CHAPTER TWELVE

          It was late, even for them.

            “I graduated college today,” Gina said. It was a new moon and they were on a hill, looking at the stars. She and John had watched a falling star not too long ago. Gina wanted so bad to laugh, but couldn’t. John was having an introspective evening, and she didn’t want to ruin it with badly timed laughter, because she was feeling it too. Because of the graduation, because of a lot of things. The night had the potential to be about a lot of things, and she didn’t want it to be about her laughter.

            “I know,” John said. “I was there.”

            “I bet it was beautiful,” Gina said, smiling. It was the right kind. Sense of humor, she thought. Having a sense of knowing what is funny and what is not, and when it is funny and when it is not. She tilted with the champagne bottle and saw John with his arms folded behind his head, looking up at the sky. He was smiling like Buddha. They were lying on the hood of his car and the night and the universe were beautiful and aligned. And everything was possible.

            “Stop kidding,” John said. “And give me that champagne.” She did and lit a cigarette.

            “I know baby, I know. I didn’t mean it like that.” She tilted back, dropping all of her weight on the hood, feeling it give a little. “I mean I graduated college and nothing has changed.”        

            “You’re not in college anymore. You were yesterday. That’s changed.”

`           Gina shook her head. “No, like big shit. Like, I don’t feel any more educated than I did yesterday.”

            “You’re not supposed to,” John said. “I mean, it’s been a four year process. It hasn’t happened over night.”

            “Like when you see a picture of yourself ten years ago and you look different but you haven’t noticed the change day by day.”

            “Exactly.”

            “So I don’t know it, but I’m much smarter and focused than I was four years ago.”

            “Exactly. But you do know it. You just haven’t noticed it happen.”

            Gina took a large swig out of the champagne bottle, which she passed to John and he held it off to the side, wasted, hanging with his arm over the side of the car’s hood, tapping freely against the body of the car. “I love you, you know that?”

            “Very much so,” John said. He breathed into the air, still and warm. He hummed. The bottle was almost empty.

            John blew air into the night. Crickets chirped, somewhere in the woods behind them. “I know that, and I love you,” Gina said. She shifted herself onto her side and gave John a quick kiss on the cheek, feeling the hood of the car creak a little. She placed her hand on his chest and felt his heart beating steady.

            “And you know why I love you, John.”

            “Do I?” He smirked briefly before letting it slide. He searched for and found her hand and squeezed it.

            “God, it’s so much.” She sat up suddenly and looked around her. “Where are we, anyway? What time is it?”

            “We’re on a secluded hill about ten miles north of Troy, and it’s almost one.”

            “We have to go soon,” Gina said. “Caitlyn.”

            “I hope you’re driving.”

            “I’ll drive, I’m not drunk.”

            “You sure?”
            Gina slid of the front of the hood and slapped at dirt she wasn’t sure was there. “John, sweetheart,” she said. “What makes you think I would let you get in a car with me if I was drunk?”

            “Good point.”

            “So don’t worry. We’ll be fine.”

            John hopped off the hood and tossed the champagne bottle about twenty feet in front of them and the car, towards the road. As it landed, one of the streetlights a little further down the road, which had been going on and off periodically, switched on again and caught a few drops of the last of the champagne flying through the air. Alcoholic raindrops. Gina watched them fall on the grass and disappear into the remnants of the rainshower that she walked out into after the graduation ceremony at the Pepsi, formerly Knickerbocker, Arena.

            “God, I just don’t want to get stuck here,” she said.

            “Well then, let’s not open the wine in the back seat,” John snickered.

            “No, I’m serious,” Gina said, her voice a bit tense, still staring out at the road, where a second streetlight that had been timed off came back on. “I’m just having one of those ‘What Now’ moments.”

            “You’ve got a diploma and computer skills. Programming knowledge. You’ll be fine.”

            “I don’t know if I want to do any of that shit.”

            John raised an eyebrow and walked up to her, sharing her view of the road. He slipped his arms around her waist and rested his head on her shoulder. Her hair smelled wet and beautiful. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. “Not a great time to decide to change your major,” he said.

            Gina straightened up a bit and rubbed his hands, clasped around the snap of her blue jeans. “Well, it’s almost June already. I just graduated. Cait and I still have the place on Lark till September, at least. I’m going to just stick for a while. Ride out the summer. Something will come up. My sister-”

            “Dawn?”

            “Dawn.” Gina nodded and smiled. “She’s going to be off to New York at the end of the summer. NYU. I’d like to visit her down there. I’ve never really been, except on a class trip.”

            “To visit or to stay?”

            “I don’t know,” she said, her voice drawn and tired. “I don’t think to stay. But maybe it will give me a kick in the ass. Seeing someone else take charge. You know, being pro active about their life.”
            “We’ve been thinking about doing a couple of gigs in New York.”

            “Really?”

            “Yeah. There are a bunch of places that we can play, like CBGB’s and The Spiral Lounge, that have audition gig nights. The bars are open and people come and you get to play for a half hour or whatever. They don’t pay you but if they like you they might sign you up for a paid gig.”

            Gina laughed. “If you bring in enough drinking customers, you mean.”

            “Well, maybe,” John said. “But I have to think that these bar owners can still get excited about a new sound they like.”

            Gina shrugged. “You sound like Turk.”

            “That’s fine. He’s a smart guy.”

            “I know,” Gina said. “It’s a compliment. You want to know why I love your band so much?”    

            “Why?”

            “Because you could just as easily get up on stage and whine about how shitty things are. But you don’t. Your guys’ music is aggressive and angry, but you never use that microphone to bitch. It’s strangely optimistic.”

            “Being an optimist in this city is strange,” John said.

