“I’ve an idea,” said Graveyard. It had been a week since BlisterPac’s surprise visit. Since then a new dunning letter from Flinders and Poach had punctually arrived each and every day, the threatening tone escalating predictably. And now their cell phones had become infected.
“Fine,” said Ambience. “I’m listening.” She was scrolling through the morning’s text messages, searching for the icky ones. “Here’s the latest,” she said. She read: “‘Wee Willie Winkie runs thru the town / Upstairs, downstairs, everywhere he’d root / Under the mattress, out on the lawn / He’d never give up searching for that fucking loot.’ Signed: A Concerned Friend. Well, how frankly scented-ass cute.”
“Poor Willie.”
“Mommy Goose must be so frustrated.”
“Cause that loot, gentlemen, it hath ‘gone where the woodbine twineth.’” They shared a hearty conspiratorial laugh. “Who’d have thought our friend Mr. Pustule harbored such a hidden fondness for verse?”
“Your average stooge is a more complicated critter than most people think.”
“That’s how they work their way up to the valuable ‘stooge’ position.”
“What was your idea again?” Ambience said.
“I believe the time has indubitably arrived for us to make a hasty exit before our next encounter with the human abscess.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“So it has occurred to me, caramel cluster: what say we drop everything right now, I mean everything, and I mean right this very minute, and sky on outta here on a second madcap holiday getaway?” He had that crafty boyish look that usually meant he just blurted out something he probably couldn’t or shouldn’t get away with.
Okay, she’d play along. “What holiday and where to?”
“Well, as you may or may not know, it’s National Mortuary Month, and in honor of the occasion, I figured we could check in on the wonderful folks who buried my once promising youth under the stone of one sorry-ass name.”
“Oh, please.”
“What? Too much self-pity?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Can’t I even be permitted one brief wallow?”
“No.”
“For old times’ sake, at least?”
“No.”
“You’re evil.”
“And talk about travel, if we’re planning on going anywhere at all, how about a long-overdue hop over to Flinchtown? I haven’t seen Mom since we stopped by on our way to visit that loose-marbles friend of yours in WestTongue—how many years ago? Five? Six?”
“Best for last, lemon drop. Your mother’s is a day at the beach compared to the domestic boot camp we’ll be subjected to by my pack of wack jobs up north. So let’s do the worst first. Get through all the internecine fun my family can deliver as quickly and painlessly as possible. Spread a touch of pecuniary cheer around Randomburg, you know, lay on that whaddya-want, whaddya-need sort of thing for a while. Then scoot on over to Flinchtown, take a breath, and sink into the pink padded pillows of Mama PlaitedHopes’s ratty couch. I can already feel the kinks in my muscles letting go. Yum.”
“You actually think running home to Mommy and Daddy can save you from Mr. BlisterFuck and whoever else they may already have in on this ass hunt? Look how fast they tracked you down here, a total stranger to them. And now they’ve got your name and address. Plus your parents’ personals and everyone else’s you’ve ever spoken a single word to since you learned how to talk. We’re all living ventilated lives now. You know that. Privacy? Odd word—what’s it mean? Some antiquated notion from way back in antiquated times. Forget about it. Long gone, blown out, dust. Never to be seen again, if it ever even existed in the first place. Everyone’s buck naked now 24-7. There are no secrets anymore. There are no places to hide. Have you lost your mind?”
“I know, I know, I know. But I need some time to think. At least we can snatch some time up there. Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t know. I think we’re in a real ratfuck here. And we’re the fuckees.”
“Start packing.”
They loaded the HomoDebonaire with more luggage than any two people would need to travel anywhere, plus, of course, the bag of money and the bag of assorted weaponry. They got in the car. They drove off. First stop, drop Nippers off again at FurryFarm, then on into the interminable stone labyrinth of the million right angles that made up the city, then the sudden bursting out onto the fast freedom of an expressway leading to a six-lane interstate and points north. It took Graveyard the usual thirty agonizing minutes to clear the congested town. It might have been a pleasant drive, tooling along through nice country under a pretty sky, but for the disturbing reappearance of his new familiar, the Red Hole, some ten miles past the city line, as if it had been lying hidden among all these innocent trees and hills, waiting to ambush him when he was least distracted. Even when not vehemently visible, the Red Hole had always been near, intimately close, ever since its first abrupt eruption on the side of RealDeal’s head back in Plexi’s apartment. And yet still he hadn’t spoken a word about what he’d seen to Ambience. He didn’t know why. Maybe he didn’t want her to feel anything like what he’d felt witnessing the event. Maybe he felt guilty, that somehow he should have done something more. Maybe he was reminded too much of his own death. He didn’t want Ambience to be reminded too much of hers. He didn’t know. Of course, he hadn’t told her anything about the LemonChiffon shellacking, either. He did know the reasons for that omission. So now he was storing two more secrets along with the usual mental garbage he was carting around from sun to sun like most people. No wonder he was exhausted much of the time.
