I stopped talking, only to notice Arnie Blondestone was staring at me in wide-eyed, silent horror. Not the kind of horror you feel when you find out the universe is full of real monsters, but the kind you feel when you realize someone else’s idiocy has just wasted your entire day. I glanced down at the tape recorder, saw that it had stopped long ago. Arnie rubbed his hands over his face like he was washing without water.
“What?”
He looked at me and made a polite effort to hide his deep, pure disdain, but didn’t respond.
“Do you, uh, want something to eat? I’ll buy.”
“No thanks,” he said, twisting his face into a pained fake smile. “Let’s just wrap this up and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“Now, just to clear a few things up, if you don’t mind. First of all, let’s confirm that that’s the little pill bottle there?”
“Oh. Yeah. It’s empty now.”
“Because you took the last of the, uh, the soy sauce before you came today.”
“That’s right.”
“So you don’t have any left to show me. Let me see the stuff crawl around on the table and all that.”
“Oh. No. I guess I should have saved some.”
“No problem. I mean, that would have been physical evidence to back up your whole story, but we won’t worry about that sort of thing.”
Asshole. I should cut that smirk off your face with my butter knife.
“And I guess you forgot to tell me that you took the pill bottle with you when you left the trailer? Because you have it now, but in your story you left it behind. You know, when your dog drove by in your car and picked you up. Hey, that would have been something else to show me, the car-driving dog.”
“I went back to Robert’s place afterward, found the pill bottle among the debris. Completely unburnt.”
“Of course.”
“I can show you where the trailer was, by the way. I mean, there’s another trailer there now but if you look at the ground you can sort of see where something might have burned there once. We can drive out there.”
“Uh-huh. And what about the dozens of deaths from the dismembered fans at the Marconi thing? I’m surprised that wasn’t bigger news, a crowd of people disappearing like that.”
“There’s actually a very good reason for—”
“And you told me Jim hauled in a dolly of sound equipment to the Luxor, but later on there were two carts of equipment there.”
“Of everything that I told you, that’s the part you have trouble believing?”
“And in your story you kept losing track of how many people were with you. At some point you said something like, ‘The five of us and the dog piled into the car’ when it was only four of you at that point, by my count. You, your friend John, Big Jim and the girl, Lopez. But you probably got mixed up.”
“It’s hard to exp—”
“You were probably forgetting you had killed Fred already. Meaning Fred Chu, the guy whose head you blew off with a shotgun.”
“So there really is a guy named Fred Chu and he’s really dead? I could look him up?”
“He’s missing. Officially.”
“Okay. So is there more story, or should I pack up? Do you have any documents you’d like to copy me on, like your tax returns from the year your dog won all the money at the casino? Which form does the IRS have you fill out for that?”
I took a deep breath, said, “Look, not every little single thing in the story is true, but the meat of it is. I swear it. I admit I get silly when—when the truth is hard to explain. It’s my way. But those people in the Luxor, they did disappear, Arnie. And I mean they totally disappeared. That guy with the beard who lost his wife? He came back later and said he had no wife and, you know what? He didn’t. He didn’t have a wife named ‘Becky’ and there was no ‘Becky’ at the show. They went down the guest list; everybody is accounted for.”
“So she was never there. Okay.”
“Would you please stop doing that? Patronizing me? You saw the wig monster out there in my truck, in the cage. That’s what it was, you saw it.”
“I saw something. I saw what you wanted me to see. Some people are manipulators, I know that much. Oh, hey, you said those monsters, they ooze the soy sauce, right? So you can go out there and get some?”
“You seriously want to go try?”
“No, I don’t. Let me ask you, did they do any psychological testing on you when you had your incident in school? The one that got you sent away? And the report they wrote, did it have the word ‘sociopath’ on it?”
I groaned.
“Don’t make this about me. The people in Vegas, the ones who vanished? They never existed, Arnie. No, listen. This is hard to understand, but the moment they were sucked into that hole, or whatever it was, they didn’t just stop existing in the here and now. They were erased from the past, too. That’s why there’s no report of them being gone. At that moment, they were never born. If I had fallen in there, you’d be able to go back and see that my mom never had a male child and she never named him ‘David’ and we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”
“Assuming this is true, which, incidentally, I’m not drunk enough to do, how can you possibly prove that?”
I took a breath.
Here goes . . .
“I have dreams, Arnie. And in my dreams the whole thing from the Luxor plays out, only we’re with another guy. And I know his name. Todd Brinkmeyer. A year older than me. Long blond hair. In the dream he’s with us, he’s toting the second dolly of sound stuff, he’s with us in the SUV. He’s carrying the second guitar—”
“Okay, okay, back up—”
“I heard her say his name, Arnie. I heard Jennifer shout ‘Todd’ plain as day. I think that was him getting sucked into the hole, the vortex thing. And as of that moment, he was gone, he got sucked in and he was zapped out of the past, present and future, out of our memories. They have that power somehow. But one night, me and John got really drunk and we sat around telling Todd Brinkmeyer stories, real stories, stories that happened but didn’t happen. I think of his face and sometimes I can see it, and it’s like a dream you can’t quite remember the next morning. And I go back and go over the chain of events and there’s places, holes where I know Todd should be. He was there and he helped us, Arnie. He fought with us. And I’m not even allowed to remember him, to mourn his death. At least Jim got a funeral. But Todd, I can’t find his picture in the yearbook. Can you even imagine what that’s like?”
Arnie sighed and for a quick moment looked genuinely sympathetic that someone could dream up something this elaborately sad. He said, “We both got places to go tomorrow. Is there any more?”
You act bored, Arnie, you act like you’re miles above it all. But you’re still sitting here, aren’t you? You’re still listening. I know you got reasons but I don’t know what they are yet. God knows I would have split by now if I were in your shoes.
I said, “You gotta understand . . . Vegas was just the beginning.”