            They stood in silence for a while, watching a couple of cars turn down the hill. Gina took enough deep breaths until she decided that the quarter bottle of champagne that she’d had was not affecting her enough to impair her driving, then walked hand in hand with John, opened the passenger seat for him, sat him down, and walked around the front of the car. Inside, John turned the ignition key and flipped the headlights on, blazing the trees in front of them. She paused for a moment to watch them, then turned to John’s tipsy smile through the dust-spotted windshield. She entered the car, decided on a radio station, and brought the car to the road, the timed streetlights once again flicking off behind them as they headed back to Albany to pick up Caitlyn.

                                                                        ~

            The new twenty dollar bills, the ones with the big portrait of Andrew Jackson, the ones everyone said looked like Monopoly money, were catching up. She’d been aware of the new bills; the fifties had come first, and then the hundreds, but not too many of those had passed by her at Royal Burger. Until the introduction of the twenties, however, she hadn’t really noticed it, or more accurately, hadn’t been aware that the whole currency was undergoing a facelift. The tens and fives couldn’t be far behind. And they were going to put a coin dollar back in circulation, she’d heard. Every old bill was going to be substituted for a new bill. The watermarks were more recognizable. The corners were nearly holographic. A customer had told her that the reason the portrait was a little off center was that seeing as how most people walked around with their money folded in half, either in wallets or money clips or whatever, the government had decided that if they put the portrait a little off to the side, the image would last longer, not being continuously creased and folded over. Quite brilliant, Caitlyn had decided sarcastically. She didn’t mind the look of it as others did, though. She actually liked that they’d decided to take away the frilly edges to the old twenties and replace it with starker lines. The new bills looked clear and handsome, even if the larger portrait of Jackson made him look wired on LSD.     

            She’d been at the new position for about two weeks now and things had gone more or less smoothly. Most of the crew was happy for her and liked her. She knew who was able to do their jobs without constant instruction, and for the most part, didn’t care what people were doing when it was slow as long as everyone got done what needed to get done by the end of the night. She basically spent the first half of her shift (almost always the closing shift) helping expedite orders or working the drive thru, if Gina happened to be working, but the second half of her shift consisted of pulling the drawers and counting all the money. She loved that she got to sit on her ass in the office and not do any dirty work and she had even started to get good at talking on the phone and counting money at the same time, a skill that Brittany had recommended that she pick up while she was teaching Caitlyn the ropes. That and the fact that since there was no air-tight method of keeping track of the drawers at the end of the night, if one of the cashiers was a few bucks over, ka-ching! It was never enough to get crazy over, and she didn’t do it all the time, only when she felt she needed it for a pack of smokes or if she was having a bad night and was just angry at the company for whatever reason. But Caitlyn was smart and had been told that a low profile was the best profile and that if anyone asked questions, a brisk denial or pleading ignorance worked almost all the time. But as Brittany had told her, the best way to avoid all of that entirely was to space the stealing out so nobody got suspicious of anything. In her two weeks as shift supervisor, Caitlyn had pocketed a grand total of twenty dollars, and combined with the extra twenty-five she got a week from the raise, she felt that she was doing all right for herself.   

            She’d never really had to think about the actual money that the company was pulling in, but part of the new job, when she worked the closing shift, was putting together the daily deposit for the morning manager to drop off at the bank next door. The place pulled in a good three to four thousand dollars a day in profit, and most of that went through Caitlyn’s hands at night. She’d never dealt with money in such large quantities before. When she was a cashier, all the money went into her drawer and was never really perceived as piling up, but when she would count it all at the end of the night it would hit her just how much money the company was making. They made the week’s payroll by Monday evening. The rest went straight into the company’s bank. Four thousand a day for her store, multiplied, more or less, by each store in the area, the state, the country, came out to an obscene figure that Caitlyn could not stop trying to calculate.

            She became fascinated with the money itself. The rhythm of a pile of money being transferred from one hand to another as she counted. Making all the bills face the same way. Reading all the things people had written on the bills. One bill she saw her first night said “Sophie Riddar from Peoria Illinois please find Patrick Gorham from Chicago now in Bangor Maine” in bright red ink on the back of it, and she couldn’t stop thinking about what on earth was going on there. And there were the new twenties. She looked for crease marks across the portraits. And she watched for the phase out. The ratio of new twenties to old twenties had just about reached fifty-fifty. When there were more new twenties, she would get kind of nostalgic, and when there were more old twenties, she would wish that they would all just disappear and get the change-over done with already. Then she’d take all the money, sign it to a deposit envelope, seal it, and leave it in the safe, and then leave, and forget about it all.

            Gina and John pulled in to the parking lot just as she was locking up. Henry and Maurice were leaving in his rusty Ford pickup. They honked at her and she waved. She gave the doors a tug to make sure they were locked and then saw Gina, who’d popped out of the car with the lights on and the engine running, skipping towards her.

            “Congratulations, Gina. Happy graduation. How does it feel?”

            “Oh, it all feels wonderful!” Gina exclaimed. She hugged Caitlyn enthusiastically.

            Caitlyn laughed. “I take it you didn’t get the guys yet?”

            “No,” Gina said. “We’re meeting them at midnight at their dad’s place.”

            “My god,” Caitlyn said, smiling. “Did you drive?”

            “All by myself!”

            “You two get in the back,” Caitlyn said, pointing at John, passed out in the passenger seat. “And get him up. We’ve still got some serious partying to do still. This is a momentous occasion for you. He shouldn’t be sleeping through it.”
            “It’s just the champagne. He’ll be fine in a minute.”

            “Let’s go,” Caitlyn said, and they went.