The Red Hole was manifesting itself in the air about hood high a hundred feet or so ahead of the car. Then everywhere he looked, he saw the Red Hole. Saw it more clearly than any actual seeing could. It was vivid and raw and painfully wet. And deep inside lurked all the grand mysteries, a veritable honeycomb of them. And sooner or later, everything everywhere would enter the Red Hole. In manacled lockstep. Then he noticed he was about twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. He needed to slow down, way down. He glanced over at Ambience. She hadn’t noticed. Her rigid profile looked engraved.
“Shouldn’t we have called your parents, let them know we’re coming?” she said.
“It’s a surprise. They love surprises.”
“So you say.”
“Why give them any advance warning?”
“Cause they might redeploy their forces in a more effective pattern?”
“They’re an uncommonly cagey lot.”
“You make an ordinary drive to visit your own parents sound like a military engagement.”
“Isn’t it?”
Ambience sat silently for a while. She was watching pictures of her own mother in her own mind, moving quietly through her own life in faraway Flinchtown. Was she lonely? Was she sad? Ambience suspected she was. She wouldn’t require a preplanned strategy to visit her.
“Perfect day, though, isn’t it?” she heard Graveyard say.
“I’ve seen better.”
“You hungry?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“I was just thinking, we left in kind of a hurry, neither of us has had any breakfast, so if you wanted, we could stop just about anywhere—”
“I’ll let you know.”
They were rolling along in the HomoDebonaire in comfortable traffic at a comfortable ten miles per hour above the posted limit somewhere north of BrokenGap, about halfway to Randomburg, when Graveyard noticed a late-model black StareCollector two cars back, one lane over. Ten minutes later it was still there. He changed lanes; the StareCollector changed lanes. He sped up; the StareCollector sped up. He slowed down; the StareCollector slowed down.
“Let’s stop for a bite,” he said.
“I’m not hungry,” said Ambience.
“You can watch me eat.”
“Fun,” she said. “Here.” She handed him half a ScooterTooter energy bar, one of several she’d purchased at a RoundTheClock next door to FurryFarm.
“I said I wanted something to eat. Not something to chew.”
When he saw the sign advertising a Rustlers&Hustlers at the next exit, he followed the big orange arrow. It was lunchtime, and the stadium-size parking lot was jammed. “Satan’s allergens,” he said to himself as he drove around and around for about half an hour, looking for a space. Finally found one about a half mile from the door.
“I’ll stay here in the car,” said Ambience.
“Oh, no you won’t. You know I can’t stand eating alone.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Have a mountain water and the ThinYou Platter of celery and carrot sticks with the famous protein-foam dipping sauce or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be.”
“Yuck,” she said. “Ultra yuck.”
“Fine. Then chew on a napkin. But I’d like you inside with me. The car’ll watch over the cash. Shelled out an extra five grand for the LeaveItAndForgetIt security sequence. I need you inside with me.” He opened his door.
“All right,” she said. She turned to look at him. “You know I can’t resist when you sweet-talk me like that.” She opened her door and got out.
On the way up to the restaurant, Graveyard paused and turned around, scanning the parking lot behind him. Intently.
“What are you looking at?”
“Stop a second. See that guy walking over there past the BringItOn Oil truck?” He pointed to an ordinary man in ordinary gear.
“Yeah. What about him?”
“He look like your guy?”
She studied the man for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “No,” she said. “I don’t know,” she said.
“You’d be a fine witness at a police lineup.”
“I was too busy trying to come up with appropriate lies to pay much attention to what the a-hole looked like. I’ve told you already. He reminded me of XSquared.”
“I believe he’s the driver of a black StareCollector that’s been dogging us for the past fifty miles.”
“BlisterPac’s much heavier and has a full head of hair. Steely gray pubic hair hair. I think.”
