”

The bartender snorted and caressed a blank TV which hung silent near the ceiling. He touched it like he could bring it back to life. “Not like you said,” he murmured sadly, and Lila changed the subject.

“Everybody has a theory today,” she said. “That woman leaving as we came in? She had a blackjack theory, how to win. It also had to do with birds, come to think of it, but they were her own birds, in cages.”

I took a delicious sip. The bourbon was perfect but then it almost always is. “My theory is,” I said, “pay no attention to theories in bars.”

Lila patted my hand and took a fake sip of water. “You should get a guy like
that
.”

“You just like him because he said you have tits,” I said.

“No no no.” Lila shook her head very carefully. “Clean him up and turn off his music and he’s the guy for you. I always
thought you’d do well with a guy who was apocalyptic. It would remind you nothing is the end of the world.”

“Except when it is,” I said, too quietly with my mouth full of drink. I ordered another. She was comforting me, which made me sick. Lila was the sick one, the one who ought to be comforted. This was an old song, too: she was sick and dying, for sure, in a lot of pain. We couldn’t drive north enough to escape this: young people in a deserted bar, drinking as death approaches, and still the men come at us and still we notice them. The only thing you haven’t heard about it is how rare she was, such a rare gastrointestinal thing that the doctors could never hide their excitement when they were called into the room. There had only been eight previous cases, one of them Lila’s mother, who had died helpless, aching and coughing all over and finally screaming, Lila told me, when Lila was the only visitor left to her.

It had been Lila and her mother; today it was Lila and me. Lila had undergone one operation that had been invented since, when they rerouted a part of her intestines or some such shit, and for a while there’d been a capful of hope, sort of. They thought in a couple of years she might be able to eat, and when she farted the doctors opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate. They poured it into urine sample cups in the hospital room, except she couldn’t have any and the doctors were on duty, so I finished the bottle myself and watched her doze in the upright bed. But it’s always dawnest before dark. Now she had a beeper clipped to her waist, for when some poor soul with the same blood type stepped in front of a bus and offered up a digestive system, but even this
was not the sort of hope one hopes for. This was hope that the operation would work for a few weeks, so that the doctors could learn something and maybe fix the next person. Lila herself would be granted more pain and a few months unless she died first. Hope was now hitched to the doctors, who were handsome to a fault and wore leather jackets when I saw them walking in the parking lot. Hope was hitched to them, and not to Lila, who rarely got to leave the room.

She wasn’t supposed to be here, of course, but it depended on how you phrased it. Lila and I had phrased it as “Can we take a walk around the block and maybe even sit out on the spiky hospital grass?” The nurses were glued to the TV and gave us an absent okay, but instead we got into my car and left Seattle in the belly of a ferry across Puget Sound. It wasn’t far, but it was far away, the ferry line the only thread which would lead us back. We drove north past Bainbridge and Kingston in search of the name that always cracked us up: Point No Point. There was a new casino, who knew? Inside it wasn’t easy to find a place that didn’t have the Super Bowl blaring on the screen. We weren’t interested in the year’s big football contest. We didn’t think those guys needed any more encouragement. It took me waiting for the bartender to slip out for something, and taking one of the heavy chairs, lifting it over my head and banging it against the bottom of the TV over and over until it spat sparks, while Lila stood underneath the green
EXIT
sign and watched for his return. If she saw him coming she was going to give me the password. The password was, “Shit! The bartender’s coming!”

Let us have our fun. By Super Bowl Sunday there was no one
to stop us. Lila’s father had died when someone had killed him, and her husband had shot himself long before she even got sick, after a nervous breakdown that left him weeping and playing golf by himself in the rain. It was something else we had in common. She and I were cut from the same cloth, an angry odd quilt, and then she went and got sick just like her mother and I had to start drinking for both of us.
“Sick?”
I would hear myself yelling to the late-night science television. It was the only thing worth watching after visiting hours were done. “Why haven’t we fixed
sick
yet? You scientists there—put down those starfish and
help us
. I hereby demand that all people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet.” Then I’d weep, finally, and fall asleep in Adam’s sweatshirt and wake up and quit my job.

“Tell me a story,” she said. “You’re thinking about Adam, I can tell.”

“Then I’ll tell you a story about him,” I said. “Once upon a time it was morning, and the two of us were hungover in Steven’s old apartment on South King. It was when Andrea visited with that boyfriend of hers who turned out to be loopy.”

“I’ve heard he’s since straightened himself out,” she said.

“You heard it from me, who’s telling this story,” I said. “The point is, five pitchers of margaritas is plenty. Andrea and what’s his-name were asleep on the couch and you in your room and by some miracle I was getting it together to make us a pot of coffee and banana waffles.”