            John was up and smoking a cigarette by the time they got on the road but still wasn’t saying much. Caitlyn was a bit tired and was just starting to get into off-work mode. Gina was being extremely talkative, but was on so many tangents that neither Caitlyn nor John felt confident enough to be able to keep up with her so they just let her talk. She was telling them about the graduation ceremony, about how it was so weird to graduate in a sports arena, about how they didn’t even cover up all the Pepsi logos, how the Pepsi logos were bigger than the name of the school and how disgusting that was, how they didn’t even get called by name and they didn’t even get to go up on stage, they just stood up as a group by major. Gina, who’d been sitting with the other Computer Science majors, had ended up right in the middle of the group and was saying that her parents said that they didn’t even see her at all. That not one person in the class set off a penny rocket or tossed around a beach ball, nothing. Caitlyn remarked that it was pretty much the same way at her graduation (or as she put it, her class’ graduation that she attended, mostly out of spite), except someone actually had gotten a beach ball bouncing around the crowd before one of the security caught it and popped it with his shoe. The sound the pop made was so loud that the keynote speaker they had gotten, who Caitlyn had never heard of (Gina hadn’t heard of hers either), stopped his speech and laughed.

            “So what happened?” John asked, looking at Caitlyn through the rearview mirror. Gina laid her head on his shoulder and pressed her legs up against the empty passenger seat.

            “He said, ‘Oooh, that’s exciting’ and then finished his speech and sat down.”

            “That’s it?” asked John.

            Caitlyn slid her hand over the wheel and smiled at John in the mirror. “What did you want him to do? Drop a shit brick on the podium?”

            “What?” Gina leaned up and pressed her chin to Caitlyn’s seat.

            Caitlyn shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t really care either way what he did about it. I was just bummed that someone popped the beach ball.”

            “Did it have swear words on it or something?” John asked.

            “I don’t know. Probably not. Albany kids are not that interesting.”        

            “At least you had a beach ball,” Gina said.

            “At least you had a graduation,” John said.

            “Aw,” moaned Caitlyn. “Poor baby.”

            John laughed. He’d graduated high school with honors and decided to go to Michigan University on a half scholarship. Two weeks after being there he decided to quit and go back to Albany. He told Gina that it was pretty clear from the beginning, when he first got there, that the university scene was not for him. He did a lot of coke, played a lot of music with the kids he met, and only went to two classes, both on the first day. But nothing he did nor nobody he met struck him as particularly special and he felt was just wasting a scholarship that someone else could need real bad, not to mention a few thousand in loans that he didn’t want to have to pay back for twenty years. He split Michigan without saying goodbye to anyone and came back to work. He got a job as a line cook at the Hooters in Crossgates Mall, moving across the hall seven months later to Bugaboo Creek Stakehouse, where he had been ever since.

            The three of them all looked in the general direction of Crossgates Mall as they headed west on Western Avenue up from the Royal Burger. It was hard not to. The recently expanded mall, the biggest in the state for the time being, dominated the landscape. John remembered he had a check waiting for him, but just as he was about to ask Caitlyn to pull in so he could pick it up, he decided that it was probably not a good idea for him to see the manager while he was drunk. And by the time that he figured it didn’t matter since the manager was a bigger alcoholic than he could ever hope to be, they had passed the last turn off. He settled back in his seat, closed his eyes a little more away from the headlights zooming past them, and welcomed Gina’s head resting on his shoulder once again.

            “You know what else pissed me off about the graduation?” Gina said, her words muffled a bit by John’s light sweater.

            “Nothing,” Caitlyn said.

            “What?” Gina asked.

            “Nothing. Nothing pissed you off.”       

            “That’s not true.”

            “It is now. You’re done and over with it all.”

            “Still.”

            Caitlyn shook her head. “No, hon. It’s over. Forget about it all. You got your paper. You’re free. You don’t have to bitch about them any more.”     

            “That’s just it,” Gina said. “I didn’t even get my paper. They don’t even let you walk up so you can get a diploma folder, which is empty because they don’t want to make the kids who are there but didn’t graduate feel bad. They’re going to mail it to me.”          

            “Gina, Gina, Gina,” Caitlyn said. “I know, I’ve been there. But it’s over. You have stuff to do now.”

            “Like what?”

            “Like whatever you want.”

            “That’s another thing. I don’t even know what I want to do.”

            Caitlyn snickered. “Don’t get angry at them for that. That’s something you can’t teach.”

            “Well I know I certainly don’t want to stay in Albany very long,” Gina slurred, settling into John’s shoulder. Caitlyn turned her head briefly to see both of them, eyes closed, the smell of nicotine and champagne kisses on their lips and flammable sex all over the back seat. She turned back to the road, shaking her head gently, motherly, and flicked on the radio.

            Gina and John slept until they reached Turk and Marshall’s place. Caitlyn pulled in and saw Turk and Marshall leaning against Turk’s Dodge Aries, parked in the driveway. They waved. Caitlyn honked the horn and winced as she realized that it was almost two-thirty, and saw Turk and Marshall turn their heads simultaneously to check if anybody was ready to bitch about it. Nobody looked up to the cause. The street was dead silent, and Caitlyn could hear the asphalt of the driveway crackle under John’s new tires.

            Turk walked up to Caitlyn’s window. “Is there room in here or should we take my car too?”

            Caitlyn thought about it. John and Gina were got out of the car, Gina rubbing her eyes and yawning as John and Marshall greeted each other. Her eyes went from them to Turk, to Turk’s car, and back to Turk. “Well,” she said finally, “I think we should squeeze in here. Better to have one drunk driver at the end of the night than two.”