They watched the ordinary cross the lot and join the end of a growing line of other ordinaries collected at the restaurant’s front door. “Let’s get outta here,” said Graveyard.
So they did.
An hour later found them some sixty miles away and seated in plastic chairs at a sticky plastic table inside a sticky half-empty JumboGutHouse. Graveyard was having the PizzleFries and Deluxe ScraperBurger. Ambience was gazing at her VegoramaPlatter, trying to determine what exact vegetables these oddly shaped and colored bits of plasticky stuff were supposed to represent. She sipped from her medium NothingCola, which, as a result of a recent breakthrough in food-product technology, now contained negative 250 calories. Each serving consumed automatically subtracted that amount from your body’s caloric storehouse. Hooray! They were both listening to a family in a nearby booth—mother, father, two kids—competing with one another to make the loudest, grossest, most realistic farting sounds. The father definitely seemed to be the most skilled. Probably more time in grade.
“Well,” said Graveyard, “that’s as valid a response to the absurdities of life as any other.”
“Kinda tempting, though, isn’t it?” said Ambience.
“What is?”
“Just cutting loose altogether. Letting it all go. Fuck civility. Fuck the social contract.”
“One sticky point, my asparagus. A refusal to John Hancock that contract pretty much guarantees a deficit of one important item in your life.”
“What’s that?”
“Money.”
Thankfully, the farter family collected its various raucous members and left, but not before leaving behind, as a sort of parting gift for all remaining, the distinct aroma of a couple of authentic rim shots that lingered on way too long.
“Tasty,” said Graveyard.
“Mingles well with the aroma of your whatever-it-is.” She was staring morosely at the half-eaten wad of bread and meat clutched in Graveyard’s greasy hand.
“I don’t insult your food while you’re trying to eat it.”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “It insults itself.”
“No one put a gun to your head…”
From the back pocket of her ass-hugging JustForYou jeans Ambience extracted her brand new WordToTheWise Tellurian Dictator cell phone and passed it over to Graveyard. “Call your parents,” she said. “Now.”
So he did. Graveyard had a what-me-worry? relationship with his cell phone. He never would have even bought the damn thing if he hadn’t been told repeatedly by friends and utter strangers he absolutely had to own one of the irritating devices in order to participate fully in the modern carnival. He didn’t care. He could be either in or out. So sometimes he remembered to pack his phone. Sometimes he didn’t.
Ambience sat there and listened to half the conversation. There were lots of subjunctive clauses and extended pauses. After he hung up, Graveyard sat and looked at her for a long moment. “Happy?” he said.
“I’ve been better.”
“They’re thrilled. They’re especially eager to lay their peepers on you again, butternut crunch. You’re their favorite daughter-in-law.”
“How many daughters-in-law are there?”
“You’re the only one.”
“Oh, my God,” said Ambience. She was staring past her husband toward the entrance of the restaurant. Graveyard had barely half a second to respond with “Wha?” before a complete stranger had plopped down into the chair next to him like someone returning from the john to reclaim his place at the table. The intruder was strikingly well dressed for a joint like this and, yes, an absolute dead ringer for XSquared, the stiff scorekeeper on that moronically popular Here Come the Po-Po show. He, too, had a headful of pubic hair. Ambience’s face looked like dried plaster. The man nodded to her. “Nice to see you again,” he said. Ambience looked at Graveyard. “This is that guy I was telling you about,” she said. “The fed.”
“Not exactly.” The man pulled out his wallet, removed a card, passed it to Graveyard. BLISTERPAC, the card read, SENIOR INVESTIGATOR. “No government affiliation whatsoever,” he said. “So you can relax.”
“I wasn’t tense,” said Graveyard.
“Didn’t say you were.”
“What do you investigate and who you investigate for?”
“I handle certain business and personal complications for a private employer who wishes to remain anonymous.”
“How nice for him. What are you doing here at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere?”
“Pure coincidence. On my way to a Helpers Convention in ToughBorough, as a matter of fact, when I happened to spot your car. Aren’t many Debonaires out on the road these days. Caught up to you to get a closer look, when who should I spy in the passenger seat but your lovely wife here? Pure coincidence, like I said. She and I have talked.”
“So I understand.”
“And have you had an opportunity to address the concerns I shared with her?”
