Jared Brophy was having a drink after his checkup. He was in some shithole in Silver Lake drinking with a bunch of kids thirty years younger than him. The news had been about what he’d expected—bad—so with a sense, this sudden urge, to just do one goddamned thing that didn’t seem preordained or inevitable, he’d driven around until he found a bar and ordered a G&T from a bartender with a straight-up bull ring through her nose. The alcohol supposedly wasn’t good for him but did it really matter at this point? Really?
The bar was a faux-redneck deal called Lu-Lu’s. Wood paneling, a gigantic stuffed black bear on its hind legs in one corner. Singing bass on the walls. Framed posters of The Dukes of Hazzard and Jeff Foxworthy. They served—Jesus Christ—they served shots of mystery booze in spent shotgun shells, which had to be against some kind of code. And yet cans of PBR were still seven dollars.
His gin and tonic could’ve fed his parents for two weeks when they were growing up. He marveled at this city, sometimes. At the very least, you had to have a trust fund or be a fucking executive to get drunk anywhere besides your own home. Where did these kids get the money? They all looked like they were skipping social studies to be here.
Still, the booze helped, buoyed him a little. It’s not good, no, the doctor’d told him today, a gravity to his voice that had thus far been held in check. What he meant was obvious. The doctor might as well have been a singing fish himself, his one tune belted out again and again: You’re dying.
“Hit me again, madam,” Brophy said. The bartender picked up his empty glass and then, her eyes widening, dropped it to the floor. It didn’t break, but clattered to the floor, rolling. Behind him, someone screamed.
Brophy turned. Not ten feet away, a smoke—he recognized it immediately for what it was—stood in the middle of the room. This one stayed hazy for a few seconds and then snapped to a solidity that hadn’t really been present on any of the videos Brophy had watched. Certainly the Bride remained more transparent than this.
It was a weightlifter, a bodybuilder of some kind. At least, that’s what Brophy assumed, because the motherfucker was huge. African-American guy—it was the vernacular now, but given the nature of these things, the guy could have just as easily actually been from Africa, could have been from fucking anywhere, right? Being a ghost and all?—who stood with his arms stretched wide at his sides, taking big gulps of air through his nose, terrified, and then he went all hazy again, colorless as a cloud of pulp smoke.
“I’m going to pump you up,” some kid bellowed in a terrible Schwarzenegger impression. A few people laughed, nervous laughter that bounced around the room like ricochets.
The smoke took a few steps to the left and someone flipped a drink coaster at him like a Frisbee. It sailed above the smoke’s shoulder. Someone else threw a plastic cup and it went, of course, right through him. Within seconds the air was full of projectiles—napkins, glasses, menus, shotgun shells, a bowl full of peanuts—and had taken on a fevered, carnival quality as people began shrieking, laughing. The smoke just kept looking around like they all did. None of it seemed to register.
Watching the people around him, Brophy’s sickness felt coiled inside him, a small dark animal waiting to spring. Claws hooked and snarled in his blood, his organs. Candice Hessler’s death had hit him harder than he thought it would. Surprised him, yeah, and scared him only a little more than he already was; he’d become well versed lately in the body’s fragility. But mostly it made him sad.
Nostalgia was a shithead like that. The contract he’d saddled Vale with all those years ago, God. Flimsy as a cardboard shithouse and he’d become undeniably rich because of it. But Vale had needed cash and had become so volatile. Such a pain in the ass to work with. Brophy knew it was a smart move, business-wise. He still believed it. But in the long run? What had been the point of any of it? Rich, not rich? He’d never been Candice’s favorite person, even when things were good, but it shamed him now to think that she, this woman he hadn’t thought of in years, had gone to her grave most likely thinking him an asshole. A cheat. Which, let’s face it, he kind of had been.
He stood and walked to the door but before he opened it something hit him in the back, some missile gone off course. He turned to see everyone in the bar standing, still jeering at the smoke in the center of the room, which still had not acknowledged that it even knew where the hell it was.
“Hey,” he said to a young lady standing next to the door. She had on a pair of those acid-splattered jeans hiked up past her navel, the kind that’d been popular when Vale and Candice were just starting out, all those years ago. Everything circular.
“Yeah,” she said without looking away. She threw a napkin. “What?”
He coughed once against the back of his hand.
“You’re all idiots,” he said. “You know that? Okay? Just because you can doesn’t mean you have to.”
He stepped outside into shards of sunlight and the air surprised him with its sweetness.