            “Fuck that,” Turk said with a laugh. Caitlyn saw he was drunk already. “Marshall will drive. Remember, he ain’t drinking these days.”

            “That’s right.”

            “Yeah. He’s taking a break. One too many blackouts.”

            “Good for him.”

            “Yeah, whatever,” Turk said. “Look, you guys have weed?”

            “Bone dry, my friend.”

            “Fuck. You got money?”

            “A bit. I’m sure between the five of us we have enough.”

            Turk shook his head, waving them off. “Hank will have.” Turk stepped back from the car. “Marshall! Guys! Let’s go, Load up, Load up!”

            They piled in, Marshall driving, Turk in the passenger seat, and Caitlyn behind him. Gina was riding bitch. When she asked why she had to, they all told her it was because she was a bitch.

            Caitlyn leaned towards Turk. “I’m squished.”   

            “What is wrong with you?” Turk asked.

            “What the hell are you talking about?”

            “We’ll find a way,” Turk said, turning around. He scanned the trio of tired faces. “Yeah, we’ll find a way. I hope everyone is ready to party.”

            Caitlyn, Gina and John, a mess of shoulders and arms piled on top of each other, all looked up at him with identical sheepish grins. Turk turned around and nodded to himself.

            “Ye-ha. Not yet, but you will.” He sounded pleased. Suddenly he stopped nodding and turned around. He threw his chin at Gina. “What’s wrong with you? You fucking graduated. Why ain’t you bouncing off the walls of this thing.”        

            “Hey don’t call my car a thing, buck-o,” John said.

            “She doesn’t know what she wants to do now,” chimed Caitlyn. She was struggling with a matchbook.

            “That’s it,” Turk said. “That’s just fucking it. You don’t have to do anything now. The only things you’ve ever had to do was go through school. And you’re fucking done. You ain’t gotta do a god damn thing except whatever pops in your head.”

            “Nothing’s popping in my head,” Gina said, picking at her cuticles.

            “Just make sure you listen when it does,” Turk said. He thrust an arm out as a salute and Marshall slid the wheel that turned them northbound on Route 39. Gina felt a yawn and intentionally held it back, watching John’s lips in the unfocused reflection against the black and green soft blur of a woodsy back road at night. The Casey brothers watched the road like hounds, and Gina knew that they were fried, like as people would say, out of their minds, but she didn’t know where she was going, had never been on this road before, and even though she’d spent time with them really didn’t know the Casey brothers. She’d gotten to know them through John’s stories of conversations in band practice or the transcript of a drunken exchange of words behind the pool hall after a night of warm pitcher drafts. But when she was around them she got the sense that though distinct individuals, they sought the same thing, essentially, out of life: direction. As opposed to motivation. They just wanted to be sure which way to throw their fire.

            They were swift. Nobody knew where they were taking them. Halfway there Caitlyn had whispered to Gina that there was rumored to be a beer ball and a twenty pack of cups in the trunk and that at some point Turk said he was fulfilling a promise to Gina that he owed her a full sky of stars. Gina did not remember this debt. Turk and Marshall were mum. Their story was that they were throwing her a graduation party.

            “There,” Turk said to Marshall in a low drawl, pointing with his nose to a gravel driveway that looked to run about 50 yards into the woods. Gina watched him. She watched Caitlyn stare blankly into the woods, impressed. Marshall grinned with the big cheesy grin he used when he felt he was in on something. John just smiled. Turk bobbed his head with the shock response and felt that he was getting a bit closer. He felt it was a good deed, and a good time for one.

            And Turk knew the result, all right. He’d been in it before. Shared control. A couple of the biggest egos in the universe, some of the biggest possible egos, heads, full of ideas and music, coming together and working towards a similar goal. Turk had always thought that the end result of everything he would ever end up doing would be not to find the answer, but the question. The one question (and it would always, only, be one, only have to be one) that the thing that represented the greatest evil in his heart, mind, soul, could not come up with an answer for. It was in this sense that his appreciation for life was a journalistic one. And it was because of all of this that he was able to accept the band as a beautiful thing, because it utilized the best use of their egos, the fact that they all wanted the same thing, using that to create something more powerful than any of them.

            And of course this meant they were all doomed. It was the reason all his bands had broken up, it would be the reason why all the bands he would start would break up. Because nothing that one is in that is more powerful than oneself can survive. It swallows everything else because of its own beauty. Because it is want. But it could never leave, it could never leave thinking it might not have done something better. But he knew it was there whenever he wanted to tap into it, he directed Marshall to pull over to the side of the road because there was this great rock that they could pull over at and pull out that case and enjoy the warm weather, almost summer already, only getting warmer...

            Hank was waiting for them there. When they pulled into the clearing, he rose up before Turk’s headlights and his eyes shone as he picked his head up. He was sitting on the roof of his pickup, playing an acoustic guitar.

            “I didn’t know Hank played guitar,” Gina said. Turk veered the car to the left and slammed on the brakes as Caitlyn whimpered and grabbed the oh-shit bar on her side.

            “Hey Gina,” Turk said as he popped out of the car.

            “Hm?” Gina asked, opening her door.

            “What do you call a guy who hangs out with musicians?”

            “What?”

            “A drummer.” Turk walked towards Hank’s truck, waving.

            Gina turned to Caitlyn. “I had no idea.”

            “Me neither,” said Caitlyn, smiling. “What a good night for people, huh?”

                                                                        ~

TO: IN%”gb0720@cnsvax.albany.edu”

FROM: IN%”yCreede@worldwide.net.ca”

CC:

SUB: ...?