“Sadly, no, Mr. Pac. Unfortunately, I’ve had other pressing issues taking up most of my time at work.”
“And where do you work?”
“It’s a sensitive job. I prefer to keep the details to myself.”
“Well, I congratulate you. You must be doing extraordinarily well. Not many folks can afford a HomoDebonaire, and a new model at that.”
“I do okay.”
“Congratulations, too, on the coming attraction to your family.”
“What attraction?”
“Why, your new baby, of course. Your wife told me all about it.”
Graveyard and Ambience exchanged looks.
“Is that a sensitive detail, too?” said BlisterPac.
“We’re a private family,” said Graveyard.
“Well, perhaps it’s best, then, I leave you two to yourselves. I would ask you both to consider a satisfactory response to the dilemma I raised at my last meeting with Ambience here. Since neither of you seems to answer your mail or your phone calls, I’m afraid face-to-faces may be the only adequate alternative from now on. We’ll be in touch.” He rapped his knuckles twice sharply on the table and stood. He looked down at the ketchup-drenched pile of Graveyard’s PizzleFries. “Spare one?” he said and, without waiting for a reply, picked up a single fry and popped it into his mouth. He chewed. He swallowed. “Spudtastic,” he said. He smiled. He walked away.
Forty minutes and seventy-plus miles later, after Graveyard had calmed down sufficiently enough to engage in rational discourse, Ambience said to him, “He never mentioned the money. Not once.”
“He didn’t have to.”
“You think he’ll follow us to your parents’?”
“No. He obviously knows the address.”
“Imagine them mixed up in all this bullshit.”
“A definite line would be crossed.”
“You know there’s a quick and simple way to exit this mess.”
“Yeah?”
“Give ’em back the money.”
“What money?”
They drove on. Graveyard glimpsed the black StareCollector in his rearview mirror, once, maybe twice more, again about two cars back. Or was it? One probable sighting turned out to be a dark blue, decidedly not black, FamilyHumpMobile full of generic family. Now he appeared to be hallucinating StareCollectors. He didn’t mention any of these recent “sightings” to Ambience. Since leaving the JumboGutHouse, she’d dropped at least three ells that he knew of. At the five or more mark she tended to lapse into nonstop rambling monologues on whatever topics happened to be passing through her head at the moment. Mostly these mental downloads were mildly entertaining when they weren’t obsessive, boring, or outright irritating. She hadn’t talked much, though, since whatever it was that had passed for lunch. She had her neon-lime buds fixed firmly in her ears, her brand new paper-thin DustPad in her hand. She was in cruising mode.
Graveyard was trying to wipe his mind, wipe it clean of the dirt accumulated over the past few hours. He had discovered over the years that the less going on in your mind, the better you felt. The seed of religion. Driving was usually a pretty dependable crud eraser. The moving road seemed to induce a sort of alert hypnosis in which the world became unglued from language. The verbal fog dissipated. You saw clearly. You felt clearly. Not today. Today was an overflowing trash bin. Message from the wreckage: whenever you have money, other people want to take it from you.
“This is a really good tune,” said Ambience. She was dancing around in her seat.
“What is?” said Graveyard.
“‘You Fit Me Like a Spandex Onesie.’”
“I didn’t know you liked TerminalSpace.”
“Well, yeah.”
“When did this happen?”
“I think there’s a lot of things I like you don’t know about.”
“Like what?”
“If I told you, then you’d know about them.”
“So what’s wrong with that?”
“Mystery is the compost relationships grow out of.”
“And where’d you get that gem?”
“I read it in MadnessToday.”
“Then it must be true.”
“Fuck you.” She stuck the buds back in her ears. She hadn’t meant to say “Fuck you,” exactly, but she had and now she couldn’t take it back and she didn’t know that she wanted to take it back.
They settled back into silence until the big green sign bolted to an approaching overpass announced: RANDOMBURG NEXT EXIT. “Here we go,” said Graveyard. He shifted over into the right lane. Ambience started rummaging around in her bag. Graveyard could hear the pills rattling around before he even saw the prescription bottle. “Are you sure?” he said.
“I’ve only had one today.”
He looked at her and kept looking.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just need to soften the edges a little, round them off, you know.”
“You look pretty circular to me.”
“Your parents.”
“You’ve met them before.”
“Yes. I wonder if just one is enough.” She studied the bottle in her hand.