Lila smiled at the waffles, curling her beautiful lips in fond remembrance of having something to eat. “And?” she said.

“And bacon,” I said, although this wasn’t true. Bacon was my gift to her. “And there was a knock knock knocking on Steven’s door. And behind the door was Adam, without a shirt on and holding his very old shoes.”

“And so how could you not,” Lila said, “take him and kiss him and live with him for six years? I mean, no shirt alone would be enough for most girls, Allison, but no shirt
and
holding old shoes? That’s better than a Jewish doctor.”

“Better than your doctors,” I said. I could say this, and not just because it was true. I wasn’t the only one who knew where the hope was hitched.

Lila dribbled her water into a potted plant above her on a counter, and then held the glass against her cheek like she’d downed a drink. “You know when I stopped with the doctors?” she said. “You know when I gave up on my life and just thought,
Well, if it makes the docs happy to learn something…?
It was when that handsome one, except for the pimple under his eye, looked right at me and said
binomial nomenclature
.”

She’d told me this story a thousand times. “Two-word name,” I said.

“Two-
name
name,” she said. “To look at me dying and waste breath with the Latin, and it’s not even Latin. ‘Okay, okay,’ I told him, but he didn’t get it, which was another bad sign.”

“Like a bird behaving badly,” I said.

She smiled right at me. “Or a chain saw,” she said, “outside the window.” Lila and I shared a room in college and spent one night drinking round after round of a 1930s drink recipe called the Suffering Bastard. We were almost out of bitters and brandy when we heard an evil buzzing outside. Boy oh boy was it very,
very late. We peered out the window and two boys were standing in the parking lot, holding chain saws and staring at us. We screamed and called the campus security, who arrived enthusiastically only to find the boys were holding remotes with antennae poking out of them, while miniature sportscars buzzed around the concrete, and that they were staring at us because we had thrown back the curtain and stood there in our underwear screaming at them. Also we knew these boys, Joe and Joe’s friend what’s-his-name. Our position was not one of strength, but Lila argued with campus security anyway.

“You were fierce,” I told her, another bourbon gone.

“I was,” Lila agreed faintly. “The point, as I saw it, and I still see it this way, is that they were dumb guys and ought to be rounded up, chain saws or no. I mean look, it’s more than ten years later and the Super Bowl still exists. Do they honestly think I don’t know why there were scarcely any doctors on my floor today?”

I looked at her: she was tops. She made me want to have a hero. “Who’s your hero, Lila?” I said, hearing my bourbon on the lilt of her name.

She gave me the look I would have given me if I were me. That was the last fun night we really had, with the chain saws; her mom died two months later, and after that, no matter where we drank or what, we were the Suffering Bastards. “You’re my hero,” she said, “for driving me here and for lack of a better guess. Finally getting to Point No Point is the last thing that makes sense. You know how the nurses started asking me to rate my pain one to ten? I just started giving them random numbers.
You can’t get to ten, I told the one with those earrings I want to yank out. You can’t get to ten because someone might slap you and that would hurt more.”

“I won’t slap you,” I said.

“Someone put ‘Jewish’ on the chart,” she said, “so they sent in a rabbi who I swear looked pre–bar mitzvah.”

“They sent you a
rabbi
?” I said.

“You must have been putting money in the meter,” Lila said. “He had that rabbi curly hair, and it was his first gig after wherever you go to be a rabbi.”

I signaled the bartender, who hung up a phone and sulked over without a bottle. “What did he say?”

Lila blinked very slowly, which she also did when she was drunk, like the move with her empty water glass. “He said I was a very pretty girl,” she said. “He said I was beautiful.”

“Let’s go, girls,” the bartender said. “Bar’s closing.”

“It’s noon,” I said, “or something.”

“Tony says I can close it up,” he said. “Super Bowl Sunday, even the Indians aren’t drinking. I’m full of hard times today. TV goes on the fritz, and I’m the only man on earth who’s in a bar and can’t watch the game. I have to call Tony every five minutes to know what’s going on.”

“There’s no justice in the world,” I said.

“Yes, I know, I know,” the man said, “but it really bugs me when the game’s on.”

“We don’t want to watch the game,” Lila said. “We want to talk to each other before I die.”

“Listen to you with your drama,” he said, and walked away
from us to reach behind the bar for a bottle of lotion. “Don’t pretend like you like me, okay? When you came in here you
strongly implied
that we were going to have a threesome if I gave you a round of drinks. As soon as I did, even though one of you wanted water, you laughed your asses off at me, so shut up with the
There’s no justice
. Justice is you leaving the Point No Point Casino Lounge Number Six right now.”