Gina Dear:

     Baby I need to know what is going on. You rarely return my emails, and when you do you’re very curt and vague, you’re never on the channel anymore, crydydian neither... I can’t get a word out of Katrina, she keeps telling me to ask you. I don’t know what to do anymore. I need to know what the deal is. Is this because of the photograph? Because I haven’t spoken to you since I received it in the mail. Just tell me...

     I know you’ll say over and over again that I can’t possibly, but I love you. I KNOW we never met and I KNOW we haven’t even spoken to each other on the phone but there’s something there. I know it, you said you felt it to. If you met someone, that’s fine, I won’t be upset, I just want you to tell me. I can take it. But what I can’t take is the silence. You can’t say it was all nothing all along, Gina. You say you’re not ready to feel love with someone you’ve never met, I say fine, but don’t just never talk to me again. I’m pretty sure we mean more to each other than the mess it has become.

     I appreciate that you’re not ready. But I am. If you wish to stop this, I won’t protest. But I’m sick and tired of not being ready. I need your answer so I can go on with my life.

all my love, marcus

                             ~

            “So what are you going to do?” Caitlyn asked. She was looking at the screen over Gina’s shoulder, at Gina’s request. She’d just gotten out of the shower when Gina called her into the room to show her the e-mail. She was wearing a black robe and a towel over her head. Little beads of water shone on her neck and threw back the glow of the screen.

            “Can you believe this? Somebody told him.”

            Caitlyn stood upright, removed the towel from her head and began to scrub her hair dry. “Not necessarily,” Caitlyn said. “When was the last time you saw him on the channel?”     

            “I don’t know,” Gina said. “Maybe a week or so? Maybe a little more?”

             Caitlyn frowned. “This poor guy. You should tell him about John.”

            “It sounds like he already knows.”        

            “Well he knows something,” Caitlyn said.

            Gina sighed at the screen and went to shut the computer down. She turned on the light on her desk as she shut the monitor off. The switch made both of them flinch for a second.

            “I’ll tell him tonight.”

            “Good for you, Gina. Get it out of the way. I mean, God, he’ll understand. He has to. He’s over a thousand miles away. I’m sure he has his life. He has to understand you living yours.”

            As soon as the hum of the computer faded, the phone rang. Caitlyn picked it up. Gina looked at the answering machine, which she always forgot to keep an eye on. It was not blinking. So whoever it was hadn’t been trying to get through. It was just

            “Good timing,” Caitlyn said, pointing the ringing phone at the computer tower. Gina nodded. Caitlyn pressed the talk button to an audible beep. “Hello?”

            Gina watched her face. Who is it? she mouthed.

            Caitlyn shook her head at Gina. “You again.” Pause. “I had just about given up on you.”

            Who is it? Gina mouthed again, more insistent. Caitlyn spoke on the phone with a stoic indifference that frustrated Gina endlessly. Always looking at Gina while listening. It was infuriating.

            “Yeah, you keep popping up.” Caitlyn smiled.

            “Nick?” Gina asked softly.

            Caitlyn nodded quickly and turned away. She was silent for a long time.

            Then: “Sure.” A bunch of uh-huhs.

            “Friday? Sounds good.” Pause. “I bet.” Pause. “See you then. Sure.”

            Caitlyn hung up the phone, grinning and shaking her head slightly.

            “Well?” Gina asked.

            “I’m seeing him Friday,” Caitlyn said flatly.

            “Sure.”  

            “Why not? No reason not to.”

                                                                        ~

            Nick walked through the front door of Last Call at six in the afternoon. Greg was already there; Charles, who would be finishing up his shift right about now, and would, as usual, throw down at least three bourbons before leaving and not get there for at least another hour. Nick swung the door open to see a thin layer of smoke had already collected on the ceiling. Greg was sitting at the bar and turned around and greeted him, holding up his glass as a salute. Nick looked out the door as he closed it behind him. Chuck was hunched over the pool table. There was some old jazz on the radio which Nick could not identify but figured it was Mingus. Every time it was jazz and he liked it and he asked Chuck who it was it was usually Mingus. Nick waved to Chuck and went behind the bar, tossing his pair of sunglasses to the side of the cash register.

            “Hot one today, huh Nick,” Greg said, his glass resting on his chin. The condensation on the glass was heavy, and Nick could see a ring where the drink had been on the bar. He nodded to Greg and slipped a coaster in front of him.

            “You know Nick, I might have to skip the ice on the next one. It just melts in seconds and leaves me with a scotch and water. And those go down too smooth.”

            Nick exhaled loudly. “So I guess the air conditioner guy hasn’t come to fix the shit yet.”

            “Don’t look at me, I just drink here.”

            “Chuck,” Nick called. “Any word on the AC?”

            “Tomorrow,” Chuck said, keeping his eyes on the table and a tough bank shot.

            “Shit,” Nick said. His eyes scanned the bar, looking for something that might need to be taken care of. He didn’t find anything. He was in blue-jean cutoffs and a tee-shirt and was already sweating. It hadn’t been so bad, out in the car with the windows open, and even the streets were not so bad. He’d picked up a small air conditioner over the weekend for his apartment. It was only mid-June but it was already starting to get sticky out. Everyone in Albany could tell it was going to be a rough summer and everyone was tired already.

            “So how’d it go?” Greg asked.

            “Well, according to the shit I looked at at Barnes and Noble, I basically have two choices.”

            “And they are?”

            “Send my book straight to a publisher or try and get an agent.”

            Greg finished his drink and placed the empty glass back on the bar, a few inches closer to Nick than the coaster. Nick took the glass and placed it in the rinse tub under the bar. He took a fresh glass, placed it on the bar in front of Greg and poured a solid two and a half ounces of Johnny Walker Black into it.

            “Thank you,” Greg said.

            Nick stood in front of him, waiting.