“What do you care, anyway? They’re not your family. And they’ll be happy we came. They haven’t seen us in ages. And they’ll probably be well oiled on whatever the drink of the day happens to be.”
“Maybe I should pop two more.”
“You know those things don’t mix well with booze.”
“I won’t drink.”
“My father’s a fucking bartender. He’s going to want to fix you one of his patented BroomDusters.”
“I can politely decline.”
“He’ll take that as an insult.”
“I’ll tell him I’m pregnant.”
“Obviously,” said Graveyard, “it didn’t work all that well the last time you tried floating that line.”
“S’all right. I’ll keep peddling that counterfeit baby till someone buys it.”
The family homestead, where Graveyard, his brother, SideEffects, and sister, Farrago, all grew up, was a two-hundred-year-old fixer-upper still in the process of being fixed up. The combination monster manse, haunted house, and carpentry shop was now occupied exclusively by his father. In lieu of a formal divorce, Mother had moved out years before to her own fairyland gingerbread cottage in the woods, Forevermore, which she had demanded Father build and pay for. And he had. Or so he claimed. Graveyard’s feelings about the old homestead were all knotted up, impossible to untie. His head was full of soft memories and hard memories. His father was named Roulette. His mother was named Carousel. One spun one way. One spun the other. Graveyard had spent the rest of his life in a more or less constant state of vertigo.
He guided the HomoDebonaire carefully through the center of town, freshly amazed by how small the old place seemed now. And so bright, too. All the great shade trees lining the main drag of his youth had been cut down long ago. Why?
Then he turned right onto Burlap Court. For a moment the street seemed completely unfamiliar. He recognized nothing. Had he made a wrong turn? The houses were all wrong. The wrong cars were in the wrong driveways. The place had the look of a phony hometown, a TV set designed to fool you into thinking you were still safe on the good ol’ mother planet when in fact you’d been captured and transported to an alien world whose inhabitants, it was soon to be revealed, had peculiar tastes in cuisine and popular entertainment. Then, as though a hidden switch had been thrown, the end of the street came into view and he recognized everything. He recognized his street. Everything in its proper place. And he was especially pleased to see that the old family hacienda was still shamelessly, beautifully, gloriously unfinished—the eyesore of the neighborhood. Seated on the second set of front steps, wearing big black sunglasses and, on this perfect sunny day, a large school-bus-yellow plastic raincoat, was a young girl smoking a blunt the size of a double corona.
“Isn’t that Farrago?” said Ambience as they pulled up onto the crunchy gravelly driveway. It was, and as soon as she saw the car, Farrago bounded across the dry scraggly lawn to greet them. They hugged, they kissed, they examined each other for any changes in appearance since the last visit, which was at least five years ago now.
“What’s with the raincoat?” said Graveyard.
“I’m washing my jeans.”
“So? You don’t have anything else to wear?”
“No.”
“You expect me to buy that?”
“They’re my favorite jeans.”
“Okay. But it doesn’t look like you’ve got anything on under that coat.”
“I don’t.”
Ambience smiled. “I understand completely.”
“Where is everybody?” Graveyard said.
“Dad’s at work. Mom’s I don’t know where. SideEffects was just here about an hour ago looking for his baseball bat or some shit, I don’t know.”
“We staying in my old room?”
“What do you think? They didn’t do a fucking thing to it, though. Said if you wanted better accommodations you could, and I quote, blow your wad on an overpriced shithole at the Stay ’N’ Pay.”
“Guess we’re home,” said Graveyard.
“Guess you are,” said Farrago.
They left their luggage and the bags in the car and cautiously entered the house. A fragrant breeze was blowing through the living room from the tears in the curtain of rattling plastic covering the space where the back wall had been razed to accommodate the additional bedroom begun, by Graveyard’s reckoning, some twenty years ago and still unfinished. No comment. They trudged upstairs to check out Graveyard’s boy cave. The room was pretty much as he remembered. An indelible memory folded into each wrinkled guitar-god poster plastered to the walls, every chipped action figure and muscle-car miniature on the largely bookless bookcase, one entire shelf of which was devoted to a complete set of realistically rendered plastic critters from Aster Feud. Decorative strings of multicolored Christmas lights were tacked to every wall. The windows were painted black. There was a green piñata in the shape of a pickle dangling from the center of the ceiling. An aquarium tank on the school desk in the corner was filled with cleaned animal bones of some kind. The closet door was open, revealing a cascade of clothes both hung and piled in heaps on the floor.
