Get in Trouble: Stories (35 page)

She’d already requested additional grant money to pay for security cameras, but when it was turned down she went ahead and bought the cameras anyway. She had a bad feeling about the two men who worked the Sunday to Wednesday day shift.

as children they were inseparable

On Tuesday, there was a phone call from Alan. He was yelling in Lin-Lan before she could even say hello.

“Berma lisgo airport. Tus fah me?”

“Alan?”

He said, “I’m at the airport, Lin-Lin, just wondering if I can come and stay with you for a bit. Not too long. Just need to keep my head down for a while. You won’t even know I’m there.”

“Back up,” she said. “Alan? Where are you?”

“The airport,” he said, clearly annoyed. “Where all the planes are.”

“I thought you were in Tibet,” she said.

“Well,” Alan said. “That wasn’t working out. I’ve decided to move on.”

“What did you do?” she said. “Alan?”

“Lin-Lin, please,” he said. “I’ll explain everything tonight. When do you get home? Six? I’ll make dinner. House key still under the broken planter?”

“Fisfis meh,”
she said. “Fine.”

He hung up.

The last time she’d seen Alan in the flesh was two years ago, just after Elliot had left for good. Her husband.

They’d both been more than a little drunk and Alan was always nicer when he was drunk. He gave her a hug and said, “Come on, Lindsey. You can tell me. It’s a bit of a relief, isn’t it?”

The sky was swollen and low. Lindsey loved this, the sudden green afternoon darkness as rain came down in heavy drumming torrents so loud she could hardly hear the radio station in her car, the calm, jokey pronouncements of the local weather witch. The vice president was under investigation; evidence suggested a series of secret dealings with malign spirits. A woman had given birth to half a dozen rabbits. A local gas station had been robbed by invisible men. Some cult had thrown all the
infidels out of a popular pocket universe. Nothing new, in other words. The sky was always falling. U.S. 1 was bumper to bumper all the way to Plantation Key.

Alan sat out on the patio, a bottle of wine under his chair, the wineglass in his hand half full of rain, half full of wine. “Lindsey!” he said. “Want a drink?” He didn’t get up.

She said, “Alan? It’s raining.”

“It’s warm,” he said and blinked fat balls of rain out of his eyelashes. “It was cold where I was.”

“I thought you were going to make dinner,” she said.

“Oh.” Alan stood up and made a show of wringing out his shirt and his peasant-style cotton pants. The rain collapsed steadily on their heads.

“There’s nothing in your kitchen. I would have made margaritas, but all you had was the salt.”

“Let’s go inside,” Lindsey said. “Do you have any dry clothes? Where’s your luggage, Alan?”

He gave her a sly look. “You know. In there.”

She knew. “You put your stuff in Elliot’s room.” It had been her room, too, but she hadn’t slept there in almost a year. She only slept there when she was alone.

Alan said, “All the things he left are still there. Like he might still be in there, too, somewhere down in the sheets, all folded up like a secret note. Very creepy, Lin-Lin.”

Alan was only thirty-eight. The same age as Lindsey, of course, unless you were counting from the point where he was finally real enough to eat his own birthday cake. She thought that he looked every year of their age. Older.

“Go get changed,” she said. “I’ll order takeout.”

“What’s in the grocery bags?” he said.

She slapped his hand away. “Nothing for you,” she said.

close encounters of the absurd kind

She’d met Elliot at an open mike in a pocket universe in Coconut Grove. A benefit at a gay bar for some charity. Men everywhere, but most of them not interested in her. By the time Alan’s turn came, he was already drunk or high or both. He got onstage and said, “I’ll be in the bathroom.” Then he carefully climbed off again. Everyone cheered. Elliot was on later.

Elliot was over seven feet tall; his hair was a sunny yellow and his skin was greenish. Lindsey had noticed the way that Alan looked at him when they first came in. Alan had been in this universe before.

Elliot sang that song about the monster from Ipanema. He couldn’t carry a tune, but he made Lindsey laugh so hard that whiskey came out of her nose. After the song, he came over and sat at the bar. He said, “You’re Alan’s twin.” He only had four fingers on each hand. His skin looked smooth and rough at the same time.

She said, “I’m the original. He’s the copy. Wherever he is. Passed out in the bathroom probably.”