            “Don’t worry, don’t worry, I got it,” Greg said, fishing through his pockets. He slapped his wallet on the bar and counted five twenties out and slid them to Nick.

            “Thank you,” said Nick. “This covers it. And that one’s on me.”

            “Good kid,” Greg said.

            “Don’t fucking good kid me.”

            “What are you going to do then?”

            “About the tab?”

            “No,” Greg said. “Get off the tab already. About the book.”

            “Oh,” Nick said. “Well, based on the shit I was reading, I think I’ve decided to go straight to the publisher.”

            “Why’s that?” Greg asked. He took a cautious first sip of the scotch, smacked and curled his lips and said aaah. “And you got anything new for me?”

            “Because this is probably a one shot thing. I don’t need an agent. I’m not going to turn this into a career.”

            “Why not?”

            “Because one thing I’ve learned writing this book is that I can’t write. Not on a large scale anyway. If I try to get another out it will kill me. The first is hard enough.”

            “What are you talking about?”

            Nick shrugged. “I’m saying I don’t think I need an agent. And the answer to your other question is no.”

            “Aw, c’mon.”

            “No,” Nick said, fidgeting with glasses in the rinse tub. “I told you. I’m more than halfway done. Nobody else sees it until it is finished. That way it can be judged properly. It will no longer be a work in progress. When I say it’s done.”

            “Jesus, all right Nick,” Greg said.

            “Did anyone call or stop by here today?”

            “What am I, your goddamn secretary?”

            “Listen,” Nick said, his voice sounding a bit annoyed. “Just answer the question.”

            “Who were you expecting?” Chuck asked.

            “I don’t know,” Nick said. “I thought maybe Caitlyn might stop by.”

            “Caitlyn?” Greg asked. “That girl you were seeing?”

            “Yeah,” Nick said. “I called her the other night.”

            Chuck laughed and came behind the bar, resting his cue against the mirror, the top touching a sealed bottle of Jim Beam. “What’d you go and do that for?” he joked.

            Greg laughed at that and took a large swill of his drink and hissed as it coated his throat. He swallowed bravely and winked a wrinkled nose at Nick and Chuck, standing with their arms folded, watching him. Greg bowed his head like a politician and rested his glass on the coaster. He massaged his side under his arm for a moment as they looked away. He held back a choke and a trip to the bathroom. His heart began to race. Nick and Chuck walked to the end of the bar and took a hard right into the office, chatting. Greg clenched his chin and felt a chill in his chest, then a pause, and then a great heat concentrated on his face. He was sweating. He could feel it on his collar. He was now alone in the bar. There were five pool balls left on the table. He closed his eyes and felt the neon through it, buzzing, a smudge of light pasted on his vision, with a low pressure tobacco head spin and the sweat leaking through and trying to cool. Greg massaged up under his armpit, feeling the valves a little blocked, not yet numb but tingling. One gasp. One time he opened his eyes and the heat was gone and the relief was enormous, see, just a pause, nothing to get worried about, he thought, and he swallowed the rest of his scotch quickly and stood up to go outside and get some oxygen in his system, waving to Nick as he came back from the office.

            “I’ll be back in a second,” Greg said. Nick watched and waved back and wiped his neck with a pale blue towel that hung from his pants. If only the fresh air weren’t so thick, he thought. Greg was standing under the Liberty and Division street signs, his hand leaning on the pole, fingers wrapped around it weakly, just barely.

            Chuck walked past Nick and shot his head towards the door. “He okay?”

            Nick shrugged. “You know him better than I do.”

            Outside, they watched as Greg lit a cigarette. The blue from the illuminated BUS sign was all over the street. A couple walked by in matching tee-shirts, carrying it on their backs. They looked into the bar and kept walking.

            “Ah, nobody really knows him,” Chuck said gruffly.

            “So just how long has he been coming here?” Nick asked. “I know my brother never mentioned him but he says he was here from the beginning. Before it was Last Call.”

            Chuck raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Well,” he said, “He got the job at the Pepsi- it was the Knick then- three years ago. I was around at the time, and I remember him being here a while, in and out, nothing regular. But since he got that job and his wife died, it’s pretty much been a regular thing.”

            “Huh.”

            “What’s that?”

            “He never mentioned a wife.”

            “So?” Chuck sounded surprised. “You tell every guy you talk to everything?”   

            “I guess not,” Nick said. “But that’s big.”

            “Hey brother,” Chuck said, running a rag along the surface of the bar across from Nick. “Tragedy is big. When it gets to tragedy that big, drama that big, you don’t even need to know the details. You can see it in a man’s face. Men that been through that don’t have to tell details. They’ve told them to themselves too many times. It wears them out, talking.”

            Outside Greg flicked his cigarette into the parking lot. A few ash sparks bounced off the asphalt. He held on to the pole. Nick could see him breathing heavy. Steady, but heavy.

            “You told her about the arm, right?” Chuck asked.

            “Yeah, you were there.”

            “No, I mean, you ever tell her the whole story?”

            Nick took a stack of bills from behind the register and placed them under the clasp of a clipboard that had been leaning against it. He coughed loudly and passed Chuck on the way to the office. “Telling a woman you fucked up as a rookie and almost lost your life and your partner’s life is a bit too intimate for a first date.”

 “True. Don’t worry about it, though. If it turns out to be anything with you two she’ll understand when you tell her.”

            “I’m not worried. And when I tell her?”

            “Yeah,” Chuck said. “You’ll tell her. Cause you’re not in it for the tragedy.”

             As Nick rolled his eyes and reached for the office door, Chuck grabbed his arm. Nick winced and turned around. He could see Greg pacing by the windows over Chuck’s shoulder.