Ambience made an unclassifiable face. “This place should be preserved in amber,” she said. “A major exhibit in the Museum of Arrested Adolescence.”
“I don’t think anyone’s slept in here since you left,” said Farrago. “Mom wouldn’t let ’em.”
“Who’d want to?” said Ambience.
Graveyard picked up a delicately painted toy planet warrior from the bedside table. He studied it for a moment. He put it down. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said. Revisiting the past enshrined in this particular room was like sorting through an impossible mound of old smelly laundry.
“There’s a tent in the garage,” said Farrago. “You could pitch it in the backyard.”
“There’s always the pricey shithole,” said Ambience.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Graveyard said. He looked around the room one last time. This is the last time I will see this space, these objects, he said to himself. This room, ever again. “Good thing we didn’t unload the car.”
“I could tell them you stopped by,” said Farrago, “but there was, like, something wrong with your car, like an oil leak or something, and you had to get it fixed, like, right away.”
“Not bad,” said Ambience. She looked at Farrago with the sisterly admiration of a fellow accomplished liar. “We could go with that.”
So they did.
At the nearby Stay ’N’ Pay they naturally decided to opt for the best, the priciest—the deluxe Wayfarer’s Delight suite, which actually consisted of little more than a couple of average-size rooms joined by a makeshift door cut into the adjoining beaverboard wall. The “suite” smelled faintly of mold and cigarette smoke, and the worn furnishings exuded a distinctly repurposed air.
“So what now?” said Graveyard.
“Let’s fuck on these filthy sheets.”
So they did. For Graveyard, entwining with Ambience was the body equivalent of a palate cleanse. His boyhood faded like a photograph left too long in the sun. Plus, sex on a strange bed in a strange place added its own particular zesty seasoning to the event. Halfway through the proceedings Graveyard’s dick seemed to detach itself from his body and become a separate object no one especially owned, a curious object they shared among themselves in a sweet space somewhere outside of time. Afterward they lay there side by side, panting, for a long while.
“Never felt that before,” said Ambience.
“Me, neither,” said Graveyard.
“I want to feel that again. As soon as possible.”
“Know what I think?” said Graveyard.
“No. What do you think?”
“There’s no end to this. There are no real boundaries anywhere. We feel as much as we can bear until we can’t bear it anymore and then we stop, and wherever we stop, however incredibly good that may feel, something inside us knows there’s more, there’s always more. Unfortunately, arriving in that place doesn’t seem to come naturally. It’s like we have to learn how to feel good. Isn’t that amazing?”
“That why the planet’s so fucked?”
“Apparently so.”
“How’d we escape?”
“On the money rocket.”
They looked into each other’s faces and for a prolonged interval they weren’t seeing faces anymore but what the faces covered. Then they fell asleep. The ringing phone woke them around six. It was Roulette.
“Welcome back, stranger,” he said.
“Hello, Dad,” said Graveyard.
“Old homestead not good enough for you? Instead of staying here for the grand sum of absolutely nothing you’d rather go off and pay actual money for the privilege of rolling around on a pile of bedbugs?”
“It’s the only exercise I get.”
“They found a body over there sometime last year. Dead with a bunch of sticks, pencils, screwdrivers, what have you jammed up his ass. Door locked from the inside. Looks like he was planning on quite a fun weekend for himself.”
“What was the room number?”
“What do you mean, what was the room number? How the hell am I supposed to know what the room number was?”
“Well, you sound like you’re an authority on the case. I doubt we’re in the same room.”
“Your mother’s here and she’s already turned the whole kitchen into some kind of mad scientist’s lab throwing together a special dinner for you. Your favorites: beef duds, potato spackles, braised fingerstalks, and those horrible little rolls with freshette marbling and those godawful catacomb seeds you like so much. So be sure to bring a competitive eater’s appetite. You don’t want to disappoint her. We expect you in an hour.”
“I haven’t eaten all day.”
“Perfect. You know your grandmother always said that hunger was the best seasoning for any meal.”
“Didn’t she also say you should eat what you want when you want?”
“Your grandmother was a crazy bitch.”
Roulette never said goodbye. He simply hung up the phone when he was finished talking. Which he did now.
“How’d that go?” said Ambience.
“Let’s get on over there and get this fiasco over with.”