Elliot said, “Should I go get him or should we leave him here?”

“Where are we going?” she said.

“To bed,” he said. His pupils were oddly shaped. His hair wasn’t really hair. It was more like barbules, pinfeathers.

“What would we do there?” she said, and he just looked at her. Sometimes these things worked and sometimes they didn’t. That was the fun of it.

She thought about it. “Okay. On the condition you promise me you’ve never fooled around with Alan. Ever.”

“Your universe or mine?” he said.

Elliot wasn’t the first thing Lindsey had brought back from a pocket universe. She’d gone on vacation once and brought back the pit of a green fruit that fizzed like sherbet when you bit into it, and gave you dreams about staircases, ladders, rockets, things that went up and up, although nothing had come up when she planted it, although almost everything grew in Florida.

Her mother had gone on vacation in a pocket universe when she was first pregnant with Lindsey. Now people knew better. Doctors cautioned pregnant women against such trips.

For the last few years Alan had had a job with a tour group that ran trips out of Singapore. He spoke German, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, passable Tibetan, various pocket-universe trade languages. The tours took charter flights into Tibet and then trekked up into some of the more tourist-friendly pocket universes. Tibet was riddled with pocket universes.

“You lost them?” she said.

“Not all of them,” Alan said. His hair was still wet with rain. He needed a haircut. “Just one van. I thought I told the driver Sakya but I may have said Gyantse. They showed up eventually,
just two days behind schedule. It’s not as if they were children. Everyone in Sakya speaks English. When they caught up with us I was charming and full of remorse and we were all pals again.”

She waited for the rest of the story. Somehow it made you feel better, knowing that Alan had the same effect on everyone.

“But then there was a mix-up at customs back at Changi. They found a reliquary in this old bastard’s luggage. Some ridiculous little god in a dried-up seed pod. Some other things. The old bastard swore up and down that none of it was his. That I’d snuck up to his room and put them into his luggage. That I’d seduced him. The agency got involved and the whole story about Sakya came out. So that was that.”

“Alan,” she said.

“I was hoping I could stay down here for a few weeks.”

“You’ll stay out of my hair,” she said.

“Of course,” he said. “Can I borrow a toothbrush?”

more like Disney World than Disney World

Their parents were retired, living in an older, established pocket universe that was apparently much more like Florida than Florida had ever been. No mosquitoes, no indigenous species larger than a lapdog, except for birdlike creatures whose songs made you want to cry and whose flesh tasted like veal. Fruit trees no one had to cultivate. Grass so downy and tender and fragrant no one slept indoors. Lakes so big and so shallow that you could spend all day walking across them. It wasn’t a large universe, and
nowadays there was a long waiting list of men and women waiting to retire to it. Lindsey and Alan’s parents had invested all of their savings in a one-room cabana with a view of one of the smaller lakes. Lotus-eating, they called it. It sounded boring to Lindsey, but her mother no longer e-mailed to ask if Lindsey was seeing anyone. If she was ever going to remarry and produce children. Grandchildren were no longer required. Grandchildren would have obliged Lindsey and Alan’s parents to leave paradise in order to visit once in a while. Come back all that long way to Florida. “That nasty place we used to live,” Lindsey’s mother said. Alan had a theory that their parents were not telling them everything. “They’ve become nudists,” he insisted. “Or swingers. Or both. Mom always had exhibitionist tendencies. Always leaving the bathroom door open. No wonder I’m gay. No wonder you’re not.”

Lindsey lay awake in her bed. Alan was in the kitchen. Pretending to make tea for himself while he looked for a hidden stash of alcohol. There was the kettle, whistling. The refrigerator door opened and shut. The television went on. Went off. Various closet doors and cabinet drawers opened, shut. It was Alan’s ritual, the way he made himself at home. Now he was next door, in Elliot’s room. Two clicks as he shut and locked the door. Other noises. Going through drawers, more carefully this time. Alan had loved Elliot, too. Elliot had left almost everything behind.

Alan. Putting his things away. The rattle of hangers as he made room for himself, shoving Elliot’s clothes farther back into the closet. Or worse, trying them on. Beautiful Elliot’s beautiful clothes.