            Chuck paused and did a visual lap of the empty bar. He saw Nick watching Greg and leaned close to him. “Nick,” he whispered, “Ain’t nothin to be ashamed of.”

            “I ain’t ashamed of it,” Nick replied.

            “Well you ain’t gotta be runnin from it either.”

            “I don’t know what you mean,” Nick said, his eyes straight ahead, back and forth, following Greg.

            “I mean, it ain’t held against you. You shouldn’t feel like you failed at all. No twenty-two year old kid should ever be put in a position where they are expected to pull a gun on someone, with a badge or not, behind the guise of a job or not. How can you blame yourself for putting the gun down? Maybe it was panic. A gun was in your face. You probably should have panicked.”

            As Nick opened his mouth to reply, he felt Chuck’s hand on his shoulder. Greg came back in, and shuffled to his chair at the other end of the bar. They watched him sit down but he didn’t look back, staring down into the bar, the tips of his fingers rubbing his temple. He seemed unaware of their presence.

            Nick felt Chuck nudge his arm. “Then again,” Chuck continued, “You might say that placing the gun on the ground was the sanest thing you’ve ever done.”
            Nick flipped the washcloth he was holding and slapped the bar with it, making Greg look up for a second before relaxing back into the presence of his drink. “I’m going upstairs for a while, Chuck,” Nick said. He had barely finished the sentence before he slammed the back door behind him.

            “What’s with him?” Greg asked.

            “He’s having problems laying shit down,” Chuck said, picking up Nick’s cloth, giving the bar an extra swipe.     

            “He told you that?”

            Chuck shook his head. “No. That’s what I get.”

            “You mean with his book?”

            “With anything. I think he’s beginning to realize he’s not stuck here.”     

            Greg shook his head and swallowed the last of his drink. “You shouldn’t push him, still,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket and pulling out a five dollar bill. “Let the man be.” He set the bill on the bar and placed his glass over it.

            “Didn’t you just pay your tab?”

            “I always pay for my last drink in cash,” Greg said, rising from the stool.

            “Early night?”

            “The tubes are a bit testy tonight,” Greg said, tapping his fist to his chest and smiling. “I know how much is enough.”

            They shook hands and said good-byes. Greg adjusted the collar to his shirt and walked out, fidgeting with his shirt collar as he passed by the window and continued down Liberty Street. Chuck, left with the empty bar, flipped his eyes to the criss-crossed street signs before nodding to himself and grabbing his cue stick and returning to the pool table. He unplugged the jukebox and turned on the radio behind the table, the sounds of Mingus being only interrupted briefly by the crackle of pool balls. Chuck chalked his cue and leaned over the table to assess his next shot. 

                                                                        ~

            “So I have to ask.”

            Nick frowned and turned back from the railing. Caitlyn was leaning against the hood of his car. The night was as dark as it should have been, and the chemistry was right where he thought it would be. As he backed against the rail for support he felt the impression of the hazy glow of Albany, now at his back, still pressing at him. He saw Caitlyn hop onto his car’s hood and drop her clasped hands between her spread legs. she now had a photographer’s vantage point, Nick with the city spreading out from his shoulders. She smiled, and Nick figured it was because she just realized that as well or that she wanted to indicate it was to be a friendly question.

            “So ask,” he said.

            They’d made out in the car a while ago, and then, seeking a quiet, large moment, had taken her to Thatcher Park. It was about a twenty to thirty minute drive from downtown, where they had been walking around, sharing a small bottle of Beefeater he’d taken out of his office cabinet and  bitching about the city. They were far away now. Thatcher Park was outside of the city and bordering on the much higher ground leading to the Adirondacks and from where they were, scenic viewpoint number two, they could see the whole of Albany. It was quiet from a distance, all lights. They were both watching, but neither one of them could tell from the view alone what Albany really was, a place for coming and going. A city that had once been something great in its own right, but had slacked behind for no longer being needed. A city that was just now a stopping place between New York City and Canada or Boston or Buffalo and points west.

            “Why did you call me?”

            She saw me watching while I was trying to write and I had to do something.

            “No, don’t answer that.”

            Nick stiffened his pose. Caitlyn tilted her head, cracking her neck. She swatted her head to the other shoulder but nothing popped.

            “Why did you take me here?”

            Nick nodded. “Well you’re from Albany. You know this place. It’s a great view.”

            Caitlyn lowered her head and her voice became wistful. “I guess everyone around knows here knows this place, but- This place has a lot of profound and intense memories for me. Like, most Albany residents around our ages I would meet I’d expect to tell me they really loved this park but I’d expect the memories to be of drinking beer or making out with a really great chick or whatever.” She laughed softly. “I guess I like to think that my moments here were more profound.”

            “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Nick said. “You’re probably right. I remember when I was a little Albany High punk I used to come up here some weekends when it would get nice out and we’d get hammered but I always thought I appreciated it more than them.”

            “Why was that, Nick?”

            “Because I always felt that being able to see the city as an entity, as a whole, was worth more than being a great view. It had more than aesthetic value. Though it had that too.”
            “I have really good memories of my family with this place. In fact, I’d say the best memories I have of my family are associated with this place.”

            “Like what?”

            “Well, okay. Take this. I have great memories of my brother from here. And nobody else in my family has good memories of my brother. He was always a little strange, a little frantic, as a kid and nobody ever really got to know him. But I did. He used to take me here all the time. He showed me this place first. We talked for hours about anything. It could have been life or bullshit. Didn’t matter. I’ve got good memories. Nobody else in my family has those kind of memories about my brother.”

            “I don’t understand,” Nick said. “Is he dead?”

            “No, he went crazy.”