At two in the morning, he came and stood outside her bedroom door. He said softly, “Lindsey? Are you awake?”

She didn’t answer and he went away again.

In the morning he was asleep on the sofa. A DVD was playing, the sound was off. Somehow he’d found Elliot’s stash of imported pocket-universe porn, the secret stash she’d spent weeks looking for and never found. Trust Alan to turn it up. But she was childishly pleased to see he hadn’t found the gin behind the sofa cushion.

When she came home from work he was out on the patio again, trying, uselessly, to catch her favorite iguana. “Be careful of the tail,” she said.

“Monster came up and bit my toe,” he said.

“That’s Elliot. That’s what I call him. I’ve been feeding him,” she said. “He’s gotten used to people. Probably thinks you’re invading his territory.”

“Elliot?” he said and laughed. “That’s sick.”

“He’s big and green,” she said. “You don’t see the resemblance?” Her iguana disappeared into the network of banyan trees that dipped over the canal. The banyans were full of iguanas, leaves rustling greenly with their green and secret meetings. “The only difference is he comes back.”

She went to get a take-out menu. Or maybe Alan would come down to The Splinter with her. The door to Elliot’s room was open. Everything had been tidied away. Even the bed had been made.

Even worse: when they went down to The Splinter, every time someone sat down next to her, Alan made a game of pre
tending that he was her boyfriend. They fought all the way home. In the morning he asked if she would lend him the car. She knew better, but she lent him the car just the same.

Mr. Charles knocked on her office door at two. “Bad news,” he said. “Jack Harris in Pittsburgh went ahead and sent us two dozen sleepers. Jason signed for them. Didn’t think to call us first.”

“You’re kidding,” she said.

“ ’Fraid not,” he said. “I’m going to call Jack Harris. Ask what the hell he thought he was doing. I made it clear the other day that we weren’t approved with regards to capacity. That’s six over. He’s just going to have to take those six right back again.”

“Has the driver already gone?” she said.

“Yep.”

“Typical,” she said. “They think they can walk all over us.”

“While I’m calling,” he said. “Maybe you go over to the warehouse and take a look at the paperwork. Figure out what to do with this group in the meantime.”

There were twenty-two new sleepers, eighteen males and four females. The new kid from the night shift—Jason—already had them on the dollies.

She went over to get a better look. “Where are they coming from?”

Jason handed her the dockets. “All over the place. Four of them turned up on property belonging to some guy in South Dakota. Says the government ought to compensate him for the loss of his crop.”

“What happened to his crop?” she said.

“He set fire to it. They were underneath a big old dead tree out in his fields. Fortunately for everybody his son was there, too. While the father was pouring gasoline on everything, the son dragged the sleepers into the bed of the truck, got them out of there. Called the hotline.”

“Lucky,” she said. “What the hell was the father thinking?”

“People your age—” Jason said and stopped. Started again. “Older people seem to get these weird ideas sometimes. They want everything to be the way it was. Before.”

“I’m not that old,” she said.

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. Got pink. “I just mean, you know…”

She touched her hair. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but I have two shadows. So I’m part of the weirdness. People like me are the people that people get ideas about. Why are you on the day shift?”

“Jermaine’s wife is out of town, so he has to take care of the kids. So what are we going to do with these guys? The extras?”

“Leave them on the dollies,” she said. “It’s not like they care where they are.”

She tried calling Alan’s cell phone at five-thirty, but got no answer. She checked e-mail and played Solitaire. She hated Solitaire. Enjoyed shuffling through the cards she should have played. Playing cards when she shouldn’t have. Why should she pretend to want to win when there wasn’t anything to win?

At seven-thirty she looked out and saw her car in the parking
lot. When she went out, Alan wasn’t there. So she went down to the warehouse and found him with the grad student. Jason. Flirting, of course. Or talking philosophy. Was there a difference? The other guard, Hurley, was eating his dinner.

“Hey, Lin-Lin,” Alan said. “Come see this. Come here.”

“What are you doing?” Lindsey said. “Where have you been?”

“Grocery shopping,” he said. “Come here, Lindsey. Come see.”

Jason made a don’t-blame-me face. She’d have to take him aside at some point. Warn him about Alan. Philosophy didn’t prepare you for people like Alan.