            Nick slouched, worried. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

            “Fuck it,” Caitlyn laughed. “How could you? It’s not something I show off. The point is that I’m the only one in my family who actually knows my brother and this place reminds me of him.”

            “Can I ask what happened?”

            “Sure,” Caitlyn said. “My father died when he was two, my mother was a beast, and our older brother Andrew was a psychopath, a literal fucking psychopath.”

            “You turned out fine,” Nick said.

            “We all thought he was slightly until about age seven. Then all at once, shit clicked, started being able to relate to stuff, learned to read, got a bit lucid, you know? His ego came through for the first time. But something was a bit off. He became completely obsessive compulsive in a destructive way.”

            “Like what shit?” Nick asked. “”The hand-washing thing?”

            Caitlyn shook her head. “Not exactly. He became obsessed with making sure things wouldn’t disappear. Shit like drinking a can of soda. He would put it down on the table while he wasn’t drinking it but he would keep looking over to make sure it was still there. He’d poke it. He’d start holding onto things so he wouldn’t have to think about it. It was kind of horrifying at the time. I’d see my brother crying because he knew he was holding onto, say, a table because for some reason he had to. Plus there was the ketchup packets, like the McDonalds ones? He’d squeeze them for hours. He’d add up any numerals that came on the television. Shit like that. Not completely debilitating, but he realized that it wasn’t right and it weighed on him heavily. He just never got his equilibrium.”

            “Did he stay like that?”

            “It was getting longer and longer in between really bad spells. But the spells were always bad, and set him back real far. So we all thought a normal high school was pretty much out of the question… but we held out hope. Then one day when he was twelve, in the middle of a good spell, Andrew, well, check this out. One day our Mom was overnight somewhere, and left Andrew, who was sixteen at the time, in charge of the house for the night. Whenever she would go away for the night it would scare the shit out of me because Andrew’s friends would come over and fuck with us to no end. It was horrible. Anyway,  this particular night, he put two tabs of strong acid into a glass of orange juice and gave it to Tony. That’s his name. Tony. Two tabs. I had no idea. I came back from my friend Rachel’s house to find Tony curled up in a corner with Andrew sitting on the couch eating pistachio nuts. He was throwing the shells at him. I can’t even imagine the things he was saying. His friend Izzy, I remember this guy good, a rail thin, hyperactive blond longhair with disgusting teeth,  he was on the couch, fucking laughing. I threw the toaster, the first thing I saw, at them. It hit Izzy on the shin and he screamed and ran out of the house. Crumbs flew everywhere and when they hit Tony he got up and walked into the bathroom with an expression on his face I can’t to this day describe accurately. Andrew told me what happened. He had dropped too. Then he threw the toaster back at me and ran out the house, presumably after Izzy, who had probably dropped as well. So I go into the bathroom and Tony is sitting in the tub with the sink running, just staring. He said the walls were breathing and he couldn’t deal with it. So I sat on the toilet and talked to him for hours, explaining to him that the walls couldn’t possibly be breathing, but that that didn’t mean he wasn’t seeing it. I’m fucking ten years old, trying to talk my borderline twelve year old brother down from an acid trip. I barely knew what acid was. I was trying to explain philosophically to him the nature of hallucinations. In an empty house. For hours. It was surreal.”

               Nick watched her move off the front of the car slowly to take the cigarettes out of her jeans pocket and flick her zippo tight against her palm. Nick watched closely. He loved her fingers doing anything. Her hands were average girl hands, but her fingers showed wear. The people he knew in New York that painted always had weak hands but strong, practiced fingers. That’s how he knew they were serious.

            “Man, I’m sorry,” she said. “He got better, it was a good night. He got better. He held menial jobs eventually. Without a hand-out. He did it. He saved a shitload of money, though, because he didn’t really do anything else. I guess it was just all doomed though, because although he wasn’t acting the part, you could tell what was going on inside his head. The obsessive thing. You could almost see it in the way he oriented and showed and used his eyes. One day a few years ago, when I was a sophomore, he split. Just left a note saying he’d tell us if he left Albany.”

            Nick scratched at his chin, unsure if he should say anything.

“Want to see a picture of him?”

            Nick didn’t answer. Caitlyn crossed her legs and clicked an imaginary camera at him.

            “Check this out.” Caitlyn dipped into her wallet and held up a folded Polaroid between two of those fingers. “This is a picture of my brother and my mother from my eighteenth birthday. See my mom laughing, holding that rope by his ear? That was part of the present he gave me. It was wrapped around the box that my easel came in. It’s the last present he gave me, and the last present that anyone gave me that I still have. The last of any importance, anyway.”

            Nick snatched the photo out of the air when Caitlyn flipped it to him.

            “It was always this big joke. ‘We’ve got to put a leash on you.’ Among everything else, he was crazy hyper too. It’s really a perfect picture, represents my family so well. Because even though we all knew something was wrong, they never really did anything about it. It was obvious. But, you know, my mom would have rather put a leash on it than solve it.”

            Behind Nick, there were building lights flickering like stars.

            “That’s part of the reason why I’m sticking around. In Albany. It’s pretty much the only conscious reason I have stay in Albany, I’m hoping I’ll find him.”

            Nick nodded again.

            “If I had faith enough in my family to see to it that if he contacted one of them, they’d make sure he was alright, then I’d be able to leave. But that’s just not going to happen. I know I’m not trapped here, but there’s just too much unresolved shit with him.”

            Nick nodded again because the man in the picture was the same man Nick had been watching from his window for the past five months.

            “I mean what would you do? Would you just leave?”

            “Not knowing what you know,” Nick said.

            “Exactly,” Caitlyn said.